The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  It had been easy for Miranda to avoid the coupons crisis that other young women all over London were facing when it came to trying to dress themselves as beautifully as they wished. Miranda had no need of coupons, she had simply to dip into one of the trunks on the landing above the studio. With a newspaper and an old sewing machine to hand she had created a wide-skirted summer dress for herself, made of old-fashioned sprigged muslin above a silk underskirt with a cross-over top. With long sleeves and a thin black belt it looked as if it had come straight out of Fortnum and Mason, not the trunks of Aubrey Close.

  Her shoes were not so easy to pass off as modern, but with the aid of a large darning needle she had sewn the front of a pair of high-heeled sandals with bows to match her dress, bows that peeped out from under the full skirt. Her hat she had of course made herself, straw with ribbons and a tiny veil, and together with a muslin parasol that could pass as a modish umbrella she looked really rather shockingly fashionable.

  There had been letters in the newspapers about young women and the New Look, about the fact that it was neither patriotic nor decent for a woman to be seen wearing a skirt which could reach nearly down to her ankles, but Miranda cared not at all. She was off to get herself a job, bent on securing a singing engagement. She had sung at the Dorchester when she was only small, and now, she determined, she would do so again. So there was nothing more important than that she should look not just up to the minute but before it, for she remembered the hotel, even during the war, as being filled with people like Pamela, still beautifully turned out despite the bombing and the deprivations. She had to look so fresh out of Paris, so devil-may-care, that whoever was in charge of auditions at the Dorchester would engage her straight away.

  The woman at the side door of the hotel was ticking off names in her book.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Miranda Darling.’

  The woman stared at her. ‘Well it’s all in the name, dear, they do say.’ She noted her name, ticked it off and nodded her in.

  As soon as her feet hit the floor of the ballroom Miranda knew that her life was about to begin. She was going to be a singer. She was going to be famous. She would probably even be on the radio.

  ‘Have you auditioned here before?’ the voice from the first row of seats asked.

  ‘No, but I have sung here. During the war. I sang to the orchestra that was here then …’

  Suddenly it all came back to her. The room had been filled with diners, pretending to eat the strangest foods, which came wrapped about with French names and thin sauces. There had been Pamela and her American colonel. Miranda had seen that they shared a room together. First thing in the morning when she would not have been expected to be up she had seen Pamela slipping out of her colonel’s bedroom and into her own, wearing his dressing gown. At the time Miranda had thought that Pamela might have left her dressing gown behind and was borrowing his, but not now. Now she knew all about people sleeping together, because Allegra had told her, and so she remembered Pamela in a different way, not so much as a goddess who had encouraged her to sing, but as a woman who not only did not mind breaking the rules, but perhaps did not mind who knew. Looking back at that one wartime night in London Miranda realized now that it had changed her life for ever. It had sown the seeds of some divine restlessness, shown her that life was not always just about living, but could be exotic and dangerous.

  Now, full of the confidence that Aunt Sophie had instilled in her, Miranda handed her music to the musical director, and with a swish of her skirt and a belief in herself that had remained unchanged since her days at the rectory, she started to sing.

  The most perfect note came winging out, a note that began one of Aunt Sophie’s favourite songs, ‘Some Day I’ll Find You …’ She carolled, making round ‘o’s and crossing her ‘t’s like mad, as Sophie had so assiduously taught her to do.

  ‘Next please!’

  Miranda could not believe it, she simply could not.

  ‘What do you mean, next please? I’ve hardly sung a bar yet,’ she protested to the musical director, who was actually only some few feet away from her.

  ‘Sorry, dear, we are here to engage proper singers, not debutantes off to Ascot in the New Look.’

  Miranda stamped her foot suddenly, which was very un-Allegra-like but, when it came down to it, very Miranda.

  ‘I am not a debutante off to Ascot in the New Look. My name is Miranda Darling, and I am here to sing and you are here to hear me out.’ She stared across at the man.

