The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  There was a long silence, which Bobbie, remembering Teddy’s advice to her, was quite determined not to break. But then a terrible thing happened. She suddenly thought not of Teddy, or Dick, but of Julian, and how he would laugh at such hypocrisy and cant. He would double up with laughter at the thought of Beatrice making such pompous speeches, just as he had rolled about in the sand that enchanted summer, saying over and over again, ‘Human beings, aren’t they pathetic, so pathetic?’

  Which was probably why Bobbie heard herself suddenly saying, in an innocent voice, ‘Davis? Do you think I have let down Davis?’

  ‘I beg your pardon? What has Davis got to do with anything, Roberta?’

  ‘I just thought I might not have let Davis down, that’s all. You know, that he might not feel let down, because he didn’t even recognize me when he picked me up this morning, so he obviously doesn’t know anything about my posing with the Bible and being on billboards, and so on; so I might not have let him down. At least I might not have let Davis down.’

  Beatrice’s eyes were hard and unmoving, as hard and unmoving as any eyes that Bobbie could imagine. And seeing their look, directed straight at her, it seemed to Bobbie that that was how the Jesuits’ eyes during the Spanish Inquisition must have looked; brown, hard flints, with not a flicker of humour or humanity.

  ‘I suppose you think that what you have just said was funny, Roberta?’

  ‘It could have been funny, but it was obviously not.’

  Taking the risk that her hands might shake, and her guardian notice it, but determined on her next course anyway, very deliberately Bobbie opened her chic leather handbag and took out a cigarette, which she fitted slowly, oh so slowly, into a holder, lit and inhaled. She had practised the lighting of that cigarette all week, knowing that if she could bring it off it would be more than a statement of independence, it would be taken by Beatrice as a positive insult.

  As soon as she replaced the lighter and cigarette packet in her handbag Bobbie saw that she had succeeded in what she had set out to achieve, and now all there was left for her to do was to pray that she would not cough, that after all those long hours of hideous practice she was going to be able to smoke a cigarette, in a slow and leisurely fashion, and make a smoke screen from behind which she could view Beatrice Harper.

  ‘No, actually, I did not think it was funny, what I thought was that I might lighten the moment, as the Major would say. That was all.’

  ‘What major?’

  ‘The Major that your former secretary, Miss Moncrieff, ran off and married.’

  Beatrice did not bother to reply to this. She too lit a cigarette, with the result that within a few minutes there was a very satisfactory smoke screen hovering between them, and a casual observer might have thought they were just two sophisticates meeting to have a smoke and a chat on an early autumn morning in London.

  ‘Roberta.’ Beatrice gave Bobbie her blackest and most commanding look. ‘I can promise you one thing. I can bring pressure to bear in certain quarters to bring your fame to nothing – or, to put it another way, to de-fame you – if you do not give me your word that you will toe the line, give up this inanity, and return to Baileys Court, take up your secretarial duties, and lead a properly quiet life.’

  Bobbie had been waiting for this. The veiled threat at which her guardian was so very expert. The hint that she could and would do anything she wished, with or without the help of governments, democracies or even monarchies. She was rich, powerful, and what was more she was Beatrice Harper, and if Bobbie did not believe her now, then she would live to regret it.

  ‘Well, I will of course, if that is what you really wish. But,’ Bobbie paused. ‘But you must explain to me. I simply do not understand what it is that I have done that is so wrong? I left Baileys Court because I did not want to be a burden on you any more, and besides that there was nothing to do, and now – well, now that I am independent, and will never again have to lean on you for anything, you want me to go back there and be dependent on you again.’

  ‘I want you to be properly grateful for what I have done for you. You are still a minor, until you are twenty-one, you must remember this. I am your guardian. Your mother left you in my care, for my sins.’

  Bobbie sighed inwardly, but remembering all her friends back at Ebury Street, and all their advice, she said, ‘But that is not true, and you know it. You are not my legal guardian. You just decided to make me your sort of ward, to help me when I was sick, and I am truly, truly grateful, but I don’t really have to do everything you tell me. There is no legal reason. I am actually an orphan, not really your ward, and while I am sorry if I have disgraced you and been ungrateful, I realize I owe my life to you, and that is, after all, a great deal.’

  ‘Your poor mother and I were the greatest friends, remember that, Roberta. She and I shared some of our happiest times as girls before the war. Your father too was one of my oldest friends. I will not stand by and do nothing, watch you drag your family name, your association with me, through the mud, to the delight of every newspaper in the land, reading material for every housemaid and boots boy in any backroom or bar.’ She stopped suddenly, frowning. ‘What is it they are calling you now?’

  ‘The New Quaker Girl. It’s only a bit of fun, actually, you know, and really it was just because Mr Singh did not want some Jezebel letting down the Holy Bible Company. I mean you can see his point, can’t you––’

  ‘Fun!’ Beatrice stubbed out her cigarette in the silver ashtray on her leather-topped and gold-tooled desk, and stared at the young woman in front of her. ‘Fun! You call having all London talking about you, this kind of press fame, fun! It is appalling. Nice people are not seen on billboards all over London! Nice people do not let down their background in this way. Nice people behave themselves.’

