The Blue Note

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘That was her second boy. She didn’t want him to go, after his brother was killed, but he insisted. You know how they all did, at that time, especially down here, in Sussex – the whole of the south coast clambered into boats and took off to rescue the British army in Dunkirk. It seems that this poor young man made three trips over to France, and on the last, he was finally lost at sea. They say he was a consumptive, so the cold must have got to him, or the boat turned turtle.’ Mrs Hartwell shivered. ‘In the village they still say, my cook told me, that of a dark night he can be heard coughing up here. That is what they say. Of course, I don’t believe that, but I do know that I must call in the rector, to bless the place, because we can’t leave it like this, can we?’ she went on briskly, obviously determined to be practical. ‘Can’t leave it full of a dead boy’s things. And now that Mrs Duff too is dead, really, there is no point, is there? No point at all. My dear, is there something the matter?’

  Bobbie was holding the photograph out to Mrs Hartwell, but she must have looked terrible, because Mrs Hartwell in her turn was looking at her, obviously quite shocked at what she was seeing in Bobbie’s face as she pointed to the photograph.

  ‘Are you sure this is Mrs Duff’s son who was killed at Dunkirk, Mrs Hartwell? Are you quite sure?’

  ‘Well, no, of course not, Miss Murray. Good gracious, I could never say that, no. But I know that these are quite definitely his things. I know that, because the ladies from the village told me. So I would hazard a guess that the photograph must be of him.’ She shook her head. ‘You see, that is the bugbear of this wing. I keep telling my husband, the bugbear is the village’s absolute refusal to come in here to clean. And that is why I must call in the rector. He must bless the place, and that will help dispel the sense of tragedy, get rid of the ghosts, if there are any, don’t you think?’

  Bobbie shook her head, suddenly distraught.

  ‘No, no, the rector mustn’t be allowed here. You mustn’t let him do anything of the sort. You must leave it all as it is. You must leave Julian here, where he’s happy. Please. Please leave him alone.’

  ‘Julian? Who is Julian? Oh, of course, yes, you’re right. Julian Duff was his name. Imagine you remembering.’

  ‘Of course this is Julian.’ Bobbie stared helplessly at the older woman, who she could now see was backing away from her, probably because Bobbie was still holding out the photograph.

  ‘My dear, are you a member of the family? Are you – at least, were you a Duff?’

  ‘No, no, no! But I knew Julian, I knew him so well.’ She turned the photograph away from poor Mrs Hartwell, who was now looking panic-stricken at Bobbie’s reaction. ‘You can see, he was so handsome. You can see that in this picture, can’t you?’ Despite every effort Bobbie started to cry, tears rolling down her face. ‘He was so handsome and kind, and the silly fool, he would, wouldn’t he? He would go out in his boat over and over again and try to rescue people. He was like that, you see. People with TB are like that. They are always trying to prove, you see, that they are better than they look, because people don’t like coming near them, they’re so disgusted by us – by them. And Julian, well, he had incipient TB. Oh, the bloody, bloody fool, he would go out in his boat and die, wouldn’t he?’

  She started to sob uncontrollably.

  ‘Wretched Boy!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Dick and Miranda wanted to make love. Of course they had known they wanted to make love for some time now, but the how and where of it had not been discussed, or even talked about. They just both knew. It was Dick who finally brought Miranda to consider the question properly. They had been kissing and kissing, and feeling terribly faint as they did so, and now, somehow, it was really not, they both realized, going to be enough.

  ‘It must be right.’

  ‘Everything must be right.’

  ‘Nothing must go wrong.’

  ‘No. Exactly. Where the lips and the noses go, we’ve sorted all that kind of thing out. Now we must make love, and then if that’s all right—’ Dick stopped, frowning. ‘Then if that’s all right, I really think – well, I really think you must marry me.’

  Miranda turned from the kitchen table. They were in the café, late at night. Her favourite time to be alone with Dick. All the customers had gone home – all eight of them, as it happened, this particular night – and Dick and she would share a glass of wine, talk over the events of the day, and then walk back to Aubrey Close, where he would leave her.

