Macaskie smiled. ‘Well, never mind your taste. You know who wants you for his collection – so you had better change your tune, young lady.’
Miranda carefully blew some smoke into the air before saying, ‘Who?’
‘The Master himself. The Master has asked for you, Randy.’
Miranda turned and stared at Macaskie. ‘But he has not even met me.’
‘Yet, but he will, and he already knows about you. He has already been told about the new blond English beauty. He also knows that for the New Look to go on increasing in popularity those photographs in every newspaper and magazine all over the world are going to have to look more than marvellous, they are going to have to look stunning. Nothing else will do.’ Macaskie reached under the table. ‘Look, I had these developed for you to look at. Hold them up, and you will see yourself as others see you.’
Of a sudden, Miranda knew that she was about to change for ever; that seeing herself in those clothes, photographed by one of the world’s most renowned photographers, she would fall in love with herself.
And she did.
She could not help herself. There she was, transformed from wartime orphan to a beautiful young girl dressed in a long, full-skirted, blue-printed organdie dress over a pale pink net petticoat, the whole strapless effect topped off by a dropped-shoulder bolero. And again, there she was in a faille silk and aubergine satin over-dress, holding a great bunch of dark-leafed flowers over her head while the strapless black velvet dress beneath the faille showed darkly against the pale blue studio walls. Schiaparelli’s narrow suit with wide belt and peg skirt, hat pulled down, dark stockings paired with dark high-heeled shoes, gave her a mysterious look, as did a black faille suit with large sleeves and slim skirt.
‘Now will you have your hair cut?’
It was certainly Macaskie’s voice speaking, but Miranda could only stare at photograph after photograph of herself, not really recognizing this tall, beautiful young woman standing in clothes that were doubtless, according to the laws of fashion, already past it. She was beautiful. She could see that now. And she had always loved clothes.
Aunt Sophie had used to say, ‘You have allure, dearest, such allure. Not many people have it. You must use it to get on, really you must. You mustn’t be like myself, or Prudence. Don’t just fester, make something of yourself, become famous, use your allure. Above all, keep away from making jam. People only eat your jam, and never thank you for it.’
‘Sorry, Macaskie, what did you say?’
‘I said now will you have your hair cut?’
‘What? Oh, yes. Yes, of course I will.’
Despite rationing, fashion was back centre stage, filling magazines and newspapers with its peculiar importance. Hair was about to be worn short, and would be for some time, giving the demobbed hair-dressers much-needed business. It also fitted neatly under hats, and hats were going to be just as important as the clothes themselves.
There would be chip straw hats worn with slender-waisted full-skirted dresses, or Venetian hats trimmed with silk worn with London coats, or hats that peaked at the front and were worn quite flat so that the wearer looked out cheekily, the hat nearly touching her eyebrows, the decoration, if there was one, worn to the front. Boaters too would be worn with white-collared Quaker dresses, and velvet cloches with many of the straight-fronted dresses – wing-backed, back-buttoned and reverse collared – but placed to the back of the head and finished with a bow in the same material.
The truth was that, loth though Miranda was to have her hair cut, she knew that in reality Macaskie was right: she would not be able to show off the coming seasons’ hats well. For, with her long, full, thick head of hair, she would not be able to change them in seconds. Most of all she would not be able to look up to the minute. At any moment all hair was going to be short and curly, or short and tapered around the face. Not to have her hair like that would be to trail behind fashion. And yet her hair was so much her, or at least that is how she thought of it, the her of Miranda Mowbray.
Hardly had she consented to the whole tortuous business before Macaskie was steering her into a hairdressing salon. It was fashionably placed on the rue de Rivoli, naturally, but like the rest of Paris it was empty. Miranda closed her eyes. She did not want to see the hair falling to the floor, but she could still hear the scissors. Suddenly it came to her that all her life was in her hair. All her life she had brushed her hair a hundred times at night, all her life she had plaited it, and knotted it, put it into chignons, or ribbons, had it admired by her granny, or by the aunts at Mellaston. She had let Teddy ride on her back using her plaits as reins; every year at Mellaston she had been chosen as the Virgin Mary in the Christmas Story because of her hair. Her hair was her memories, her personality, her confidence.
