‘Yes, dear boy. I will play it for you, un de ces jours. It is the quirky note, you’re quite right – the one that comes between the two that fit together. Two are all set to harmonize, and then along comes the blue note et voilà – a kind of dis-harmonic harmony arrives, making a new kind of sound, but not the kind of sound that is expected. Beautiful, but completely unexpected, almost uncalled for, like so much that is interesting or worthwhile.’
Dick rolled his eyes, and, what with his freckled face and red hair looking, as it did, somehow incongruous beneath his navy blue Gallic beret, he made Teddy laugh at him, which was what he was aiming to do, for Dick was never, ever serious about anything, least of all art, which he took too seriously to be serious about except, as he said, when he was quite alone.
‘Art is decoration, amusement, entertainment. It should never be political, or try to change the world. It can change the world, but if it does it must only be by chance.’
This statement – which he all too frequently repeated in front of a set of extraordinarily serious, unentertaining, entirely politically minded fellow students – had landed Dick in more trouble than any politics. Better for him to have been a Communist, really. But of course as soon as he had realized how wonderfully inflammatory his statement was, Dick had been quite unable to leave it alone, and had repeated it as often and as publicly as possible. Which of course was where Teddy had come in, also all too frequently. Teddy had stepped between Dick and his enemies in bars and pubs, in clubs and cafés, and despite his only recently mended back had been quite prepared to take on all comers for his friend, for Dick had that effect on people. Teddy thought sometimes it was because he was so droll, or so nonchalant, or so sunny natured, seemingly uncaring, full of optimism and loving life, that he earned people’s undying devotion or their undying enmity.
‘What are you thinking of? You have your submerged expression, dear boy.’
‘I am thinking of photographing everyone I meet in the Blue Note. I am thinking of all the beautiful women, all the beautiful girls, I shall meet there.’
‘In that case, stop thinking.’ Dick shook his head. ‘There are never, ever any what we would find beautiful girls in the Blue Note. There are singers, and deadbeats, and Existentialist women with long black hair, but no beauties. Beautiful girls are not attracted to the Left Bank. If you want beauties you want to go to the sixteenth arrondissement, not the sixth.’
‘But there will be women with long, black hair.’
‘Women with long black dyed hair.’
‘Ah yes, of course. That is all the rage, long black dyed hair.’
‘And they will have dangerously loose morals.’
‘Of course, dangerously loose morals.’
‘And strange habits.’
‘Those too?’
‘Some very strange habits …’
Teddy sighed, already delighted beyond his own imaginings. ‘I can’t wait to photograph them in a dim light, their white faces lit by a Gauloise cigarette, their waists nipped by a large black belt, their long black skirts showing their womanly shapes.’
And now there they all were, just as Dick had described, except more dangerously feline and more svelte than Teddy had dared to imagine. There they sat, among the tables, listening to the jazz, some with a drink in front of them, some talking, despite the music, some smoking, some waiting to stand up and sing, if and when the opportunity offered itself.
For that was part of the attraction of the Blue Note, as Dick had carefully explained. It found new people for all the people who had already been found to admire, and they in their turn found new people, and so nothing stayed static, for obvious reasons.
And there was a great turnover in human beings – musicians, singers, customers – due to the late night, and other, habits of the clientele and performing artists. There was much talk of smoke, and dope, and drink, and other things that went on there, Dick had said.
But, on the surface anyway, it was, Teddy thought as he looked around, a huge outward success, being far more like the popular conception of a jazz club in Paris than anything he himself could have imagined. The atmosphere was loosely held by something unseen, some kind of commitment to that oddity to which perhaps only a thousand or so souls are linked at any one time, that gossamer thread that makes a sound that certain souls know and recognize to be the blue note of life, something for which they are searching.
