The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Play me something, Teddy. You know, like the old days. Play me one of Aunt Sophie’s old songs. There’s sheet music on the piano over there, and I know you can play just a little, and I’ll sing just a little, and we might bring Aunt Sophie back into the room, imagine.’

  And so Teddy sat down at the piano and, after shuffling through some of the old music on the lid, propped up something against the stand and began to play.

  ‘It’s hopelessly out of tune,’ he said, but he played on. ‘The soft pedal’s gone.’ But still he played on.

  Bobbie walked across from the window seat and joined him at the piano and sat down beside him, which was where Dick found them. Teddy of all people singing and playing to Bobbie of all people.

  Dick stood still, listening to them, singing ‘If You Were the Only Girl (in the World)’. They looked like a couple suddenly, Bobbie and Teddy. And as they sang artlessly together, smiling despite the haunting sadness that the song’s lyric seemed to hint at, Dick thought of crowds on newsreels during the war, and people in pubs that he had passed with his uncle of a gentle English evening, those same words floating on the air, and then drifting down the village street towards the farms and the cottages in the distance where so many only girls were still sitting waiting for so many only boys who had not finally come back to them.

  And yet here it was still being sung by the new generation, by two young people who had somehow survived to live and laugh again, despite everything. As Dick stood and listened, his tall figure framed in the doorway, unmoving, and unwilling to break the moment, the dust caught in the evening sunlight that span a length of light across the piano with the two young heads, so close and so suddenly intimate, he found himself realizing something that he should have realized weeks before. ‘Good God, Teddy’s in love with Bobbie, of all people.’ That was the first thought, and the next was, ‘Dear Lord, I wonder if Bobbie knows that Teddy is dotty about her?’

  Feeling somehow as if he was intruding on a very private moment he backed out of the drawing room and into the kitchen, where he started to whip some eggs for Miranda very fast indeed.

  What on earth would happen to Teddy? After all he knew, as well as anyone, simply because she never spoke about it at all, that Bobbie had been passionately in love with some man in Sussex. Poor Teddy probably did not have a chance with her, any more than Dick possibly had a remote chance with Miranda. Suddenly everything seemed a terrible mess.

  He stared at his eggs, unable to go on beating them with quite such vigour. Miranda looked round briefly from the Aga and smiled.

  ‘Oh, Dick, be an angel and find some candles for the table, would you?’

  As Dick did so Miranda gave a sudden sigh.

  ‘It was good that we came back, wasn’t it, Dick? It makes sense of everything that happened to us afterwards, you know – when we all became separated and Teddy never bothered to get back in touch with me after the aunts were killed. It now all makes sense, because we’re together again, and it’s even better – because you’re here too.’

  Dick smiled and as he always did when he felt shy and pleased at the same time, he ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘Dear girl, dearest darling Miranda,’ he said, softly, but quite to himself, alone in the old larder, as he searched for candles.

  They all ate Miranda’s sumptuous supper in a spirit of joyous festivity, after which the girls left the men to go to bed early, ridiculously happy at being able to fall asleep in their old beds, while Teddy and Dick walked round the garden, smoking and looking at the stars and wondering silently about each other, Dick thinking Poor old Teddy, I don’t suppose he has a chance with Bobbie and Teddy thinking Poor old Dick I don’t suppose he has a chance with Miranda.

  Upstairs the objects of their thoughts fell asleep, laughing and remembering, because, together in their old room again, it was as if all the memories of the in-between years had been sent off to bury themselves in the distant hills and Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence had just been in to check the blackout and wish them a crisp goodnight, which was probably why they both slept without dreaming.

  Bobbie’s rooms at Ebury Street were finished and there was little now for her to do but enjoy them. It was, as always when the busy times of redecoration are over, an almost languorous moment, so languorous that it was verging on the dull, Bobbie found suddenly. It was not just that everything in her rooms was finished and perfect, it was not just that she now had a comfortably plush bedroom, it was not just that her sitting room was everything that she could wish it, painted in a decorous lemon, with brown tweed furniture and one of the newest styles of coffee tables on spindly legs; it was, she knew, because Teddy no longer had an excuse to come round, and so as a consequence life was dull.

