The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  Julian seemed to relish stories such as these, and he had a fund of them. He liked to quote Hilaire Belloc and his poems, and he liked to put on ghostly voices to frighten Bobbie when they walked under the house, down the long secret tunnel that linked the main house to the garden wing of Baileys Court. When he was not doing that, he loved to make up horrendous murder stories, relating them in a High Church clerical voice which he fondly thought made the item much funnier. And after that he chopped and chopped until there was nothing whatsoever left of her except her little finger.

  But Bobbie eventually became inured to his stories, thinking of them as simply stories, just as now she could not believe that Miss Moncrieff had dropped any of her stitches for the Major, that it was not just another of Julian’s inventions. And yet, as they walked back to return to their rebuilding of the old walls of the garden, to their discussions of where, eventually, the old roses would once more be planted, to their marvellous plans for making the grounds at Baileys Court a paradise, a jewel set beside the silver sea, Bobbie could not turn away from the realization that Julian might be right about her guardian’s secretary.

  To begin with Miss Moncrieff had changed her hairstyle of late. And what was more, she no longer wore her own hand-knitted stockings, but, also just of late, had affected a lisle pair, a really great advancement for her. Her hair too was no longer scraped back into a tight knot at the back of her head so that her scalp showed through pink and white – Bobbie flinched at the idea of sporting a hairstyle that must cause a kind of permanent headache – but arranged at the nape of her neck in a figure of eight wrapped around a piece of horse-hair. And then, too, instead of the eternal pre-war tweed coat and skirt, she had started to leave off not only her coat but her home-knitted cardigan with its three-ply cuffs and collars knitted in moss stitch. All this meant, to Bobbie, that Julian might be right, and by the time they both picked up their trowels and began work once again she had come to the same conclusion as Julian, Miss Moncrieff must now be leaving off not just her coat, but perhaps her skirt too.

  The fact is that once an idea comes into someone’s head, it is not unusual for that person to find that it simply will not be removed. And just as Bobbie always found that if someone thought her a bore she found it impossible to be in the least bit interesting, so too, now, she found that by the time she was handing Julian up the stones from the flower beds, and the Major and Miss Moncrieff were strolling back from lunch together in the Sheds, they presented themselves, to her eyes at any rate, as famously in love as any Antony and Cleopatra or Dido and Aeneas, or Daphnis and Chloe.

  Julian nodded to her to hand up the next stone, and then winked largely and flamboyantly towards the Major and Miss Moncrieff, so that Bobbie would notice what must have been all too obvious all along. Miss Moncrieff was wild about the Major. She looked up at him for reassurance every two seconds, she ran to hand him his gardening tools, or his hat, she rushed back to the Sheds for lemonade, she darted to the stream for ice cold bottles of tonic once the sun had gone down below the yard arm and it was safe for any gentleman, or gentlewoman for that matter, to pour a goodly measure of gin into the bottom of a glass and sip contentedly together the just reward of honest toil.

  The Major too had changed. His carelessness of dress had been replaced with a meticulous attention to detail, even in the boiling heat. So, although he still might be only in shorts, now he made sure that they were sparkling white, and he wore tennis shoes and socks with them, so that he looked more like a boy scout than an army major. He raised his hat to Miss Moncrieff at any moment that seemed appropriate. The moment she returned with the lemonade, up would go his hand. The moment she put the picnic basket with their lunch inside it down beside him the hat would be raised again, and the moment the precious gin bottle could be produced from the leather case with its silver-topped bottles and its glass casings, the courtesy was again performed, and the hat eventually replaced.

  ‘It’s all going to end dreadfully,’ Bobbie announced that evening as she and Julian strolled, side by side as usual, down the corridor under the good Sussex earth towards the garden wing. ‘It’s all going to end so dreadfully we shall be sobbing into large spotted handkerchiefs.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she heard Julian asking her, his voice sounding suddenly far away, so concentrated were her own thoughts.