  ‘But it is not a nude picture or anything.’

  ‘Nude it may not be, but it is large and vulgar, and you are posed trying to sell the most sacred book ever written, in a large satin skirt with the Holy Bible. It is appalling. Only last night at dinner Lord Holbrook made fun of the advertisement and you in that large satin skirt, to me, to my face. He knew I had something to do with you and he could not wait to mock me.’

  ‘He was probably just joking.’

  ‘He was making fun – that is not joking, Roberta. That is making fun at my expense, and you are responsible for my discomfiture. You and you alone. Ever since the newspapers picked up my connection to you, God help me, my life has been hellish, completely hellish. I am just waiting for questions to be asked in Parliament. That will be the final humiliation, a question asked in Parliament about the Bible and the Quaker Girl, or whatever they are calling you.’

  There was a long silence while Bobbie tried her hardest to appreciate her guardian’s position and think of a practical solution.

  ‘Well, can’t you just disown me? I mean, wouldn’t that be the answer, don’t you think, to disown me?’

  ‘Is that all you can say? After all the time and money that I have spent rescuing you from your wretched disease …’

  ‘My incipient disease …’

  ‘All you can say is can’t you just disown me. What do you think your poor mother would say if she were alive now? What could she say? A heroine, a perfect heroine, in her own right, she would hang her head at your infamous behaviour at my expense.’

  Bobbie stood up. It was all becoming too dull. She had to go. Beatrice had gone too far. Anyway, when all was said and done, she suspected that Beatrice was merely an older woman who was jealous. Her nose had been put out of joint by being connected to Bobbie, instead of the other way round. She had probably wanted to be a model or an actress or something herself. She had probably wanted to be someone like Vivien Leigh, and failed.

  Besides, it was not Bobbie’s fault that she had gone to work for Mr Singh. It was not Bobbie’s fault that some ferret in the press had found out Bobbie’s connection with the Harper fortune and Baileys Court and all that. It was no-one�
��s fault. But there was one thing that was at fault at that moment and that was Beatrice Harper. She had gone too far, and as a result Bobbie was determined that she would finally end the whole hypocritical charade. She could hear Julian, sitting somewhere at the back of her mind as he always did, laughing and saying, ‘Go on, Bobbie, tell her what you know. That will be funny; that will be so funny.’

  ‘I am sorry you feel I have let you down, but I must tell you that I do know that your kindness to me has very little to do with my “poor mother” as you keep calling her, and everything to do with your own guilt. Miss Moncrieff has told me everything. She told me that you had an affair with my father, and that they were both killed before you could ask her forgiveness, and that was why you have looked after me all this time. Nothing to do with your friendship with my mother, but everything to do with your affair with my father long before the war. I will pay you back for everything you have done for me, every penny of the cost of my time at the sanatorium, and I have to say that I am in a far better position to do so than I would ever have been had I stayed down at Baileys Court. We had better say good morning now, and as I say, I do thank you. But you must realize, besides what I owe you, you have no further hold over me.’

  As Bobbie walked back to the door, in her imagination she could hear Julian laughing and cheering, but in reality what she actually heard was Beatrice’s hard voice saying, ‘Don’t think this is the last you will hear of this, Roberta, because if you do, you are even more naive than even I realized.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dick and Miranda had found the ideal site for the café cum restaurant on which they had both set their hearts. It was at the top of Kensington Church Street, but set back, in one of the many side roads threaded through endless square-fronted cottages that wound up and down behind the main thoroughfare. The cottages had been built for railway workers employed on the tunnelling needed for the London underground trains. They were substantial cottages, and now, a hundred years later, actually pretty and quaint, and largely occupied by artists and writers, the overspill from the older Bohemian areas of streets such as Aubrey Close, clusters of studios built for artists with grand ways and even grander ideals.

  Miranda enjoyed walking in London more than she had ever done in Norfolk. She realized now that it must be her Cockney upbringing that made her love cities so much. It was because she was at heart a Cockney that the migrating of birds held no real interest for her compared to the occupants of those cottages. She was far more intrigued by seeing Augustus John walking about town in his black velvet, or a famous actress stepping from her open-top Bentley, than she was by seeing a migrating Bewick’s swan, or an incoming swallow. Besides, it was the human beings that she hoped to attract to her café.

  In the middle of the night, if she could not sleep, she liked to lie awake and imagine that, in time, she would attract famous people to her café, and as a consequence by the time she was old she would have many anecdotes to recount to friends about them. She thought of herself not as being the star of her premises, but the quiet listener, for if there was one thing of which she was quite sure it was that she never, ever, wanted to be the centre of attention again. The night when Dick and Teddy found her in the Blue Note, singing like a drunken sailor and looking like a tart, had ended all her notions of becoming a singer, or anything like it. Now all she wanted was to be quiet, cook, and become prosperous. Even her fascination with clothes had come to a shuddering full stop. Nowadays she found that she was far more interested in what dear Bobbie was wearing than in how she herself looked. It was as if by caring too much about her appearance she might be led back to be the person that she had become in Paris.

