The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  MEANWHILE …

  ‘My eager feet shall find you again,

  Though the sullen years and the mark of pain

  Have changed you wholly …’

  Rupert Brooke, ‘The Beginning’

  Chapter Nine

  Teddy had loved the idea of the army, until he joined it, that is. He wanted so much to join, and then the reality of it hit him, and another part of him, practically all of him actually, wanted it to go away and be something else, something which was less restricted. For, in his imagination, Teddy had thought that the army was going to be full of heroes in the making, and that he would become one of them straight away, the kind of person he had read about, seen films about, been inspired by. But the army was not like that at all. The army was like school. It was full of routine. And being in the army was like school, like staying with people’s parents in the holidays, when you got close to it, it just was as it was, and could never be anything else except – the army.

  Of course he loved the officers’ uniforms, and of course he was grateful to Rawlins’ father for getting him accepted into such a smart regiment, a regiment which was steeped in what seemed to be an endless history – Obdaman – Ratterspitz – Constantin – the names of battles were written on the walls of the regiment’s dining rooms, as well as on the minds of those joining it.

  Oh, bravery, courage, taking a stand in some stinking hole, defending the King or Queen, and Country in some remote part of the British Empire, it was all there in the way that the officers walked, the way they talked, the way their dark blue coats swayed behind them on the Parade ground, the way their swagger sticks stayed under their arms, even when they lit a cigarette, it was all there, in the minds of those who had been elected to become part of this shining, brilliant elite.

  It was there too in the impossibly matching horses, with their harness polished harder than the steel of the drawn sword that ended parade. It was there in the endless rehearsals of the military band, in the band master with his shining white moustache, in the music sheets so carefully annotated, in the sound and the sight of the blackened boots, each one of such a mirrored finish that they reflected the sun, before it moved on to silver spurs or horse bits, straps, or regimental buttons.

  So why then, amid such beauty, was Teddy so relieved to break his back?

  Why was it when the doctors, grave-faced and solemn, crowded around his bed to tell him he was to be moved to a specialist hospital, that Teddy Mowbray, who had so longed to join the army and become a hero, why was it that he felt so awfully relieved? Why was it that despite the gravity of his state, despite the sorrow reflected in the young nurses’ eyes, despite his longed-for hopes for an army career, he felt nothing but relief?

  I must be a coward, he thought, as he felt himself being lifted into an ambulance and driven for miles to the new hospital. That has to be it. Without realizing it, I must be a coward.

  As the lights of the darkening evening flashed past the windows of the ambulance Teddy wondered whether or not his accident, falling from a high bar in the regimental gym, had actually been almost wilful? Perhaps, hating the army as he had from day one, night one, perhaps he had caused himself to fall? Not to die, of course, he would never want to die before his allotted span, but to fall – perhaps he had wanted that – falling was different. And now, it had to be faced, he would never ever be able to become an army officer.

  Now, well now, now he would have to become something else, and that was, it must be said, more than a little depressing. He had never thought beyond the army, but if he should walk again, as the doctors had promised him that he would, he would actually have to do something. He would have to find a way to fill his days. It would not be enough to be an invalid with a small allowance, and most probably a limp, it would be less than enough, he would have to be something.

  But what? What could he become? He had hated the army but it had, when all was said and done, actually been leading to something to which he had been able to aspire, a marsh light leading him on through his adolescence, but now the aspiration had vanished, he had to think of what to be.

  But what, he groaned inwardly, what? He had been so lucky in everything so far. Lucky in a war that had plucked him out of the east end of London and sent him to the aunts at Mellaston rectory. Lucky that they had set about adopting him officially, practically straight away. Lucky in that they, being gentlewomen, had immediately set about sending him to good schools. Lucky that they had finally left him not just the old rectory in their wills, but half their money too, enough money to allow him to become an officer and a gentleman. Now, only the last part was open to him, because the first part, it had to be faced, was a gonner.