  What was more, if she wanted to see the others she had always to go to Aubrey Close, because Miranda only ever left the old studio to go round to the Café Parfait, as she and Dick had christened their tiny new café. So, when she was not working, or ‘posing’ as old Major Saxby always called it, in front of cameras for Teddy or some other photographer, Bobbie tended to feel left out by the other three.

  Of course she said nothing about this because, it had to be faced, if she was one thing and one thing alone, Bobbie was proud. She stared up at her newly painted eau de Nil bedroom ceiling. She did not really, really miss Teddy exactly, but she did not not miss him either. Teddy was such a bighead always. No-one had ever yet praised Teddy more than Teddy himself – but, even so, when he was not around talking about himself, and jumping on and off ladders, there was no doubt about it, he left a bit of a gap. And it was not the same when they were working together, as subject and photographer, because, well, work was work, and it had to be admitted there was only a limited amount that you could say to each other when, as Bobbie had been last week, you were dressed as a clown and being made to sit on a trapeze for half the day.

  It was at the precise moment that Bobbie had quite made up her mind to telephone to Miranda and Dick and ask them round to her rooms for dinner, a meal which she had already planned to be quite definitely Indian in flavour – the Major and Mrs Saxby having taken to cooking Indian cuisine had interested Bobbie in curry powders and rice and the use of coconut and chutneys, which was all rather exciting, to Bobbie anyway, and quite certainly exotic – when there was the sound of a modest knock on Bobbie’s sitting room door.

  As she heard the knock, Bobbie felt a surge of relief, and at once threw back the blankets and jumped out of bed. The truth was, she realized, long before she had thrown on her new oriental dressing gown, bought in a flurry of excitement from Fenwick’s the previous week – the truth was that she was not bored with life, she was actually bored with herself. This was a shaming sort of truth, because people who are bored with themselves were boring, the aunts always said.

  As she hurried to her sitting room door Bobbie realized that ever since going back to Mellaston she had felt a strange sense of dissatisfaction. It was as if she either needed to go back to live at Mellaston again, this time for ever, or should never have gone back there at all, because going back had reminded Miranda and herself of their marvellous days at the rectory. Days when they had only the aunts to look to, and no-one else in the whole world had seemed to care about them, and as a consequence they had been strangely free and unfettered and the rectory and its garden a paradise for children.

  ‘Bobbie––’

  Mrs Saxby – it was still strange to think of Miss Moncrieff as such, but there – stood at Bobbie’s sitting room door, and her earrings and charm bracelet seemed to be ringing out not the kind of pleasant notes for which they had been made, but a very different sound, the sound of fright and alarm. They seemed, as she swayed forward, the fingers of one hand pressed to her lips, to be pealing out a warning such as medieval bells must have rung, summoning everyone to the town square to help avert some fearful danger.

  ‘Bobbie, oh Bobbie, the most terrible thing has happened.’ Mrs Saxby waved a stiff piece of paper
, closely typed and largely headed by a black print. ‘The most terrible thing. The poor Major, he is destroyed. I cannot understand it. Trumped up, of course, the whole thing, but real none the less, we must realize, real, real, and terrible too.’

  Bobbie took the piece of paper, suddenly feeling calmer and more grown up than Mrs Saxby. Probably because she had been so ill as a child she had a kind of ability, at moments when everyone else panicked, to stay quite calm. It was as if a voice inside her was saying, ‘Well, you’re still alive, and they’re still alive, so there is still hope yet.’

  She frowned now, as Mrs Saxby sank down in one of her new tweed chairs, and started to read the closely typed nonsense that was on the piece of paper.

  Eventually, having digested the un-plain English, she looked up from the paper – no-one could call it a letter – and said, ‘What on earth … who on earth … I mean to say, I never read such nonsense.’