  ‘Oh, very well, dear, but don’t be too long about it, will you? We’ve got another fifty behind you coming in today and it is still only twelve o’clock.’

  With considerable aplomb Miranda flicked through the music in front of her, and having redirected the accompanist began again. This time ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’ soared from her slender throat and she was allowed to sing it all the way through, but the reaction from the floor was unmoved, and the expression on the musical director’s face remained remarkably unenthusiastic, particularly considering that Miranda was quite certain that she was a genius.

  ‘Thank you, we’ll let you know.’

  Miranda wandered out into Park Lane. After all that sewing and making herself look so up to the minute – so much so that even Christian Dior himself would surely turn to look at her as she passed him – after all that she was back exactly where she had started before the taxi had drawn up outside the wretched hotel. She was back amongst the crowd.

  Feeling more disconsolate than she would have thought possible, Miranda wandered round to the front of the hotel. She would go in, she decided, and somehow once inside something would happen, she knew it would, for the truth was that she needed to work. It was no good just staying locked away in Aubrey Close. She needed not just a place to live, but money too, money to buy food and pay for taxis or buses. Her tiny allowance from Allegra – Two pounds a week will be ample, bless you, won’t it, darling? – her silk stockings found at Burfitt Hall, left over from before the war, the marvellous clothes that seemed to spill endlessly from the old trunks at the top of the studio stairs, just as they had from the Clothes Exchange – they were all more than she deserved and she knew it, but the appalling fact of the matter was that she still needed money. She had to find a position somewhere or her life at the studio would come to a shuddering halt.

  For a second Miranda paused in front of the Dorchester. Judging from the flurry of activity in front of the hotel, it seemed that a great star was expected at any moment. She paused, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of envy. What must it be like to be a great personality of your day arriving in a limousine, the hotel staff ready and happy not just to greet you but to put you up – sometimes, she had read recently, for free. It was an intoxicating idea, most particularly because Miranda remembered her one night at the Dorchester with Pamela and the Colonel as being what Allegra would call ‘heavenly’.

  ‘A gin and it, please.’

  Allegra always drank ‘gin and it’. Miranda was not sure what the ‘it’ was really, but it sounded so right, she was really pleased she had ordered it. As she waited for the waiter to bring her the drink, she lay back against the plush of the chair and lit a cigarette, slowly and satisfyingly drawing in the smoke with evident and quite public enjoyment, once more feeling glad that Allegra, among many other things, had taught her to smoke, as well as not to cross her ankles, or say ‘pardon’.

  ‘May I join you, mademoiselle, for a drink?’

  Miranda looked up. The owner of the voice that seemed to be so far above her was immaculately dressed in what she guessed must be English tailoring, dark suit, immaculate shirt, just the right kind of dark tie, but his voice had that faintly international twang that is acquired by the frequenter of exclusive bars in exotic places, attractive men in the diplomatic corps, foreign correspondents, and Americans living in Paris.

  ‘I am sorry, I have already ordered. Besides, I am not in the way of paying for gentlemen’s drinks.’
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  ‘Of course you’re not,’ he replied easily. ‘A young woman as beautiful as you is used to having everything bought for her. So, obviously’ – this as the ‘gin and it’ was placed in front of her – ‘you are expecting someone pretty soon, I presume?’

  ‘No, I am not.’

  Miranda knew that if it were not for the fact that she was wearing a veiled hat, she would be looking confused and embarrassed. To cover her discomfort she quickly pretended to be Allegra, and stared at the man.

  ‘Would it be presumptuous,’ he asked, gently, ‘if I asked you to expect me?’

  ‘I’m sorry? Why should I expect you – you, if I am not mistaken, are already here, are you not?’ A second later, she added, ‘Bless you.’

  He lit a cigarette from a silver case and smiled with the kind of suavity that young women are always meant to find so fascinating in older men, but which, in reality, they find irritating and patronizing.

  ‘Put another way, shall we, both, have a drink together, now?’

  ‘Oh, very well. Bless you.’

