The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Oh God.’

  Bobbie put her head in her hands and felt how hot her face had become. Her head was throbbing. She could see no way out, and in a way it was all her fault. If only she had not used the information that the poor woman had given her about her parents. She should never have faced Beatrice down with it, it was just a fact. She should have simply told her to go jump, and that would have been that. She was not her real guardian, anyway. But as Teddy always said, that was the trouble with Bobbie.

  ‘You’re so aggressive, that’s your trouble, Bobbie.’ He had often said it. ‘It’s because you were so ill as a child, I think. And being put with the Dingwalls who didn’t understand you didn’t help either. Now stand still and let me take the picture without you coming out with some statement liable to inflame.’

  ‘I’m only ever aggressive with you,’ was Bobbie’s statutory retort. But it was not true, as it happened. She was aggressive with a lot of people besides Teddy. She had been aggressive with Beatrice that day. She had said the extra thing that had brought about the Major’s downfall. The Major of all people, someone, like the nurses in the sanatorium, who had been more kind to her than anyone, except the aunts.

  She picked up the telephone beside her. It was quite new, and in keeping with her equally new status as a fashionable person, it was really rather stylish.

  ‘Teddy?’

  At the other end Teddy’s heart fairly zipped about in his chest and started to resound in his ears at the sound of her voice. ‘Bobbie?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘Your usual dry self, so that is all right.’

  ‘No time for jokes, Teddy. I am in such trouble. At least I am not in trouble, but I have got someone else into trouble. Two other people, Teddy, and it is all my fault.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, the Holy Bible Company is suing you because the designer has sold more copies of the skirt I put you in than they have of their Bible? Dick has painted a nude of you and been arrested for obscenity? Um. Let’s see. The Major has left Mrs Saxby because he’s in love with you?’

  ‘No, Teddy. This is serious.’

  ‘And that wouldn’t be?’

  Bobbie was sure that she could hear Teddy eating his usual late breakfast of a baked bean and bacon sandwich at the other end.

  ‘No, Teddy, this is très, très serious. My sort-of guardian, that Mrs Harper person, you know, the one who paid for me to be in the sanatorium, you know, I told you about her?’

  ‘I think it was an asylum and they didn’t tell you, you know that?’

  ‘Teddy, please. She’s had someone throw the book at the Major.’

  ‘Not the Holy Book?’ Teddy started to laugh. ‘Not even your Mrs Harper could authorize that, surely?’

  ‘No, Teddy, not the Holy Book. The Customs and Excise one. You know when we were in Sussex, by the sea, and we were doing the garden all that summer? Well, it seems that the Major, without realizing it of course, used to accept gin and other things, sometimes bricks for the garden, oh, I don’t know – just things that were in short supply, or rationed, or had been smuggled from France, although of course he did not know about it. Well, they all did. We all did. Julian used to––’

  ‘Ah yes, the sacred man in your past – the great Julian.’

  ‘Julian used to laugh about it. We both used to tease the Major that he was breaking the law – but it was nothing. Just some bricks we needed to repair walls, and everyone bought gin from under the counter at the pub, and wine from Mrs Duddy at the farm, but now, guess what, because I’m living with the Saxbys she’s got someone to charge him with smuggling and those sorts of things.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘I wish I was.’

  ‘I will be round in the next two hours, just as soon as I have thrown out the dancing girls and put on a clean shirt.’

  Miranda stared across the newly laid café table at Dick. ‘You think Teddy is in love with Bobbie?’

  ‘Yes, I do. In fact, I am convinced of it.’

  Without realizing it Miranda found her hands rubbing themselves over and over on her checked apron. As soon as she saw Dick staring at them she stopped, but not before he had observed her reaction.

  ‘And, er, I mean, do you think Bobbie is in love with Teddy?’