  Bobbie’s voice sounded accusing, even to her own ears. ‘Because the lives of people like the Major and Miss Moncrieff always do. They always end quite dreadfully in frustration and gin-ridden guilt. She will never allow him to marry her. The moment she sees her mother in Pinner again, the old ties will reassert themselves—’

  ‘Doom, doom, doom, that is all you talk. You are the doomiest person I know,’ Julian said, accusingly, and he fell back a few yards.

  Bobbie wished that she had held her tongue as from behind her she heard Julian suddenly starting to cough, and cough. She knew he was suffering in the heat, and she knew just how, but there was nothing she could do. She had an idea that he was seeing a doctor somewhere, sometimes, because every now and then he would disappear for half a day, and return looking more cheerful, and she had noticed, over the past days and weeks, he did seem to have changed. He had filled out, and turned a marvellous golden colour in the intense heat of that particular summer. Not that she would ask him anything – not ever. Bobbie knew all too well what pity and concern in other people’s eyes could do to a person. She knew how pity could make you feel more ugly than anyone could imagine, and how an outward show of concern could make you feel that your insides had turned to knots, and how, conversely, seeing the worry you were causing someone all at once made you feel that you would never, ever get better again.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Bobbie continued, after, eventually, the coughing had stopped, ‘it is true. Miss M will see her mother, her mother will moan and cry and never want her to leave Pinner again, not even to go to her flat in Ebury Street. Miss M will turn away from the Major and the Major will drink himself to death and be buried unmourned in the village graveyard with only the publican attending the obsequies, for he at least will have found that he has fond memories of him.’

  ‘We won’t let it all end that way, we just won’t.’

  ‘You will have to give in to the idea of fate. Fate cannot be stopped, Julian, ever. Fate will have its wicked way, no matter what.’

  ‘I don’t agree. I refuse to agree. I say we will stop fate. Like a traffic policeman we will hold it up, we will make it do as we wish. Just for a few days or hours we can turn the clock back, and make things better again.’

  ‘But how can we?’ Bobbie said stubbornly. ‘We are mere mortals, just little dots. Not really mattering to anyone, anywhere, except perhaps to ourselves.’ She was aware that Julian had stopped listening to her, so she quickly switched subjects.

  ‘We will have to make a plan. We will have to talk to the Major, make him see that if he and Miss Moncrieff are to live happily ever after, he will have to, have to, run off with her. It is the only answer. We must at all costs stop Miss Moncrieff from returning to Pinner and her mother, or to London and Ebury Street. We must force her to run away and find a new life before even Mrs Harper comes down and starts dictating to her, in every way.’

  Julian shook his head. They had reached the top of the secret passage. ‘That would never work, Roberta.’ He smiled down at her, suddenly and instantly sadistic, and Bobbie could only wait in awful dread, knowing all the time that he was about to make her laugh.

  ‘Why ever not?’ she asked, her own eyes now widening, returning the innocent look that Julian had managed to maintain, aware that she was falling into his trap, but utterly helpless to prevent it.

  ‘Why ever not? Why ever not? Why, for the very simple reason, Roberta Murray, that the Major cannot run. He smokes too much.’

  Bobbie whacked Julian on the arm.

  ‘Wretched Boy, goodnight!’

  Miranda was determined to keep Sam Macaskie from knowing her ad
dress. She did not want anyone visiting the studio for the minute, perhaps not ever – for the very good reason that she knew she had everything she wanted at Aubrey Close. Everything was arranged for herself, for her own return. It was her little paradise and she wanted to be alone in it.

  Besides, she could, after only a few weeks, appreciate that there was something deliciously dominating and selfish about the atmosphere of studios. They did not ask you to be quite alone in them, they demanded it. In fact the studio at Aubrey Close did more than that for Miranda.

  Every evening when she returned to it, it ordered her to dress up for it, to dress in some way that would please it and remind it of the old days, using any or all of the clothes in the trunks that still sat, old and important, on the landing at the top of the dark wood stairs. Once dressed up in some satisfyingly grand costume, Miranda would wind up the old gramophone and dance to it, quite alone. Or she would sit at the piano, and sing to the women with their gold headbands in the great coloured windows, or to the bust on the plinth beside the staircase, or to the dark-eyed woman in the red velvet dress who had been left, without a frame, somehow abandoned on an easel in one corner.