After being pushed and prodded, and hearing the sound of ‘ooh’s and ‘aah’s from the other hair-dressers who had come to watch the still unusual sight of the master cutting off this luxuriant hair to a length that was hardly longer than a boy’s, Miranda opened her eyes. When she saw what the hairdresser had done, tears – tears that she had not shed for Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence, not for anyone or anything to date – started to spill down her face. He had ruined her.
Minutes later, when Macaskie arrived, he was unsympathetic. There was nothing to cry about, he told her, she looked better than ever; but his eyes, even as he spoke, drifted away from the shorn Miranda, and towards other models, being coiffed, or curled, or tonged.
Miranda stared at him, realizing suddenly that he did not care about how she felt, or how she looked. She was, she saw, just a girl to him. He was only interested in what she could bring to his bank. Deep down inside she felt desperate. She had to make him care about her, she had to make him mind about her more than anyone else.
‘Sam.’
He looked bored. ‘Yup.’
His eyes looked into hers, still bored, still longing to get on with something other than Miranda and her now very short hair.
‘Let’s go back to the apartment. I’ll pull myself together, I promise.’
He shrugged his shoulders, his indifference suddenly heightening her fascination. ‘Yup. If you want. But it sure as hell won’t help your hair to grow.’
‘No, but – but you could make love to me.’
She did not know why she said that, or how the words, so alien to her, came out, all on their own, too. As if they were issuing from another person locked up inside her, as if that person had suddenly appeared beside her with an emotional begging bowl. Because without her hair, she was no longer Miranda Mowbray, she was a pathetic figure, without spirit, without shape.
‘We’ll see.’ Macaskie turned away, still indifferent, still only interested, it seemed, in other models, other girls, girls who suited short hair.
In Sussex Bobbie was being lectured by Beatrice. Beatrice had decided to visit the Sheds. She wanted to know a great deal more about the estate. Bobbie must take her round. Bobbie stared at her dully, knowing that she should not feel this great lump of resentful dislike, verging on hatred, for this immaculately dressed woman who had saved her life, paid for her recovery from tuberculosis, altogether looked after her when no-one else cared to, and all because of some long forgotten promise to Bobbie’s mother, made on the outbreak of war. But it was more than she could help, it was an uncontrollable dislike that had nothing to do with duty or gratitude. Deep down inside, deep in her secret heart, Bobbie knew that she hated Beatrice.
‘You must show me round, Roberta, but don’t come too near, my dear, you know, because of the risk of infection – my frail health, you know.’
Bobbie nodded, and picking up her coat she prepared to leave the Sheds and go outside into the wind and the intermittent sunshine of a day that already held a hint of autumn. Of course as soon as she was walking ahead of Beatrice and thinking about her guardian’s permanently ‘frail’ health, the mischievous notion came into her head, and would not be dismissed, that if she wanted Beatrice to go away
and not come back again, to return to London at once, she should really start to pretend to cough again. That way she would send Beatrice packing. But another thought came close upon the first one, and that was that this course of action would not only send Beatrice packing, it would doubtless mean that Bobbie would be sent packing too, but not back to London – back to Hazel Hill and the kindly French nurses, back to her room with its dull green institutional curtains, and its pale cream walls, and its far-off sounds of other people’s sufferings.
That thought was too bad to contemplate. In fact it was so bad that Bobbie shuddered inwardly and put it away from her as being too terrible to think about, ever, even as she realized that her life was very far from being safe, or dull, now that her guardian was here. She would have to take particular care never, ever to cough in her presence, for to do so might be to invite a return to the sanatorium, to that other life that Bobbie had, recently, put so very far behind her that she had actually, until now, all but forgotten its realities. She was after all still under age, not yet twenty-one, so Beatrice was still her guardian, and could do as she wished as far as Bobbie was concerned: shut her back up at Hazel Hill, or put her to work down the mines. No, Bobbie was very lucky, really.
