The Girl from the Paradise Ballroom: A Novel

by Alison Love

  “Antonino? Is that you?”

  “Of course it’s me.” He sat on the bed, sliding out of his braces. The light from the street lamp filtered hazily through the rose-patterned curtains. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Danila sat up, one arm cradling the bulge of her stomach. She was seven months pregnant. When they were first married she had been tiny and slender, her wrist bones as delicate as filigree. Now it was as if someone had gently smudged her beauty with a thumb, broadening not only her body but her face, turning her from a flower into a fruit.

  “I wasn’t asleep. I was waiting for you.” There was a note of reproach in Danila’s voice. “Were you talking to Filomena?”

  Antonio hesitated. His wife and his sister did not see eye to eye. Danila was a sweet-tempered girl, but she liked to have her status as a married woman acknowledged, and it irked Filomena, who had been running the household since her mother’s death.

  “Yes. She made me some hot milk.”

  “Why was she awake? She has to go to work in the morning.”

  “She was reading a letter from your cousin Bruno.” Antonio loosened the studs in his collar and slid them onto the bedside table.

  “But there haven’t been any letters from Bruno. Or if there have, she hasn’t told me.”

  “Maybe she was re-reading an old one. She misses him, Danila, out in Africa.”

  Danila pulled a rueful face, and she put her arms about his neck, asking to be forgiven. The scent of her skin aroused Antonio. He slid his palm to her breast, which was taut and hot beneath her cotton nightdress. At once she stiffened. For the past few weeks she had been nervous about sex, afraid it would hurt the baby. He withdrew, and pulled his white shirt over his head.

  “It is just that I am sleepy—”

  “It’s all right, my darling. You need your rest.”

  When he had undressed he slipped between the sheets beside her. She was snuffling against the pillow: an innocent sound, like a small pet animal. Antonio thought of their wedding day, and how Danila had gazed at him in the church, her huge eyes misty with rapture. That is love, he thought, reassurance flooding through him, that is true love. For an instant he remembered the girl from the Paradise Ballroom, with her fierce tragic face, but he pushed the thought out of his mind and fell asleep.

  Olivia lay upon the lumpy divan in her bedsit in Pimlico, staring at the yellowish plaster ceiling. A week had passed since her encounter with Antonio, and in that time she had not set foot outside her front door. She had stayed in bed first out of pain, then out of misery. The memories bobbed and surfaced like monstrous fish: the abortionist’s flat with its reek of disinfectant, the tugging pain, the hot gouts of blood. She knew she would lose her job at the Paradise Ballroom, but she could not bring herself to move.

  Olivia had been christened plain Olive Johnson, daughter of a bank clerk who was killed on the Somme at the age of twenty-three. There was a photograph of him on the mantelpiece, absurdly young, perpetually startled. Daisy, her mother, had been bred to be pretty, not clever, and it was a shock to have to earn her own living. She became a dressmaker, sewing party frocks for middle-class wives in Uckfield. Her chief ambition was for her two daughters to make decent marriages. With this in mind she sent them to elocution lessons and dancing classes, although the younger girl, pink-and-white Wilma, repaid her efforts far better than poor gawky Olive. Mrs. Johnson had great hopes of Wilma.

  Both girls left school at fourteen. Wilma got a job in a haberdasher’s, where she enchanted the customers with her cheeky smile. As for Olive, she worked with her mother, rolling the slippery hems of crêpe de Chine frocks, stitching sequins and bugle beads. The only time she came out of her shell was in the dance hall. Daisy had paid for Olive’s dancing lessons mainly so that she could accompany Wilma, but she turned out to be unexpectedly good. The tango became her forte. She danced it as though she had hot Latin blood, her face set, her eyes wild.

  “I don’t think you ought to be doing that, Olive,” Wilma said, as they were walking home one day. It was a fine autumn evening, and the air smelled sharply of their neighbor’s conifer hedge.

  “Doing what?”

  “The tango. I don’t think it’s quite nice. Can’t you stick to the other dances, the waltz and the quickstep? At least they’re not vulgar.”

  Olive stopped walking. “You’re jealous,” she said, astonished. Nobody had ever been jealous of her before, certainly not her bewitching younger sister.

  “Of course I’m not jealous. I think you look a bit of a fool, that’s all.”