All this was fine and exciting to Teddy, to find a place to be a cliché of itself was not to be disappointed. And as his eyes wandered to and from the incoming people, the departing people, the dark-clad legs of the girls, the striped jumpers – obviously a must – the black, black everything black, eyes, hair, clothes and even faces. A new set started and he began to listen to just some of the inspired music which was played there every night of the week.
It happened just as a lone pianist had started to improvise brilliantly. A girl at the far end of the room stood up and started to sing, drunkenly, wantonly, perhaps imagining in her drunken state that she too was improvising. She sang in a horribly dissonant drunken way, her black hair and white face somehow grotesque against the walls, so fearfully drunk that as the other people around him started to catcall, and some to laugh at her, Teddy turned his head away. He hated to look. There was something particularly upsetting about a girl who was drunk and making a fool of herself. Besides, he was still old-fashioned enough to think that a girl getting drunk was pretty terrible.
‘Taisez-vous, enfin! Partez, enfin! Trouvez votre mec et partez, mademoiselle!’
‘That is not a blue note that girl is making,’ Dick commented, turning his attention away from an extremely beautiful woman at the next table, and bossing his eyes at Teddy. ‘That is a screwed note. Sit down, mademoiselle, sit down and let us enjoy the music peacefully!’
Teddy shook his head, still turned away from the sight.
‘Sit down, you stupid tart!’ someone else called to her in French.
But the young woman at the far end of the room continued to sway, trying to sing too loudly and too long above the sound of the slow, sexy music, one hand holding on to the checked tablecloth beside her.
At last the man she was with stopped laughing at her, and pulled at her hair suddenly and viciously hard, forcing her to sit down. Teddy had turned just in time to witness this yet more upsetting sight, and of course he stood up at once. As Dick said afterwards, ‘Being English, he would, wouldn’t he?’
‘That’s going too far,’ he announced to Dick, but even as he started to walk across the room Teddy heard Dick behind him urging him to come back.
‘Dear boy, this is not Frimley, this is not Tisbury, this is the Left Bank in Paris, and here you would do well to mind your own business, really you would.’
Teddy ignored him, of course, for the simple reason he was none too sober himself. He walked between the tables towards the girl, whose black dyed hair now touched the red and white tablecloth, waving one finger side to side in that well-known international gesture which said to the hair puller, ‘No, no, no. Drunk she may be, singing like a banshee she may be, but hair pulling is just not on.’
The man, suddenly seeing Teddy making so purposefully towards the table, quickly stood up and left the club. The music went on playing, cool music that Teddy was just beginning to appreciate when he bent down and said in fractured French, ‘Are you all right?’
‘’M all right – ’m all right – kind of all right – just a bit.’
Her voice tailed off and she relapsed into unconsciousness. It was as if Teddy had been hit. Not just because the voice was English, but because he knew it so well. He stared down at the collapsed girl in horror. The dyed black hair, the white face, the dark clothes, none of it was finally a disguise.
‘Oh, my God! I say! For God’s sake!’
He turned and beckoned frantically across the room to Dick.
‘Over here,’ he called in English. ‘Quick, over here. I need help with this girl. We must
take her out of here. She may need to go to hospital. She’s very ill.’
Dick arrived slowly and reluctantly at his side and he too stared down at the girl collapsed over the table. It was a very unattractive sight, and although Dick thought that Teddy might be right, and she might be ill, what he said was, ‘You want to be careful who you pick up in here, dear boy. Some of them have rather large men attached to them, business arrangements, you know the kind of thing.’
‘Never mind that. You’ve got to help me.’
‘Oh, very well, but this girl is, I have to tell you, dear boy, hardly the kind of girl that your mother would want you to bring home.’
‘That is not quite true, actually, Dick.’ Teddy’s expression was grim as he tried to rouse the girl. ‘Help me, would you? Take that arm.’ He draped the other around his own shoulder and Dick followed suit. Teddy started to drag the unconscious girl towards the exit. ‘You see,’ he went on, as they inched their way towards the door that led to the Paris street outside, ‘this girl is actually my sister.’
