Happy Little Bluebirds

by Louise Levene

  ‘I go quite often with my sister-in-law,’ she confessed. ‘Her husband – my late husband’s brother – is away and it takes her mind off it.’

  The Major had squeezed another illegible word into one of the boxes in the printed form on his blotter.

  ‘Jolly good. No dependants? And an Irish grandmother, I think you said? Excellent.’

  Before the week was out she was aboard the Mouzinho on her way to New York.

  Sixty-two cargo and passenger ships were sunk in the Atlantic in September. Her own ten-day crossing had been blessedly uneventful, but although there were still a few passengers dressing for dinner and playing quoits on the chilly promenade deck, you could almost smell the mounting sense of panic in the public rooms. The ship’s course had not been exactly as advertised in the window of the steamship office and a small boy with a map had had his compass confiscated by his increasingly tetchy mama. Morning prayers of various kinds were unusually well attended but Evelyn, a poor sailor, had spent half the voyage in her cabin sipping bouillon, watched over by St Christopher.

  She was very tempted to adopt the same strategy on the Chicago train but the steward reappeared to make up her bed and she decided to take refuge in the club car. As she turned to put on her jacket, she caught her reflection in the oval looking glass. Her face wasn’t mirror-ready and her mouth and forehead still had the unfriendly, exasperated look she had been wearing for the steward.

  She plumped her features back into a faint smile but the improvement was only marginal. The woman in the mirror looked bad-tempered and underfed. The grey suit muffled her shape like a herringbone loose cover. ‘You’ll fatten up soon enough over there,’ Silas’s mother had prophesied nastily during one of her less confused moments. ‘“A land that floweth with milk and honey”? All right for some.’

  Evelyn looked doubtfully at the red hat on the shelf: ‘older women still wear them’ … but did they wear them at dinner or only at lunch? And what was the form for furs? The dark wool looked drab suddenly without its foxy garnish. She heard female voices outside and opened the door the merest crack. A large, blonde woman and her daughter were swaying unsteadily down the corridor. Both had marcelled hair and both wore identical pale green dresses (same colour, at least: different sizes). No furs, no hats, although the mother had a scribble of frilly green veiling perched on the top of her head like butcher’s parsley.

  As she closed the compartment door, Evelyn remembered the collection of lucky-dip packages in the carrier bag Genista Broome had given her and found two lace handkerchiefs, a pair of sunglasses, a flagon of Odorono and, right at the bottom, a tin of prophylactics. The brand was Merry Widows – some sort of sick joke? No wonder the girl had blushed. Evelyn was about to put the tin into the waste-paper basket when it occurred to her that the steward might find it so she slipped it into the inside pocket of her suitcase. The last remaining parcel in the carrier bag was a roll of violet-coloured tissue paper containing a length of pleated white organza. Evelyn wound the collar around her neck, tucked the edges inside her lapels then pinned it in place with the diamond brooch. She looked back at her reflection: white features highlit and dramatised by the ruff of snowy silk: a portrait of an unknown woman. She snatched some magazines and newspapers from the bedside shelf and followed the sound of laughter.

  Two men on high stools were telling the barman how best to make a dry martini.

  ‘Easy on the ice, Jefferson baby, we don’t wanna bruise it.’

  Their shoulders were wider, their ties gaudier, than any she had ever seen but there was, again, that nagging sense of familiarity. Back at the Woking Ritz or the Weybridge Odeon, Evelyn had assumed that Hollywood substituted a bigger, brighter, version of American reality but here they all were sitting on a train: large as life; twice as unnatural.

  The waiter found Evelyn a window seat. The railway track hugged the path of the Hudson River and the sunset burned like a bushfire beyond the trees on the far bank.

  She stared uncomprehendingly at the cocktail menu until the waiter took pity and suggested ‘punch’. The tall, frosted glass looked refreshing with its long ringlet of lemon peel but there was a sour aftertaste beneath the first fizz of sweetness and she had to swallow hard not to choke on the medicinal blast of liquor.

  She pulled a cigarette from her jaunty new pocketbook. A man with a sixth sense for such things reached across from the neighbouring table and lit it for her, scanning her face and figure for points of interest before turning back to his friends.

