The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  The following morning found Bobbie watching at her bedroom window as rain swept across the Sheds and out towards the sea where it seemed to become lost in the grandeur of the waves, playing chorus to the main star, but not before it had impressed Bobbie with its insistent thrumming on the roof above her bed. Despite a remarkably congenial supper the night before, during which she had actually made Miss Moncrieff laugh, Bobbie now felt low. As low as she had felt when at Hazel Hill, for with the sudden worsening once more of the weather came the realization that there could be no gardening.

  It was hardly a surprise, for it had rained all night, but this morning when she had peered out of the window she had seen that it was not just rain that was crashing around the roof and throwing itself against the windows of the Sheds, it was a gale of the kind about which the BBC would have sent out warnings on Miss Moncrieff’s wireless, which now set Bobbie imagining what a comfort it must be to all the small boats out on the seas, fishing boats that had set out from harbours all around the coastlines, to hear a steady, calming, BBC voice warning them of the weather to come.

  ‘I am going up to the house,’ Bobbie told Miss Moncrieff after breakfast. ‘I promised Mrs Harper that I would try to keep it swept clear of leaves and that sort of thing.’

  ‘I dare say you can do as you say, but I really have enough to get on with here.’ Miss Moncrieff looked distantly ahead of her at nothing at all, a habit of hers when she thought Bobbie might be going to ask her to do something that might mean venturing outside the Sheds.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Miss M. Mrs Harper said to tell you that your salary is being paid as usual into the bank at Baileys Green.’

  Miss Moncrieff always blushed at the mention of money because it was so important to her. But the reminder brought on not just temporary embarrassment, but the inevitable ghost of Mrs Moncrieff.

  ‘Mother, you know, dependent on me for everything. I have to send her an allowance every week without fail. A widow for so many years, without any support from my father’s family, so difficult for her. Of course had I been the longed-for boy it would have been quite different, but, alas, I was not.’

  ‘Had you been a boy you would probably be dead,’ Bobbie muttered to herself, already moving away towards the start of a new day. She could not and would not, whatever happened, stay stuck in the Sheds, no matter what the weather outside. One cup of chicory coffee later and Bobbie was not only dressed, back in her green jersey and corduroy plus fours, but out of the door, hat pulled well down, dashing back up through the wilderness to Baileys Court.

  Entering the walled garden through the side door, she paused before closing it with difficulty, the wind and the rain being still so strong. Then, head down, umbrella folded, for it was useless in the gale, she battled her way to the nearest wing of the house, reluctant to approach the main front door, which would, she knew from only a cursory glance inside, have meant pushing past leaking pipes and bare wires, stepping over puddles in the corridors and trying to ignore the sound of her own echoing feet.

  Now she stood inside the entrance to the garden wing, and taking off her hat shook the rain from it, as also her old worn top coat, a fine navy blue wool garment with brass buttons that had a distinctly nautical air, but was lined, in typical extravagant Beatrice Harper fashion, with minerva – a kind of fine rabbit fur.

  Bobbie had been told by the Major that, before the war, guests had used to stay in this particular wing in the greatest luxury, attended by maids and footmen dressed as medieval waiting women and pages, and indeed, as she stood there, for some reason quite unmoving, Bobbie was filled with the strangest sense that she was, despite the fact that the house was empty, actually trespassing – that all around, unseen , were people from the past waiting to observe what she was doing in their house.

  ‘It’s all right. I am not going to be doing anything that you would not like,’ she said out loud, quite suddenly. ‘I am just looking. I will not disturb anything.’

  There were candles and matches left to the side of one of the windows, matches that proclaimed themselves to be from some pre-war nightclub. Bobbie picked them up and stared at the gold-engraved name on them in an absent-minded way – Ciro’s. She slipped them into her pocket and stared round at the rest of the hallway.