  Miranda’s eyes, when she required them to, could look strangely hooded. She had practised using the hooded look in front of the mirror for many hours at the Cottage, usually to the sound of Allegra snoring off her lunchtime tipples. Now, however, she realized, the time had come not just to practise the look, but to use it on a real, live human being. And so she did. She stared at the elegant man who had seated himself, rather too promptly she thought, opposite her, and pretended to be a cobra.

  ‘Is there something the matter?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He blew out some smoke towards her, at which, not to be outdone, she promptly and swiftly blew some back at him. ‘Nothing, no. I just thought you looked a little unwell.’

  Miranda held out her hand as she said, ‘Hungry actually. Miranda Mowbray – how do you do?’

  ‘Sam Macaskie.’

  ‘I actually sing under the name of Miranda Darling, but in private life I am just Miranda Mowbray.’

  ‘You will never be just Miranda Mowbray, believe me. Take my word for it, you will never be just anything.’

  For one tiny second Miranda had the worst idea, and it was the very worst, and it was that Sam Macaskie had guessed that she was actually not quite eighteen and that she had never sat drinking gin in the Dorchester on her own before – that, in fact, as far as London was concerned, she was more than a little wet behind the ears.

  But then she remembered that she was a true blue Cockney, originally, and Cockneys did not scare or embarrass easily. They were born within the sound of Bow Bells, and they never grumbled, no matter what Hitler dropped on them, and so she raised her glass and sipped at the drink. Seconds later she stopped.

  ‘You’re not enjoying that one bit, are you?’

  Before she could answer him he had leaned forward and, taking hold of her glass, had poured her drink into his own gin. Then, signalling to the waiter, he called for a lemonade ‘on the rocks’. She looked momentarily shocked, so, perhaps to comfort her, he said, ‘I never think that young women should drink gin anyway. Wine, but not gin. Gin gives them fat arms and a vile temper in the mornings.’

  ‘I just thought it might be a nice change, you know, from – anything else. My guardian always drinks gin and it.’

  ‘And does he have fat arms and a vile temper in the morning?’

  ‘She. Oh no.’ Miranda shook her head. ‘But she does sleep rather a lot after lunch,’ she added, after a few seconds.

  ‘Speaking of lunch, I wonder if you would like to come up for luncheon? I am staying here for a few days.’

  Miranda did not know where ‘up’ was but she guessed it must be to some luxurious set of rooms such as Pamela and her colonel had enjoyed what now seemed like a century ago.

  ‘I am very hungry …’

  ‘The Dorchester is beating the ration rap here quite brilliantly. The chefs are all back from fighting with the Free French in France, and coupons are not always asked for, I am happy to say.’

  ‘Where are your – rooms?’

  ‘Right at the top. You can see over the whole of London.’

  ‘In that case I think I would rather eat down here, if you don’t mind. I have no head for heights.’

  ‘Of course, I don’t mind at all.’

  Miranda saw that he did mind, but thought that really, it was too bad. Allegra had never told her specifically not to visit a gentleman in his hotel room, but remembering Pamela in the Colonel’s dressing gown, that quick glimpse of her wandering back to her own room from his bedroom, Miranda was suddenly not at all sure that she was really in the mood to break any rules, at least not quite yet.

  Chapter Seven

  Julian had told Bobbie a secret. It seemed that at long, long last the Major had made a dishonest woman of Miss Moncrieff.

  ‘He has rounded off her stocking for her, and she is now a real woman,’ he said, chewing on a long stalk of grass, his eyes as always half closed. ‘He has made himself known to her, in the full Biblical sense.’

  Bobbie started to laugh, rolling about in the thick-stalked grass that bordered the shore, running along the top of the beach before the line of overgrown hedges and shot saplings.

