The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  From the kitchen Miranda went quickly back into the main room, the studio room – for that essentially was what it was – and stood gazing around her, yet again marvelling at the luck of finding herself in this strange paradise with its cornucopia of brilliant objects. The trunks with their yellowing labels which proclaimed that they had at some time or another visited Penang and Delhi, or Edinburgh, or Paris. The old engraved glasses filled with dust and not wine, waiting to be raised once again. The picture frames stacked one against the other, also empty, their old, gilded carving faded.

  It was as she was still standing breathing in the dust-filled air that yet at the same time exuded that particular kind of fragrance that only comes from good, old, seasoned wood that her guardian’s reticence, her reluctance to explain Aubrey Close fully to her ward, started to become clear. And it came to Miranda that the house must once have belonged to one of Allegra’s sisters – perhaps her much mourned eldest sister? Or perhaps to the middle sister who was rumoured to have been, as Allegra always put it, hopelessly artistic? Whoever had owned it, it had been given to Miranda to live there until such time as she found her feet, which Miranda knew was Allegra’s way of saying until such time as Miranda might decide to marry.

  But Miranda knew what Allegra did not, namely that she did not want to marry, not ever, ever, ever. She had always known that she was not the marrying kind, and had gazed in amazement at girls at school as they happily spent hour upon hour designing their ideal wedding dresses, or talking about what good wives they intended to be. No, she wanted to be anything except just someone’s wife – the trouble and strife, as her grandmother had used to put it when she was tiny. I’m just his trouble and strife. I can’t sign nothin’ for you, she’d tell house-to-house callers as Miranda clung to her flowered apron staring up at everyone from the Breton onion sellers to the shoe-shine men, or the knife grinders.

  She gazed up at the windows again before turning to her own trunks and beginning to unpack, before going to find the bedrooms and doing all those statutory things, like bouncing on the beds by turn to find which one was most comfortable. Before all that she stood still, staring up at the saintlike figures that dominated the studio room.

  She dared swear that those women portrayed up there had been, at some time, poor souls, a wife to someone or another. And where had it got them? Enshrined in a window, their bare toes peeping from apostles’ sandals, their waxen fingers clasping lilies or held in praying positions. They were not women, they were saints and angels, nothing to do with glorious reality, or, more important, freedom.

  Bobbie stared at the Major. He had just lit his tenth Craven A cigarette for that morning. She knew this, because she had made a bet with her new friend Julian that he would reach fifteen before they all stopped for lunch at midday.

  The terrible thing was that once the bet was struck they had, inevitably, found themselves a great deal more interested in the Major’s lighting up times than they were in helping him to chop and stack the fallen trees that littered the garden leading down to the beach.

  ‘I dare say it is going to take us a good many weeks to clear this lot.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Bobbie bent down to pick up and throw a piece of rusting metal into her wheel-barrow. ‘It is strange, though, that all the trees fell over, because I mean to say, if you look at them, they really are quite old. At least they look quite mature, don’t they?’

  ‘It is because, before the war, they imported them all. You’d never find trees of this kind normally by the seaside. Look at the rusting girders. You don’t see girders holding up trees as a rule, do you? Well, that is it, do you see, Bobbie? The family imported all the trees to look decorative and to make their restored monastery look acceptably park-like, and they put these girders round ’em to stop them falling over, and the result is they did fall over, once the girders had been eaten away with rust. Albeit it took them a quarter of a century to fall over, fall over they did.’

  They all looked down at the rusted girder, and although it was summer, Julian coughed, and after that he laughed at some new thought, a habit of his. Sometimes, Bobbie had noticed, he laughed with an almost ecstatic happiness, as if he was hugging some wonderful notion to him, and finally she said, to fill in the moment, ‘Tell you what I think. These trees are emblems, they stand for the aristocracy, don’t you see?’

  ‘No, I am afraid I do not, young Bobbie.’

  The Major pulled heavily on his cigarette, and Bobbie wondered if she was about to lose her two shillings and whether he would light another one straight away, because it was entirely possible, considering the way he was smoking this one.