Yet still, she had not told Beatrice about Julian, nor Julian about Mrs Harper’s hypochondria. She had said nothing to either of them that first day, hoping in some mad way to find an answer to her problems overnight, but the next day, which when it came dawned as fitfully as the previous one, she crept from the Sheds, and, avoiding the main house where Beatrice and her staff were camping in the drier more civilized rooms, dived into the underground passage and ran along it, hoping against hope that Beatrice would not find this secret corridor, at least not for months and months.
Climbing up the narrow winding stairway, she started to call.
‘Julian! Julian! Julian!’
For a second as she knocked on his door, and then fought her way through the velvet curtain, she found herself imagining that he had gone, and she would never see him again. But, no, thank God, there he was and he was still as tall, and as oddly dressed, as always.
‘Oh, Julian, there you are.’
‘Yes, here I am, Roberta.’
She knew straight away from the expression on his face that he had heard what a rotten fist she had made of telling Beatrice about poor Major Saxby and Miss Moncrieff.
‘You heard me telling her, didn’t you? I knew you would. I felt you were nearby, I just couldn’t see you, which was probably just as well, really, because I should have started to laugh, and it was bad enough anyway, without that.’
Julian stared down at her momentarily, his head on one side, a lazy affectionate expression in his eyes, and it seemed to Bobbie as she looked back at him that he loved her, but would never tell her so. She knew that he thought of her as a madcap but also that part of his problem was that she had changed so much since she had first stumbled upon his room in the garden wing. And of course she had grown up with him in the last months, it was only to be expected. Yet she had not grown out of him. Julian was still her best friend, her fidus Achates, everything that she could want in a companion.
Since she was a child Bobbie had always imagined having a friend of her own, someone to whom she could talk and confide everything that she had ever felt or thought. She had never thought of her future as one long enormous stretch of years, more one long enormous stretch of months, until Julian had arrived in her life and then, suddenly, she seemed to have a future, and there was always something to which to look forward – Julian arriving, seeing Julian, being with him.
And yet nothing stayed still, and she knew it. She could not ignore the changing weather, the way the waves were getting stronger, the winds around the Sheds noisier. Autumn will come and the leaves will fall, and there will be no more laughter, no looking for sense among the stars, no walking to the beach at lunchtime and stripping off and swimming all alone except for some figure miles off walking his dog. There will be no more of that, no more of the sunshine, and worst of all no more of the laughter. So, it is best if we treat the whole summer as being not like any other time to come and not spoil one lovely moment of it, remember it as it is, as it was, a sunny, happy, perfect idyll.
After that Bobbie said to Julian with her usual urgency, ‘You see they don’t know about the underground corridor that runs between the wings, and so you can stay on here, for the moment anyway. I know they will never, ever bother with this wing, not at the moment anyway. They’re all too busy trying to make themselves comfy in the main house. Besides, I will tell Beatrice that this wing is dangerous, and damp, and so on, just to make sure. So you really will be quite safe still, here, until the building regulations are changed. And that won’t be for years and years and years. You will be as safe as the mice in the attics, as safe as the stones on the beach, as safe as safe as—’
Bobbie could see that Julian was only half listening to her while in his imagination he, like herself, was wandering through the past months, laughing and talking, and, as always, Bobbie was still talking.
‘So look, I’ll come back here, with a picnic, because by dinner time they will all be past caring where I am, and then we can either go down to the Sheds, and picnic on the beach, or stay here. What do you say?’
Julian smiled his lazy smile at her, one last time.
