Love Song

by Charlotte Bingham

  If he was he would certainly find Marjorie drinking his best brandy at eleven in the morning amusing. Look at you, Marjorie, at eleven o’clock drinking brandy like a barge woman! Claire imagined she could hear him saying. Anyone would have thought that you were in love with me!

  And of course the truth was that Crawford had It. The thing that Aunt Rosabel was always talking about, that quality that made someone so fascinating to people that they would always want them around, so it was natural that Marjorie would always imagine that Crawford was around her. Besides, she loved him, Claire could see that, which was why she had stayed with him all those years, despite knowing, which she must have done, that he would never marry anyone, after losing his wife that way.

  ‘Just one more thing I think you should know, my dear.’

  Claire looked across at the secretary, waiting for her to confess that she had been in love with Crawford. In her head she started to write the words that she thought she might use. I was in love with him, you know, my dear? All my life I was in love with him. Words that older, elegant women in black and white films seemed always to be using.

  ‘Just one more thing, my dear,’ Marjorie said again, topping up her brandy glass for the second time. ‘As you probably knew, Crawford was long aware of what was happening to him, knew all about his illness, and so on, and although he made several wills over the years, in this last one, during his last weeks on Bryndor, he changed his mind about some things, and kept other things the same. Oh dear, I am rambling on, I am dearly afraid it must be the brandy!

  ‘What I mean to say is, he left the business to me, which was so very sweet of him, in gratitude for thirty years here, and, as well, the use of this house, as tenant, for my lifetime, after that to pass to the Fellowes’ boy, his godson. His paintings are left to various galleries and so on, all perfectly proper, but there is one more thing.’

  Marjorie looked across at Claire nursing a lemonade and mineral water.

  ‘He has left you his little – and it is only little – his little art gallery, dear, the Kingsettle Gallery. It’s in Hampstead. It’s only small, but it is freehold and he thought you would like it. And as a matter of fact, I thought so too.’

  None of them could bear to watch the score sheets being written up, and yet to leave the tent where they were posted was worse, and so yet again, and agonizingly, Melinda, Josh and Barley watched more score markers coming in with a fresh set of cards collected by a team of small volunteers on sturdy ponies.

  ‘Is this the best that they can do in the computer age?’ Josh asked Barley, but she just smiled and lit a cigarette.

  From afar the markers’ backs seemed to be deliberately hostile.

  ‘I can’t look,’ Melinda muttered, but she too rushed forward to gaze up at the boards.

  ‘Here we – go!’ Josh said quietly as the last scores were written up. ‘Mellie! Walden Wonder’s had a stop! A refusal – that puts you second!’

  Melinda made a fist of her hand and bit it.

  ‘You are second! You have to be second!’

  ‘You might even be fir – fir – fir – damn it, you might even be first!’

  ‘No way, Josh, look.’ Melinda pointed to Blake’s Epiphany which was now being posted for the cross country phase. ‘Clear, see? No penalties.’

  ‘No, look,’ Josh said suddenly and clearly, ‘look, they’ve got time penalties. Five time penalties. They’ve finished on twenty-seven. You are only twenty-six.’

  ‘Josh. Barley. Mums! I’ve won!’

  Chapter Twenty

  Jack had made up his mind, long before he left home, that today was to be the day. He arose in the morning, and, putting on a clean shirt, he shaved off his beard and packed his guitar into the back of his four wheeler, knowing that today was definitely to be the day that he would sing to Hope. Yet long before he could walk to her side, in that room which he knew as well as any room in his own house, he sensed that there was something different in the ether. A profound change, a change which he had somehow already anticipated.

  And yet.

  There was no sign of anything different. Hope still lay as she always lay, supported on two pillows, flat on her back, her arms by her sides.

  And yet.

  As he placed his guitar down by the side of her bed and kissed her forehead he knew that there was something different about her. Normally he would sit down and start to talk to her, telling her about what was happening back at the Mill House, or about Letty going to play group for the first time, or James’s new weight. He knew that Melinda had been in the day before telling her all about winning. That would have really thrilled her. It was wonderful when he knew that the girls had been in, that they had told her things like that.

  A few weeks back it had been Rose rushing in to tell her about getting the role in the Art movie. Then there was Claire down only yesterday on a flying visit to tell her all about this art gallery some bloke had given her. Given her, would you believe!

  But they were the things that Jack knew she would want to know, and the girls themselves always seemed to want Hope to be the first to know about them too. That had not changed the whole time she had been lying there. To them, as for Jack, Hope was still alive. No question of it, she was still with them, part of their lives as much as if she was sitting in the kitchen at Keeper’s, waiting to hear all their news.

  ‘Now, darling, today I have brought in my guitar, and I’m going to sing you a song, which has actually been recorded by Rusty Naylor. You remember her, way back a little? She was never off the airwaves. Well, she thought she’d retired until I made her sing this, and it is good, this song, especially the way Rusty gives it her special treatment. But I wanted to sing it to you myself, because I wrote it for you, Hope, and to you, and so here it is. I won’t do it as well as Rusty, but here goes anyway.’