  Of course she made sure that she washed her hair every morning, and following that, in order to be quick and get out to the café site, or to the market at Covent Garden, as fast as possible, she had designed herself a kind of uniform of navy blue jumpers and skirts, dark stockings, flat shoes, and a pony tail. Then she forgot about herself and how she looked until evening, when she bathed and changed into yet more navy blue.

  ‘You don’t have to look quite so boring,’ Teddy kept complaining when he came home to yet another of her fabulous suppers. ‘Does she, Bobbie? Not every day, surely? Not Sundays as well? You’ve become a sort of culinary nun.’

  ‘No, I don’t have to. I just want to, that’s all.’

  She could not explain to Teddy, of all people, just what it had done to her to be found by him, of all people, her sometime young brother, in that most terrible of positions for a young woman, a positive slave to a man who was using her when and how he wished. To be found in the thrall of a man who had delighted in humiliating her, who had somehow caught her in the headlights of his personality, who had so scared her, finally, that she would do anything and everything that he wished.

  How could she explain that to Teddy of all people? Teddy who was as innocent of such ways as Miranda was now conversant? Teddy who, spiritually at least, had never really shaken off the influence of the aunts at Mellaston, who loved to see life as full of the kind of beauty that he was determined to photograph, who was incapable of hitting a woman, let alone pulling her hair? Teddy whom she loved with all her heart. She could not begin to explain to him how someone like Macaskie could get a hold on you, whittling away at your confidence to such a degree that you no longer knew who you were, or cared.

  ‘I like navy blue,’ was all she said, before asking, ‘Coming to the fun fair tomorrow, Ted? Dick and I are longing to go on the bumper cars and behave like the great Fangio. Would you like to come?’

  Teddy turned to Bobbie. ‘Coming, Bobbie?’

  Bobbie nodded, and Miranda turned away, not wanting to see the look of delight in Teddy’s eyes that Bobbie had decided to go with them.

  She knew that she should be pleased that her brother was in love with her best friend, yet all she could feel was jealous. She loved Teddy. She had picked him up from the orphan section at the school, adopted him for a brother, and now she wanted no-one to love him as she did. He was hers.

  Dick was full of the rumour that there was going to be some sort of festival for Britain. As it happened both Teddy and Dick had heard about it quite separately, and both were enthusiastic. After all those dreary years, it seemed that at long, long last the skies over Britain were lightening, and people were longing to celebrate the fact that the war and its aftermath might finally and actually be over, and there were young people and middle-aged people still alive and dying not to die but to live their lives and show that they were talented, that England was still full of invention, and flair.

  They were all walking briskly along talking about it, on the way to the fair, and in great spirits although it was late and autumn. But the weather was fine, and the leaves on the London trees were still green in places, as if they too were hanging on grimly, longing to help enliven the post-war scene.

  ‘Of course there would be an artistic point to absolutely everything in the festival,’ Dick announced, as they grew nearer to the fair, almost as if he was warning them not to be complacent. ‘I was talking about it to someone in plastics, would you believe, in the pub the other day. Of course the Labour government is not in the slightest bit interested. Too arty sounding for them, but you know it could be fantastic, really. It could be a signpost for everyone to realize that we do have a future, that England can be great again. Certain of the press are getting a sniff of it, they can see what us arty types are on about, it’s just the politicians and people who need convincing.’

  It was early evening by the time they arrived at the fun fair, and all four of them could feel their hearts rising with the excitement of seeing such a medley of lights and colour. What with Dick’s chatter and the feeling that there might, soon, sometime, be perhaps a great and colourful rainbow over Britain, a great arc of colour; that the death and destruction of the last decades might at last be over, perhaps even for ever, they all started to run towards the various attractions, towards the mu
sic and the fairy lights. They were grown up, of course, but they were still young, they could climb on the horses going up and down, or pile into the dodgem cars and ram each other’s vehicles and laugh – and forget. Forget about the bomb sites and rationing, about coupons and bad food. Just for a few hours they could be as their parents might have been before the war, carefree and happy.

  Bobbie’s favourite attraction turned out to be a miniature railway.

  ‘It’s because it’s like Mellaston.’

  ‘No, it’s not at all like Mellaston.’ Bobbie shook her head at Miranda, frowning. ‘No, it’s more like the station at Baileys Green, where I was a few summers ago.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Miranda looked at her briefly. ‘Of course. Where you met the Major and all that.’

  ‘All that, yes.’

  Miranda stared at her suddenly, her eyes narrowing, something of the old Miranda coming back into her expression, and she pulled Bobbie ahead of the others so that she could hear the answer to the question she wanted to put to her before the boys were tempted to eavesdrop.

  ‘You were in love with someone at Baileys Court, weren’t you, Bobbie? Tell, oh do. You fell in love with someone when you were there. A man, you fell in love with a man. Did you have an affair with him?’

  Bobbie managed to look both shocked and affronted at Miranda’s mockery, and Miranda started to laugh.

  ‘It’s not so shocking, Bobbie, really. Other girls do have affairs nowadays, you know, not just me. I am not the only damaged goods around this city. So long as you don’t – you know – become enceinte, well, that’s all right, isn’t it? No babies please, we’re not married.’