The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  Bobbie knew that Miranda had been reluctant to come on the long journey back to Mellaston, not because she did not want to see Mellaston again, but because, as she had confided to Bobbie several times, she did not want to model anything for anyone, ever again. She feared that just standing about in a model gown, as she had done in Paris for Macaskie, might bring back memories such as no-one would want to revive.

  ‘Was it that bad? I mean Paris, with that man, was it that bad?’

  Bobbie suddenly found that she wanted to know everything, that, for some reason she could not name, she was overcome with an intense curiosity. Before, whenever the subject of Macaskie had come up, she had always turned away from Miranda’s memories of Paris, and, most of all, their truth.

  At her question it was now Miranda who turned away, frowning and shaking her head.

  ‘You wouldn’t know how bad.’ She started to brush her hair. ‘It’s just a little pathetic, but I realize now that Macaskie, he – I – that I was never even in love with him. I mean I know – well, you think you should be, but it was nothing like that. He became a – well, a challenge. It was far more that than love really. You see, right from the start, he really did not want to know about me, as a person. To give him his due, he always made that quite plain. And so I made it my business to make sure that he did know about me.’ She paused, the expression on her face one of resignation. ‘You know how I’ve always been, part show-off, and – well, all push.’ She turned from her mirror and looked sadly at Bobbie who was sitting on her bed pulling on her stockings, and clipping her suspenders to their tops in a precise, almost military fashion. ‘Remember? At Mellaston? I always was a bighead, a bit like Teddy is now. And of course, being sent to stay with Allegra made it worse, really. She was always and forever urging me on in the wrong ways. I mean. She had me smoking, for goodness’ sake, and for no better reason than because, she always said, if I smoked she would not feel so bad about smoking in front of me. She hated to drink and smoke on her own. I even used to have to pretend to drink in front of her, but then I would hide the glass when she wasn’t looking. But of course, once in Paris, I really did start drinking wine, if only to keep up with the rest of them. That is how it is when you’re someone like me, I’m afraid, with more front than Selfridges. And then of course he cut off my hair, and suddenly I was like Samson – lost me hair, lost me confidence, drank half a bottle of wine before going on the catwalk, and blow me if I didn’t fall straight off it.’

  Bobbie looked across at her. Although they both knew the story, and only too well, of a sudden at that moment it stopped having any tragic value whatsoever, and became more than funny, it became hilarious.

  They started to laugh, and they simply could not stop, but every now and then between the gasps of laughter came a small strangled sound which was Miranda saying over and over again, ‘I only fell off the catwalk! Oh God, I only fell off the catwalk! Oh God, I only fell off in front of the world’s fashion press. Oh God! I would, wouldn’t I?’

  Finally Bobbie sobered up enough to say, ‘Actually, it’s a wonder you didn’t hurt yourself, Miranda.’

  ‘I did. As a matter of fact I was in bed for a week afterwards. The bruises, well, you can imagine, and that was before Macaskie – well, we won’t go into that. He drank, you see. Not just a little at a time, either – when he drank, he drank a lot. It was all or nothing with him. He was all right to start with, laughing and talking, you know, and fun – and then that funny thing would happen, that switch-over that comes about with alcoholics, and boom – he’d lay into me, and that would mean another set of steak to go under the eyes. Or – well, he would start to make fun of me about, well, you know, intimate things, in front of everyone, mocking me, and of course I’d cry, and he would get such a thrill from that, from my crying. The times I cried in Paris. I reckon the Seine rose half an inch from my tears, I do really.’

  ‘Why did you stand it? I mean – why?’

  ‘I was lost, wasn’t I? I had no-one to pull me out of myself – you know, the way we all need someone to pull us out of ourselves?’

  Bobbie frowned. ‘That is too awful to think of. I mean, maybe if we had all found each other before, it would never have happened.’

  Miranda shrugged her shoulders. ‘Don’t feel too sorry for me. As a matter of fact, I can hardly remember those days, or those nights, thank God. I drank so much it was a wonder I lived at all, that I didn’t break my neck or something. I can hardly remember anything until, you know, Teddy and Dick found me in the Blue Note, and that was that. They brought me back to England with them, and really – I’ve never looked back, have I?’

