The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  Sometimes, at night after dinner, and after they had walked from the Sheds across the garden, and then into the main house, dropping off the Major en route, Julian and Bobbie would walk arm in arm down the long thin underground passageway that linked the main house to the courtyard of the garden wing – a corridor built long ago as an escape route for the monks and left over from the days of the persecution of the Catholics. There in the wing, where Julian felt so at home, after a kiss of his fingertips to her from the crooked winding dark stairway, he would disappear up to what he called his ‘eyrie’, leaving Bobbie to battle with a strong desire to follow him up and keep him company during what she knew might often be a long, wakeful night.

  But knowing that Julian would not want that, that it would induce in him the kind of claustrophobia that she herself would feel when people were too kind to her, Bobbie would once more wander back down the secret underground corridor, imagining to herself the monks hurrying through that same passageway, their hearts beating with terror, fleeing from the sound of the soldiers of the government arriving to search the house, escaping from the men who were waiting to torture them. Thinking on these things she would climb back up the stairs into the main house, and eventually into the warm night air of the garden.

  And so it was that, for most of the past nights, finding herself quite alone and filled with that particular sense of restless excitement that makes even the thought of sleep impossible, Bobbie would find it ridiculous to return directly to the Sheds and the gentle rhythmic snoring of Miss Moncrieff. She simply could not. She felt too full up with some emotion that she could not name. Instead she would walk across what had been, before the war, the front drive, to the hay barns that lay beyond, and pushing open the old, battered, protesting doors she would fling herself into the new-cut hay and roll about in it, hugging herself, filled with the joy of just knowing Julian.

  After this she would lie for many minutes remembering various moments of the day that had gone, its colours and its pleasures running through her mind. The way Julian would boss his eyes at her behind the Major’s back when the older man was lecturing them on some new subject. The way he would swim with her, read aloud to her from books by authors of whom she had never heard, and talk to her about the life of the spirit, making her listen with him to those sounds that can only be heard when, as Julian maintained, the soul is reaching towards unseen horizons, beyond the gross, greedy grasp of the material world, to where the rhythms of life make a music that speaks only of lightness of being, where there are only heavenly sounds.

  Julian was not only Bobbie’s first friend of her own age, for years and years, she was his too. And although they never spoke about the places in which they had both been incarcerated during the war, or about what it had been like to be a small child locked up for month after month with older people – older people who were often mortally sick and ill – Bobbie imagined that for Julian, as for herself, childhood must have been a kind of hell. Nothing but kindness, and pity, nothing but people pretending that he was not ill, that he would get better, that he was, one day, going to be just like other little boys and run about and play games and not have fevers and a never-ending cough.

  For all these reasons Bobbie could never bring herself to go straight home to bed, but lay in the newly cut hay thinking that if she waited just a little longer she might hear the sounds of which Julian had spoken so often; but she never did.

  Beatrice was speaking in her usual commanding way.

  ‘Miss Moncrieff has written to me that you are very well, and she thinks you have grown this summer, and certainly look much better. Is there still measles about? I am off to the South of France to stay with Pansy and Mikey Holbrook, but when I come back I am determined that I shall come down to Baileys, measles or no measles.’

  That dread of all dreads, a letter asking her to make a telephone call to her guardian, had Bobbie standing once more in the village pub at Baileys Green staring at the dirty cream-painted wall, looking towards the dusty barrel-filled cellars, hearing the sound of darts hitting a darts board, and male voices making speeches with ever mounting passion – against the government, against the council, against rationing and deprivation, the voices always wondering over and over what they had all fought and won the war for?

  ‘I am also sending you a parcel of clothes,’ Beatrice continued. ‘The New Look should suit you, but of course there are other things too. I will require you to acknowledge their arrival, please, Roberta.’

  Bobbie nodded silently into the phone which, as always, smelt dreadfully of cheap cigarettes.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘No need to thank me, Roberta. Just make sure you are wearing something that I have sent you when I come down, would you? It is always such a compliment, remember, when one wears something another has gifted to you.’

