The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  He leaned forward and took one of her hands in his, longing now not to go, but to see his Bobbie, the one he had re-met that day in the old bombed-out conservatory, coming back to him, instead of staring miserably up from her pillows as she was now, the dark circles under her eyes making her face seem plain and wan.

  Bobbie was about to open her mouth and say, as the Major would have done, ‘Oh, what tosh,’ when she started to laugh weakly.

  ‘Oh, Teddy, if only I could snap your face!’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. I’m like a dog, you can laugh with me but not at me.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Teddy stared at Bobbie now as she moved restlessly against her pile of pillows. He stood up and went to the back of her.

  ‘Sit up, while I do your pillows. I know how to do this. Two crossed pillows, hospital style, and now one straight one. There.’

  He took up the folded newspaper from the table beside her bed and looked at it. She had folded it into a square to do the crossword, except, because Bobbie had never been any good at crosswords, she had only filled in one clue.

  She looked up at him defensively as he stared at it. ‘It’s probably wrong.’

  ‘It is,’ Teddy agreed absently. ‘What was I saying?’

  Bobbie frowned. ‘I don’t know. Something.’

  She half closed her eyes, already tired out but still waiting patiently, as if Teddy was about to start reading her a story, and had just put the book down for a minute before continuing.

  Teddy sat down again. ‘Let’s do the crossword together.’

  ‘No.’ She opened her eyes and looked petulantly at him. ‘I don’t want to do crosswords. I can’t think at the moment. My chest hurts too much to think.’

  ‘Very well, I’ll read to you.’

  ‘No, I don’t want that.’ She kicked out suddenly and restlessly at her bedding. ‘Mrs Saxby keeps reading to me and it just sends me to sleep, and then I’m awake all night, instead of all day. Besides, I feel frightened at night on my own, I alway have.’

  ‘Wireless then.’

  Seeing her eyes close once more, Teddy tiptoed over to the wireless and, having switched it on, adjusted the sound to ‘low’ and prepared to tiptoe out to the shops to find her something tempting to eat, or a present of some kind.

  ‘Don’t go.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘Please, don’t go.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to go, I was just going to go and – buy you something, a present, something cheerful.’ Teddy took one of her hands, looking as calm as he did not feel.

  As he stared into Bobbie’s eyes, which were not at all like the old familiar Bobbie’s eyes, but like someone else’s, someone who was not really there, Teddy realized with sudden shock that he had never really seen death close to. People he had known had died, but he had never seen death. The aunts had died, and his parents had died, of course, but now it seemed to him that in reality, for the first time, he might be facing death, Bobbie’s death, and it was as if there was only silence around him, and around her. People did die of tuberculosis, or whatever she had, and now it occurred to him that Bobbie might indeed be dying.

  As this thought came to him and together with it the next one – namely that even he might not be able to stop her dying – it seemed to him that although the old big-headed Teddy would have been able to make instant decisions the new Teddy could only stare, and pray silently, Please God, don’t let Bobbie die!

  He went to the shops and came back again with a box of glacé fruits and a large jigsaw puzzle. Bobbie was so pleased that he was able to get her to agree to go with him to see a specialist, because, as Teddy said, ‘Lying about being ill is not much fun, even if you are quite used to it.’

  ‘Really Miss Murray should go back to a sanatorium, but—’ the specialist hesitated.

  It was that but that hung in the air and waved itself in front of Bobbie and Teddy, in the manner of an inn sign. Backwards and forwards that but swung before Bobbie’s frightened eyes. She had known so much sorrow over her last years of growing up, she had known that there was so much of which to be frightened, that she had learned never to look ahead for more than a few hours. Even so, back to a sanatorium again, all those whey-faced nurses, all those other patients in various stages of their mutual illness. She looked quickly at Teddy, suddenly frightened.