  Once Beatrice had purchased Baileys Court she had, with typical extravagance, the electricity in the main house and the wing turned on, but even so, after all the shortages of winter, Bobbie took the precaution of slipping some half-used candles left on a window sill into the pocket of her plus fours. Should the electricity fail, as it often did at the Sheds, she did not fancy coming down the winding, narrow, medieval staircase without any light.

  She started to climb up the dark oak stairs, holding on to the dusty red rope that passed as a banister as she went. At the top of the first flight there was a narrow corridor. It was lighter outside now, the gale having abated a little, and so she pulled up the latch of the first round-topped oak door outside which she arrived, and stepped inside. It was a big, bare room with nothing in it except a strange medieval-looking wardrobe. There was no light switch, so she lit one of the candles and, curious to see the view of the gardens from above, walked across the bare, noisy boards and stared out of the window into the courtyard below.

  It must have once had climbing roses and old-fashioned planted borders. And although Bobbie knew that someone from the village had once been employed to try to keep the grass down during the war, they had obviously long ago given up the unequal struggle and left nature to its own devices, for the grass had been allowed to run riot, just as the walls which must once have been so solid had started to crumble with the impact of the constant gales from the sea, and the salty breezes. She had just started to imagine the garden as a place with wall fountains and sea shells set around the entrance and pots planted with bright flowers when the door of the room slammed hard shut, the latch catching and dropping, seemingly, of its own accord.

  Bobbie jumped round, her hand flying to her cheek. She had no walking stick, nothing to hand, and so, for no reason she could think of, she lifted the candle and walked to the door, as if the light from it would somehow protect her from anything or anybody that might be on the other side of the round-topped door.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  She called down into the winding stairwell, but there was no reply except the whistling of the wind, and the creak of other doors in other parts of the old house. Despite her determination not to show her inward fear, her inspection of the first clutch of rooms down that particular corridor became more perfunctory than it might have been, and she contented herself with standing at the entrance to each room and looking round before quickly closing the doors again. Open – shut – open – shut – and so she continued until she reached another round-topped oak door, up a short flight of stairs. Having climbed them and opened the door and looked briefly round, as with the other rooms, she just could not resist going right in, because the room was magnificent, and also strangely inviting, and unlike all the others it was partially furnished, which was surprising.

  A red velvet curtain hung just inside the door, and at one of the Tudor windows was a dark oak chest, very large, and set about with brass fastenings. In the middle of the wall opposite the windows was a dark oak table bearing writing materials, a pen, some white paper and an ink well.

  Bobbie, her imagination already thrilling to the idea, walked towards the oak table, curious to read the sheets of paper that were strewn about it, imagining to herself that there might be some last loving message left there from before the war by a guest, perhaps someone in love with his famous hostess, someone who had then flown off in a Spitfire, never to be seen again.

  ‘I thought you might be put off when I slammed the door, damn it!’

  Bobbie whipped round to see the vague outline of a tall, slender young man with a shock of blond – almost white – hair standing in the doorway through which she had just come. For a second time her hand flew to h
er cheek, but as ever when she was afraid she stood her ground. She lowered her hand, and feigned disdain as she looked at him, narrowing her eyes, and pulling herself up as straight as possible as she did so.

  ‘What are you doing here, may I ask?’

  ‘I said, I thought I might put you off, when I slammed that door down there! It puts off most people from the village! Damn it!’

  ‘I am not from the village,’ she told him coldly, her voice echoing in the gloom that surrounded them. ‘I am not from the village. My guardian has just bought this house, and I am taking care of it for her. So will you please leave?’

  The stranger stepped down the three wooden steps that led into the dark room, nodding his head agreeably.

  ‘No, I know, I know.’ He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said again. ‘I should not be here, but there you are. It is so quiet, you see. And the house was empty all through the war, and so I am afraid I formed the habit of coming here because of its being quiet, usually so quiet, no-one around except myself.’

  Outside the gale seemed to have returned with even greater force, slamming itself suddenly against the windows of the room as if it was trying to get inside, as if it was a wild, tormented person trying to gain entry and come between them.

