The Blue Note Read online

  CHARLOTTE

  BINGHAM

  THE BLUE NOTE

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781409057307

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  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  RANDOM HOUSE (PTY) LTD

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  Published 2000 by Doubleday

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © 2000 by Charlotte Bingham

  The right of Charlotte Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0385 600631

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  About the Book

  Part One: Somerset 1939

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: Sussex in Spring 1949

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Also by the Author

  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  GRAND AFFAIR

  LOVE SONG

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE BLUE NOTE

  SUMMERTIME

  DISTANT MUSIC

  THE MAGIC HOUR

  FRIDAY'S GIRL

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  IN DISTANT FIELDS

  THE WHITE MARRIAGE

  GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART

  THE ENCHANTED

  THE LAND OF SUMMER

  THE DAISY CLUB

  The Belgravia series

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

  AT HOME

  BY INVITATION

  The Nightingale series

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  The Debutantes series

  DEBUTANTES

  THE SEASON

  The Eden series

  DAUGHTERS OF EDEN

  THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS

  The Bexham trilogy

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE WIND OFF THE SEA

  THE MOON AT MIDNIGHT

  Novels with Terence Brady

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE'S STORY

  YES HONESTLY

  Television Drama Series with Terence Brady

  TAKE THREE GIRLS

  UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

  THOMAS AND SARAH

  NANNY

  FOREVER GREEN

  Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady

  NO HONESTLY

  YES HONESTLY

  PIG IN THE MIDDLE

  OH MADELINE! (USA)

  FATHER MATTHEW'S DAUGHTER

  Television Plays with Terence Brady

  MAKING THE PLAY

  SUCH A SMALL WORLD

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Films with Terence Brady

  LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER

  MAGIC MOMENT

  Stage Plays with Terence Brady

  I WISH I WISH

  THE SHELL SEEKERS

  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  BELOW STAIRS

  For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,

  see her website at www.charlottebingham.com

  The blue note is the odd note: the one that seems to have a life of its own, and yet comes from nowhere. It cannot exist without the others, though, and needs the conventional notes to show up its oddness, its rarity. Sometimes it is a little sound, and strange; but it is always there, waiting to happen.

  Afterwards they said there was never to be a time quite like it again. It was not just the exuberance, and not just the fun of it either; it was the sudden realization that they were actually alive. That despite the war, doodlebugs, rationing, dreary clothes and even drearier food, despite the A-bomb and the H-bomb, despite Korea and Malaya, despite Russia and the Berlin Wall, despite the terrible threat of Communism and Marxism, the Yellow Peril and the Red Peril, despite almost everything they knew or had been told about – against all those odds, against everything that everyone had predicted about the doom of days gone past, and the doom of days yet to come, despite all that – they were still living, and on this earth.

  And what was more, and what was better, they were young, and some of them were not just young, but beautiful. Not that it mattered, beautiful or not beautiful, pretty or not pretty, handsome or not handsome; it did not matter a single, solitary little damn, not once they came to and realized that after all that – all those dead people, all those fathers that had not come back, uncles who had never returned, mothers whom they had never known – they were actually alive.

  But first – they had to grow up.

  PART ONE

  SOMERSET

  1939

  ‘There is no doubt that to our dying day

  the words salvage, war savings, herbs,

  hips and haws and meat pies will bring

  back poignant memories to all of us …’

  Lady Denman, 1943

  Chapter One

  It would be not just their first wartime Christmas together, but their first sensations of the kind of childhood happiness that will always be remembered. Miranda’s lasting memory would be of Bobbie crawling out of bed, once the red-dressing-gowned Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie had crept away, and staring into the woolly socks at the end of the bed. Teddy would always remember having a pillow put over his young face to shush him when he asked, ‘Was that Father Christmas what just went out?’ While Bobbie’s memory would be of clambering to the end of her bed and reaching down into each of the socks by turn, and finding that unimaginable luxury, an orange.

  ‘What is there?’ Teddy demanded again in a gruff voice, only to be threatened once more with being hush
ed with a pillow, because Bobbie was sure that she could still hear their wartime ‘aunts’ creeping back down the bare-wooden-boarded corridor of the old rectory. ‘What is there?’