  She should not have said who on earth, for as soon as she said it she knew, and Mrs Saxby knew, who on earth could have perpetrated the trumped-up charges written in that piece of official nonsense.

  Beatrice.

  ‘Mrs Harper. She is behind this, dear, isn’t she?’

  Mrs Saxby stared across at Bobbie, and Bobbie nodded slowly, her hands, which had been warm in a just-out-of-bed state, now ice cold as she reread the letter, more slowly this time, quite unable to believe what she was reading, and yet quite able to believe it too.

  ‘It is Mrs Harper, isn’t it?’

  Bobbie stared at Beatrice’s former secretary and nodded again. ‘Of course. Who else could it possibly be?’

  ‘I should never have told you, should I, dear? About her and your mother. But really, dear,’ Mrs Saxby took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes, first one and then the other, ‘I had to, dear, really I did, for it was so hard on you, always thinking that you had to kowtow to her, that she was your real guardian when she was no such thing but merely your father’s ex-mistress. But don’t think badly of your poor father, only of Mrs Harper, for any young man would have had his head turned by such a glamorous creature as she was. All furs and French scent, and lace insets in her underwear deeper than on a vicar’s surplice. So no blame to him. These women, women like Mrs Harper, they must have their own way, dear, it is just a fact. And now she is to have it again, it seems. I can see that, after all these years, no-one better, believe me.’

  At this point Mrs Saxby gave way completely, and tears streamed down her face, and her own handkerchief was not enough to stem them, so Bobbie had to go quickly for one of her own, not a fine affair at all, left over from her childhood at the sanatorium, only made of cotton, with a rather shaming bunny rabbit embroidered in the corner.

  ‘We must think clearly and coldly,’ she told Mrs Saxby when the poor lady had finally stopped crying, and Bobbie had handed her a cup of strong tea, not at all the sort of tea that she liked but probably more the thing when it came to pulling them both together.

  ‘We have no defence against Mrs Harper.’ The ex-secretary’s voice was suddenly as factual as it must have been when reading out to her old employer the day’s projected engagements. ‘She knows everyone from the Prime Minister to the bootboy at the Ritz. There is no-one she does not know, no-one she will not be prepared to lobby, no stone she will leave unturned until she has revenged herself on me, and the Major. By putting the Major behind bars on these ridiculous smuggling charges, she will be, more than likely, satisfied. At least we must hope so.’

  Bobbie walked about the room a bit, sipping her tea, and then coming back and standing in front of Mrs Saxby, as if the sight of the lady who had, in former days, driven her quite dotty in the Sheds, would now bring about a sudden burst of inspiration.

  But of course it did not, for the truth was, and it was the truth, Beatrice did know everyone. And those whom she did not know she could pay, and those whom she could not pay would do what she wished anyway. There was no way around someone like Beatrice. There was no-one big enough or grand enough in spirit anyway, with enough courage to stand up to her. Somehow or other, and it was awful to think how, Beatrice had managed to find out that while restoring the garden during that idyllic summer, Major Saxby had flouted the currency regulations and infringed some other footling customs and excise law. It was pretty good detective work, in a footling sort of way, for, after all, the climate of the times being what it was, any infringement of the regulations meant that you were a cad, and there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Of course it’s not true. The Major never flouted the currency laws. How could he? But if he accepted some bottle of gin or something that Mrs Duddy passed on, well, how would he have known that it was smuggled? Of course he wouldn’t, no-one would have. It was not possible to know. He sometimes did use bricks and things that came in via the back door, but then everyone did. The building regulations were so complicated and those councils so narrow in their attitudes.’

  ‘It was Mrs Duddy, was it, who – you know – told on him?’ As soon as she finished speaking Bobbie thought dully it was a stupid thing to say. Told on him. It was the sort of thing she and Teddy would have said to Miranda in the old days at Mellaston. Such a childish way of putting things.