  Feeling distinctly affronted at his being there at all, Bobbie stepped back and away from the table as the stranger advanced, but at the same time she could not help feeling curious. He was very tall, and very pale, and his clothes hung off him, but they were obviously expensive clothes, or had been once, and he wore them with an oddly defiant air, as if he knew that they were strange, and did not care in the least. A cream silk shirt, black silk trousers, a deep red velvet jacket, slightly like the curtain which, Bobbie realized of a sudden, might actually belong to him, or it might be that the jacket had been cut from it, and finally, and most incongruously, on his feet he wore old, black, wellington boots.

  He must have noticed her staring at his feet because he smiled.

  ‘I wear these for trespassing through those underground corridors below,’ he told her, smiling slightly. ‘I wanted to frighten you off, you see.’ He gave a little sigh. ‘But you would not frighten, would you? I like that. I like people who are curious and not frightened, because I am always only frightened not to be curious. And frightened not to be passionate too. You know, about simply everything. I am frightened of that most of all.’

  For a few seconds before he finally smiled, Bobbie had wanted very much to run away from this strange young man and his intensity, but then had come the smile. A smile which started in his large, blue eyes, and only at the very last dropped down to his mouth. As a person who has dropped from a height might find himself, of a sudden, in two minds as to whether or not to land on the ground below, so the young man’s smile swung, seemingly undecided, for a few seconds between one feature and another, and it was only when it landed and his whole face lit up that Bobbie knew just where it was that she might have seen that smile before.

  SUMMER FOLLOWING THAT SPRING

  Chapter Six

  Miranda had been expelled from her boarding school. She was most relieved. As soon as she was home she saw that her guardian, Allegra Sulgrave, was also relieved. The worst winter in anyone’s memory had been followed by the hottest summer, and Allegra needed Miranda to put her gin bottles to cool in the stream that ran down the bottom of the garden. She also needed her to bicycle to and from the old ice house at Burfitt Hall, only recently vacated by the army, and left in terrible condition.

  ‘The ice house was the one thing that they ignored, thank God,’ Allegra muttered, her full lips closing over a Passing Cloud cigarette, her long-fingered hand holding its oval shape so elegantly that they all but concealed its presence, ‘because the silly idiots would not know an ice house from a mad house, or a dolls’ house, for that matter.’

  They had returned to ‘Burfers’, as Allegra always called the fifteenth-century castellated house, surrounded by a moat, to take a closer look at the damage done by the now departed British army.

  ‘War does not just kill people, it kills everything. Houses, wildlife, furniture, staircases – I mean did they really need to piddle down the stairs, one has to ask oneself? I mean was it too long a walk for the blasted idiots to make their way from the hallway to the loo? Really, the army – anyone’s army – always do prove themselves to be such one hundred per cent shits.’

  Miranda stared at the stairs at which Allegra was gazing, and then back again at her guardian’s strangely affecting if ugly face with its long Plantagenet nose, its almond-shaped eyes set deep, and its general air of history preserved in one set of features – as if the face was in some way a living portrait. As usual Allegra was right. The marks from the urine had bleached a horrid little line, but that was not what was foremost in her ward’s mind. What was foremost in her mind was that being brought up by Allegra had proved to be more complicated than either of them had at first envisaged. Not because they did not get on. It had taken only one look between Allegra and the tall, elegant, blond ex-Cockney child – delivered by Pamela and her American colonel that rainy afternoon what seemed like a century ago – only one glance, to confirm to the small, vibrant middle-aged aristocrat that they were twin souls.

  No, where the complication lay was in the fact that Allegra, like so many patrician ladies, used the language of the barrack room and the stables as easily, and nonchalantly, as she smoked her endless Passing Clouds in their pale pink boxes.