  ‘Miss Murray doesn’t want to go back to a sanatorium,’ said Teddy, speaking for her. ‘And you can’t blame her; she’s spent half her childhood in one. Besides, I often think that when you’re ill the last place you want to be is with someone else who is ill. No, there must be some other way. After all, it’s just convenience that makes you lump sick people together under one roof with a whole lot of other sick people, it’s just because you don’t want the bother of them singly. But it’s not like that for Miss Murray. She has someone who does want the bother of her, someone who can nurse her and look after her.’

  The specialist managed to look both bored and irritated at this statement. ‘Her mother or someone? I suppose some relative might be prepared to––’

  ‘No, not some relative, me. Her––’

  ‘Brother!’

  Teddy and Bobbie stared at each other, momentarily embarrassed and confused at Bobbie’s sudden interruption, but the specialist could not have been less interested if they had been married and divorced.

  ‘Scotland is good,’ he said in a voice of polite disinterest. ‘Scotland is very good for incipient TB – plenty of mountain air. Or the seaside can sometimes do the trick. A lot of patients go to the seaside.’

  ‘I was at the seaside before – in Sussex.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that could be as good as anywhere. Sussex.’

  ‘Very well, we shall take her to Sussex.’ Teddy smiled suddenly at Bobbie, and stood up. ‘I will take you to Sussex, and you will get better, see if you don’t. You won’t be seeing her again, Dr Larkman – not if I have anything to do with it.’ He put his arm protectively round Bobbie. ‘Come on, Miss Murray, bucket and spade time.’

  Outside the door Bobbie looked up at Teddy. ‘But what about your work, Ted?’

  ‘My work can go fish. My work is you. You’re much more important than my work.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘I say, I suddenly realized – you called me Ted. Is that how you think of me?’

  ‘Course.’ Bobbie leaned against him, allowing herself to feel suddenly affectionate for a few seconds.

  ‘That’s funny. Miranda said that of the two of us – Ted or Teddy – you would prefer Teddy.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Ted – I like both.’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Yes. I like both of you.’

  After that they walked on down the seemingly endless hospital corridor in silence, knowing that they had reached an understanding, although what exactly it was, neither of them could have precisely said.

  Teddy was as good as his word. Within a few weeks of their visit to the specialist, he took Bobbie to the seaside. All right, it was the seaside in winter, but the seaside in winter was without doubt just as beautiful, if not more beautiful to Bobbie. Teddy had managed to hire a small house for her, in a quiet road on a private estate, and himself set up home for them both, living, as far as the estate agent, their landlady and their neighbours were concerned, as brother and sister – Mr Mowbray and his sister Bobbie Mowbray.

  ‘Must preserve the proprieties!’ Teddy liked to joke, while secretly thinking that ‘Bobbie’ and ‘Mowbray’ went together as if they were made for each other.

  With the realization that Bobbie was so ill and needed him more than she would ever admit, Teddy found, to his permanent surprise, that not only was he able to run a house, quite effortlessly, but he actively enjoyed it. Day after day he meticulously observed the same routine. First he would rise early to make breakfast for them both, whistling and singing and going to the gate for the paper in a determinedly cheerful manner. Then he would run Bobbie a bath, and after she had washed and dressed, help her to the downstairs room
where he would leave her to sit warmly blanketed with rugs in front of the open French windows giving onto the garden, which itself gave straight onto the beach.

  And so, having breakfasted off fresh lemon juice (‘the best drink for bad chests’) and coffee and rolls, Bobbie would find herself warmly wrapped but breathing in sea air, listening to ‘Housewives’ Choice’ to the sound of the ancient Hoover provided by their landlady being pushed with ferocious enthusiasm by Teddy all over the carpets, until she was sure that there could not be an atom of dust within miles.

  The house they had rented was not big, but it was spacious enough, and the long room that was its feature overlooked not just the sea but the small garden as well, so that there was a square of green and some hedging before the beach began. As Bobbie knew only too well from her childhood, on a bad day the sky and the sea could seem unremittingly grey without some green somewhere to relieve the depressing intensity. It was on this small, green sward that Teddy started to turn away from direct images. Unable to leave Bobbie for any length of time, and having found that he had tired of people and fashion, which nowadays seemed to him to be suddenly lightweight, he became fascinated instead by photographing the wonders of light reflected on water.

