The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  Comforting as it was to hear Miranda talk that way, the feelings that Mrs Dingwall had brought on would not go away, those feelings of being not just ugly but repulsive. Of being not just a plain little girl, but a girl from the other side of the tracks, none of whose friends and family would ever want to know her again. Bobbie gave another little cough.

  ‘Anything the matter?’

  Bobbie shook her head, but taking out a handkerchief she wiped her mouth with it and then stared down at it.

  ‘Is that blood?’ she demanded of Miranda suddenly.

  Miranda, her hand on the door of the old rectory, turned, horrified.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said Is that blood?’

  ‘No, of course it’s not blood, Bobbie. For goodness’ sake, what’s got into you? That’s your lipstick, you fool. Remember, you wear lipstick now?’

  Miranda snatched the handkerchief from Bobbie and waved it in front of her.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Bobbie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, as Miranda took her in her arms and hugged her, ‘for one terrible moment, I don’t know why, I thought it was blood. I thought I had coughed up blood.’

  Miranda patted her back and Bobbie stepped aside from her arms.

  ‘God, Miranda, I am so sorry. It’s that woman.’ Bobbie blew her nose now on the lipsticked handkerchief. ‘It all came back, the hell of that place – Rosebank, and Bert, and all that. My God, it was such hell. And really, how they hated me, poor things. Not on top hatred, nothing like that, but underneath hatred, because I was different from them, and they knew it, and I was not their beloved Marion. And, God, the ghastliness of the outside lavatory, and the attic with the rats. It all came back when I heard her voice.’

  ‘Maybe it was a mistake—’

  ‘You bet it was a mistake – I’d rather have someone strangle me and throw me in the river than ever go back to those days.’

  ‘No, I mean coming back here, to Mellaston. Maybe we should never have come back. Going back is always meant to be a mistake, isn’t it? Do you think we shall start looking for the aunts everywhere? Shall I start singing in a small reedy voice, and look for Aunt Sophie to play for me? Should we really not open this door, stay on this side, leave the past to be the past? Should we?’

  Bobbie did not answer Miranda but gave another little cough, after which she took a lipstick and her compact from her handbag and repaired the damage done by her tears.

  ‘I don’t know, Miranda. I really don’t know. But I have a feeling––’ They both turned as they heard Teddy’s voice calling them from inside. ‘I have a feeling that it is too late to wonder what we should be doing, because, let’s face it, we have done it now, and nothing to be done, really, is there?’

  ‘It won’t all be bad, surely. Will it? It won’t all be bad and sad? There will be other bits, bits we have forgotten, behind this door, and we will remember them, and the aunts. Above all we must remember the aunts.’

  Bobbie nodded, her eyes not meeting Miranda’s, turning away from the pain of even hearing the aunts mentioned. The truth was that she had learned to hate the aunts, and Teddy and Miranda, and that was why she had never tried to meet up with any of them again. Once Beatrice had appointed herself Bobbie’s guardian she had not thought to see anyone from the Mellaston days again, but she could not say that to Miranda who had suffered enough already, what with Paris and Macaskie, and now the expression on her face was so eager, hoping against hope that behind the door she was now opening would be some of the gaiety and the happiness of ‘their war’; some of that time when they had all felt so oddly secure – that it would all come back to them, and the pain that had come after it all would recede, perhaps even fade to nothing.

  ‘What’s best, Bobbie?’ Miranda’s voice was low and urgent, almost panic-striken.

  Bobbie shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I wish I did, really I do. I wish I knew.’

  Teddy was in his element. He was back at the old rectory, his house now, and the four of them were all together.

  ‘It’s just the same, isn’t it? It’s all just the same,’ he kept saying to Miranda.

  Miranda, following him, and in her turn followed by Dick and Bobbie, nodded. ‘Of course it’s just the same, Ted. But it’s not the same either.’