  Bobbie, small, brown-haired and always and ever the eternal optimist, whispered gleefully as she felt down into the hand-knitted socks. ‘There’s an orange, and I think – something else as well – er – something woolly – yes, look, a pair of gloves. Navy blue, because of your father being in the Navy, Ted, I should think, and look – same for you too, Miranda,’ she went on, staring at a pair of identical but much larger gloves knitted for his sister.

  For one awful moment Bobbie thought that Father Christmas was going to have missed out on her stocking, and that there would be no gloves for her, because her father was dead. She suddenly could not remember whether he had been in the army, the Navy, or the air force, until, that is, she saw the colour of the gloves in her sock, and knew at once, the gloves being khaki, that he must have been in the army, because that was the colour the aunts knitted scarves and socks for soldiers, whereas for the Navy it would always be navy blue, and for airmen a sort of grey blue.

  As she stared down at the small, expertly knitted gloves, for a few seconds Bobbie felt a single darting feeling of regret that her daddy had not been in the Navy, because khaki was not the prettiest colour, and blue would have gone better with the thick wool cloak that the aunts had found in the attic for her winter wear.

  But there, she knew she was lucky to have any gloves at all, really.

  Bobbie had been evacuated to the old rectory in Somerset via the WVS the previous September. Before that she had been at a kind of boarding school for orphans where kindly relatives had paid for her but did not bother to come and see her. She was there until Lady Reading, who started the Women’s Voluntary Service, had heard about her, probably because Bobbie’s mother and Lady Reading had shared a mutual friend, so that was why Bobbie had been ‘heard about’.

  She would never forget that day, when Mrs Hervey, the headmistress, had read out her name and given her a bad look. Bobbie had been convinced that she was going to be beaten. Mrs Hervey always said beaten that way – ‘I am going to beat you, Roberta. I feel you might not have told me the truth, so I am going to beat you!’ Since, as soon as she saw Mrs Hervey, all thoughts except of extreme terror flew out of her mind, Bobbie never did find out why she was being beaten. But this time, just for once, there had been no beating, only what Aunt Prudence now gaily referred back to as ‘rescue time’.

  And instead of being beaten with the old hockey boot that Mrs Hervey so sweetly kept for that purpose, Bobbie had been marched out into the bitter wind in her thin clothes, and practically thrown into the back of Aunt Sophie’s battered old pre-war 1932 Austin, and driven for mile after tortuous mile to Somerset, where quite suddenly there was a fire burning in the old rectory kitchen and the low murmur of the aunts’ voices, and food on the table that was warm and tasted of all sorts of comforting things that were soft to eat. After which she had been put into a bed that smelt of lavender, between old linen sheets that felt cool but kept her snug all night, and when she had woken in the morning, she had heard birds singing, and there had been no-one waiting to punish her for something that she could not remember doing.

  Since Bobbie’s father and mother had been killed in a motoring accident before the war she knew she was officially an ‘orphan’, not just an evacuee or being paid for to be in a children’s home. Being a proper orphan would have been really sad if she could have remembered her parents at all, but since she could not, and since she could only imagine them, they had become for her just like people in a story, people that she had read about, and she realized that it would have been much worse for her if she had known them, or been able to remember them, because she might not have liked them as much as she did in her imagination.

  Of course Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie were only ‘wartime aunts’, not the children’s real aunts, although since they were only in early middle age they could well have been. It was the same with Bobbie and Miranda; they were not related. Miranda had not been there long before the two girls began to try to pretend that they were sisters by trying to wear their hair the same, and not telling anyone in the village their real surnames – so much so that by now Bobbie had become all too convinced that her real surname was the same as Miranda and Teddy’s, and the three of them were really and truly two sisters and a brother, and always had been.

  Somehow – and had they been grown-ups the children might have asked how – Aunt Prudence and Aunt Sophie were able to produce a small roast goose for Christmas lunch that year – a lunch which was placed reverentially into the lower oven of the once spanking cream pre-war Aga while they all went to church.

  ‘A bomb hit the poor thing. How lucky that we found it!’ was always Aunt Sophie’s joke whenever they all sat down to a rare roast dinner in the rectory kitchen with its baskets of herbs hanging high up around the fire, and its blue and white cloth on the long, low oak table around which were placed oak chairs, which slipped a little when you sat on them.

  Of course, seeing that they were living in Somerset, it was a bit easier for Aunt Sophie and Aunt Prudence to find food, much easier than if they had been in London, where Miranda said she thought her mother was still working in a place called ‘Baker Street’.