  They ended their telephone call, as always, with a brevity of small exchanges that would have done credit to a Morse code message. Sometimes it seemed to Bobbie that the always beautiful, entirely competitive Beatrice was actually competing as to who could most swiftly put a stop to the telephone conversation.

  ‘Is your guardian well?’ the Major wanted to know, as Bobbie returned to the private bar to rejoin him and Julian.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘In that case why so glum, chum?’

  Bobbie shook her head and smiled at Julian. She might look glum but she certainly was not going to go on feeling it. The truth was that she knew, logically, that she could put off being glum for quite a few precious weeks yet, weeks when Beatrice would be staying with one or another of her friends in the south of France, but after that Beatrice would be down, and Bobbie hated to think of how much that would change everything. It was not that she was not grateful to Beatrice, for everything, but when all was said and done – she was nevertheless Beatrice.

  Certainly once Beatrice was down it would not be possible for the Major and Julian to stay on camping at the house. Nor would it be possible for the Major and Miss Moncrieff to continue to lunch together on the Major’s smuggled gin and endless supply of cigarettes whilst listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary, or whatever they enjoyed listening to together. All these delights would have to stop as Beatrice, seated on a great dark cloud of authority and possession, would descend like Cleopatra on Baileys Court, and Miss Moncrieff would once again be called into play to take notes and make telephone calls – for obviously Beatrice would immediately insist that the authorities install Mr Bell’s famous invention – write letters and fetch and carry so hard and so fast for her employer that never again would she have the time or the leisure to round the heel of one of her famous knitted stockings.

  That would be the status quo. Bobbie knew this from her guardian’s past behaviour at Hazel Hill, where she would descend for what had seemed like only a few seconds, but was enough to ensure that the nurses were all running around her as if she owned and funded it, which perhaps she did. For Beatrice Harper’s real enemy, even during the war, had been boredom. That terrible curse of the spoilt soul was always haunting her, snapping at her heels, and although Bobbie had hardly spent any time with her guardian she nevertheless sensed just from their conversations that her fatigue with life was even closer to her than her shadow. The inevitable longueurs induced by monied leisure hung over her, hovering like a bird of prey, and they were, it seemed, responsible for her all too tempestuous arrivals and departures. Often they would cause her to leave London suddenly for some unknown destination, New York, or Venice – Bobbie had gathered that it mattered very little where, really, just so long as Beatrice was moving on, restlessly, to some new playground. And if not to a city she would flee to one or another of the recently opened European resorts, some innocent spot, unmarked and unsung as yet, which the rich somehow always managed to find, make their own, and ruin.

  So, if Bobbie, at Hazel Hill, had come to know just how painfully slow days could be, each second seeming to slowly, slowly inch its way on all fours through a whole
set of sixty of the same, and another sixty, and another, finally making up, inch by little inch, the twenty-four hours that had comprised yet another whole day, then she realized that pretty soon – starting now – she would also be finding out the opposite. She would be finding out how tearingly fast the days could go.

  The days to come, because she would go on being happy, she knew now would be more precious to her than any crock of gold at the bottom of any rainbow – and they would hurtle forward, refusing to slow down for anyone. Faster and faster they would go until quite unheedingly, not realizing just how unfair it was of them to be going at such speed, not realizing just how precious their cargo of happiness was, not realizing the effect on Bobbie and Julian, on the Major and Miss Moncrieff, on them all, they would crash to a terrifying stop. And gone for ever would be the happy hours that had made up all their previous days and weeks.

  Bobbie also knew just how her guardian’s arrival would be conducted.

  First the car door would be held open by her chauffeur and out would step her maid, carrying the all-important blue leather, minutely monogrammed jewel case in one hand, the latest hat box from Paris in the other, a spare set of gloves for Mrs Harper tucked into her own handbag along with a bottle of Madame’s favourite scent – ready to refresh Madame at any given moment of the journey.