  ‘Do we have to make love before we marry, do you think?’

  Dick nodded. ‘Absolutely. There would be no point in marrying if we did not make love first. It can all go disastrously wrong, the beddy-byes bit. I have heard that it can go terribly, terribly wrong. No-one should take that risk, not ever. It’s too important.’

  ‘I don’t want to just go to bed with you, just like that.’

  ‘Well, don’t then.’

  After that there was a long silence during which Dick lit a cigarette and smiled serenely through the smoke, removing a little piece of tobacco from his mouth before taking another sip of wine.

  ‘It would seem so cold-blooded, somehow.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I agree. It would seem cold-blooded. Too cold-blooded for words. You are right. What we should do is not go to bed together, and just get married. Take a risk. What is life without risk?’

  Miranda nodded, smiling, and blew him a kiss. ‘On the other hand, marriage is a risk, isn’t it?’

  ‘Huge and horrible.’

  ‘So if we married and we were not suited, what could we do?’

  ‘Get unmarried and return to being suitable.’

  Miranda nodded again. ‘That is what I like about you, Dick. You talk about as much rubbish as I do. I should hate to be in love with someone who did not talk rubbish. It would make me feel inferior.’

  ‘Or superior, if they talked worse nonsense than you.’ Dick took hold of one of Miranda’s hands and kissed the palm before holding it to his face. ‘Tell you what, let’s get married anyway.’

  ‘You know all about me. There is that.’

  ‘And you know all about me.’

  ‘But what about the other two? You know. We can’t get married, just like that. Not without talking it over with Ted and Bobbie.’

  Dick sighed.

  ‘Mind you, no-one can talk to Ted at the moment.’ Miranda sighed, suddenly remembering her unwanted guest. ‘I didn’t tell you. I forgot to tell you. Ted came round at about six this morning and he was still as tight as a tick.’

  ‘Oh well, if the studio’s occupied then we’ll have to get married if only to get Teddy out.’

  ‘It’s all Bobbie’s fault. Such a stupid idea, throwing him at the beautiful Mrs Harper. She was bound to break his heart.’

  ‘That’s the bit I can’t understand.’ Dick frowned. ‘The fact that Bobbie threw him at that woman of all people. You would think she would – well, you would think that she might not want to do that, somehow.’

  Miranda caught up their coats. ‘Come on, partner, let’s go and see poor old Ted. He’s probably sobered up by now and calling for an aspirin and an ice bag.’

  ‘My favourite game – doctors and nurses.’

  But as soon as Dick saw Teddy lying white-faced on Miranda’s sofa, half asleep and half not at all asleep, he felt sorry for him.

  Because he was comfortingly a little older than the rest of them, Miranda found that Dick had a way of taking charge at just the right moment, and so without questioning she ran for some blankets and they gave Teddy something to drink and tucked him up and left him while they, still longing for each other, crept off upstairs to Miranda’s room.

  Hours later Teddy found himself waking up on Miranda’s large studio couch. Despite the darkness he knew that there was a downstairs cloakroom, somewhere in the darkness out there. Somewhere very, very far away there was a bathroom, and if he was determined to he knew he could reach it, but it was finding that determination, findi
ng that courage.

  At last his eyes started to sort out the different pieces of furniture, large, thank goodness, and then where the kitchen was, and then he saw that there was a small chink of light that was catching its reflection in Miranda’s old brass kettle which she kept on the great oak side table, and suddenly everything came back to him in that single second of seeing that tiny chink of light in that kettle.

  Of course. He had made a fool of himself, and he had been dumped back outside Aubrey Close by Beatrice Harper’s doctor.

  He could still hear her voice saying those words to her guests. Heaven only knew how many there had been, but he could still hear her friend, he had no idea who, saying, ‘Beatrice, who is that gorgeous young man of yours?’

