‘I can sing this,’ Miranda told Pamela, in confidence, she thought, but Colonel Jennings had overheard and was beaming his now familiar confident smile.
‘Then you shall do so. We will tell them to play it again and you can sing into the microphone, Princess Miranda,’ Colonel Jennings joked.
‘Of course! I shall ask Maurice to let you – but first we must try to eat out phoney caviar, and our sole Riviera, or the chef will be upset. Imagine what he has gone through to produce this. It hardly bears thinking of, does it?’
Years later Miranda herself would joke about that first moment when she discovered the power of the microphone. She would wonder aloud to friends how appalling she must have looked to anyone else.
‘Can you imagine,’ she would say, ‘a child dressed as an adult singing “I’ll See You Again” with a jewelled clip in her hair?’
But as it happened, at the time, she was only aware of singing to her two fans at the nearby table, not of how incongruous she must have looked in a wartime ballroom, singing what was already an old number to women in old-fashioned dresses and men in uniform, so, really, all told – really it did not matter. She cared only to sing to her hero and heroine, Colonel Jennings and Pamela, of spring breaking through again, and time lying heavy until they would see each other again. She put her whole heart and soul into it, as Aunt Sophie would have wished. Indeed, she pretended for the first few opening bars that Aunt Sophie was playing for her as she had used to do, so that her voice sounded as sad as it had ever done, because Aunt Sophie was now in heaven and not there to applaud her little star.
And so, following the warm applause, itself followed by air raid warnings which sent people in evening dress and military uniforms on their seemingly leisurely way to the Dorchester basement, to the Turkish baths beneath the ballroom – to anywhere else they considered to be ‘safe’ – Miranda forgot to be afraid. For a few sublime minutes she had held the floor, and had felt the power of one voice, her voice, coming from her small frame; and so she was able to follow Colonel Jennings and Pamela, not downstairs but upstairs, where they all retired to their rooms, ignoring the sounds of the air raid warnings, knowing that bombs were dropping but seemingly confident that because they were at the Dorchester, they could not be harmed. Buckingham Palace might be hit, but not the Dorchester.
Long after the sound of the All Clear, Miranda stayed awake, thinking of the fun that standing before a microphone had given her, dreaming of other nights when she would stand in front of an orchestra, perhaps on the wireless, perhaps singing to thousands of people at home. Pamela and Colonel Jennings also stayed awake, but for rather different reasons.
The next morning Miranda came to yet another new realization, namely that she had never seen a beautiful woman in her slip before. Hitherto her life had been filled with women such as the Mellaston aunts, practical women who could plait their long hair at the sound of a siren, quickly and efficiently, and usually at a moment’s notice. As she stared at Pamela in her wondrous petticoat, Miranda did remember that she had once seen Mrs Meades too in a petticoat, but it had not been the kind that Pamela was now wearing, and even if it had been, Miranda was suddenly sure, it would not have looked at all the same.
Pamela had black hair, which was perhaps why the petticoat was trimmed with black, a white fashion slip gathered high around the bust with lace straps, but tightly fitted with two seams running in a narrow band to the hem, which was trimmed with black ribbon, beneath which was a thick frill. Not for Pamela the uniformed look of Colonel Jennings’s pretty young driver; for Pamela the scent not of soap but of rare perfume. And not only was her petticoat elaborate, feminine and flattering, she wore real nylon stockings with seams. On the way to the Clothes Exchange in Mellaston, Miranda had often noticed that young girls they passed had painted their legs to look like nylons, but she had never before actually seen anyone wearing them. The aunts only ever wore much-mended lisle, and Mrs Eglantine what she called ‘pre-war silk’. No-one in Mellaston had ever worn nylon.
Nylon made Pamela’s legs look wondrously shiny and the lines up the back drew attention to their delicious shape and length, a length displayed to perfection beneath the pale blue spotted rayon dress that she now slipped over her head.
She turned to Miranda, who was seated on a small chair beside her dressing table.
‘Do up my buttons, darling, would you?’