  Then would come Mrs Harper. First her long, nylon-clad legs, supported by beautifully shod feet, and then her tall, slender frame, dressed not to the nines, but to the tens, every hair in place, a piece of jewellery somewhere, quite prominent, perhaps a brooch, or a necklace. On her head a hat would be placed just perfectly, and on her hands, gloves, smoothly covering their long tapered shape.

  Everything about Beatrice Harper would be so perfectly perfect that now Bobbie came to think of it, once she was dressed there really was nothing else for her to be except bored with life. When everything was perfectly perfect, time must hang so heavy.

  ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’

  Bobbie stared momentarily at the barman. To her he seemed to be calling, Time, Roberta Murray, time, and it occurred to Bobbie that his call must be directed straight at her because of a sudden there was so very little time left, so few days before Beatrice’s perfectly shod foot came down firmly on the gravelled drive of Baileys Court. As soon as that foot hit the good Sussex earth they would all change. They would no longer be a strange little band, a comical team of incongruous friends. Nor would they any longer be comrades, shoulder to shoulder with hoe and axe, but just a pathetic assortment of beings whom, doubtless, Beatrice would dismiss within hours, bringing in instead some fashionable personage, some stranger to take charge of the gardens. And of a sudden the Major would no longer be heard whistling to his pug, and Julian and she would no longer be stepping, shouting and laughing, into the cold, often fast disappearing sea, and all the enchantment that they had sensed coming towards them from those slowly awakening places in the garden would disappear under the new people, and voices that were as sharp as the Major’s axe would resound with new and modish ideas, and it would all be over. The happiest time of Bobbie’s life would be quite over.

  The lights behind them winked and blinked now the way they never had during the war, what with the blackout, the regulations, the fines if even a minuscule chink of electric or candlelight appeared beneath a blind, as the three of them walked along from the pub looking for fireflies, as they very often did after dinner and a visit to the pub.

  ‘There’s one – no, it’s not, it’s some kind of moth.’

  ‘If you stop looking you will see one.’

  ‘I know I saw one the other night.’

  As bats swooped suddenly, making strange patterns against the luminously dark night sky, Bobbie stared up at the stars above them all. The beauty and distance of each one seemed to her, as always, to be so incomprehensible as to be almost comical. What on earth did any one of them matter compared to the stars above them? They did not matter, not even the tiniest bit. They were just specks of dust, one of a billion, billion dots that had sprinkled the earth since it had first exploded into life, and how they thought, how they acted, how they were, would affect no-one at all, not one person, not really, not finally.

  ‘When he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun,’ Julian quoted as he wandered along beside her, his eyes, as always when he was happy, half closed, his smiling mouth giving him what Bobbie called his ‘Cheshire Cat’ look.

  ‘Shakespeare has made people mind, and matter,’ Bobbie remarked suddenly, her eyes once more on the road ahead. ‘He at least has been, has become, is still, more than a dot.’

  ‘We all make people mind and matter.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Or certainly not people like us. People like us – we are just dots. At least that is what I think we are, just so many dots – dot, dot, dots.’

  The Major snorted lightly, ambling along slightly ahead of them in high good humour.

  ‘What tosh you talk! But there. Perhaps you have to have been a prisoner of war to know what I mean,’ he mused, and for a second the glow of his lighter illuminated his face in the darkness as he stopped and lit another cigarette. ‘We all matter so much to each other at times like those, it’s almost criminal.’ The Major laughed, briefly, more a snort than a laugh really.

  ‘You mean if you are in a camp or something, the little dots suddenly all become one big dot, all linked?’ There was a pause as Bobbie considered this. ‘You mean, like that painter Seurat, like point-illism, where all the little dots make up one marvellous painting and it all makes sense when you stand back from it? Like those little dots called stars that dot the sky above us – like those?’