  He put his guitar across his knee and began.

  All of my life all of my life

  I’ve been searching for

  A love like ours

  Somewhere to stay

  Somewhere safe

  In your arms

  I was so sure.

  It seemed to Jack that she was moving, but that could not be, because – well, it just could not be.

  But it was. Hope was moving and she was sitting up and her eyes were opening and she was looking so beautiful. Her hair was blowing back, it must be from the breeze coming from the window, and she was smiling, and everything was just as it had always been, and she was reaching towards him and putting her arms round him, and Jack could feel her hands wiping the tears from his face as he sobbed out his gratitude at the sight of her.

  ‘Oh, Hope, I knew you’d come back to me, I just knew it. I told everyone I’d bring you back and I have. I have sung you awake!’

  She slipped off the bed and he started to waltz her around the room, saying, ‘I’ve sung you awake. I knew I could. I just knew it.’

  ‘Oh, Jack, once more. Sing to me once more.’

  Hope stood in front of him, and picking up his guitar Jack prepared to sing to her again. Hope sat leaning towards him, her hands clasped in front of her. He continued, the music strong and insistent.

  Don’t leave me this way

  Don’t tell me it’s over

  We’ve only begun

  And love is so young

  You’re leaving me nowhere

  Don’t leave me this way.

  He was singing it so much better now, so strongly, and with her eyes on him the last lines became triumphant.

  ‘Oh, Jack, I am so glad that you love me!’

  She smiled at him, and Jack, unable to bear the moment any longer, the sheer euphoria of it, ran out of the door to fetch someone, anyone, to tell them all that Hope was back.

  ‘Nurse, nurse, doctor – she’s come back. She’s all right. I said she’d come back, I said she’d wake up. I sang to her, and she came back!’

  As Jack ran down the corridor towards two nurses who were hurrying towards him, th
e sun became brighter and brighter until it filled the whole of the room where Hope lay.

  ‘We’re coming, Jack, we’re coming!’

  The nurses smiled but they looked so anxious that Jack stopped and stared at their hurrying.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he called, ‘she’s all right. Really. She’s come back.’ He frowned as one of the doctors passed him too. ‘It’s OK, really. She’s all right.’

  Seconds later he was still standing in the same place when they came back out to him and the doctor walked towards him. ‘Jack. I am so sorry.’

  Jack stared at the young man and frowned. Why did he have tears in his eyes?

  ‘Hope has gone, Jack.’

  ‘No, Hope has not gone. She spoke to me.’

  ‘No, Jack, Hope has gone.’

  ‘She can’t have gone. I tell you, I was there, singing to her. Do something. Bring her back. What the hell’s it called – when you use electricity? Use those electric things on her! Do something!’

  As he was imploring him the doctor was walking Jack gently back down the corridor and into Hope’s room.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to the monitor above the bed. ‘It’s there on the monitor. Hope died minutes ago. There’s the time, see? Blood pressure, heart, everything’s recorded from in here to out there. It all stopped, suddenly, five minutes ago, out there, and no-one noticed. You get this with even the best monitors – everything stopped. That’s why there were no alarms sounding, and it was only when one of the nurses noticed the fault—’

  Jack stared. ‘But I was singing to her, and we were laughing and talking, and she was fine.’ He looked at the monitor above the bed and then back at Hope. ‘I was singing to her and she danced and I held her in my arms.’ He was silent, and then he said again, and his voice was full of gratitude, ‘She came back to me.’ He looked at the doctor. ‘She came back to be with me while I sang to her. She came awake with my song!’

  They buried Hope in the graveyard of the little church that was so near to Keeper’s and the Mill House that the children could put flowers on her grave any time they wanted. The sun played on their bright hair as they walked up to the church, and there was a light summer breeze which moved and swayed the roses against the side of the church walls, while high in the sky a song thrush sang.

  Jack had filled the place with musicians, because, as Melinda said, ‘She really only had us, when you think about it.’ And they too came to the little church on that bright summer day with their violins and their cellos and a Yamaha piano. And Rusty Naylor came, as she said, ‘just with me voice’.

  The three girls helped Jack to choose her music. Among much that was beautiful, they chose Jack’s song, which meant that Jack kept saying, ‘You don’t have to have it, you know, just because I wrote it.’

  As for Jack, he chose ‘Morning’, which Richard Strauss wrote on the eve of his wedding to his so-great love, a sublime evocation of tenderness and purity, because, as he said, when his time came and they were reunited, he liked to think that they too would be married.

  After everyone had left, late in the afternoon, as the sun was preparing to set and the evening breeze was ruffling the leaves of the willows, they all went down to the river that ran past the house and one by one they threw the petals from the roses they had made into a bouquet for her and Jack sat under the trees, watching them and playing his guitar, playing, for the last time, the love song he had written to the woman he loved.

  Epilogue

  Jack still went to see Hope every day and told her everything that was happening and what he hoped might happen too. Visiting her and talking to her was as much part of his day as it had ever been, and she as much part of his life as she had ever been.