  ‘Oh, they are emblematic all right, and I will tell you exactly why—’

  ‘Sounds too damn intellectual for my tastes. Rust is rust, if you like.’

  ‘Of course rust is rust,’ Bobbie agreed. ‘Rust is rust is rust is rust, but—’ and here she opened her eyes wide and stared across at the Major before smiling in angelic docility. ‘But,’ she went on, dropping her voice, ‘life is much more fun if we think of it as something other. It is just a fact.’

  ‘Oh, very well, but if you ask me you’ll be wearing a black beret and singing sad songs in a Parisian boit de nuit, some nightclub with black-frocked women, if all this goes on much further!’

  ‘Are you ready, both of you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Julian smiled while at the same time he made sure to boss his eyes at Bobbie behind the Major’s back to make her laugh.

  ‘Get on with it, dear bean, really,’ the Major begged, and then looking down at the pug he said, ‘Boy old bean, better block your ears at this.’

  ‘Very well, these trees,’ Bobbie said, well pleased with the silence that now surrounded her, ‘these trees, if you will imagine, if you would, please, that these trees, these trees – they are the Normans, because they do not, as we know, grow here of their own accord, they have been imported. They are the Normans, therefore, the invaders of plain, beautiful Anglo-Saxon England.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the Major agreed, suddenly more interested, and lighting a cigarette.

  ‘And the girders, they are the law.’

  ‘Good,’ the Major agreed. ‘They are our impeccable legal system which has been in place since the Court of the Star Chamber, in good old Henry the Seventh’s days. Very well, dear bean, I get your drift.’

  ‘Then we come to the rust. The rust is the two world wars we have suffered in the twentieth century. The rust therefore has induced the ancient, stable, Anglo-Saxon world, which has lasted nearly ten centuries, to fall over.’

  The Major looked down again at Boy. ‘It’s all right, you can listen to this, old thing. Nothing too shocking for pug’s ears here. As a matter of fact, old bean, I think you have a rather good thing here, in your emblem, really I think you have. Not as much codswallop as I imagined, dear bean.’

  After which he smiled at Bobbie, and went back to his handsaw, while Julian too smiled, but only at Bobbie, opening his blue eyes a great deal wider than is normal.

  It was at these moments that Bobbie realized what a mischievous look Julian had to his face. And not just his face – his whole aura was mischievous. He had long ago captivated Bobbie’s imagination with his inventions, his dares, above all his ability to make a game out of nothing.

  Julian’s mischief was part of his permanent sense of cocking a snook at life – as Mrs Dingwall would often call it when Bobbie was living with her – and it was most particularly intoxicating to Bobbie. She really loved Julian for cocking a snook at everything. It made sense of him, and in a strange way it made sense of Bobbie too. It helped them both get by.

  Of course at that particular moment, as she tried to keep a straight face, Bobbie realized that she had really rather meant what she said, that, when you looked at it, it was like something in a painting, something that an artist would use as a symbol. All the fallen trees, the rusted girders, everything – it was very like England, with the fallen trees representing the
old world of country house life, of servants and privilege.

  And not only that, but, now she came to think of it, comparing the rust to the two world wars did seem very apt, because really, everywhere you looked in England now, everything did seem to be rusted through. Hardly a thing was not dull, or drab and sad, outside Baileys Court and Baileys Green, that is. The only way forward was to try to plant something different, something that would not need a great iron girder around it to keep it in place, something that would grow on its own, without support from outside.

  ‘Will Mrs Harper have to import more trees again and hope that they will grow this time?’ Bobbie asked, and this time it was she who bossed her eyes back at Julian, as the Major lit up his eleventh cigarette of the morning.

  ‘Oh yes, thousands more. Well, anyway, hundreds. After all not even wild flowers will grow around here, only gorse and more gorse, and yet more – gorse.’