  ‘Yes, that is what I mean. We are like those little stars up there. Some of them may have already burnt out, but they stay twinkling away because they still want to matter. Like us. We want desperately to matter, but the truth is we don’t, not really, not compared to the night sky, or the tides, or the weather.’

  After she had finished speaking Bobbie looked up again at the stars in the clear Sussex night sky, at the wonder of it all, at the vast, far-flung, sometimes midnight blue sometimes dark black silk sheet above them, seemingly so endless that it confirmed her view of life. But the Major was not happy.

  ‘What tosh you talk, Bobbie, what complete tosh, you dear old bean. And I for one will have none of this mish-mash talk of whoever and whatever. Human beings must matter to each other or all is lost, and we will have fought and friends died for nothing at all. The world has to get better because of what has just happened, or at least less worse, or it has all been pretty bloody pointless, wouldn’t you say?’

  Another pause, and then Bobbie heard Julian laugh and say quietly, ‘The trouble is, for me, it doesn’t matter if it is, you know, if it is all pointless. It doesn’t matter one of Bobbie’s dots, not a single jot, and really, why should it?’

  Julian laughed again, almost exultant, it seemed to Bobbie, at the idea that he would not have to toil through the usual three score years and ten like the rest of them, that he would not make old bones, but would, in some way, manage his escape to a better world before even the Major.

  ‘We are none of us long for this earth,’ the Major said, throwing his cigarette underfoot as they ambled along, while at the same time he smiled at Bobbie and Julian. ‘I was like you, once, thought I was not going to last long, that I was sure to die a young, heroic death, but the Burma railway taught me different. Now, well, now I can’t even see the morning light without wanting to burst into tears of gratitude that I’m here, and I bloody well wouldn’t be if it hadn’t been for one of those people Bobbie here calls dots. I tell you, I would not be. Dots! You dear bean, bless you, such tosh. Oh. Shut up Gilbert!’

  After a minute the Major lit yet another cigarette and Bobbie watched its glow come and go in the darkness, thinking with regret that although it mu
st be the Major’s twenty-fifth smoke of the day, it was too late to win her bet with Julian.

  ‘So what are we all settling for?’

  Julian walked along without answering, staring ahead of him, his hands in his pockets, seemingly the epitome of relaxation.

  ‘We are settling for making this world a better place to be in, dear bean,’ the Major stated. ‘We cannot settle for less. We have to help make this little jewel that is called England a better and more beautiful place. We must not have passed this way and left behind yet more rubbish or discontent. We must not leave behind a legacy of bitterness or hatred.’

  ‘Easier said than done, Major.’ Bobbie turned and looked at him gravely. ‘I mean. Look at you. Can you forgive what happened to you?’

  ‘I have, dear bean, I have. There was no other way. Can’t forget, but I have forgiven or I wouldn’t be able to go on, it’s just a fact. Like Pilgrim, we must shed our burdens and look only to the day.’

  Miranda looked at herself in the old mirror. She was wearing the New Look for the first time and as she stared at herself she could not help wondering why it was that it was considered so terribly, terribly shocking, which it was. Women passing other women in the street would berate them, or shout remarks as the long skirts passed them, or hopped up into a cab.

  No amount of shouting in the street however had stopped Fenwicks advertising a ballerina suit, with softly rounded shoulders, page-boy nipped-in jacket, gaily swinging skirt to give the new fashion look. Exciting colours and gay mixtures. 18 coupons. £5 12s. 6d.

  And of course, as soon as she had asked herself this simple question, Miranda knew that she already had the answer. She knew exactly why the New Look was shocking to people, and why women who wore it were frequently subjected to insults from passersby. It was because the New Look took up yards and yards and yards of material, so of course, in a time of post-war deprivation and clothing coupons, it was terrible to pass women in the street who were wearing more material in one skirt than most people would be able to afford, or obtain, in a whole year.