  ‘Do it on purpose, did you?’ the army doctor had wanted to know, but he asked it with such a twinkle in his eye that it made Teddy feel embarrassed for his lack of tact. Supposing it had been true, and he had?

  ‘Of course!’ Teddy had riposted. ‘I love having accidents and breaking my back, and being in pain is positively spiffing.’

  The truth was that over the next few weeks of recuperation, over the lying for ever as still as a dead leaf, over wanting to make love to all the pretty nurses that came to his bedside and knowing that he never would, the truth was that a new kind of truth was gradually dawning on Teddy.

  This truth was – and he was too honest not to face it – the truth was that he was not Teddy Mowbray at all. That was the real truth. He was no more Teddy Mowbray than he was William Shakespeare. He was lucky Teddy. He could be lovely Teddy. He could be handsome Teddy. But he could not, at any time, pretend any more that he was, actually, Teddy Mowbray.

  Teddy Mowbray was the young boy that the aunts at Mellaston, his adoptive aunts, had invented because he had been the only kind of ‘nephew’ that could be acceptable to them. The reality was that he was actually Ted Darling, and even he was only what his so-called sister Miranda had created. Who he actually was he would probably never really care to know – it might be too off-putting. But what he did know, from being in the army those few months, was that he was definitely not a ‘Teddy Mowbray of Mellaston rectory’ kind of person, try as he might, and much as he would like to wear a smart regimental coat in dark blue with two regimental buttons on the half-belt and a great sway of cloth making up the main pleat at the back. He knew that he would look an idiot in it, because deep down inside he knew that he was just not that kind of person. And that was why he had not liked the army, because the person he really was would not like the army. In fact, he would hate it.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ the chairman of the Army Medical Board stuttered, before following up his verbal astonishment with, ‘I wonder if you would repeat that, if you would not mind? Did you say – did you say that you wanted to go to—’

  ‘I want to go to art school, but not to paint, to study photography. I want to be a photographer.’

  The gentlemen who made up the Medical Board now, to a man, stared at each other, and Teddy could see that in at least one pair of eyes his choice of training was confirming that they thought he truly must have broken his wretched back on purpose, and that now it was mended they should really have him shot.

  ‘Gentlemen officers do not usually become photographers.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Teddy agreed with his usual easy charm. ‘But you see, now I am useless to the army, I don’t suppose that matters as much as it would have done had I not been useless, as it were. Although,’ he went on, the thought suddenly occurring to him, and the logic of it appealing too, ‘Although, when you come to think of it, people like me – people with bad medical histories, we should be useful, if you think about it, because being so useless we could be the first to be shot, couldn’t we? I mean really, when you think about it, it would be a better way, wouldn’t it?’

  There was a growing silence around him, and he sensed it, but he could not stop what he was about to say. He found it too interesting.

  ‘I mean, the army could keep us crocks for every
day stuff, really, if you come to think of it, and save the fitter chaps for later, couldn’t they? I mean I always think it’s such a waste really, putting really fit chaps, chaps who have taken months and months to get fit and are simply bursting with life and rippling muscles, into battle situations and then having them killed. I mean – having got them so fit.’

  The dignified, respectable members of the esteemed Medical Board did not think this at all funny. In fact the grave-faced, unsmiling members of His Majesty’s Army Medical Board, without saying a word, without looking either at Teddy or at each other, as one man, could be heard silently, and with relief, thinking, What a mercy this fellow is being invalided out. What a blessing he is going. Better the Medical Board and a disability allowance than a court martial and a firing squad, because, with these ideas of his, that is where he would have undoubtedly ended up, being shot by us, and not by anyone else.

  There were some murmurings, some glances to and from the papers in front of them, and then the chief medical officer, the spokesman, said, ‘Very well. If that is what you really want, if you are quite sure that you wish to attend an art school, to become a photographer, then that is what the army will pay for. You will be trained to become a – photographer. Perhaps you will be attracted to photographing war subjects,’ he added wistfully, hope suddenly permeating his dulled, official tone. ‘Perhaps you will be attracted to those subjects, with your – er – camera. Army subjects.’