  ‘She might be. She might be, and not know it, yet. That sometimes happens, you know. Sometimes a person has fallen in love but the penny hasn’t dropped,’ Dick finished, wistfully.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Miranda’s mouth set in a really firm line as she thought about it. ‘Bobbie’s always had this sort of crush thing about Julian – this young man she knew in Sussex before she came to London. She still talks about him sometimes. I think you will find that he is who she is thinking about more than anyone, she will be thinking about “Julian”.’

  ‘Don’t you like the idea of Bobbie and Teddy? Big Sis not approve?’

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ Miranda snapped. ‘Anyway, he’s not really my brother, he’s my wartime adopted brother.’

  ‘He’s your brother, dearest girl, really he is.’

  Miranda stared at Dick. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Because that’s how he thinks about you, that’s how he talks about you. I know, believe me. You are as much his sister as anyone could ever be. Even if you had shared the same parents you could not be closer, and that’s a wonderful thing. Not everything that came out of the war was bad, you know.’

  Miranda opened her mouth to say that they were not really close, and that she and Teddy were as different as they could possibly be, and then shut it again. It was true. All the time that they had been back at Mellaston that was what had occurred to her, over and over again, although she had not wanted to admit it. She had tried to block out the thought, but it would not go away – Teddy and she were like brother and sister, more like brother and sister than maybe any brother and sister could ever be, and while she had thought that now they were grown up she loved him in a quite different way, it was not true, and going back to Mellaston had proved it to her. She could no longer think of Teddy as anything except a brother, all the rest was just a kind of ridiculous fantasy. She had chosen Teddy, the pathetic little boy with the half-torn label, standing wetting himself with fear in the orphans’ section of the school, to be her much longed for younger brother, and although they had spent years apart that was what he still was, in essence, her much longed for younger brother. She could not love him as a man, and to think that she could, or might, was perfectly ridiculous.

  Miranda looked up at Dick. ‘Yes, you’re right. I am Teddy’s sister, and he is my brother, even though we’re not related. That is how we are, and always will be. It is a fact.’

  Dick lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So now that we’ve got that cleared up, and since there are no customers to speak of, shall we go along to the Odeon cinema and see the complete programme, including the intermission, and up to and not forgetting the cartoons?’

  For the first time since they had worked alone together, starting the café and becoming not just close friends, but partners, as they walked along, Miranda slipped her arm through Dick’s. Of course he pretended not to notice. Nor did he look anxiously down at her as if to reassure himself that she was really there. Rather they walked along in that contented silence that is brought about by a growing intimacy, leaving the café locked up behind them, and a great deal else besides.

  Chapter Fifteen

  How Bobbie and he laid their plan Teddy would never know, nor indeed would he care to remember. The fact was that they made the plan together, and as crazy conspirators always do they both thought that it would be easy to accomplish, was perfectly brilliant in conception, and would leave them unscarred and carefree.

  Teddy knew that Bobbie did not love him, at least not at that point. In fact he would always know and accept that at that moment in her life she definitely was not in love with him. So there was no question, he knew that in o
rder to win her he had to do something very special and very brave, and since there were no longer any Nazis to shoot down, or dragons to slay, and since the far flung Empire no longer wanted to be conquered, it seemed that the only way he could try to win her was to seduce Beatrice instead.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, do you think it will work, me taking her to bed?’

  He had actually said that, he had actually uttered those words, and more than once, to Bobbie.

  What he had not said, what he had not dared to tell her, was that he was not just not very experienced when it came to women, he was not experienced at all. He had just been, finally, up to then, well – just too busy.

  Dick was older, and he was experienced, Teddy knew that. But he could hardly ask Dick since Dick was in love with Teddy’s sister, and might tell her. And Miranda would, in the way that women do, immediately go round to Bobbie and tell her, and he would end up by being the laughing stock of everyone they knew. Or worse; if there was a worse. Out of all four of them he, Teddy, the great bighead, the Mr Toad of Aubrey Close, would be discovered to be wanting in an area where, it had to be faced, young men never, ever want to be found wanting, or worse ignorant, namely, in the bedroom.