Miranda all but ran to help her push each of the covered buttons through the beautifully sewn loops at the back, after which she watched with adoring eyes as Pamela did up the belt for herself and arranged the small, splayed bow at the front of the dress before pulling on her gloves, placing her tiny black hat with its spotted net to the centre of her head, and tucking a handbag under her arm.
‘This is the way fashion is going, my dear, do you know? Colonel Jennings brings me back so much in the Diplomatic you-know-what from the States, and things – by that I mean coats and skirts of course – are going to be fuller once the shortages go away, really they are.’
She moved away from Miranda and as she did so the young girl’s eyes fell upon the headlines of the Daily Express. Nighttime bombing had destroyed yet more of the East End. Fleetingly Miranda wondered if her granny was all right, but since Pamela was calling to her to come down with her, because the car was leaving, there was no time to go on trying to read the newspaper. Besides, her granny now seemed a remote figure, like someone in the Bible, not at all anything to do with Miranda Mowbray, nothing to do with the new life which Miranda now realized had adopted her so wholeheartedly. Indeed, as she effortlessly followed Pamela down the plush staircase to the rooms below, it seemed to Miranda that just as she and Teddy would never have recognized Bobbie when she came to her birthday party, now her granny would never have recognized Miranda in the sophisticated young girl who climbed once more into the military car – having first cheekily returned the salute thrown by the young woman driver as if she was military personnel – and sat cuddled between the divinely beautiful Pamela, and the still more handsome Colonel Jennings, all the way to Norfolk.
PART TWO
SUSSEX IN SPRING
1949
‘Young man in a purple suit
doing a little business on the side
it was not for you my son died.’
Virginia Graham
Chapter Five
‘Miss Murray! Your clothes! What would Mrs Harper say?’
Bobbie stared down unconcernedly at her new but faded brown corduroy plus fours, long socks, brogues and really quite smart green jumper, which she had bought only that morning from a local farmer’s wife who supplied them daily with eggs and butter and home-made brown bread as nonchalantly as if she was actually helping to repay the National Debt, rather than breaking the law by supplying them with illicit produce.
‘How about the hat, Miss Moncrieff? Très chic, n’est-ce pas?’ Bobbie loved to use French to Amabel Moncrieff because she already knew that the poor lady was completely ignorant of even the teeniest bit of French, and so it was somehow marvellous to tease her. ‘A trifle stylish, don’t you think?’ Bobbie went on. ‘I bought these from Mrs Duddy, this morning. One of the land girls left them at the farm, and so Mrs Duddy passed them on to me. Even the wellington boots fit, with just a bit of scrunched-up paper in the bottom of the toes.’
‘Oh, but Miss Murray, land girls’ clothes, and someone else’s too. Supposing Mrs Harper comes down and finds you like this, what will she make of it? And she will blame me, I dare say. She will blame me for everything.’
Miss Moncrieff did not add that Beatrice Harper always did blame her for everything, that being secretary to Bobbie’s sometime guardian and self-styled ‘fairy godmother’ meant that she was really a whipping post for anything that went wrong in Mrs Harper’s life.
Perhaps for this reason Bobbie now tried to look as serious as Amabel Moncrieff, because of course casting off Mrs Harper’s old smart clothes, all of which had been retailored for B
obbie, and putting on corduroy knickerbockers and woolly socks and brogues, was, in Miss Moncrieff’s eyes, tantamount to treason.
‘Mrs Harper is not here, Miss M,’ Bobbie gently reminded her guardian’s secretary, ‘so really – what does it matter? She is in London, and we are living in the Sheds, in the jolly old servants’ quarters, so we don’t need to pretend that we have to change into cocktail dresses for dinner, do we? Not really, not truly? Not even Mrs Harper would expect that, would she? I could hardly garden in one of her newest Mainbocher ooh là là suits, could I?’
For a second both Bobbie and Miss Moncrieff’s minds flew to London, to Grosvenor Place, where Beatrice Harper would doubtless be seated in her mock Strawberry Hill Gothick library at her eighteenth-century table with her all-important leather-bound personal telephone book beside her, wearing something new and striking, at the very least a little number with a roll collar by Schiaparelli, or a morning outfit with a charming Napoleonic collar by Piguet, paid for with heaven only knew how many clothing coupons.