  Teddy shook his head, hating to let the poor man down but now that the gates of freedom seemed to be opening up in front of him, he could not tell a lie. He felt too free, too much a soul at large, to be able to obfuscate. Besides, he believed in the basic tenets of beauty, truth and goodness, and that being so he had to tell the truth. It was the only way.

  ‘I have to be honest, sir. I am afraid there is only one thing I want to photograph, really – only one subject that really interests me.’

  The esteemed members of the Medical Board seemed to lean forward as one. Hope sprang up anew in their hearts, hope that a reprieve would be near, that this tall, charming, handsome young man would suddenly justify the army pension that he had just been awarded with some kind of decent attitude. Plants, animals, war, Africa, tigers, tanks, those would be the subjects to which a former member of the great, historic regiment of the Royals, would be undoubtedly attracted, surely?

  ‘Women.’ Teddy smiled just thinking of them.

  ‘Women?’

  ‘Women.’

  The way the chairman said the word they could have been gorillas, or secret weapons, or foreign spies.

  ‘Women.’

  Once more the word span across the short space between Teddy and the board, span and span, round and round, repeatedly, until it finally lay flat, a brown, round penny of a word.

  ‘Yes,’ Teddy agreed, seemingly oblivious of the consternation that one word had caused and the expression on his face becoming ever more dreamy. ‘Beautiful women. I am going to photograph hundreds and hundreds of beautiful women.’

  There was a sound. Not a loud sound, not a sound that anyone else would be able to identify, but it was a sound none the less. Certainly Teddy heard it. He had never heard it before, not even at school, but he did now. And if you can see a sound, which of course no-one can, Teddy definitely saw this one. It was large, and strangely shaped, like a doodlebug, growing in volume until, too late, it cut out and was upon you, destructive, final, fatal.

  It was the sound of a body of decent, regular, church-going, respectable Englishmen giving up entirely and completely on a former junior officer of His Majesty’s esteemed Royals.

  But what followed was disappointing, for it transpired that there was no course for photographers at the art schools. No-one thought photography, still only a hundred years old or so, at all important. No matter that painters all over the world had been using photographs to work from, to paint from, to inspire them; art schools – those esteemed branches of the art world – still viewed photography as vulgar. And so, quite against his will, Teddy had pursued his art course, all the time moonlighting at a photographer’s studio in Mayfair. Bicycling like mad, between lunch hours and classes, he began to learn what he really wanted to know, about lighting, about cameras, about what the magazines and the film companies, the theatres and Society, wanted from a photographer.

  Flattery to begin with, naturally. (No-one wanted a photograph of themselves that did not tell them that they were yards better looking than they actually were.) That was to start with. Secondly they wanted something new. That also was hardly surprising. Thirdly they wanted it, whatever it was, yesterday.

  Within a very few months Teddy had decided on his style. Dramatically, he would compose an entirely natural picture in an entirely unnatural way.

  He would style his photographs the way stills of films were made, and he would style his sitters the same way. He would dramatize them. They would not stay stock still, characterless, just showing off their clothes – they would be doing something. Just as he realized that painters had worked from photographs, now he realized he could do quite the reverse. He could work from the ideas behind paintings and make beautiful photographs.

  But London was just too drab. No matter where he went the underlying feeling of rationing and queuing, of a strange kind of defeat in victory, permeated everything. Society, the fashion world, the people he passed, whom he sometimes photographed, sitting on park benches or beneath some victory statue from yet another war. They had no life to them. It seemed that in the supreme act of repulsion had also come revulsion. The second great war of the twentieth century had taken its terrible toll on peacetime. It had been one war too many, even for the great, brave British. In defending their island they had surrendered their gaiety, seemingly, for ever.