  And then Mrs Harper’s reply, ‘Oh, just a bit of young, very active young. My new little toy, to pass away the time. You know how it is at the moment, what with London’s being so dull. I am planning to go to Venice – Gloria’s there, you know that, don’t you? We are going to go and stay at their new hotel, all of us. Not him, of course. Can’t take him, because of you-know-who busily swimming back into my life. But I will say for my little toy that he has taken some brilliant photographs of me. Did I tell you? Vogue want to do a cover, but I don’t know. Might let them, might not. We’ll see.’

  Teddy always did have a weakness for listening to conversations. To his own detriment, naturally.

  He closed his eyes shut, tight shut, and found himself groaning as he remembered yet more. Please God! He hadn’t really rushed down her stairs to her drawing room and screamed at her, had he? Please God he hadn’t done that, had he?

  But God had no need to respond to his question because Teddy already knew the answer, and it was in the affirmative. He had indeed rushed down the stairs and screamed at Mrs Harper, at Beatrice; and tried to pull her back up them too, shouting that he was not just a toy, that he counted for something, that he loved her, that she had said that she loved him too.

  After that, perhaps particularly after that last statement, her friends had no hesitation in calling her doctor, and who could blame them? No matter how tight Teddy shut his eyes again, he knew that he could not black out the awkward, terrible truth. He had not made an ass of himself over Beatrice, he had made a complete idiot of himself.

  Since it was Beatrice’s private doctor, he had come round instantly – hardly surprising after all since Beatrice probably had him on a retainer. Anyway, he had injected Teddy with something quite lethal to stop his hysterics, and then eventually driven him home and thrown him out of his car, in the early hours of the morning, back outside the front door of Aubrey Close.

  Of course Teddy had not been at all himself that evening. He had already been ill, not feeling well, running a temperature. That at least was a small, vaguely comforting excuse, but only vaguely. To say that was not to excuse how he had been. But that was why he had been drinking, to keep going, through her early evening cocktail party, through till nighttime when he could lie in her arms again and make love to her passionately, adoringly, giving himself to her entirely – no – giving himself up to her entirely.

  But that had only been part of the whole misery. The other part of the misery was hearing her voice, laughing at him, laughing against him, and in a way that someone who really did not care a fig for you laughed, with despite.

  He groaned inwardly as he remembered Bobbie warning him, over and over again, or so it seemed to him now, about older women, about how they just used young men, and then threw them aside, about how they just pretended to love you because you were young and virile, but really had about as much interest in you as a fly, about how dull you were to them, really, and how they only cared for your body and not for you as a person.

  ‘It’s all been my fault, all my own bloody fault.’

  He said this out loud to the room, and then he managed with great difficulty to crawl out of bed and towards the narrow kitchen at the back of the studio where he hauled himself up and, reaching for the cold tap, drank from it. After that it was back again to the studio couch, and falling asleep, still aching and hurting, everywhere, inside and out, but somehow comforted by this minor achievement of reaching the kitchen and drinking from the tap.

  Upstairs in her bedroom Miranda thought that she heard something and because of that she stirred in Dick’s arms. They had made love at last, and it had been mystical and intense, and at the same time warm and comforting, and with the lovemaking had gone the whole, awful past. Paris, Macaskie, the idiot that she had made of herself – it had all gone away.

  That was why she felt so sorry for Ted, because she knew without being told that somehow or another Ted had made just the same kind of fool of himself as she had done in Paris. Miranda had known for the past few weeks that he was being ravished by the brilliant and beautiful Beatrice Harper, but what she had not realized was that Mrs Harper was the female equivalent of Macaskie. She crept down the studio stairs and across to the couch. He seemed to have woken for a little, because she could see that the disposition of the blankets was not the same as it had been earlier in the evening, or rather late in the evening, when they had seen to him before creeping off to bed to make love.

  Poor old Ted. Miranda stared down at him. Poor old Ted. He must have really done himself to pieces to end up this way.

  ‘Ted?’

  ‘Hallo.’

  He smiled weakly, and then, to Miranda’s horror, she saw tears slipping down her brother’s face. Teddy never cried, not since – well, not since he had been with her and the aunts at Mellaston. She was sure that he had not cried since then.