‘She might decide to come down. I mean. Dear. I mean, you do look like a land girl, dear, really you do.’
Miss Moncrieff’s voice reflected the very real fear that Mrs Harper engendered in her employees, and indeed in her ward’s heart.
‘Well, of course I look like a land girl, these are land girl clothes, and if she comes down,’ Bobbie continued, with sudden aplomb, ‘which I doubt very much, seeing that the weather is turning so bad, I will tell her, you will tell her, we will both tell her, that I have to wear clothes appropriate for gardening.’
‘Gardening.’ Miss Moncrieff said the word as if it was a piece of cold cod on a plate that someone had ordered her to eat for breakfast.
‘Out there,’ Bobbie continued, waving a dramatic hand, ‘out there is a wilderness that has to be conquered, Miss Moncrieff. For the moment I am afraid that we must forget my guardian––’
‘We can never do that, Miss Murray––’
‘––and tackle the jungle!’
‘I just so miss my flat in Ebury Street,’ said Miss Moncrieff in her usual dismal tones, before moving back towards the kitchen, and the old cooking range where, nowadays, she seemed to spend her days annotating little bills and writing home to her mother in Pinner. ‘Have I told you about my flat? Quite pretty, really.’
‘But I think it is delightful here. Can’t you think of the Sheds as being really rather like having our own flat? It is really, don’t you think? And we are so lucky not being at Hazel Hill any more. Well, not you, but me …’ Bobbie paused, her mind stretching back over what now seemed to be the forever years of the war, years during which she had grown up, and been cured of ‘poison on the lung’ as polite people always seemed to call tuberculosis, years when she had known no-one of her own age, seen no-one of her own age, and worst of all not even had a letter from one.
Sometimes, feeling more lonely than she hoped she would ever be again, she had been forced to write to herself. These letters, which she called Dear Bobbies, were usually from imaginary Americans. It amused her to have them write things like, Do tell me all about your situation in England. And if you would like a food parcel. And whether or not King George is a nice man?
These pretend letters from people she named with startling unoriginality ‘Frank’ or ‘Eunice’, who did not and never would exist except in her own mind, meant that Bobbie could sit down at her window at Hazel Hill, with its view of sea and pebbled beach, and write descriptions of yet another imaginary life where she was living in a large house with lots of friends, instead of in a private sanatorium with no-one who really cared if she was alive or dead.
Being the only child growing up at Hazel Hill, she had not been allowed to mix with any of the older patients, some of whom sometimes died, and some of whom, on occasions, even married each other. Bobbie always heard of both these major events from the French nurses, but that was all she did hear, for the fact was that the French nurses only ever spoke French, and never really bothered much with English. Perhaps because of this Bobbie soon came to think of marriage and death as two states which were somehow inseparable.
This morning, as she tidied her room, an old piece of verse that she had written the previous year fell out of her diary and onto the floor, part of which ran:
She wrote in her books
The things that she wanted
Them to say.
She wrote ‘Dear me’
And ‘Ten today!’
And ‘How I love you
More than I can say.’
But now, today, of a sudden it seemed to be just that – an old piece of verse, for the fact of the matter was that the sun was shining and it seemed to Bobbie that she could feel its gentle warmth right inside her, and what with Hazel Hill and all its associations of lonely sickness being behind her, and the knowledge that she had a clean bill of health for the first time since she had lived with the Dingwalls at Rosebank, its intimations seemed to be quite passé, out of date, and thankfully gone for ever. No-one knew better than Bobbie how irritating a constant cough was to the sufferer, and all the more so for knowing that it was driving everyone else dotty as well. She had quickly come to accept this during the years that she had spent at Hazel Hill, as she had come to accept that her guardian must hate visiting her for this reason. And, really, Bobbie could not find it in her heart to blame her in the least. Beatrice Harper was a fashionable woman, who for many reasons could not risk being near someone who, as she elegantly phrased it, suffered from ‘poison on the lung’. But although Mrs Harper had seldom visited her ward, she had always seen to it that Bobbie had an entirely private first floor room at Hazel Hill, well away from older patients, and that she could see the sea, and was occasionally visited by sweet and kindly but really rather frightened ladies who sat on church committees and undertook to visit the sick.