  No, there was no question, there was no place for Sam Macaskie in the studio at Aubrey Close. There just was not, and to give him his due, Sam Macaskie did not seem terribly interested in escorting Miranda home, which was really rather a relief. Nor did he seem to notice that Miranda was reluctant to take a taxi cab in front of him, in case he heard her address. He was far too interested in asking her out to dinner that night.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so …’

  Miranda, still beautifully and perhaps, she realized of a sudden, a little eccentrically dressed, was now waiting with mounting impatience for Macaskie to go back inside the hotel. They had enjoyed lunch together; that was surely quite enough for two strangers. Why would he want to eat dinner with her too? Why would he choose to dine with her rather than any one of the older and more interesting women who had passed by his table?

  The truth was that Miranda had grown up in only a matter of hours. She realized now that the life she had led in Norfolk with Allegra, which she had once thought to be so terribly sophisticated, was mundane and ordinary to the point of hilarity. Sam Macaskie’s conversation, his whole approach to life, the people who stopped by his table in the dining room, were the opposite of everything she had known in Norfolk, or in Mellaston, for that matter.

  These people were the epitome of sophistication. They had all to a person just come back from New York on ‘the Queen’, or were just going, and they made sure to tell Sam Macaskie this. Or they had just been to Paris or Rome. They dropped famous names, but not to impress, simply because they were friends, and friends do have names.

  And then too they obviously knew him so well that they laughed at ‘in’ jokes with him, speaking in a kind of shorthand – quite a different shorthand from Allegra’s shorthand, but a kind of shorthand all the same. Whatever he was or was not, by the end of luncheon ‘Sam, dear Sam’ as one older lady kept calling him, laughing at his wry remarks while patting his cheek with her white-gloved hand, was obviously immensely popular.

  What was impressive to Miranda about all the people who stopped by their table was that, beyond touching her outstretched hand lightly, they never once made the mistake of asking who exactly was, or why exactly their friend Sam was to be found on a sunny weekday in Park Lane seated with Miranda Mowbray.

  It was as if they took it for granted that Sam would be having luncheon at the Dorchester with a young, pretty girl. To anyone less ingenuous it might have mattered not to matter to these worldly people, but to Miranda, it was somehow calming. And because she was not able to follow their conversations, not knowing those of whom they spoke, or about whom they laughed, it allowed her, seated silently opposite Sam Macaskie, to appreciate the women’s clothes, their jewellery, their hats, and most of all their mouthwatering style. For despite clothing coupons, the summer heat, and the National Debt to America, style was back in force in London that year. White gloves worn to the elbows, and waisted, belted dresses, of silk chiffon and muslin, long and charmingly demure, some almost to the ankle. Just watching the ladies who stopped at Sam’s table made Miranda ever more aware of the improvised nature of her own New Look, for although she could appreciate that her hat was all that it should be, she knew that there were certain details of her home-made costume which were entirely and utterly amiss.

  She had just decided to leave Sam Macaskie on the pavement outside the hotel while she nipped into a taxi and drove off, when he leaned forward and said, in a low but kindly voice, ‘If not dinner, Miss Mowbray, how about shopping for some gloves, preferably white gloves to the elbow?’

  As soon as he had finished speaking Miranda turned slowly and brightly red. She had so hoped that no-one had noticed her lack of gloves. If Sam Macaskie had noticed, then it was obvious that everyone else would have too. Perhaps that was why no-one had paid much attention to her? She had, from the start, been all too obviously not one of them, perhaps because of no gloves.

  And Sam Macaskie had most probably noticed all along. All during the little matter of pre-lunch drinks, all during luncheon, he must have noticed that she was the only woman, young or old, in the restaurant without gloves. She had shoes, she had a hat, she had a dress and petticoats. What she did not have, and what her budget could not run to, were gloves.