  But it was Aunt Rosabel who momentarily rendered them all speechless. Her lawyers, having extricated Hatcombe from the dubious orphans’ charity, subsequently discovered, and her safe revealed, that having died seemingly penniless, she had in fact squirrelled away a positive fortune in as many as twenty different accounts.

  ‘I think she was hiding it from Alexander. Goodness, Mums would laugh, wouldn’t she?’ Melinda shook her head, staring at the card that Aunt Rosabel had left her, forwarded to her by her great-great-aunt’s solicitors. It transpired that Aunt Rosabel’s money was to go to Rose, Claire and Letty, while Hatcombe was to go to Melinda. Paradoxically, the card depicted an idealized Victorian family Christmas, but the riddle was explained when on opening the card Melinda saw the greeting. It read, With love from the Spirit of Christmas Past.

  Together, Melinda and Jack decided that Hatcombe should become the home of not just the soon to be married Mellie and Josh, but of the two youngest children too, Jack deeming it better that they be brought up with younger people, and Josh and Mellie welcoming the idea of a ready-made family. With Jack in residence only a few miles away at the Mill House, and Rose and Charles, also heading for the altar, living at Keeper’s Cottage at weekends, there would be no shortage of relations on hand to help them.

  And so it was that with all the unhappy memories banished, Hatcombe prepared to put on its finest and host a wedding for the young couple. Not a grand wedding, but a splendid one, with flowers and music, and food made by them all in the kitchens of the old house.

  By the time another June was preparing to set to and bring on high summer, the wedding arrangements had necessarily gathered momentum. The fitting of the bridesmaids’ dresses – gowns made of lawn with fresh flowers at gathered sleeves, and underbusts in the Regency style. A cream and pistachio-coloured cake to match the marquee that Jack had chosen to be pitched on the big lawn, south of the house. The picking and arranging of dozens of pale cream roses and brightly coloured leaves from shrubs in neighbours’ gardens. And the bride’s dress, a simple but beautifully fashioned gown of cream pleated silk matching the pale cream roses in her hair and her bouquet. It seemed that everything was ready.

  But one more event gave the wedding an extra and special blessing, for no sooner had it been decided that Melinda’s wedding was to be held at Hatcombe, than a pair of linnets began to build their nest in the roof of an old greenhouse in the grounds.

  They were brought to Mellie’s attention by Mr Parsons, Aunt Rosabel’s old gardener.

  ‘They’re rare now, Miss Mellie. Very rare,’ Mr Parsons whispered as he took Melinda to see them. ‘All but extinct in some parts, yet when I was a boy they were a common garden bird. What them’s doing building in the greenhouse I don’t know, since they nest in bushes usual, or thickets. They’s special birds, you know, and not a lot of people do. For they have a mantle of luck about them. They say if linnets nest as you wed – well, ’tis for a lucky couple, that’s what they say, Miss Mellie.’

  So, whenever she was at Hatcombe during those last weeks before she and Josh were married, Melinda would creep down to see the linnets nesting, finding not only eggs, but in time a chick, which, as the preparations for the wedding gathered pace, feathered and fledged until it was a perfect tiny bird.

  Up bright and early on the morning of the wedding itself, Melinda paid a hurried call to the greenhouse only to find Mr Parsons there cutting flowers, but the nest empty.

  ‘Oh, no. What happened?’

  She turned to Mr Parsons, who ignored her, continuing to snip at his precious blooms before looking out to the skies beyond the open door.

  ‘She’s flown, Miss Mellie. She’s flown. First thing this morning as I was opening up I saw the mother on the greenhouse roof with her baby, then as the sun got warm they spread their wings and up they went to the skies.’

  ‘I’m so glad …’

  Yet she couldn’t help feeling sorry, too, seeing the empty nest.

  ‘So you should be, Miss Mellie.’ Parsons turned to look at her. ‘That’s how it is with linnets, see? The old tale has it that if the young fly on the day that you’re wed, you’ll be happy for the rest of time. It’s what the bird represents, see? It’s all to do with what the little bird represents.’

/>   ‘Which is? What exactly does the linnet represent?’

  ‘Why, did you not now know, Miss Mellie?’ He smiled for the first time. ‘The little linnet, she symbolizes hope.’

  THE END

  About the Author

  Charlotte Bingham comes from a literary family – her father sold a story to H.G. Wells when he was only seventeen – and Charlotte wrote her autobiography, Coronet among the Weeds, at the age of nineteen. Since then she has written comedy and drama series, films and plays for both England and America with her husband, the actor and playwright Terence Brady. Her most recent novels include Goodnight Sweetheart, The Enchanted, The Land of Summer and The Daisy Club.

  Also by Charlotte Bingham:

  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

  AT HOME

  BY INVITATION

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  DEBUTANTES

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  GRAND AFFAIR

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE LOVE KNOT

  THE BLUE NOTE

  THE SEASON

  SUMMERTIME

  DISTANT MUSIC

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT

  Novels with Terence Brady:

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE’S STORY

  YES HONESTLY