She also arranged for Bobbie to have private lessons. Sometimes these were from other patients, who were deemed to be on the mend and therefore in some way thought to be less infectious. Sometimes, as the months and years of the war crept by, she was taught by goodly women who came in from the small Sussex villages in and around Hazel Hill. These women were always single, but lots less gloomy than Miss Moncrieff. With their help Bobbie read every classic in the English language, learned History of Art, and was shown how to draw the view from her window, endlessly and sometimes to her way of thinking quite pointlessly, especially considering the wartime shortage of paper and pencils.
Finally, to Bobbie’s amazement, the war had actually ended. She had really never thought that there would ever not be a war. Or if there was to be an end to it some day, she had never, ever imagined that she and the patients at Hazel Hill would be there to witness it. But somehow Victory Day had arrived, and the war had come to a halt, with a bang, as the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.
At long, long last, with the war over, one by one the older patients had been moved out from Hazel Hill and returned to their homes or other places, while Bobbie had been deemed well enough to move to the newly vacated Baileys Court. Not to the main house, but to the old servants’ quarters which directly overlooked the beach, up which the great sea would creep, or stumble, sometimes actually managing to pound on the one-storey building with its fists, at others quite content to hiss its presence, before backing once more down the sand.
Now Bobbie could not just see and hear what she had come to regard as her old friend during the endless years she had spent at Hazel Hill; she could walk up to it and feel the water on her toes and stop and stare out over the grey-blue, blue-blue, white-grey, grey-white waters of the Channel, all the time wondering why it was that simply being on the beach was so satisfying, why staring at the sea seemed to be an entirely worthy occupation, as if looking at it made it seem more real even to itself.
It was shortly after Bobbie’s arrival at the Sheds that she had been joined by Miss Moncrieff. But Miss Moncrieff was not impressed by the idea of a view of the sea. Indeed s
he had not been impressed by seeing the sea at any time since she had arrived.
‘I just so miss my flat in Ebury Street,’ she would repeat, every evening, before turning on the news, as if she was hoping that she might hear her own dear residence mentioned.
And she was far more interested in having Bobbie wind wool with her than in talking about the excitement of what might be happening outside the windows of their lodging, with its feeling of bygone grandeur and its old stone fireplaces. Indeed, it seemed to Bobbie that Miss Moncrieff had been made as miserable by her sudden change of address as Bobbie herself had been made happy.
Today Bobbie left the Sheds and in her new, secondhand, stout land girl shoes, she started to walk towards the tangled wilderness that surrounded the former monastery which was Baileys Court.
As she struggled past the walls of brambles that now swamped what had once been formal gardens, Bobbie tried not to notice the fallen trees with their rusting iron girders which littered the five hundred acre estate. But it was finally impossible, for they were everywhere, some cut into logs and then left, some just lying helplessly on their sides, bare roots exposed. It was the saddest of sights, and as she strolled past them, it appeared to her imaginative mind that they seemed to be silently begging her to turn them back to life and growth, beseeching her to restore them to the fine and beautiful sight they must have been before the war.
And where once fashionable ladies must have swayed down private walks to see the peach or orchid houses, now there were only weeds and broken brick paths, and stunted trees stripped of everything except their bare outlines, even those that had managed to remain upright were white and bare, strangely skeletal from the impact of the constant coastal winds.
Despite knowing nothing about gardens, Bobbie found even her normally high spirits inevitably lowered by the sight of endless broken fencing. As she climbed up and around the chaos of the deserted garden, she passed empty plinths that must once have proudly displayed statues of figures from the ancient world, but were now devoid of ornament. Overhead birds passed calling to each other, a sorrowful sound in such bleak surroundings. And despite the tangle of the brambles and the fallen trees, the wind too seemed to be calling to someone or something Bobbie could not see, making her turn to look behind her, fearing another human being and yet half expecting one too. And so, turning, and pulling her hat harder down over her long, brown, wavy hair, Bobbie headed back towards the outer edge of the small estate, which was itself bounded on one side by fields and a cluster of woods, and on the other by beaches and the sea.
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