  As his patient slept or woke fitfully all during the day and sometimes at nighttime too, only to sleep again, tired out from coughing, her hands clasping an unread book, the wireless playing endlessly, and sometimes, it seemed to her, quite pointlessly, Teddy worked on his pictures of sea and moonlight, sea and sunlight. Early morning, late at night, whatever the time, he found himself again and again drawn to the shore.

  ‘I am in love with light on water.’

  The results were so good that he sent some up to his new gallery in London. Happily the post brought back an enthusiastic reception and several commissions. It also brought an invitation to Dick and Miranda’s wedding and ensuing reception at their café, which Teddy took at once to show Bobbie.

  ‘I can’t go, Ted.’

  ‘Of course you can go.’

  Bobbie shook her head, miserable but certain the way people with lingering diseases can be. ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘Dick and Miranda probably won’t get married at all if you’re not there.’ But even as Teddy finished speaking he realized from the expression on Bobbie’s face that she would not be moved.

  ‘No, Ted. I am sorry, but I’m just not well enough.’

  ‘You are better than you were. You know you are. You look better.’

  ‘I know. I know I am better than I was, but if there is one thing that no-one really understands about this wretched disease …’ She paused, remembering. ‘Well, no, there was someone, once, who did,’ she said, remembering Julian and their jokes about being The Incipients. ‘At any rate, to put it another way, if you haven’t had something like this, what you don’t understand is that it fills you with a horrid sense of self-disgust. You hate yourself for being like this, and as a consequence you don’t really like anyone else. It’s just a fact, I am sorry to say.’ As Teddy looked shocked, she shrugged her shoulders but went on, insistently, ‘No, really. It does. This disease makes you hate yourself, and then you can only see the distress that it seems to cause other people, and so you end up not wanting to see anyone. Not anyone! Not even – well, you. No, I want to see you, but no-one else.’

  Teddy sighed, the invitation still in his hand. Their two best friends, his sister, getting married and Bobbie was refusing to go, even for a few hours.

  ‘Miranda will be devastated, you know that. I mean, Miranda, well, she sets such store by things – and Dick – they’re so fond of you—’ His voice petered out.

  But Bobbie just shook her head and tried to smile in an effort to lighten the moment.

  ‘Don’t be dotty, Ted Darling. Can you imagine? I mean, really, just as the organist starts playing “Here Comes The Bride” I’ll start one of my marathon coughing fits, and everyone will stare and wonder why I bothered to come all the way up from Sussex just to cough at the happy pair. It’ll seem more like sabotage than friendship, to go all that way to make everyone else feel uncomfortable, and you’ll end up wishing I’d stayed at home.’ She attempted to laugh at the idea, but then as always the coughing started again, and conversation came to a temporary end.

  ‘Oh, very well. I expect they’ll understand.’

  Teddy wandered off looking morose, and during the following weeks Bobbie imagined that despite acceding to her wishes and writing to tell Dick and Miranda that she was still too ill to attend, he had not really understood how she felt. As he prepared to go up to London by the early train on the day of the wedding, leaving Bobbie in the charge of their landlady – a matronly woman in a navy blue coat which she never seemed to take off – Bobbie could hear him whistling and singing to the wireless as he dressed, and his very cheerfulness seemed to confirm what she had thought. Teddy was too insensitive to either understand, or care how she felt. How her self-disgust and embarrassment at her disease made her feel that everyone would stare at her and pity her, and how her sense of isolation from the world made her feel resentful that she was too ill to go, which in turn made her feel sorry for herself, sometimes finding herself crying miserably in the night, wondering if she would ever get better.

  ‘I am on my way.’ Teddy peered round the sitting room door looking extraordinarily smart for Teddy, and of a sudden extraordinarily handsome to Bobbie. She nodded, pretending cheerfulness.