  ‘What could Mrs Duddy do against such a person as Mrs Harper?’ asked Mrs Saxby, her voice of a sudden sounding harsh and bitter. ‘She is Mrs Harper’s tenant, for goodness’ sake. What on earth could a poor widow, struggling to bring up a family and feed everyone by hook or by crook, do against her? Nothing. There was nothing she could do. Except confess, as it were, and hope that the whole thing would go away and she would be allowed to go on living at the farm. You can’t blame Mrs Duddy.’

  ‘No.’ Bobbie stared at her feet. It was true. She could not blame Mrs Duddy, but she could feel like throwing a vase at her, if only to relieve her own feelings of frustration. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, this is ridiculous. There must be someone we can turn to for help, surely?’

  ‘The Major is being very brave, dear. Really he is. He knows he does not stand a chance against her, and he is just trying to work out how many months he will be sent down for.’

  ‘He’s not going to go anywhere, not down, not nowhere. We absolutely won’t have it. What we’re going to do is think of a way to force Mrs Harper to make the customs people drop the whole thing. There must be a way. There’s always a way.’

  ‘She’s a hard and horrible woman, and hard and horrible women do not go away, Bobbie, I’m sorry to tell you. They do not even fade away, dear. They live to make havoc of everyone’s lives for ever and ever, amen.’

  Mrs Saxby, despite the strength of the tea, started to cry again as Bobbie frowned. She could see only one way out, and that was for her to go and beg Beatrice to make whoever had trumped these charges up drop them, at once.

  ‘The Major has been through so much, Burma, the war, everything. And now here he is in the October of his days, happy and at peace, and he has to go and face prison all because of me. He says it will be nothing after the railway, but I have heard dreadful things about men’s prisons. He is not the right class for prison in England, dear, really he isn’t.’

  Bobbie stared at the carpet, trying to imagine the Major in prisoner’s garb calling all the warders ‘old bean’ and generally being the gentleman that he was, and she suddenly felt like bursting into tears and at the same time laughing too. She remembered how good he was at forgiving his old enemies, and how he used to tell her and Julian off for not having more belief in humanity. The memory made her heart swell with indignation, and of a sudden she wanted to take a gun and shoot Beatrice who was just playing about with people’s lives for the fun of it. For her own gratification and to assuage some petty feelings she nurtured about her past she was pulling the wings of people who had only just managed to learn to fly again after the horrors of the war.

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘I said leave it to me. I am determined that the Major will
never be taken to court. We will make them drop these charges, we will fight it all, we must do. He deserves his little bit of happiness, enough to make a sailor three pairs of trousers, as a matter of fact.’ Bobbie patted Mrs Saxby briskly on the shoulder. ‘You are not to worry about another thing. Tell the Major that I have friends at Court, and that I will speak to the King if necessary. We will find a way. You would be surprised at how many people I have met in the last months. Influential people, people who will be quite prepared to help the Major. It will all be all right. Tell him that from me. Just give me a few days, a week or so, and it will all go away, and don’t you yourself, or the Major, give it another thought. Not even a tiny one, because it is not something that people like you should be bothered about. Besides, I hired the Major, in place of Mrs Harper, if you remember. So, really, it should be me who is put up on the charges. In fact I shall make sure it is me that they charge, if they do. So, away with dull care …’

  ‘What, dear? What was that you said, that last bit?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just being foolish. Just believe me. I will take care of everything, and if you don’t mind I will keep the letter.’

  Bobbie shut the sitting room door behind the now smiling Mrs Saxby, and went back to her new armchair, into which she had no hesitation in sinking.

  It was all too awful, and the truth was that she had no more hope of being able to defend the Saxbys from Mrs Beatrice Harper than she had of forcing the Pope to get married.

  If only Julian were there, if only he had not gone off, disappeared into the wide blue yonder, she could have gone to him and they could have done something together. Made some plan. But she had no-one. No-one who had really known them at that time, except the landlord of the pub in the village, and that too was owned by Beatrice.