‘What a good idea, dear bean,’ he said, imitating the Major. ‘Come here, yes, and we’ll picnic, by candlelight.’ He gestured round to the precious candles of which they had only the other day found a quantity in the basement of the house. ‘It’d be lovely.’
‘Good, yes.’ Bobbie turned, frowning suddenly. ‘Sorry. Did you say “would be”?’
‘No, I don’t think so, why?’
‘Nothing. I don’t know why, I just thought that was what you said, that it “would be lovely” as if you were not going to be there. Because if you had you would regret it – Wretched Boy!’
She smiled across at him. ‘Because.’ She paused. ‘Because … Mrs Duddy has promised to bring us chicken.’
‘Chicken?’
‘Yes, chicken.’
For a second Bobbie thought she saw the determination in Julian’s expression waver. Chicken. No-one ate chicken nowadays.
‘You must be her favourite person ever.’
‘Of course.’
Bobbie hurried off, waving back to him from the courtyard below, and as she did so she imagined that Julian would turn away and start writing or drawing as it seemed he always did once he went back to his room in the garden wing.
Then she imagined how he would wait for her to come hurrying back down the underground passageway with the big, old-fashioned picnic basket from the Sheds. She delighted in the thought of his expectation of her arrival, of how he would hear her mounting the twisting stairway, each narrow step bringing her closer and closer to what she knew he always thought of as ‘their room’. She thought of him imagining her pushing through the doorway, backing through it, as she usually did if she brought him a picnic.
Of course if he was not there when she returned, she thought suddenly as she went through the underground passageway, she would hate him for ever, and ever. She would hate him the way she knew girls and boys always hated each other when they had been let down so badly that they would never, ever forget, or forgive. But really, when all was said and done, that would be by far the best way, for her to hate him. It would be a far better ending to their idyllic summer. But not yet, she prayed silently, not quite yet.
After all, quite apart from the likelihood of his leaving now that summer was gone, there was also his incipient TB. They had both laughed so much about that word together. Why was TB always incipient, Bobbie had wanted to know, when nothing else was? There was no such thing as incipient measles, or incipient mumps, or incipient influenza.
‘I tell you what – let’s call ourselves The Incipients – you know, like a band, an American jazz band.’
Of course she ha
d laughed and minutes later forgotten all about it, preferring to become engrossed in harmless gossip – like whether or not Miss Moncrieff had yet surrendered to the Major, or whether the landlord of the Dog and Duck was a black market spiv, or whether the Major was really a sham, and had never been a prisoner of war, and had made it all up in order to take Miss M’s savings? Somehow it had all been talking. Even when they were swimming they had never really stopped talking, even if it meant swallowing mouthfuls of sea.
Necessarily, because they were always walking about or cutting things back, or digging, numerous fantasies had surrounded everything they did. All very harmless, but somehow, given the long, leisurely hours of that idyllic summer, the fantasies, the arguments, everything they talked about had assumed an enormous and engrossing importance. And that was before he had read Keats to her by candlelight, or walked arm in arm with her through the tunnel beneath the old gardens – or before she had returned to the Sheds and Miss Moncrieff.
And too, as summer had progressed, and he had seemed to become better and better – because of ‘the sea air’ as Bobbie had kept saying, so encouragingly – Bobbie had fantasized that they might be able to stay together, somehow, which was ridiculous, because they were both only young, and people like Mrs Harper never allowed their wards to stay with young men without futures.
And so now it was all over, and she knew that one of these days he would be going, without any doubt, moving on. It was perhaps because of this realization that she suddenly turned and ran back up the passageway again, only to find that he had stayed at the window long after she had vanished from sight, long after she had left the courtyard far below – long after that, Julian had stayed at the window, looking out.
Now he opened it and as he did so Bobbie kissed her hand up to him, in an exaggerated way, in ‘their’ way, and he kissed his hand back down to her, before shutting the window again, and going back inside the room.
‘Wretched Boy!’ Bobbie called up to him, but Julian was gone.
The Blue Note Page 21