  ‘What a fool I’ve been, Miranda. To think that I could make love with the Snow Queen and her ice would not burn me.’

  Miranda who, while not being as entirely pragmatic as Bobbie, was nevertheless also inclined towards the practical, frowned momentarily. But realizing, after a few seconds, that Ted was indeed referring to the fearful Harper woman, she nodded sympathetically.

  ‘Yes, I know, Ted. Women like that. Mm. Well, you know. You can’t win. Anyway, she’s gone away now, so you won’t have to think about her any more.’

  He opened his eyes again and tried to sit up. ‘Gone away?’ he asked, and then groaned as he felt his backside where Beatrice’s doctor had given him an injection surely more fit for an elephant. ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘Away,’ Miranda lied quite determinedly, relying on the fact that rich people were always going away. ‘So you can put her right out of your mind, Ted, and get on with your life, can’t you?’

  Teddy shut his eyes. Yes, he could. But even as he nodded his head feebly, he felt an awful draining sense of hurt, of disappointment, of dull despair, and as he drifted back into a strange, feverish sleep he knew that he was still longing for the smell of Beatrice’s scent, to feel her body, to see her cold, grey eyes laughing at him. He was sure now that he had not loved her, and at the same time if he had not loved her, why did he feel that he was drowning in such sorrow?

  ‘I think you should come round and see Teddy, as a matter of fact. He is better, sitting up and making much more sense, but Dick and I are at the café most days, and I’m getting quite busy, because Dick can only do so much now he’s been commissioned to paint the Thames by some Society of Bargemen, or something. At any rate, I do believe that you should come round to see him, really I do.’

  Bobbie felt intensely irritated by Miranda’s interfering maternal tones, most especially because she knew that Miranda was right, that she should go round and see Teddy. Yet she still put it off for over a week.

  The truth was that she was ill, and not able to cope with seeing anyone, least of all Teddy. With her return from Somerset had come the return of her insidious little cough, and a feeling of fever. Deep down inside, and she could hardly bear to think it, let alone admit it, she feared that somehow or another her incipient TB might have returned, and she could not cough without finding herself staring immediately at her handkerchief.

  ‘
I’ll try to come and see him, but I can’t promise.’

  Miranda had replaced the telephone and then turned away from the thought that Bobbie might be the kind of person who, once she had used someone, no longer needed them around to remind her of the favour that she had extracted, and so would not want to see Teddy at that moment, perhaps at any moment.

  Days passed, days that Bobbie spent in her room with the curtains closed, speaking to no-one, not wanting anyone to do or be anything to her, feeling as she had done all those years before when she had become so ill at the Dingwalls’, unwanted, despairing, and wishing only to hide herself away from everyone.

  Mrs Saxby, perhaps having noticed the eternal gloom emanating from the first floor rooms, had, eventually, made it her duty to knock on the door every now and then, but Bobbie refused to see her, explaining only that she was not quite the thing, not wanting her to come near her.

  Finally Mrs Saxby, instead of knocking and enquiring after Bobbie, had telephoned to her, and most politely demanded to come up and talk to her.

  When she finally arrived in Bobbie’s bedroom Mrs Saxby was wearing her usual carefree Bohemian clothes, and her earrings sang as she came straight to the point, which, in a way, was of some comfort to the utterly despairing Bobbie.

  ‘The Major and I knew that you were in for a shock, when we heard you had taken it into your head to go back to Baileys Green. The Major actually said, “The dear old bean will find out everything and that will be a bit difficult.” And obviously it has been. A bit difficult. But then a great deal has been a bit difficult these last years, and the war before that, that was difficult, and the war before this last one, and now we have Malaya and Korea and so on. So I thought that perhaps, and I might have been wrong, you could cope with it, because you always seemed so cheerful and practical really.’

  Bobbie sank low in her bed, her Japanese kimono tied tightly across her undressed body, and sighed suddenly and violently at that word cope.