  The tears stung Olive’s eyes. “You’re horrible. That’s a horrible thing to say. I wish you were dead.”

  “Don’t care.” Wilma swung her handbag at the dense green hedge. “I wish you were dead too, so there.”

  Two days later Wilma came home complaining of a sore throat. The next morning her tongue was as bright as a strawberry. It was scarlet fever. Olive caught it as well, and for three days the silver mercury in the thermometer soared. In the end, though, she recovered; Wilma did not.

  The death of her favorite daughter was the last straw for Mrs. Johnson. Since the loss of her husband she had felt as if her real life had been stolen from her, and was unfolding somewhere else, behind a window in some stranger’s house. She had a vague notion of what was happening in it—comfort, prosperity, the joys of a good marriage—but she had no idea how she could cross the glass to reach it. Now there no longer seemed any point in trying. Olive watched her mother’s spirit leach away as the color fades from chintz curtains in south-facing rooms. She grew grayer, thinner, ceased to eat, ceased to talk, until one morning she was no longer there at all.

  At the funeral an aunt who ran a boardinghouse in Croydon offered Olive a home, but Olive could see what the aunt thought of her: a hulking girl who would never marry, good for a lifetime of skivvying.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind of you, but I’ve decided to move to London. And I’m going to change my name. From now on, I intend to be called Olivia.”

  —

  It was Jeanie who came to Olivia’s rescue. She had betrayed her fellow dancer’s secret out of pique, seeing the Italian singer take her hand, and she felt guilty, especially when Olivia failed to reappear at the Paradise Ballroom. At three o’clock on a gloomy October afternoon Jeanie made her way to the house in Pimlico, carrying a sixpenny bar of milk chocolate as a peace offering.

  “This place is a mess,” she said. “You’re a mess too, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  Olivia did not argue, but lit the gas fire with a loud pop. Jeanie sat down in the chair closest to the fire; the room was very cold. It was not a bad room—Jeanie was a connoisseur of bedsits—but the furniture was filmed with dust and there was a bottle of sour milk on the table next to the gas ring. A damp towel and a pair of lisle stockings hung dejectedly over a wooden clotheshorse.

  “I suppose I’ve lost my job at the Paradise?” Olivia said, hugging her knees to her chest.

  “Mmn,” said Jeanie, through a mouthful of milk chocolate, which she was eating herself since Olivia had shown no practical interest in it. She wanted to add, What did you expect? but she thought it might depress Olivia even more. “I’ve got good news, though, that’s why I came. Some place in Kingly Street wants dance hostesses for a private party. A chap who plays the sax there told me about it. It’s only for one night, but the tips’ll be good.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Olivia stretched down lethargically and clasped her feet in their knitted bed socks. “When is it?”

  “Tonight. For two pins I’d do it myself, but I’ve got a new regular who’s the cat’s pajamas. Steady job, pretty face, the works. I don’t want one of the other girls poaching him.”

  A shadow of a smile crossed Olivia’s face, as though she had remembered a joke that once, perhaps a year ago, she had found funny. “I don’t know,” she said again.

  “Well, what do you think will happen if you don’
t give it a go? Do you want to slouch about here for the rest of your life? Some people would kill for the chance to earn a bob or two.” Jeanie swallowed the last piece of chocolate. “Here’s the address. Six o’clock sharp, ask for the manager. It’s up to you now.”

  When Jeanie had gone Olivia picked up the tortoiseshell hand mirror that lay on her bedside table. It had been her mother’s, and whenever she looked into it she half-expected to see Daisy’s face, pinched and pretty and disappointed. This time though she saw not her mother, but Antonio Trombetta, his eyes stark with horror. How dare he judge me? she thought. Putting down the mirror she reached for her sponge bag, and set off to light the geyser in the mildewed bathroom.

  Bernard Rodway had not intended to go to the party in Kingly Street. It was to celebrate the first anniversary of Carnival, a gaudy magazine full of society gossip; not the kind of thing Bernard himself would ever pick up, except by accident. Nevertheless, he had an hour to kill before dinner, and he decided to call in for a drink. You could never tell whom you might meet in the strangest of places. Cheerfully he accepted one of the lurid cocktails from a tray, and surveyed the room for anyone he might recognize.