It was winter now, and Bobbie was permanently sheltered in the Sheds. She kept telling herself that at least she was not in London with Beatrice, at least once the winter started to bring what winters tend to bring – rain and sleet and hail – Beatrice would visit Baileys Court less often, and then only at the weekends. But even this did not do very much good. Why would it? She was in the Sheds and all alone, and not able to be anything else, really. She was at Beatrice’s beck and call, a minor, as Beatrice kept reminding her, and a minor for some years to come, and likely to be left in the Sheds until such time as she reached her majority and was able to free herself from her guardian and her seemingly endless, and very often pointless, demands.
The autumn had been terrible. She had never before had any real opportunity to get to know Beatrice, but now she had, she devoutly wished that she had not.
Beatrice, Bobbie discovered, could not have anything tomorrow, she had to have it now, this second, not even this minute. And Beatrice trusted no-one, which was not just tiring, it was exhausting, and then, worst of all, because she was so beautiful, because she could never, ever bear a hair to be out of place, her clothes to be less than perfect, she was always in perpetual fear that they were, in the same way that because she enjoyed perfect health, she lived in terror of disease.
Sometimes Bobbie found herself wishing that Beatrice would actually be ill. That she would contract something mildly terrible which would allow her to concentrate on just one thing that was wrong with her, instead of fearing a hundred. It would make life so much simpler for everyone if Beatrice was surrounded by real doctors and nurses, instead of by unknown terrors about which nothing could possibly be done.
I am hoping that and here she wrote she only to rub it out again and leave a blank, I am hoping that will go away soon.
Bobbie wrote this in her diary. That was all she wrote and she was careful not to date it because she knew without being told that Beatrice would be the sort of person to read her ward’s diary, and any more would incur terrible retribution. For besides her fears about her health Beatrice suffered the usual fear of the very rich – she was convinced that no-one liked her for anything except her money.
‘Your mother was one of the few people I really trusted. She saved my life once, from drowning, I was drowning in a swimming pool, and she dived in and rescued me. I had fainted, it seemed, and was going under, and staying there, and she dived in – just like that. So brave. It was then that I said I would do anything for her. Anything at all, but of course, I never realized that she would take me at my word and leave me her daughter.’ Beatrice had laughed humourlessly at this, as she did at so much. ‘Life can be funny like that. You will find that out, Roberta,’ she would add, her eyes flicking backwards and forwards from some magazine which would be also being flicked, endlessly and restlessly. ‘You will, in time, find that life can be quite unexpected.’
Since Bobbie had not found life recently to be at all funny, or to be anything except expected, she was, to say the least, unimpressed by Beatrice’s warning, but eventually a woman had been found to teach her to type and to take down a form of shorthand, very, very slowly.
‘I don’t think you are made for this work, dear, really I don’t,’ Miss King would mutter, sometimes as much as twenty or thirty times a day as Bobbie struggled with pencil and rubber to pick up the rudiments of Mr Pitman’s shorthand. ‘Really, I should be doing your job, and you should be doing mine.’
This was all too true, since Miss King, unable to find secretarial work in the country, was being employed to work in people’s gardens. But of course there was no question of swapping occupations for they both knew that Bobbie was being kept as a secretary at Baileys Court simply and solely as a form of imprisonment.
‘I think Mrs Harper is – how shall I say – very nervous about you, dear. She is prey to her nerves, I gather, and so you really are a victim, aren’t you, of her nerves, I mean?’
They were walking round the gardens at Baileys Court as Miss King ventured this opinion, and Bobbie looked about her sadly. The whole fun of the garden had gone. It had disappeared overnight in a flurry of modish ideas. Italian garden to be here – Tudoresque there – everything tidied up to a point of readiness. And soon, they both knew, it would all be planted out by people who would not care for it, who, once their job had been done, would go away and forget about it, leaving it to other people, who would not care for it either, to look after it. Julian and she, the Major and Miss Moncrieff, they had rebuilt the walls, they had cleared and they had burned, ready to start again, but most of all they had loved it.