  Julian laughed, mockingly, as always, and then, perhaps because the Major had lit yet another cigarette and the smoke smelt strong and acrid on the air compared to the subtle, sweet smells of wild flowers and the sea, he started to cough. Bobbie looked anxiously towards the Major, but if and when Julian coughed in front of him, the Major always seemed not to notice and would merely stroll off pulling on a cigarette, or whistling some tune he and his friends had whistled when they worked as prisoners of war on the Burma railway.

  Often, at night – when they had all decided to stroll around the gardens together for what the Major called his ‘last gasp’ – Bobbie and Julian talked to him about his war, and he would tell them about the fall of Singapore and then Burma and the camps, and how he and all the other young Englishmen what he called coped.

  Bobbie know that he did this to make sure that she and Julian understood how lucky they all were, to be there, to have freedom, to be able to work in a garden, or build walls as they were now doing, even if it was with cement smuggled to them by someone in the village, and sand the same, and bricks too. They were lucky, so lucky, because they were all still alive.

  When Bobbie had first seen Julian standing in the great red-curtained room in the wing of Baileys Court she had, for a second, thought – no, that was really too weak a word – she had longed for him to be Teddy, all grown up, and come alive again in front of her.

  It would be false and untrue to herself not to admit that there had been something about Julian’s smile, something about his odd clothes, but most of all about his white-blond hair that had made her think for a few dizzy seconds that her wartime brother had materialized in front of her in that dark room. But of course he had not, and at that moment of meeting with Julian she had known suddenly that it was ridiculous to even think of Teddy again. Teddy was most likely, was almost certainly, dead by now. Shot, or blown up, something like that, because he was a boy, and that was what happened to boys, probably even before they were old enough to go into the army and be killed. It was the English way of life, one of the French nurses had explained to Bobbie – to bring up their sons to be killed for the Empire and England.

  Of course as soon as she had realized that Julian really did want to live at Baileys Court all the time, for ever and ever, but would have his tongue cut out rather than admit to it, Bobbie had arranged with Miss Moncrieff to have him made up a bed in the garden wing of the house, in the room where Bobbie had first found him, and where for one glorious second she had thought he might be Teddy, come back to her, somehow finding her again – not in the bright pink dress and bright green cardigan and silver shoes of the much lamented Marion Dingwall, but in her own clothes, the kind of clothes they had used to wear in Mellaston, at the rectory – faded clothes of marvellous old-fashioned materials that had been softened by age.

  Naturally, Baileys Court was different from Mellaston, quite different, and Bobbie very different too, thank goodness. For what with the marvellous hot summer, and the sea so cool to bathe in, she and Julian, between working in the garden and building walls, could wear practically nothing, and did. Even the Major now wore only shorts and a shirt and bare legs, uncaring how he looked. Only Miss Moncrieff remained in her twinsets, buttoned up and hatted.

  At Julian’s urging, Bobbie had asked the Major to come and stay in the old house.

  ‘Too much for the old chap to be asked to drive in every day, what with petrol coupons and everything. And it’ll kill him to keep bicycling in this weather. Let him come and stay in the house, but well away from me. He wouldn’t want to be near me, especially not in the night when I prowl about, writing verse.’

  It took little prompting for the Major to make his ‘quarters’, as he called his bedroom, on the ground floor of the main wing, near to where the old spider-ridden bathrooms, once used by the staff, were housed. The two men were so far apart from each other that the Major joked to Bobbie that he never met Julian in the house.

  ‘Splendid chap, though.’

  He always said that about Julian, and when he did an odd look came into his eyes and he patted Bobbie on the shoulder in a kindly way.

  ‘I expect,’ Bobbie said once or twice to Julian, ‘you wish that the Major wouldn’t be so marvellously nice to you. I know I do, often. It makes you feel all gooey, doesn’t it? I am often fine, until I meet with the Major’s kindness, and then whoosh, I feel sorry for myself. He really must stop being so nice, don’t you think?’

  At this Julian smiled, slightly raising his blond eyebrows, his blue eyes staring not at Bobbie but straight ahead to what Bobbie sometimes called ‘our wobbly future’, because they both knew that neither of them was quite as well as they should be, not quite. Getting better, but not quite the thing yet.