  Teddy stopped. ‘I’ve kept it just the same as they left it,’ he said, sounding indignant. ‘Just the same. I had that old building firm in Mellaston – what are they called – Greenstones – I had them come in and wash the place down with sugar soap. None of the paint has been changed, all the furniture’s been kept in the same place. I wanted it to be a shrine to the aunts who saved us from whatever it was that they saved us from—’

  ‘Hitler—’

  ‘The bombs—’

  ‘Our families,’ Miranda said, giving a sudden rippling laugh. ‘Ted doesn’t even know who his family is,’ she told Dick. ‘Not a clue, have you, Ted, thanks to me and the aunts.’

  ‘Lots of kids like me got swallowed up in the war,’ Teddy told Dick with a queer kind of pride in his voice. ‘And there we were and people took us on and changed us for ever. It happened a lot. Anyway, I don’t care,’ he called back to Miranda, who had stopped to peer into a cupboard. ‘I don’t care who I was, Ted Darling, Teddy Mowbray, anyone, I don’t care, Sis dear. You took me on, the aunts adopted me, and that’s enough for me. I mean it. I just count my lucky stars that I don’t know who my mother was, because whoever she was she didn’t want to know about me, did she? Or my father, whoever he was, and if that’s the case I don’t want to know who they were, and that is that.’

  Dick, who was an emotional outsider at this point, and intended to remain very firmly as such, now murmured in a pacifying voice, ‘Quite right, old thing, quite right. You don’t want to go delving about in some bit of your life that don’t matter and never will. It would be like trying to find out why you came about. Appalling thought. Although I say that, but I know from an uncle that I was apparently the result of too much gin at a cocktail party, on whose part, mama’s or papa’s, I could never find out, nor indeed cared to really. They never had much to do with me. The only love I had was from Nanny, and since they’ve all passed on, what does it matter now? I have a few letters from my father still – used to sign himself “Yours faithfully” …’ As Miranda started to laugh, he turned back to her and said, ‘No, don’t laugh, really, he did. As a matter of fact for a long time I never could differentiate between letters from him and ones from the bank, since they both typed on rather similar paper and signed themselves in black ink too!’

  ‘Well, there you are, you see,’ Teddy too turned back to Miranda. ‘There you are, Sis. Things are as they are, aren’t they?’

  Miranda stared at him for a few seconds. ‘Yes, they are, Ted, aren’t they? Now go on, let’s get something together in the kitchen, shall we? I’m starving.’

  She suddenly ran ahead of them all, and as she did she started to whistle, and instantly Teddy and Bobbie remembered that Miranda had always done just that, run ahead of them both, whistling some Cockney song that her ‘nan’ had taught her before the old woman had left her at the school to join the throng of evacuees from London. Some song like ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ or ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, one of the old East End favourites. Aunt Sophie had never liked her to sing them, so Miranda had always got round that by whistling them instead.

  As soon as they reached the old kitchen, still with its blue and white china on the dresser, and its large scrubbed table in the middle, a kind of reverent calm settled about them all. Even Dick, who had never been fed blackberries and cream around the table, nor run out from the back door to the scullery to pull on wellington boots and gallop off to the stables to see Tom Kitten, fell silent.

  For a couple of minutes, standing in the old room with its now old – once new – cream-coloured Aga, none of them spoke. It was as if they were all overcome, so redolent of past times enjoyed was the old r
oom. And not just their past times, but all the past times ever enjoyed in that room, which was now, it seemed, just resting, as if, like some old, beloved, and much polished piece of farm machinery, it was only waiting to be started up again, perhaps longing for someone to cook on its Aga, hoping that there would be other generations to sit around the table and eat and laugh. Or, as Miranda and Teddy had done, merely grow up surrounded by its welcome homeliness.