  ‘I know Teddy nearly had a heart attack when he found you. He told me that, only the other day. I mean there he was in the Blue Note, not doing anything but listen to the music, and then this girl with dyed black hair and a white face stands up. You can imagine how he felt when he realized that it was you. He could hardly believe it was you. I mean he worshipped you as a child, he really did. He worshipped the ground you trod. So you can imagine. He could hardly believe it was you, his Miranda.’

  ‘I know.’ Miranda’s expression was suddenly curiously closed, and she turned back to her mirror. ‘It was awful for him, poor Ted.’

  ‘Especially since he thinks of you as his sister,’ Bobbie continued inexorably, in her usual tactless fashion. ‘Big sisters don’t go down the drain, do they? I mean not in the minds of their younger brothers. Which is ridiculous really, because we’re all human for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Miranda took up her hairbrush and dragged it forcefully through her blond hair again. ‘I say,’ she said, staring at herself determinedly in the small mahogany mirror, ‘I could eat the side of a house, I’m so hungry. Let’s zip downstairs and order dinner before the boys. That’ll put us in the catbird seat all right. I believe they are cooking roast pork for the first time. Hush, hush, whisper who dares, there is a piece of crackling cooking under the stairs!’

  Bobbie nodded, not noticing anything different about Miranda, having her back turned to her as she pulled an evening top over her head. Which was just as well, really, because whether it was the self-inflicted pain caused by the hairbrush, or whether it was the fact that she was fainting from hunger, Miranda looked suddenly pale and drawn. She hurriedly applied some rouge to her cheeks to bring colour into them, and then, seeing how the rouge stood out against her pale skin, she pinched them hard, making two high-coloured spots she had to give time to calm down before turning to face the now waiting Bobbie.

  ‘I feel like a cigarette,’ she said, standing up. ‘And a drink. A large drink. A very large drink.’

  Bobbie frowned as she followed her down the wide shallow stairs of the old inn to the hall, and from there into the dark-walled bar. She could not quite remember, but surely Miranda had not drunk or smoked since Paris, had she?

  They were too late to triumph over the men, however, for Teddy and Dick were already ensconced in the bar, enjoying both a drink and a cigarette, and perusing the dinner menu, which thankfully did not make mention of anything like Spam or Snoek, or even chopped cabbage.

  ‘As soon as I see an old inn sign,’ Dick confided to Miranda, as they shared the reading of a menu, ‘I feel like Dr Johnson’s hungry man who could eat a cow.’

  Miranda smiled, and, taking one of his cigarettes from the packet laid out on the bar, said, ‘Never mind the cow, just order me a gin, Dick, would you? And you don’t mind me pinching one of your cigarettes, do you? Been dying for a fag the whole journey.’

  Both the men stared at Miranda as Bobbie climbed onto a bar stool and ordered herself a lime juice with water.

  ‘I know, I know!’ Bobbie shook her head and at the same time shrugged her shoulders towards Teddy. ‘It’s not my fault. She just announced upstairs that she had reformed her ways, and would now, if you please, resume better habits.’

  ‘Do you think you should, Miranda?’ Dick frowned and lightly tapped her on the top of he
r head with the menu.

  ‘Of course. You are, aren’t you? Why not I, for goodness’ sake? I am not a child.’

  Miranda smiled, and Teddy saw, of a sudden, and with alarm, that Miranda’s smile was the sly one she used to have when they were little and she was just about to chase him and Bobbie with a dead mouse, or push wet leaves down the backs of their pullovers.

  ‘Come here, Miranda, come with me.’ Dick pulled at her arm suddenly, succeeding in making her slide off her bar stool and marching her outside into the hall where he squared her up in front of him. ‘About smoking and drinking, if this means you’re going to end up trying to sing “Parisian Pierrot” at the top of your voice, I beg you, put out that fag, change your tune, and drink a tonic water as you normally do, Miss Mowbray.’

  Miranda pretended to give a tired smile. ‘Dick, dear Dick. I am not a Mowbray. I am a Darling.’

  ‘Very well, Miranda darling,’ Dick said pleasantly, taking her cigarette and throwing it into the hall fire. ‘Very well, Miranda, please just stick to your guns and drink tonic water. You’ve done so well since Paris, really, it would be so tiresome for you if you slide back to your old ways. Besides, you know you will get tight if you so much as sniff the barmaid’s apron. That is really your problem. You can’t drink at all – not many women can. It is nothing to be ashamed of, really.’