  And so the long holidays approached and not even the exotic and strangely un-Chinese Madame Yin, the photographer in Mayfair whom Teddy was now assisting, not even she, with her raised platform, her velvet drape, and her black backdrop, would stay – or worse, be seen – in town during August. With the closure of her studio for the month, Teddy packed up his old cameras, inherited from the aunts, his new lighting, bought with his allowance, and headed for Paris, and the apartment of a fellow art student much adept at faking Teddy’s signature at the bottom of forms.

  This was a really quite significant asset in any friend, particularly for Teddy. Dick Fortescue’s ability to sign in ‘Teddy Mowbray’ was crucial when the real one was busy moonlighting with Madame Yin instead of attending drawing class or being set to copy, copy, copy, the old masters.

  So, instead of copying an orchid, or staring disinterestedly at some nude woman in a life class, Teddy would be busy placing a single lily in a vase, or a vase of flowers on a fake plinth, before coaxing some middle-aged Society hostess into an appealing pose in the Grecian manner.

  Dick could not understand the attraction of photography, but since he was an easy-going sort of fellow he did not try to dissuade Teddy from his chosen route. Instead, he invited him to join him in Paris, cameras and all.

  ‘Montmartre, dear boy. Nothing but steps, and far too many tourists, but once you’re up them, you’ll be pleased. Once you’ve lugged all your stuff up you’ll find not just the view, but little cafés, little boîtes de nuits, little restaurants, great food. Oh yes, it will be worth it. See you there, if you haven’t had a heart attack finding me.’

  Teddy saw what Dick meant as he struggled from his taxi. If he had had to carry his stuff all the way up instead of coming round the back way, he surely would have had a heart attack, but as it was he had only two or three flights of steps before he was pushing open the door of the old, crooked apartment, whose floorboards were so uneven that for a minute they seemed to be imitating the steps outside.

  ‘Welcome, dear boy,’ Dick called to him, appearing from a doorway as crooked as the rest of the house. ‘This is Maison Fortescue. Don’t look at the wallpaper, look at the view.’

  Teddy stacked
his cameras and suitcases to one side of the largely unfurnished room, and turning saw immediately what Dick meant. The fact was the whole room was just one unbelievable view. Two large, floor length windows were wide open, and beyond them, set about with old chairs that had once been smart, was a balcony from which stretched every rooftop in Paris, or so it seemed to Teddy as he stood there, breathing out and in with the marvel of it all.

  Rooftop after rooftop, of every faded colour and patina, fell one after the other, seemingly sliding, sliding down and down until, inevitably, somewhere, beyond and out of sight, they were finally halted by the Seine.

  Teddy stared. He could not wait to get out there, but it was already boiling hot, so he also could not wait to get down to one of the cafés below them and drink a beer at one of the tables, sitting under an umbrella and watching the girls whom he had already glimpsed sauntering by, some on the arms of men, some walking alone, some, tantalizingly, walking together, baskets on their arms, hips swaying, cotton dresses floating, hair shining. Long-legged beautiful women, women in smart clothes, women in expensive clothes, women in long dark clothes, student women, married women – they were all down there beneath Dick Fortescue’s window, passing underneath his balcony. But first, he must drink a beer.

  Of course Dick knew all the best places to go, and after lunch, long and leisurely and strangely filling after English food, despite there seeming to be considerably less of it, he took charge of the rest of the day.

  ‘Come six o’clock I’ll take you round to see that friend I was talking about. He’s in the thick of it, do you see? Knows all the painters and the musicians, always in the Blue Note – you’ve heard of the Blue Note? It’s on the Left Bank, always full of the best jazz musicians, and beautiful women singing sad songs, sirens beckoning us poor idiots into their webs before consuming us like dreaded spiders. Ah me.’

  ‘Now, remind me.’ Teddy frowned. ‘The blue note in music, in jazz. It is the odd note, isn’t it? The one between that doesn’t fit?’