  Evelyn inhaled deeply and half closed her eyes. The buzz of voices created a queer kind of calm. It wasn’t that the Pullman car was quiet – far from it – but Evelyn had always found that, provided the people around her – in a railway carriage, in the lunch bar, in the queue at the cinema – were all speaking the same language, she could block out their conversations: I’ll say, Don’t mind if I do, Didn’t he just, Can’t say I blame him. The 20th Century’s passengers spoke only English and it was as soothing as silence to have her thoughts unmolested by the random anxieties and endearments that had midged about her head on board the Mouzinho. Newly uprooted from their homelands, her fellow shipmates had assumed that their mother tongue would be an impenetrable private code and that nothing they said would ever be understood.

  The library on the ship had been colonised by a large, very argumentative group of Austrian Jews and it was easy enough to screen out their tirades, but in the other public rooms where the signals switched constantly back and forth – Polish, Portuguese, a full set of German regional dialects – Evelyn’s super-sensitive ear had scarcely a moment’s peace: Heinrich will meet the boat; Mitzi will be with us very soon; All the girls wear high heels in America, Mutti; We should have stayed in Amsterdam; There was room in the trunks for his books but he lets his wife dress like a cleaning woman. It was like being able to read people’s thoughts – and every bit as unsettling. It was all Evelyn could do not to blush at the enforced intimacy. The customs shed at Pier 94 had been another such Babel, with anxious first-class passengers muttering to each other about who had hidden what where or bickering about the most suitable demeanour when lying to an official: ‘Shout? What do you mean, I shouldn’t shout? Sure I shout. Shout and they think you’re a bigshot [Gantseh Macher].’

  It had been the same at home in Woking with the wireless. Tracking between the pre-war choice of Home and Light and Third, she would sometimes stop in the wrong place, her well-filled head automatically translating – did she even translate any more? Only realising she had tuned it wrongly when Silas’s mother complained.

  Mrs Murdoch had seen no need for Abroad and nor for that matter had her son. Whenever Evelyn had spoken to Silas of her travels he would lose no time in changing the subject. Her knowledge of other languages was, likewise, something he’d rather she didn’t talk about. She had tried explaining her father’s views on Talents but old Mrs Murdoch was unimpressed by Evelyn’s skill, viewing it much as she would any other freakish affliction – double-jointedness, webbed toes: as something that couldn’t be helped but needn’t be mentioned. Talents? Scant excuse for spending so much time away from her family and friends. While one might, in Christian charity, ‘remember all the people who live in far-off lands’ when the occasion required, there was no need to fraternise with them to that extent. And as for her reading matter … the very titles were suggestive: La Bête Humaine; L’Éducation Sentimentale; Au Bonheur des Dames: highly unsuitable.

  In peacetime the Mouzinho would have printed off a daily newspaper summarising world events but the Captain had made some excuse about the copying apparatus. Evelyn soon realised why when she settled into her seat in the 20th Century’s Pullman car and made a start on one of the newspapers that had been stuffed into her bag. Of the 113 children being posted off to safety in Canada aboard the City of Benares only thirteen survived, six of them found frozen and starving in a lifeboat a week after the ship was torpedoed. ‘The children behaved magnificently,’ said a woman a
drift with them. ‘Never at any time did the boys complain.’ Surgeon Lieutenant Silas Murdoch had not complained when Exeter caught fire (or so the Captain said in the letter), but when his personal effects were returned two months later there wasn’t so much as a charred scrap of uniform, not even his wristwatch.

  The front pages of both New York newspapers carried prose poems on the continued ‘super-bombing’ of London: ‘Germans Claim Secret Ray’, ‘Ambulances screeched through debris-piled streets, collecting the dead and injured. The horizon was lighted by great angry red splashes of flame.’ There were uncensored pictures of blazing buildings and craters but it didn’t take much to push European news down the front page. A very small, very rich child had been kidnapped by ‘a hook-nosed man’ demanding $100,000 ransom but had been safely returned: ‘His joyous mother, the Countess, dry-eyed, audibly whispered “My angel!” as she clasped him in her arms.’ ‘Dry-eyed’? Oh dear. The Countess was obviously not sticking to the script. Evelyn found herself warming to the woman.