  ‘Who are you, Dick, please, who are you to tell me what to do? Please, tell me – who?’

  ‘I am your business partner, and what is more I am your friend. And I love you,’ Dick said simply. His large eyes were honest with the emotion of the moment. He did love her – even if she did not love herself. And anyway, it was such a relief to say the words ‘I love you’ – more than he could ever have known. He was experiencing a sense of simple relief hearing himself say those deceptively complicated words.

  Miranda laughed, not really understanding at all and really rather determined on continuing with her boring little performance. ‘Oh all right,’ she murmured, suddenly giving in. ‘Oh, all right, but you are being just a little stuffy. I am sure I would have been fine with just a little drink.’

  ‘And I am quite sure you would not.’

  After that she let Dick walk her back to the bar, where she sat down almost meekly. ‘Dick is being strict,’ she announced as the others rejoined them. ‘He does not want me to have the gin, just the tonic.’

  Teddy nodded. ‘Dick’s right. You’re rotten on drink, Sis. You should be like Bobbie here, just have lime juice. Women aren’t good on drink.’

  ‘That’s the whole point, you idiot.’

  Both the men stared at her suddenly.

  ‘Women are bad on drink. That is the whole point of women and drink, isn’t it, that it makes them bad?’

  Miranda picked up her menu, and fell silent, perusing all the dishes, and still feeling sulky. Bobbie. It was always ‘Bobbie’ with Teddy. Anyone would think that Bobbie was Teddy’s real sister, the way he went on, instead of just a rescue case, like herself – an orphan. As other voices blended into Miranda’s conscious mind, making that particular sound that is so English, and fills and warms an English bar on a cold autumn evening, she realized that despite her jealousy over Teddy, she was happy.

  Feeling Dick looking at her, waiting to hear her choice from the menu, she looked up and smiled at him.

  ‘Thanks, Dick. You know. Thanks.’

  ‘Friends again?’

  ‘Of course. With such a friend, who even needs a brother?’

  At that she smiled sweetly, nodding towards Teddy, but he did not even notice, too busy telling Bobbie how brilliant he was going to be on the morrow, how he would set up the camera at just the point where the old rectory gates still stood, how he would shoot through some smoke – lighting a bonfire to the side of the camera – and, and, and …

  Miranda leaned forward and kissed Dick on the cheek. Not to annoy Teddy, but because she wanted to, and after that she found that she did not care to either smoke or drink. She cared only to wonder how Mellaston would be, if it, like them, had changed?

  No-one said anything, they were all so afraid that what had been there would have gone away completely. Reassuringly there were the old gates up to which Aunt Sophie’s pony Tom Kitten had trotted with Aunt Sophie click-click-clicking behind him in the pony trap, where Miranda and her new brother Ted huddled together in a frozen heap. And although the drive was now grassed over, as so many drives had been during the war, and Dick had to park the Morris Oxford outside the gates in the small country road, the old house, Teddy’s house, was there all right.

  The tenants who had been living in it up until the past month were now flown, gone back to their own house in London, relieved to put the quiet life of the country and the small church-going society of Mellaston behind them, eager to take up the reins of city life, the hubbub and scrum, the hurly burly of the metropolis. In their stead, living over the stables, where the three of them had used to sit in the straw silently worshipping Tom Kitten as he, equally quietly, ate his hay with a steady chomp, chomp, was Mrs Dingwall.

  Bobbie knew, because Teddy had told her, that Mrs Dingwall was now looking after the place for him, but what she did not know was how she would feel when faced with this former guardian to whom she owed, through no-one’s fault, the legacy of her former illness.

  Again Julian’s voice, teasing her, came back. Let’s call ourselves The Incipients, like an American jazz band.

  Mrs Dingwall had not aged well. Bobbie realized as she greeted her that it would have been something of a surprise if she had done so, for with the life she had led, and Mr Dingwall now, alas, deceased, day to day existence in downtown Mellaston, on the other side of the tracks, could not be expected to be anything but harsh, as it was Bobbie had never thought to see her again.