  ‘Oh, no, please, Julian, don’t say things like that,’ Bobbie gasped, and stopped laughing, perhaps because she was laughing alone, but then she started again, laughing quite helplessly, because Julian’s expression of Buddha-like calm was just so funny, and besides, the whole idea of the Major and Miss Moncrieff being Biblical together was even funnier than Julian’s unmoving expression. ‘I think you’re wrong,’ she said finally, and stopped laughing and stood up in front of the still seated Julian. ‘I do think you’re wrong,’ she went on determinedly, brushing sand from her knees. ‘You can’t be right because—’

  ‘Because?’

  Julian’s expression was suave to the point of urbanity and he lifted his damp chin from the sand and stared up at Bobbie.

  ‘Because,’ Bobbie went on, determined not to show him that she was in danger of bursting into another fit of helpless laughter at the sight of his sand beard. ‘Because,’ she said, breathing in, slowly. ‘Because, because—’ she cast around in her mind for the perfect reason why Miss Moncrieff would never, ever make herself known to the Major, in the Biblical sense. ‘Because she has to think of her mother, in Pinner. She would never do anything to upset her mother, in Pinner.’

  Julian looked up at Bobbie, his blue eyes solemn. ‘I think you will find that when it comes to passion, mothers simply do not count, Bobbie. They just do not.’

  ‘I never had a mother, so I shall never be able to prove you fearfully wrong.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Reasonably,’ Julian announced as Bobbie sat down once again, and then eventually lay back in the blazing heat, giving in to the pull of closing her eyes and sunbathing, succumbing to the lazy, shimmering heat, ‘reasonably you must have a mother, Bobbie. I mean, the Messiah had no father except God, but the rest of us, Bobbie, even you, have all had a mother and a father, with the single exception of my grandmother’s friend Mabel who had a virgin birth, because, so the legend goes, she and her husband simply did not do things like that.’

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean. My mother and father were killed before the war, and I don’t remember them.’

  ‘Well, isn’t that just too, too sad?’

  It was Julian’s turn to close his eyes and lie back against the sand. Bobbie had noticed that they always seemed to find it easier to talk quite frankly while lying down, side by side. However, today Julian obviously had nothing more to contribute to the subject of mothers, and since Bobbie would never dream of asking him anything that he did not wish to tell her, they lay for a while in silence, sweltering in the heat. The news reader on the wireless that morning had announced that England was enjoying the hottest summer of the twentieth century so far and just now neither of them had any trouble believing it.

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bsp; By the seaside at Baileys Court, with the water running up the beach or receding out to sea, but constantly with them, the heat was bearable and enjoyable, and strangely marvellous after the freezing temperatures of the past winter. But in the cities Bobbie knew that there were no frigidaires and no ice houses, no cool streams and no sea. Those same people who had frozen in the winter now queued for coupons, for fish, for bread, for anything and everything that they could get, and if they could not get it they found themselves trying to buy it from a spiv in a pub, and all the while they stifled, for there was no air in the cities and the towns, and no coupons on earth, not even a spiv in a pub, could purchase air for them.

  ‘Do you realize that somewhere, now,’ Julian’s sepulchral tones crept once more towards Bobbie, ‘somewhere, nearby, the Major may well be enjoying Miss Moncrieff, Roberta? Do you realize that?’

  Bobbie started to laugh again, uncontrollably. She did not bother to sit up, but just let the tears roll down her face into the sand.

  ‘Oh, stop, Wretched Boy, stop,’ she said, but the laughter became yet more uncontrollable, and she had to turn on her front and put her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking, a piece of towel to her eyes.

  Wretched Boy was her new nickname for Julian because he had told her that when, briefly, he had attended a boys’ boarding school, the headmaster had never addressed any of his pupils in any other way. Julian maintained that the poor man was a victim of the demon drink and as result never could remember anyone’s name. All boys were ‘wretched boy’ and all the teachers ‘Er Um’. He smelt so strongly of whisky before ten o’clock in the morning that someone’s parents had, eventually, complained to the Board of Governors. As a result, in panic, or while still under the influence, he had forced himself to drink a bottle of stale cologne, apparently in an effort to drown the smell before coming up before the said governors, and as a consequence died quite horribly.