  The cover story of Nation was an article by Sybil Harper, the lady journalist from the station platform, on the menace of the German Bund, which she claimed was using its beer and bockwurst parties as a front for Nazi sympathisers. The article ran to over a dozen pages: eight, perhaps ten thousand words. Evelyn sighed. Perhaps not.

  ‘May we?’

  The only free chairs left in the train’s club car were at Evelyn’s table and these were now taken by the yellow-haired woman she had spotted in the corridor together with her matching daughter and a small, pop-eyed dog. The girl – who could hardly have been of drinking age – wanted a Horse’s Neck and her mama ordered a martini with a cocktail onion in it at which point her daughter told her that no, Mother, that was a Gibson, after which their dialogue dried up rather.

  ‘May I take a look at your magazine?’ The woman jabbed a manicured finger at the cover of Nation. ‘She’s on the train, you know, holding court down there in the observation car. They say she’ll be Woman of the Year. Such a command of language– ’ she leaned over confidingly ‘– and such large helpings …’

  The woman drained her cocktail, ordered a second and turned to Evelyn with a sunny, gin-washed smile.

  ‘I should introduce myself: Ida Van Clark and this is my little girl Wanda.’

  ‘How do you do?’ muttered Wanda.

  ‘And this is my other little girl, Delilah,’ simpered Mrs Van Clark, pushing her lapdog’s ratty pink snout towards Evelyn for a kiss. Its collar was the same bilious shade as the women’s clothes. Did it travel with its own doggy suitcase?

  ‘Van Clark … Is that a Dutch name?’ asked Evelyn, who had once spent a week with a family of Calvinists in Utrecht.

  Wanda sniggered into her powder compact while Mrs Van Clark swallowed half of her second Gibson. ‘You’re English, aren’t you? We were in Europe a couple of years back. Shopping mostly, but we saw everything: Buckingham Palace; the Changing of the Guard; Saint Paul’s Cathedral: the full set. Which reminds me, Wanda, I meant to say: it said in the paper that arcade place where we bought the damask dinner napkins was bombed the other day.’ Mrs Van Clark looked pointedly at Evelyn, brow furrowed, meaning obvious. ‘It must be such a relief to be here in the States out of harm’s way.’

  Not a word one could say, of course. Several of Evelyn’s work colleagues had said much the same and her mother-in-law had been very scathing but her sister-in-law’s reaction to her posting had been uncharacteristically good-natured: ‘Jammy old you. The dear knows I’d jump at it, war or no war.’

  Mrs Van Clark and her little girls were going to be staying with her sister in Palm Beach until Thanksgiving.

  ‘Or Thanksgivings, I should say. It always used to be the last Thursday in November but there are five Thursdays this year and Mr Roosevelt says it oughta be the 23rd and there’s been quite a fight about it. My sister’s husband is a Republican but a lot of his clients are voting for a third term so she’s going to make some turkey farmer very happy. Her cook isn’t too pleased.’

  Ida, Wanda and Delilah had spent most of the summer at a lake resort and Mrs Van Clark had been intending to take Wanda back to Paris in the spring but that plan had been put on hold thanks to what she called the International Unpleasantness. Buenos Aires was said to be very lovely in the spring and of course they all spoke English there.

  Evelyn took another sip of punch but made no reply. She could make conversation in nine languages – more if one merely wanted to find the way to the bathroom or ask for one’s meat well done – but ‘small talk’ had always eluded her. What small things was one supposed to talk about?

  Mrs Van Clark appeared nonplussed by Evelyn’s failure to contribute. She tried her usual gambits – children; health; servants; dietary regimes; travel plans – but the Englishwoman didn’t seem to know how to keep the ball in play and poor Ida found herself rambling on and on. She had met Oscar on a train, she said; she’d been on her way to a dance at West Point – just like those girls at Grand Central this evening. She’d worn the palest green mousseline de soie (green was always her colour).