  In the end it was Bobbie who broke their trance first, moving into the scullery to stare at the carefully labelled jam jars, still declaring in Aunt Prudence’s clear, rounded, almost childish writing, ‘Raspberry Jam, 1942’ or ‘Apple Chutney, 1943’. And too, alongside the now really rather too old preserves, all carefully sealed with wax and topped tightly with frilled hats and tied about with kitchen string, were tins and jars from before the war, obviously only recently dusted by Mrs Dingwall, who would, Bobbie knew only too well, disdain to eat such things as Patum Peperum or Cods Roe, or even sardines (can’t even bear fish paste, dear).

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Teddy said, eventually, after he had joined Bobbie in the scullery, followed by the others, ‘I don’t suppose even Miranda could cook this lot up into something approaching a meal, could she?’ He looked round slyly as they all stared in some fascination at the ingredients that had been left so untouched.

  Miranda frowned, and turned back towards the larder shelves. Given some eggs and a packet of fresh flour, and various other things which she hazarded a guess even Mrs Dingwall would be keeping in her flat above the garage, she certainly could cook up something from what Teddy called ‘this lot’. She turned to Bobbie. ‘You and Teddy go and get some eggs from the old bag over the stables, and scrounge some flour from her, if you can. And Dick, you could drive into Mellaston and get me some bread, and some potatoes from the greengrocery and whatever fresh vegetables you can find, and – oh, some cider. Get some cider, would you? From the George, on your left as you drive out down the main street. I saw some apples in the garden, and some pears, and there’ll be blackberries still in the hedges, won’t there? Good.’

  ‘I’ll get the old Aga going, if you would like something roasted tomorrow.’

  Teddy and Miranda stared at each other for a few seconds, silent again, until Teddy said, ‘I say, just like the old days, isn’t it?’

  Less than an hour later they all returned from fulfilling their various commissions to find Miranda with one of Aunt Prudence’s old cookbooks propped up against a jam jar, her hair tied up on the top of her head, and an old apron with lace frills on the bottom tied around her dress.

  Teddy nodded at her briefly, much more interested in seeing what she was cooking than how she was looking. Only Dick stared at her, thinking that really the sight of a young woman concentrating on her cooking was one of the more beautiful domestic scenes, and how he would like to paint her, exactly as she was in the half-light of the old kitchen.

  Turning to Teddy he said, ‘Why don’t you photograph Miranda like that, in the kitchen, with Bobbie as the hostess, standing by in that ball dress you were talking about and handing Miranda a fruit gum as an encouraging gesture. It would be great, wouldn’t it?’

  Teddy shook his head, staring at Miranda without much interest but considering the idea none the less, despite its having come from Dick. ‘Not bad, actually. Miranda cooking and Bobbie standing by with the gums. Not bad.’

  Dick stood further down the kitchen, still imagining his painting, but unlike Teddy thinking how beautiful Miranda looked when she was concentrating, not paying much attention to anyone, really in another world, probably imagining how good the dish she was about to cook would be. Perhaps seeing in her mind’s eye too how they would all look when they had eaten it, appreciative and smiling, perhaps hoping that they would all love her just a little more for providing them with such pleasure.

  Not that he himself could love her more than he did at that moment. He really did not think he could. It was as if by taking her out of Aubrey Close, and the affinities of their life there, he was able to appreciate the whole of Miranda, Miranda in the round as it were, not just little bits and pieces of her.

  He sighed inwardly as Teddy’s voice came back into his consciousness, as the voice of a person who is climbing the other side of a hill on which you are standing comes to you, increasing in clarity, little bylittle.

  ‘Actually, Dick, that’s not a bad idea. I mean Miranda makes really quite a striking cook, and Bobbie is looking ravishing, isn’t she, so that – as far as the advertisers are concerned – we could sell them the idea that there is something in the picture for everyone, couldn’t we? The cook that no-one can find nowadays, even to marry, on one side of the frame, and on the other, with the kitchen table between, set with the blue and white china, the hostess that everyone everywhere always longs for their wives or girlfriends to be, cool, beautiful, slender and pure.’

  Perhaps because Bobbie was not in the room at that moment Teddy stared back at Dick, who was still standing behind him. As he did so, he suddenly saw what was in Dick’s eyes, and if he had let it his mouth would have dropped open.