  ‘Right next door to Sherlock Holmes,’ was another of Aunt Sophie’s regular jokes, and although none of them exactly knew who their adopted aunt meant by this ‘Sherlock Homes’ person – Bobbie always imagined that he was perhaps some sort of relative – nevertheless they would all laugh uproariously, if dutifully, however often Aunt Sophie repeated her jokes, because she mostly made them when she was serving lunch or dinner.

  The truth was that while Aunt Sophie’s jokes were not at all funny, she was a perfectly marvellous cook, and Aunt Prudence a perfectly marvellous gardener who seemed to know where to find berries, or nuts, or any of the other things that Aunt Sophie would somehow make up into something which tasted, or just smelt, so good; so much so that for the three young evacuees from London it sometimes did seem nowadays, at mealtimes anyway, that there really was no war on at all.

  ‘It’s nice that it’s Christmas Day,’ Bobbie confided to Miranda as they struggled into two dresses that the aunts had unearthed from mothballs in the attic and adapted for their use over the holiday. ‘I expect Hitler will stop bombing on Christmas Day.’

  After which Miranda started to sing, ‘Music while you work, Hitler is a jerk …’

  ‘Shshsh!’

  Miranda had a really pretty singing voice but the sound of her singing made Bobbie feel suddenly and unaccountably sad, for no reason that she knew.

  Miranda began again, her voice louder this time. ‘You are my sunshine, my double Woodbine, my box of matches, my Craven A …’

  ‘Shsh! It’s like a Sunday, we’re meant to be specially good today.’

  ‘It’s all right – they don’t mind! You know Aunt Sophie’s teaching me to sing. She says I should go far.’ Miranda twirled suddenly, her arms above her head, her hands waving.

  ‘I wish I could sing, Miranda.’

  ‘I wish I could knit and crochet.’

  ‘Do you think we shall have to do knitting and things today?’

  ‘I hopes not.’ Miranda spread out her old-fashioned ankle-length velvet party frock and twirled once more in front of Bobbie, her blond hair spinning, her slender childish form exactly suiting the elegant shape of the long Edwardian children’s dress. ‘I dunno. Do you think this was once Auntie Prudence’s party dress?’

  ‘’Spect so, ducky!’ Bobbie pulled a little face and rounded her forefingers and thumbs together, putting them either side of her nose, in a passable imitation of Aunt Prudence when she was wearing her specs. ‘After all, they have always lived at the rectory. They knew my mother, you know. That is why I was sent here from the boarding school, because of my mother being a friend of a Mrs Harper person who is a friend of Lady
Reading. She was killed – my mother I mean.’

  Miranda nodded, and turned away suddenly. She had liked where she had been before, in Kent, by the sea, with Mr and Mrs Meades. But they had to give her up, send her back to London, because of the fear of invasion, or something like that. After being sent back to London to her grandmother, she eventually came down to Somerset with Ted, but no-one local wanted to take them, because they were too small and would be no use working on a farm.

  She would always remember how she and Ted had stood and stood in the market square in Mellaston, from teatime until dark, getting colder and colder, and how Ted had kept crying, until Auntie Sophie came to the square, just by chance, and having first come over to them and tried to comfort Ted went and told Mrs Eglantine – who was very powerful in Mellaston because she was not just the WI Jam Inspector for the area but also the Billeting Officer – that since no-one wanted them Aunt Sophie was more than happy to take them back to the rectory with her and put them up ‘for the duration if needs be, poor souls’.

  Miranda remembered shivering and shivering, the cold almost seeming to become colder for just thinking that some time in the near future she and Ted would be less so, and how Mrs Eglantine had kept saying in a loud voice, ‘But Miss Mowbray, I don’t think so, really. I mean to say, these children are London children, you know. And such children, well, they really are quite a handful, I believe. After all, not even the farmers wanted them, so I am sure that you can understand from that, that they really might not be suitable for two spinst— two unmarried ladies such as yourself and Miss Prudence to look after?’

  ‘Oh, just so much tosh. They’re just not old enough and strong enough for farmers to be interested in them. No use on the farm, just another mouth to feed.’

  ‘I would warn you that children of this kind … their language, their bed-wetting, their nasty rough ways, can be daunting little people to take charge of, even for married women,’ Mrs Eglantine had persisted.