  All the gloves in the trunks at Aubrey Close were moth-eaten, or had holes, or were so stained that they were beyond even sending to a dry cleaner’s. The only pair that she had been able to find were evening gloves made of fine kid, reaching right up to the tops of her arms, the buttons of which had taken her nearly a quarter of an hour to do up with a little tiny hook. When she had, eventually, done them up, she had been so pleased with the feel of them, the look of them on her long, slender arms, that she had gone back down the studio stairs again and danced in them, quite alone, waltzing around the studio, between all the old furniture, wearing only her underwear.

  ‘Gloves.’

  ‘I know a glove maker, very inexpensive, but we will have to go to his shop, in a back alley, around Soho. He makes up privately, for all the couturiers in Paris as well as London.’

  Miranda hesitated. Out of the corner of her eye she could see a taxi cab waiting. She could see couples strolling towards the Park in their lunch hour. A man with a poodle on a lead being pulled along. She could see the trees nearby moving slightly in a sudden, thankfully cool breeze. What she could not see was that it could possibly be wrong to accept a pair of gloves from a man whom she hardly knew. She needed gloves, she wanted gloves, she had to have gloves. She just did.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ she said back, pretending to be Allegra. ‘Bless you, thank you. Yes, I would like some gloves as a matter of fact. Just until I go home. I left mine at home, in my trunk, hardly unpacked yet, bless you.’

  But life had a habit of not being quite as simple as Miranda wished, and even as she accepted the innocent offer of some gloves from Sam Macaskie she saw something that put her almost insatiable desire for gloves into true perspective.

  She saw someone like the Pamela she remembered from long ago, a beautiful woman with auburn hair wearing a stunning dress in cerise pink which fell in tiny knifelike pleats so fine that they could have been in military formation. She wore the dress, together with a hat with a matching silk rose, tip tilted forward and shoes dyed to match, with such insouciance that for a few seconds Miranda could have believed it was Pamela – not because of what she was wearing but because of her sophisticated, carefree air. Watching her, Miranda felt that she knew just how the woman would laugh, how she would look, her eyes searching for, and always finding, amusement in something, if only the sunlight on the trees in the Park, or the man in the trilby hat who had just passed her.

  Sam’s deep voice penetrated Miranda’s thoughts. ‘I said – you would like to look like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes …’

/>   Now not just her lack of gloves, but everything about herself appealed to Miranda as being desperately home-made. The gloss, the patina, the ease of expensive clothes: everything about the woman who had just passed made her into someone quite different, someone that, of a sudden, Miranda wanted desperately to be. A Pamela of a person, someone who would look at ease beside this older man, this colonel of a person that Sam Macaskie seemed suddenly to be.

  She was still looking back towards the woman sashaying down Park Lane when the American voice beside her was heard urging, ‘Come on, then, Miss Mowbray, let’s get gloving.’

  Bobbie and Julian were seated with the Major between them in the private bar of the Dog and Duck discussing the finer details of the Major’s plan to abduct Miss Moncrieff to Gretna Green. There he would marry her finally, and completely, and weeks before she was due to take her mother on holiday to Bournemouth, so that, as Bobbie pointed out in her usual practical way, there would be enough time for the new Mrs Saxby not only to become used to her new status, but to break it to her mother before all three of them went to Bournemouth.

  ‘I don’t suppose she’ll mind her daughter being married, just so long as she knows that you will still holiday with her and share Christmas with her, and that sort of thing, I don’t suppose Mrs Moncrieff will mind, will she?’

  ‘Of course she will mind. If she was not going to mind Miss Moncrieff would have been snapped up and married years ago, wouldn’t she?’ Bobbie sighed.

  The Major nodded and threw back his whisky in one before ordering another. ‘The thing is, the thing is you’re right, Bobbie,’ he said, just a little fuzzily, ‘we have to get under the wire, as we used to call it in Burma, before anything happens to induce “Bel” as I call her, to funk it. We just have to get under that wire, before her mother falls dangerously ill, or some other hazard. I would never get back in with her, because you know how it is with single women and their mothers. They have not remained single for nothing, they have remained single because their mothers don’t want to be left on their own, so they stake their claim pretty early.’