  Bernard was always being invited to parties; the mantelpiece of the house he rented in Bedford Square was thick with embossed cards. He was a sociable, serious, plumply attractive man of thirty-two, who looked as though he might be someone important: when Bernard entered the room people instinctively turned their heads. He dabbled in journalism—poetry reviews, articles about the rise of fascism—and he sat on several committees concerned with the welfare of refugees. These activities gave him a pleasing, rather frantic feeling of achievement, but they could not erase the sense that he had not yet made his mark in the world.

  “Rodway! Good to see you.” It was John Allsopp, the editor of Carnival. He resembled a cynical, middle-aged leprechaun, dark and slight, with protuberant eyes. “Decent of you to slum it with us.”

  Bernard remembered, too late, that Allsopp’s handshake was limp and clammy. “Oh, it’s a pleasure,” he said. He wheezed a little when he spoke, a relic of childhood asthma, which gave his voice an unexpected charm. “This all looks very jolly. Dancing, too.”

  Allsopp glanced toward the parquet floor, where a small band was playing among the potted palms. Half a dozen girls in evening frocks were leading their partners in a foxtrot. The dance hostesses had been Allsopp’s idea. He thought they would give the party some allure, and besides, in these hard times the girls might be grateful to him for the chance to earn a little extra. There was one that he particularly fancied, a blond creature called Florence with helpless eyes; just his type.

  “So, Rodway,” he said, in his bright facetious voice, “how are you? I’ve spotted your name in the New Statesman a couple of times. I like to keep an eye on the competition.” He seized a cocktail from a passing waiter. “Glad they’re keeping you busy. Though of course you don’t have to worry about paying the rent, unlike the rest of us poor reptiles.”

  Bernard gave a tight-lipped smile. He did not like to be reminded that he had a private income. His family owned a silk manufacturing business in Macclesfield, weaving exquisite jacquard cloth in crimson and indigo.

  “I wouldn’t have thought the New Statesman would be competing for readers with something like Carousel,” he remarked.

  “Carnival,” said Allsopp, rising to the bait; and then: “Of course, if you have any suggestions for improving the magazine, I’d be delighted to hear them.”

  Bernard knew that Allsopp was being sarcastic, but he gave a magisterial frown all the same. “You should be more critical of the dictators: Mussolini and that madman Hitler. Even if you just poke fun at them, it would be better than nothing. In fact, that would be an excellent strategy. Humor can debunk monsters where logical argument fails.”

  Allsopp sniffed. “We can’t do that. Nobody else does.”

  “Precisely. All the national papers treat them with kid gloves for fear of offending them. It’s time someone made a stand. Your readers will welcome it, even if the politicians don’t.”

  “I don’t think you’re very familiar with the readers of Carnival,” drawled Allsopp, annoyed by Bernard’s moralizing. “They don’t care about politics. In any case, not everyone thinks that Herr Hitler’s such a bad thing. What’s wrong with a powerful leader who inspires his people?”

  Bernard opened his mouth to do battle. He thrived on political arguments. Just as he was about to speak, though, the band struck up a tango, strident and bittersweet, and automatically he turned to look. A tall young woman was sweeping across the floor. She wore a spangled black sheath dress, split to the thigh. It was Olivia.

  “What an astonishing girl,” said Bernard. Unlike Antonio Trombetta, he recognized at once that she was beautiful. “Who is she, do you know?”

  Allsopp peered. He had not taken to Olivia, who seemed to him too clever by half, not a quality he admired in women.

  “She looks like an exiled Russian countess,” Bernard was saying. “And she’s a wonderful dancer. Seriously, Allsopp, who is she?”

  “Just a hostess I hired for the night. Nobody very distinguished. And now, Rodway, if you’ll excuse me there are people I must see…”

  Bernard looked at Olivia once more, this time with regret. An empty-headed creature, if Allsopp had picked her; that air of grandeur was a trick of the light. The tango came to an end. Bernard glanced at his wristwatch. Once around the room, he thought, and then I’ll be off.

  In the lobby the attendant gave him his coat and hat. Bernard was groping in his pocket for a tip when he heard a girl’s shrill voice coming from the red-curtained cloakroom.

  “Take your hands off me. I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be a silly girl, Florence.” That was Allsopp, nasal and peremptory. God, he’s a slimy little shit, thought Bernard, and he snatched at the plush curtain.