  From the moment that he and Bobbie had finally decided that it was the only possible way, since Beatrice Harper’s two acknowledged weaknesses were herself and sex, Teddy had not hired a model, nor passed a beautiful woman or a pretty girl in the street, without wanting to stop her and beg her to help him gain experience of some kind, somewhere, so that he would not find himself hopelessly at sea with the beautiful Mrs Harper.

  The trouble was that there was not much time, certainly not enough for a whole, big relationship. Not the kind of time that was needed to gain the sort of experience that would make Beatrice Harper’s body sing with delight at Teddy’s prowess in the bedroom.

  Unsurprisingly, since agreeing to accept his strange mission Teddy had found that he could neither eat nor sleep. He kept wondering why he had agreed to anything so foolish. Inevitably even he had to come to the sad conclusion that it was purely and simply so that he could look bigger in Bobbie’s eyes. He loved Bobbie. More than anyone in the world he now knew that he loved spiky, droll Bobbie, with her skinny figure and her inevitable way of putting him down at every turn. Meeting her again on the shoot at the bombed-out conservatory, it had been as if he was meeting one of his oldest friends, and one of his newest. Compared to Miranda then, Bobbie had seemed so confident, so proud, so dismissive of him. Not at all like other girls or women, who, because Teddy was Teddy, always behaved as if they were determined to make themselves available to him, something which always seemed to have quite the opposite effect on him. He had always walked away, or been too busy for them. Making love had been something Teddy had told himself he would make time for very soon, after this shoot, or the next.

  But then he had met Bobbie, and boom – that had been that. There was no longer any time that he truly wanted to spend with anyone else; every other girl or woman seemed dull beside her, beside Bobbie.

  ‘Oh God, oh God!’

  The thought of this Harper woman even haunted his dreams, nightmares where women turned into monsters with heads of eagles and bodies that evaporated the moment he went to touch them. Or he would find himself tearing down a black tunnel towards some light or other with some unknown figure pursuing him, until, at last, he woke up to the real world, and what to Teddy was rapidly becoming a worse place to be even than his dreams.

  And yet it was easy enough to be introduced to her. Teddy might, in his agonized mind, have potential problems looming as far as his prowess as a lover was concerned, but being a photographer of beautiful women he had none in the social area. He only had to pick up the phone and make sure that some friend of a friend knew that Teddy Mowbray was yearning to photograph the beautiful, famous, wealthy Beatrice Harper, and all doors would open immediately to him. That part at least of the plan, his and Bobbie’s plan, was easy.

  He saw it all before it happened.

  He knew that when he was ushered into the Grosvenor Square apartment, or taken down to the Sussex house, there would be the sound of servants running to and fro doing whatever servants seemed to have to do a great deal of within the hearing of the very rich. And seeing and hearing them hurrying about Teddy would know that his luck was in, that his whole career was going to take off, because that was the effect that being taken up by one rich woman could have on the life of one young man.

  And yet, what would happen to him? What would happen to his soul, if he still had one? That was what worried Teddy. What about his integrity?

  ‘Don’t be silly, Teddy. You haven’t got any integrity, at least not to speak of.’

  That was what Bobbie had said as soon as he had mentioned it, hoping against hope, naturally, that Bobbie would come to the firm conclusion that now she had come to think about it, and seeing it from his point of view, to seduce Beatrice would be to endanger his soul.

  ‘I have some integrity, Bobbie, really I do. As a matter of fact––’

  ‘I tell you what. If you find your integrity does not allow you to get your wicked way with Beatrice, if you find you simply can’t, well, we’ll just have to think of something else. But I don’t see how you can get her to get the authorities to drop the charges, I really don’t, unless she is mad for you, and you’re – you know, holding out, as it were.’