  ‘Miss Bobbie! I would not have known you, except for that you’re still needle thin. Really, I would not have known you, dear. You were such a plain girl, really, weren’t she, Miss Miranda? Plain as a pig in a sty, and nothing to her. I used to put your hair in papers and dress you up in our poor daughter’s clothes. I did what I could, but you still stayed as plain as a pig, but looking at you now – why, you’re as pretty as Miss Miranda here, now. I’d say that was a turn up for the books, all right, I would really. Oh, but I do wish Mr Dingwall could see you now, dear. He never would have believed it possible, he never would. He always thought you’d end up on the shelf, as an old maid with a parrot for company, but he got that wrong, didn’t he, dear? I would never have thought it possible, really I wouldn’t.’

  Nor would Bobbie have believed it possible to feel such a surge of revulsion at hearing from this well-intentioned old woman, in her flowered blouse and cotton scarf still knotted in the appropriate wartime fashion on the top of her head, how plain Bobbie had been. Standing beside her, listening to her running on about her looks, and how hard she had worked to put her hair in papers, Bobbie remembered the terrible day of the party when Mrs Dingwall had walked her up to the rectory and announced her in a special voice, and how Miranda and Teddy had stared at Bobbie in silent horror, and the aunts too.

  It had been a nightmare. Worse than Teddy wetting himself in church that time; worse than when Mrs Eglantine had announced that the committee was insisting on splitting them all up and the aunts had decided that it was better if Bobbie went with Mrs Eglantine because she could ‘cope better’; worse than all of that was standing here now while Mrs Dingwall blathered on about how plain she had looked. Of a sudden Bobbie was again that skinny little girl with the dreadful Milly Molly Mandy hair and the secondhand cardigan, and the silver shoes that held the shape of a dead girl’s foot and chaffed a little at the sides. She had not realized until that moment how far she had come, or, really, from where.

  ‘Bobbie? Bobbie? Come on!’

  At the sound of Miranda’s insistent call Bobbie turned away with relief from Mrs Dingwall’s too interested expression.

  ‘That’s right, dear, you go along with
the posh children. But you know, I never would have believed it, not never, that you would have turned out such a beauty, and famous too, you know that? That picture of you what’s on the station at Mellaston, well, the dean, he’s retired now, you know, he never would have known you, he never would. He said as much to me when I saw him outside the Co-op the other day. He’d read all about you in the newspapers, of course, but he never did recognize you, not until I pointed you out. He was that pleased that I had pointed you out, because he would never have known you, he said. Never would have known you! Not ever. Have you still got that teddy bear I gave you, dear? That was our Marion’s, but once she had gone there was no point to keeping it.’

  ‘Bobbie! Come on, tea and biscuits!’

  This time Miranda was calling from the door of the rectory and beckoning too, so that Bobbie had a good reason to move out of the way of Mrs Dingwall’s grasp, smiling as she did so.

  ‘I say, I am sorry, they do keep calling me, Mrs Dingwall. I’ll come up and see you in the flat, later, if that is all right with you?’

  ‘Yes, you go along with the posh children, Miss Bobbie, that’s right. Give yourself a bit of a leg up. Not that you need it now that you’re on the posters and all that. Honestly. My Bert, he never would have believed it, really he wouldn’t. Such a plain child! Like a pig! He always said that. “Poor Miss Bobbie, plain as a pig!”’

  Bobbie started to walk away from her erstwhile foster mother, slowly at first, smiling grimly back at her, and waving a little, her breath starting to make little circles in the air as she gave a small cough.

  ‘Something the matter?’

  Miranda frowned, first at Bobbie’s irritating little cough, and then at the now disappearing Mrs Dingwall, at whose retreating figure she pulled a little face.

  ‘God, Mrs D! I don’t know why Teddy thought of her as a caretaker. I’d forgotten all about her. She always was such a bloody old bore, wasn’t she? Remember that time she sent you to the party looking like Milly Molly Mandy? That was so awful. I wanted to scratch her eyes out for you. You poor thing, you looked sick for the whole of the party. And then you ran off home and we never saw you again, Ted and I, did we? We never saw you again, until now. Bloody woman. She did it on purpose I always thought. Tried to make you look like one of them – you know, a Dingwall – on purpose. My grandmother had more taste in her little finger than the whole of Mrs Dingwall’s body, and she was a Cockney. She knew not to make you look like a freak. She just wanted to make a point to the aunts. Like “She’s one of us now, and nothing you can do about it.” Just a cunning old woman, that’s what she is.’