  It was Olivia who intervened, though. She had noticed Allsopp’s pursuit of Florence, and although she thought Florence a foolish girl she did not see why he should get away with it. Seizing a canary-yellow cocktail from a tray, she upended it over Allsopp’s head. Florence let out a giggle of shock as the cocktail ran stickily down his red, rather bulbous nose.

  Allsopp rubbed his hand across his face, gasping. “You’ll be sorry for that. I’m a very influential man. I tell you, you’ll never work again.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Olivia. Her voice was husky and pleasing, Bernard noticed.

  “Bravo,” he said, “well done.”

  Allsopp turned furiously toward him. “Lend me your handkerchief, Rodway, and don’t be such a prig. Those girls are no angels, you can have any one you want for tuppence ha’penny. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”

  Bernard pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and held it out disdainfully as if it, or Allsopp, or both, stank like a cesspit. Then he extended his arm in Olivia’s direction.

  “I wonder, my dear,” he said, “if you would do me the honor of dancing with me?”

  There had been Trombettas in London for more than sixty years, migrating from their village just outside Rome. Antonio’s grandfather Nino had arrived first, in 1870. He had been recruited in Lazio by his mother’s cousin, who ran a flock of organ-grinders from his house in Clerkenwell. The organ-grinders were all boys, thirty of them, under contract for three years. Each morning they would go out into the streets with their barrel organs and their mischievous white-faced monkeys; each night they would return to the ramshackle house in Saffron Hill, hand over the cash they had gathered, and sit down to eat boiled rice and cabbage and bacon.

  Nino was fortunate. Unlike some padroni, his mother’s cousin was an honest man, who fed his boys properly and paid up at the end of their contracts. When he got his lump sum of eight pounds sterling Nino went home to Italy. He gave half the money to his father, to buy a small plot of land on the outskirts of the village; then he married his fidanzata in the plain stone church where his
parents had been married. There was not enough work in Lazio to feed him, though, never mind keep a family, and six weeks after the wedding he returned to England.

  By now organ-grinders had fallen from favor. Too many people complained that they were a nuisance, plaguing respectable passersby with their squalling. Nino, wise to the times, purchased a handcart and a brazier and sold roast chestnuts, imported each autumn from his homeland. The handcart was shaped like a Venetian gondola, prettily studded with mirrors. In the summer his young wife made ice cream, boiling up the milk and sugar in their little kitchen in Soho. The ice cream was pale and crystalline, scented with vanilla. It was served in small glasses, a penny a lick, sluiced out between customers in a tin bucket beneath the counter.

  This was the business that Enrico, Antonio’s father, inherited. When he was thirteen he came to London and learned to peddle his barrow along Piccadilly, trilling his hand organ as he went. Like his father, though, Enrico had a nose for change. More and more of his compatriots were abandoning their street traders’ lives to set up proper establishments—cafés, boardinghouses, barbershops. Enrico wanted to be one of them. After Nino died from tuberculosis Enrico sold the barrow and persuaded his father-in-law to go shares on the lease of a sweet kiosk. It was in a convenient spot; working men and girls walked past each day, as well as plush West End couples in their top hats and fragile silk dresses. The right man could make good money from it.

  Enrico worked hard, hefting boxes of wine gums and peppermints, smiling benignly when pimpled office boys accused him of shortchanging them. Half of what he earned he sent home to Lazio. It meant that his mother could purchase her own small house on the village’s steep main street; it meant that his brothers did not have to live in poverty. Soon he felt confident enough to bring his wife, Mariana, to London. Antonio came too, a dark-eyed, curly-haired boy of three. Before long more children were born: two daughters, Paolina and Filomena, then Valentino, his youngest, the apple of his eye. The family took rooms in Frith Street, and Enrico smiled indulgently as his wife bought furniture, bric-a-brac, smart Sunday clothes for the children. There were trips to Italy every other year; more land was bought; marriages were arranged for Antonio and for Paolina, who joined her new husband in Lazio—one less mouth to feed. It was a good life, a settled life, and Enrico knew it. All the same, in the summer when day broke early, he would dream that he was back in Italy, in the village that he thought of unshakably as home. He would hear the jangling of the church bells, the shrilling of the cicadas, he would feel the heat reverberating from the earth, and his heart would sink like a stone to remember where he was: in a gray foreign country, a stranger.