  ‘Send them my best love, Ted, won’t you? Don’t forget the present, and don’t leave it on the train. And tell them I shall raise a glass to them at four o’clock when they should be cutting the cake.’

  Teddy nodded, now walking down the long room to where Bobbie was stationed, as always, in front of the open windows. He bent down and kissed her on the cheek, and at the same time brought round a large box from behind his back.

  ‘Wear this for me while I’m gone. Wear it for me, and for Dick and Miranda, pretend that you’re with us in London.’

  Bobbie opened the box and carefully undid the tissue paper. Inside was a hat, as it happened the prettiest hat she thought she might have seen in months, if not years. Having examined it for a few seconds in delighted silence she turned to thank Teddy, but he was long gone, and when she set aside her rugs and went to the front room window, he was already waving to her from the station taxi and leaving her to find a note at the bottom of the box.

  Wear this and think of us.

  Bobbie stared out to sea. The sea like the hat was blue. That was propitious. She thought of Miranda, and then of Dick, and she thought of their happiness, and she put on the hat, and went on staring out to sea to some indefinable moment that she imagined might never be hers.

  In London Dick and Miranda’s wedding was everything that a small wedding between two Bohemian young people should be, the church filled with friends and flowers and the café tables laden with as much food and drink as rationing would allow. But none of them could stop thinking about Bobbie, her absence having the effect of making her illness seem even more real, and of course in his anxiety Teddy could not help talking about her.

  ‘I keep hoping that she will be better once the spring comes. At least she is not worse, at least she’s still with us. I suppose that is something, isn’t it, Dick?’

  The bridegroom put a sympathetic hand on Teddy’s shoulder. ‘Just don’t set too much store by her getting better quickly, old chap. Remember Bobbie’s been ill since she was a child. I sometimes think that is what is so hard for her. I mean to have got better, and then suddenly to get the wretched thing again. Miranda thinks it was all to do with this Julian fellow and some sort of discovery that he died at sea, you know, rescuing people from Dunkirk, setting off again in his little boat and then being overcome by the sea, and all that. She thinks that in her heart of hearts Bobbie’s still waiting for Julian, that she actually doesn’t want to get over him. That she’s still clinging to the idea of him, not really interested in anything or anybody els
e. But, you know, it’s anybody’s guess whether her illness has made her think of sorrowful things or whether sorrow has made her ill again. Just a shot in the dark, I’d say, but for some reason Miranda’s convinced. Just thought I’d tell you, you know. In case it helps.’

  Teddy nodded, and as there was to be dancing and he had been asked to play the piano he put the matter out of his mind until he returned home when, having given a lively account of the wedding and all its gaieties to Bobbie, he suddenly announced that he had taken it into his head to buy himself a boat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The day had been longer and sunnier than expected, as can sometimes happen in early spring, but now it was getting dark, and the sea was rough and the sky streaked with orange, alleviated now and then by clouds darker than its own reflection. Bobbie had been reading in front of the French windows as usual when she awoke to find the growing darkness outside was slowly becoming a reality. She closed the open doors and then stared through a side window. Normally Teddy would be home by now, but he patently and obviously was not, either home, or busy calling to her from the kitchen.

  She vaguely remembered his telling her that he might be going out in his little boat, because it was such a fine afternoon that he might load it up with some cameras and try photographing the shore from the vantage point of the sea. But that was all she could remember now, having not paid much attention to what Teddy was telling her in his usual enthusiastic way, and now of course she had no idea of how long he could have been gone or even whether or not he might have taken it into his head to go on a longer trip than usual. She knew that the boat had an outboard motor and that there would be a flare on board, or something of that nature, and that he would be warmly dressed and in an oilskin, which he always was of late, but that was all that she did know.

  ‘You’m do well to ring the coastguard, Miss Murray,’ her landlady agreed when she came in to make Bobbie tea at the usual time. ‘Folks is lost out at sea all the time these last years. But only to be expected, what with it being a Labour government, my husband says.’