  Evelyn had worn darkest chocolate brown on the evening she first met Silas. Deborah had introduced them at a church hall dance and then left them to it. It had been a very awkward ten minutes with the silent Silas staring glumly at the other couples Lambeth Walking across the dance floor. His brother, Gilbert, Deborah’s new fiancé, was rather nice-looking but Silas did not resemble him. He had a curiously narrow face – the hinges of his spectacles had to be bulked out with tightly wound black button thread to help them grip his head – but when viewed in profile his aquiline nose and chiselled cheekbones made him very nearly handsome. He hadn’t asked her to dance. Dancing, she later learned, had numbered among Wesley’s original list of Questionable Amusements, a list that old Mrs Murdoch was forever adding to: lipstick, icing on cakes, brilliantine, hair ribbon, earrings, fires in bedrooms. As a last resort in all matters of leisure and any borderline social vices, the Murdoch boys were to ask themselves: What Would Jesus Do? It seemed that Jesus, given the choice, would opt to sit mumchance on the sidelines slurping watery orange squash.

  Silas hadn’t had much to say for himself and eventually Evelyn could stand the silence no longer. Asking people what they did was a bore’s question (or so her father had always insisted) but she asked it anyway (even though she knew the answer). Was he a dentist too?

  It was as if someone had put a penny in a slot. He gave a sudden grateful smile and began to speak. Evelyn had very nice teeth, very nice, very nice indeed. And then, quite unexpectedly, he had taken her hand and squeezed it and said in a low, mad, urgent voice that everything, everything about her was nice. Nice as could possibly be. Every bit as nice as his brother’s fiancée had promised. He had hoped to meet someone nice at the dance but he couldn’t have talked to any of the other girls, he said, because they were too flighty for him. Not like Evelyn. Evelyn was nice. Would she please come to the cinema with him? A patient had said that Gunga Din would be ‘suitable’.

  Many films were not, Evelyn discovered, and Hollywood’s output that summer – Next Time I Marry, A Royal Divorce and Bachelor Mother – meant that their brief courtship included only half a dozen cinema outings. Gunga Din was a rare exception but their evening in the dress circle had not been a success: you could see the strings on the snakes, Silas had hissed, and they were using quite the wrong sort of bayonet. He would have walked out, he said later, but they were in the middle of a row.

  Evelyn soon learned that Silas’s chief cinematic pleasure lay in spotting the inaccuracies in costume pictures. He was always exasperated when Ancient Romans spoke with American accents (as if Caesar and Mark Antony and Brutus would all have been to Radley or RADA) and he was constantly deploring the actors’ bridgework (C. Aubrey Smith’s dentures were a regular source of professional amusement). Like Evelyn’s father, he frowned upon the constant love scenes and the cheap, tarty appearance of the actresses (although he was a
lways decidedly more ardent afterwards).

  The remainder of their dates were spent driving into the Surrey lanes in his glossy black motor car past pretty pubs and on to balding grass verges where Silas would assemble the folding table and chairs and Evelyn would unpack the sandwiches he had asked her to bring. Once he’d finished holding her hand and pronouncing on her niceness he would turn away from her to admire the view and she would be struck afresh by how much better looking he appeared sideways on.

  His proposal came at midsummer during a picnic on Horsell Common.

  ‘I shall be sorry to go if there is a war,’ he had said, staring across at the sunset. ‘It’s been nice.’ And, turning his other face towards her, he asked her to marry him.

  She thanked him and promised to think about it and he had squeezed her hand some more. He had very soft skin.

  He had driven her home to her lodgings and she had sat with Kowtow on her lap and looked around her at the cheerless oddments of furniture and thought of all the long, solitary evenings she had spent and would spend there. Her eye was caught by the gilt lettering on the spine of her father’s Bible. The Reverend had disapproved of bibliomancy but John Wesley himself had practised it. It fell open at the Book of Psalms: ‘My days are like a shadow that declineth and I am withered like grass.’

  The next Saturday afternoon when she met Silas at his favourite tea shop Evelyn had nodded her head and he had grabbed her hand uncomfortably hard and pushed a ring on to her third finger. It had been his grandmother’s, he said, and the seven stones spelled ‘dearest’.