Of course, it went without saying that Beatrice had managed to wipe all that out in a minute. She had stared around her, on that first day, and of a sudden there had been no happy memories, no laughter, no fine times to remember, and all that Bobbie could see and hear were her restless unhappy eyes and her impatient perfectly shod feet echoing over the stones and her disapproving voice calling, again and again, for attention.
For Beatrice needed attention as much as other people needed oxygen. It was as if she was determined to draw everyone else’s energy away from them and use it just for herself. She was the motor car and they were her petrol. She left Bobbie exhausted, so much so that by lunchtime, whenever Beatrice was down she would find herself walking back to the Sheds in a state of tiredness that she felt could only be normal after a twelve-hour shift at a munitions factory.
Once back in the Sheds she would sink down into what had been Miss Moncrieff’s chair and sit with a cup of Bovril just staring in front of her. Nothing in this life was perfect. Bobbie had always known that, but Beatrice Harper, unfortunately, did not. She aimed for perfection in everything and everyone around her. Nothing was good enough. If a room had been cleaned from top to bottom, or, more to the point recently, completely redecorated, she could be relied upon to find the one patch, perhaps only the size of a sixpence, that had been missed by the painters.
Now Bobbie came to realize, and all too soon, why poor Miss Moncrieff had taken to sipping Bovril in her lunch hour, and knitting endless stockings for herself. Why, until the Major came into her life, Miss Moncrieff had never laughed or smiled; why she had lived in a state of permanent dread that ‘Mrs Harper’ would arrive to, as it were, suck her dry. Bobbie now understood why it had always been, ‘What would Mrs Harper say?’ ‘We must telephone to Mrs Harper and find out whether that is possible.’ When Bobbie had first come to live at the Sheds nothing had been possible without Mrs Harper’s first being mentioned. Bobbie had sometimes teased Miss Moncrieff that they could not even clean the bath without the say-so of Mrs Harper.
‘Oh, no, dear. No, but you do see, I mean – you do. Mrs Harper is most properly exacting. It is her way. She is one of the old-fashioned sort, do you see, dear. She must have her way.’
How exactingly true that statement seemed now to Bobbie – as true as the fact that the sun came up in the morning was the fac
t that, come what may, do what anyone could, no matter what, Beatrice Harper must have her way. But until now, until she had been forced to confront the full power of her guardian’s demanding personality, Bobbie had not been able to appreciate just how draining that personality really was.
There was something so ruthless about her that it left everyone else wrong-footed. And there was no-one within her entourage who was not paid, so it would seem that there was no-one who dared to risk their livelihood by standing up to her, or answering her back, or telling her that what she had demanded was truly unreasonable. Often, as they left her presence, they would look as if they had just been told bad news, before passing Bobbie with tired smiles, or the look of a person who felt that any minute now, if luck was on their side, something must happen to relieve them of the misery of working for her. Something must bring much-needed light back into their lives, because such egotism as she possessed blotted out the sunshine.
Sometimes Bobbie would wake in the night and dream of drowning Beatrice in the sea in front of the Sheds – either that, or drowning herself. And then in the morning, as she dressed, she would tell herself that it made no sense to feel like that. That she had to have more of what the Major would always call ‘gumption’ and, that being so, today she would make sure to try to change something. She would stand up to Beatrice, she would tell her that it was unreasonable to expect her to work until ten o’clock at night. That it was impossible of her to still be telephoning the Sheds and demanding that Bobbie go and play canasta with her at two in the morning; or make her a boiled egg at dawn; or drive to London with the chauffeur to fetch a certain dress – a dress which would subsequently be hung up in the wardrobe by the sighing maid, only to be given to that same maid a day later, because Mrs Harper had found that she did not like it after all, and had no idea why the chauffeur and Bobbie had gone to London to fetch it for her.
The Blue Note Page 23