  Bobbie was always very vague when she came to the logistics of their plan. Teddy had already noted this with some trepidation. He remembered it, suddenly, as he faced Beatrice Harper, standing in the very same place where, although he could not know it, Bobbie had stood some time before, facing her too, but for very different reasons.

  What he had not counted on was her inestimable beauty. He had not expected to look across the room at her and have his breath taken away by a middle-aged woman.

  For the truth was that hateful though she might be Beatrice Harper was still beautiful, and once he stood opposite her Teddy was left behind and the photographer took over, and he knew at once that he had to snap her. She was sensational. Such cheekbones. Such a marvellous head of hair, black, thick and sleek, and above all there were her grey eyes – so cold, so somehow unmoving, watching, always watching – for someone to deceive her, for someone not to pay her homage, for someone not to want to do as she wished.

  ‘Mr Mowbray.’

  Her voice was strangely deep for a woman, and terribly attractive. As soon as she had finished saying ‘Mr Mowbray’ Teddy knew himself to be in love with her already. He had dreaded this moment so much, and yet now he was here in his best suit, with his best shirt, his most charming smile, Teddy’s poise deserted him, and he wanted neither to run forward nor to run back, but to stay quite still, staring at her across the thick, rich carpet that lay between them.

  ‘Mr Mowbray?’

  She smiled as she repeated his name as if to wake him up from some sleep into which she could see he had fallen, and her smile was the smile of a goddess, and he saw that she knew he had fallen for her, there and then, that instead of fearing her, he was adoring her.

  ‘Mrs Harper. It was so kind of you to see me. I am so glad that you are here – I mean I am so glad to be here. And it is very kind of you. To see me. That is.’

  ‘Mr Mowbray, why don’t you sit down and I will ring for drinks for both of us? Would you like a glass of champagne? Would you like that? I know I would.’

  As she rang the bell to the side of her desk she gave a rippling throaty little laugh that made the necklace of minute sapphires and diamonds at her throat seem to move in a shared moment of enjoyment, and sent Teddy’s blood racing round and round his body more like a lasso around a cowboy’s head than a human pulse.

  ‘You are so beautiful.’

  It was his voice saying it, no-one else’s, and he knew that he should not have said it, not just like that, as if he was some kind of schoolboy. It was so unsophisticated to blurt out something like that. He should have wai
ted at least five minutes before he told her what she already knew.

  But it didn’t seem to matter, thank goodness. Not at all. It didn’t seem to matter one whit. She sat down opposite him and continued as if he had not blurted out his admiration.

  ‘I gather you would like to photograph me, is that right?’

  Teddy nodded.

  ‘Let us talk about it, after you have drunk your champagne, and I have drunk my champagne. We will talk about it, and then perhaps you can come back tomorrow and we can talk about it some more. I have to go out to the ballet in half an hour, but that does not mean we can not at least discuss some ideas.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘How would you like to snap me?’

  She looked so interested in him. He breathed in, and then out, and then taking a sip of champagne promptly choked on it and she immediately went to him, laughing, and patted him on the back.

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was her almost roguish use of the word ‘snap’ that had done it. He knew that she had said ‘snap’ because it was up to the minute and almost risqué in its casualness, most particularly in the great, grand surroundings of her Grosvenor Square house. The word snapped and whizzed around the room, bouncing off the silk-covered walls, and nestling behind the plumped-up cushions on the great grand sofas with their golden colours flowing and glowing in the growing twilight. She wanted to be snapped by Teddy. He half closed his eyes. He would snap her all right. He would snap her until she snapped.

  ‘I would like to see you in a vast ballroom lit only by candles, in a gold dress which shone under the warmth of the candlelight, and wearing what would look like live snakes in your long black hair.’

  She considered this notion quite quietly for a moment, and then, having taken a sip of her champagne, she nodded.

  ‘I have done something like that before,’ she said, at last. ‘Although not with snakes.’

  He did not know from her expression whether she was teasing him or being serious, so he began again.