  Miranda, under the influence of Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence, had learned to drop her Cockney accent and speak what they had always called nicely. Above all, not to use bad language, not at any time, or for any reason. In those days, which now seemed so far off, bad language had been ‘bloody’ and ‘blasted’ and ‘damn’.

  But then she had come to live with Allegra at the estate manager’s house in Burfitt village, and bang, out went nice talk, and in came every kind of bad word imaginable. It had sent Miranda into great mental contortions, because if she did not use the same language as Allegra, her temporary, self-appointed guardian would not have understood her. In between ‘cocktails’ at lunchtime and ‘cocktails’ at six, Allegra spoke, rapidly and often, in a quite strange mixture of bad language and truly aristocratic, and sometimes Royal, references.

  In this way it became quite natural for Miranda to grow up thinking and hearing that the Duke of so-and-so was an absolute unmentionable; or that Princess so-and-so had ‘round heels’ or that Mrs such-and-such was the ‘by-blow’ of a certain Royal personage. This did not matter at the Cottage – as the estate manager’s house was known in the Sulgrave family – but it mattered terribly once Miranda had been sent to boarding school. It was only natural that, at moments of extremis, her ‘Allegra-isms’ would keep popping out. And so it was that, only recently, while Miranda had been trying to take her higher school certificate in an exam room which was actually an old air raid shelter and one of her carefully written papers had fallen to the really quite filthy floor, an extremely adult word had escaped her lips. Most unfortunately, quiet had fallen all over Norfolk at that point, and so Miranda, unsurprisingly, had been promptly and publicly expelled from her boarding school.

  It had been a shame because she found school work very easy, and had really rather set her heart on becoming some sort of formidable bluestocking. Someone who would end up running a college at Oxford, firmly unmarried, tall and imperious, but just that one word, beginning as it did with the sixth letter of the English alphabet, had ruled out her academic ambitions for ever, and back she had come to Allegra, and Burfitt, and the Cottage, and all the other deprivations from which she had been rescued in a really rather comforting fashion by the strictures of boarding school.

  But Miranda was nothing if not realistic, and the relief on Allegra’s face when she opened the door of the Cottage had told her all. And when she had gone to the kitchen she had quickly realized that Allegra had been living off what looked rather like a form of cat food, and st
uffing her soleless shoes with newspaper, rather than admit to Miranda that she could no longer afford to pay her school fees.

  So, all in all, the naughty word that had escaped Miranda’s lips in the tension of the moment as she discoursed eloquently and beautifully on the dilemma of Shakespeare’s Othello had been nothing but a blessing to the Honourable Mrs Sulgrave. As for Miranda, it had left her with a feeling of lingering regret, and a slight sense of having been arrested for a crime that she had not committed. But habit dies hard, and the truth was that Miranda’s bad language was such second nature to her now that in moments of stress, such as an exam, or being stung by a bee, or a similar incident, the words popped not just up, but out. Besides, not to use the same language as Allegra would have been to alienate her guardian.

  Not that they communicated in any particularly sophisticated manner. Their conversations were seldom of a beautifully eloquent nature. Indeed, such dialogue as they enjoyed would often be one of repetition.

  This was most particularly noticeable between or after drinks time when, having drunk or smoked in silence, thankfully, for some few minutes, Allegra would, of a sudden, notice that her ward was still present – Miranda called it, quite privately, ‘fire watching’.

  ‘Don’t you think that this government is one hundred per cent …’

  Here Allegra would stop, suddenly searching wildly not just for another cigarette from the pink box beside her chair, but also for the word which would be most appropriate, all the while without turning to look at the cigarette box, but looking beseechingly across at Miranda.

  ‘Beastly?’

  Miranda would always start by trying something innocuous, hoping that it would be sufficient, but, like Allegra’s drinks, a word like beastly was never strong enough.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Ghastly?’

  ‘Miranda! No. You know. They are …’ She would click the fingers of the hand that was not holding the cigarette. ‘They are – oh – what’s the word! For God’s sake! The government is – the government is – the government is …’