  Surely not? Surely Dick could not be in love with his sister? Not with old Miranda. Never. Miranda was just old Miranda. She was beautiful, OK – well, everyone knew that. But, well, she was damaged goods, for a start, and then she was – well, she was – Miranda. She was just – well, Miranda, for God’s sake. No-one fell in love with Miranda.

  He left the kitchen in a state of confusion, almost panic, and went in search of Bobbie.

  ‘Bobbie?’

  Bobbie had been sitting for some time quietly in the drawing room, on her own, thinking over the evenings they had used to have there, before she had been sent off by Mrs Eglantine to live with the Dingwalls, before all her happiness and security ended. She was enjoying the silence of the room, finding that the good memories were really very healing, when Teddy interrupted her, and walking noisily across the old wooden floor sat down beside her, seeming much larger and heavier to Bobbie than he actually was in reality because she had just been remembering him as a small, curly-haired boy, her brother who always needed protecting and looking after at every turn.

  ‘You were always in such a pickle, did you know that, Teddy?’ Bobbie said dreamily, but Teddy paid no attention. He was far too alarmed by what he had just seen, Dick of all people, his friend, in love with Miranda, his sister.

  ‘Bobbie. Doom. Bobbie? Bobbie?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me, doom.’ Teddy looked at Bobbie, the expression in his eyes deeply troubled. ‘I mean it, doom.’

  Bobbie did not seem terribly impressed, just anxious to return to her memories of the happy times they had enjoyed in the drawing room. Her unspoken thoughts prevailed for a while, but finally she turned to him and without her saying a word Teddy knew that he was at last allowed to speak, that she had finished tripping down memory lane and was now prepared to listen to him.

  ‘Bobbie.’ Teddy dropped his voice just as he had used to do when he was a boy and did not want the aunts to know that he had swallowed a button and thought he might die, or that there were mouse droppings in the pony’s food because his tame mouse had escaped from its cage. ‘I think that Dick is in love with Miranda. I do. I think he’s only fallen in love with her.’ His voice rose slightly under the pressure of his emotions as the thought once more made itself plain. Dick was in love with Miranda, of all people – his sister, Miranda.

  Bobbie leaned back against the old window panes before giving a small cough or two, and then with closed eyes she whispered back, ‘Stale news, Teddy old thing, very stale news indeed.’

  For a second Teddy felt so grateful to Bobbie for not calling him Ted the way Miranda did, which was so putty downy always, that he did not take in what Bobbie was saying. ‘What?’

  ‘I said stale news,’ Bobbie told him, suddenly opening her eyes and smiling.

  ‘But Dick, of all people. I mean he’s a nice man, he’s fa
r too nice for my sister. Miranda’s – well, she’s a good cook, but you know – that Macaskie thing. You know. She’s not quite what she should be, is she? I mean living with someone like that – he used to beat her up, and everything. It’s not as if Miranda is, well, the person she used to be.’

  ‘Which of us are, Teddy old bean?’

  Bobbie was really just imitating the old Major back in Ebury Street, but somehow because she had chosen to be lighthearted and facetious at that moment Teddy felt desperately wounded.

  ‘There you are, you see. I never could talk to you half as well as I could to Miranda,’ he said, hoping to hurt her. ‘Out of the two of you it was always Miranda who listened to me, finally. I could never talk to you.’

  Bobbie put her head on one side and smiled at him, realizing at once that she had offended him but unwilling to make a great show of apologizing because Teddy was always so protective of his own rather than other people’s feelings.

  ‘No, of course you could never talk to me, Teddy, which is why you’ve come all this way, right from the kitchen to the drawing room, to do just that.’

  Bobbie closed her eyes again and breathed out. She hated complications. Who could talk to whom, and why. Or why people could not talk to whom, and if not. Because of her complicated childhood Bobbie had become almost determinedly uncomplicated. She liked to do things rather than to talk, and she liked other people to do the same.