  ‘Don’t worry, though,’ Bobbie went on bracingly. ‘I’m so nasty I’ll make up for all the Major’s gooeyness. As a matter of fact I don’t feel sorry for you in the least. Probably because I know you to be just a palsied poet of no fixed abode. I say – do you think that the Major’s going to make an honest woman of Miss Moncrieff?’

  They were walking down to the beach now with their picnic lunch, leaving the Major to wander off to the Sheds where he would be welcomed by Miss Moncrieff, who would serve him some form of the fresh kippers that he so adored for his lunch and some of Mrs Duddy’s home-made brown bread, and even some butter.

  ‘No, I don’t think he is going to make an honest woman of her.’ Julian sat down on the stones of the shore and stared out at the sea as if he could see far away to something that no-one else could, as if he was looking to something that was beckoning to him.

  There were still fortifications left to rot at their back, but before them was sea enough and beach enough for them to swim and enjoy themselves at lunchtime, while the Major ate and drank with Miss Moncrieff, who, to the amazement of both Bobbie and Julian, seemed, under the Major’s influence, to have taken up the last two habits with alacrity.

  ‘The Major is not going to make an honest woman of Miss Moncrieff, for the good reason that he has not yet made a dishonest woman of her.’

  As Bobbie unpacked their picnic they both started to laugh.

  ‘I can’t imagine them even holding hands—’ Bobbie stopped, frowning. As a matter of fact she could not imagine anything to do with anything. She reddened slightly, staring at the silver salt pot in her hand. There was little use in asking Julian if he could imagine anything more, since he was a very ill boy and probably very ill boys did not even think of things like that.

  ‘I think about love and passion all the time, do you, Bobbie?’

  Bobbie looked up. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said – I think about love and passion all the time, but it’s because of my condition, apparently, so you are quite safe with me, Roberta Murray of the long brown hair. Do you know that I have written a poem to your long brown hair, but you shall not read it until I am gone.’

  ‘Oh, do stop talking about going,’ Bobbie said, crossly. ‘Besides,’ she added with her usual show of pragmatism, ‘you can’t go until the garden is finished.’<
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  They had become a little team during those early summer months, building walls, planting what flowers they could, hiding from the ‘authorities’ their newly built walls, draping them with fallen trees and rubble which could be removed the moment some spy or other from the council, or wherever, went away.

  ‘I don’t know why we bothered to fight the Nazis,’ the Major would mutter after some new swoop from some new bureaucrat, ‘it seems to me we’ve fought one lot and got rid of them only to replace them with a home-grown set. We have our very own Nazis in our midst now, and they’ve got us all shouting Sieg Heil with the rest of the mob – it makes you sick, really it does. The trouble with these bureaucrats is that they get everything so dead wrong. They simply can’t see beyond their own noses. What is worse is that their thin skins and their prejudices are so apparent that they can put up more backs, cause more harm to the democratic way of life to which we all aspire, than a château filled with blasted Marie Antoinettes.’

  After one of his long speeches the Major would usually stomp off to have lunch with Miss Moncrieff, leaving Bobbie and Julian together, nearly always staring after him in some bewilderment. They soon stopped worrying, however, and now, with the sun so hot, and the sea beckoning, and no-one else around to frown, neither of them thought anything of wriggling about under towels and changing into bathing things in front of each other. Probably because they were such friends, or perhaps because she had always ‘shared’ with Teddy and Miranda during the war, Bobbie found that they were not self-conscious at all. She at least thought nothing of changing in front of Julian, and nor it seemed did Julian.

  More than that, they were, in so many ways, twin souls. They each knew precisely how the other felt, and the joy of this, the whole marvel of it, made Bobbie want to run up and down the beach shouting, just as they occasionally saw dogs running up and down along the shore, pretending that they were being chased by the waves which crept, or, on stormy days, cantered, up the shingle, before turning with the undertow, and following it back down again, barking all the time, just for the sheer joy of, the utter marvel of, living.