The Painted Lady: A moving story about family loyalty, friendship and first love

by Ursula Bloom

  The Painted Lady

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2018

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1945

  www.wyndhambooks.com

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover images © Irina Bg / sheff (Shutterstock)

  Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  Other titles by Ursula Bloom

  published by Wyndham Books

  Wonder Cruise

  Three Sisters

  Fruit on the Bough

  Dinah’s Husband

  Youth at the Gate (autobiography)

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  Contents

  THE PAINTED LADY

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TIME PASSES

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Promises by Catherine Gaskin

  Preview: Victoria Four-thirty by Cecil Roberts

  Preview: Wind on the Heath by Naomi Jacob

  Preview: The Print Petticoat by Lucilla Andrews

  Preview: A Shaft of Light by John Finch

  TO

  RUBY M. AYRES

  WITH MY LOVE

  THE PAINTED LADY

  The painted lady

  Flits here and there,

  Seeking warmth, and sun,

  And all loveliness …

  So.

  The boy saw the butterfly scintillating against the vivid May sky; she was tawnily orange, her wing-tips of jet were spotted white, and she fluttered low across the grass veiled with cow parsley, like a lace spread.

  ‘Look,’ he said to his mother, ‘it’s a painted lady!’ and he watched the butterfly as she moved restlessly from grass frond to flower.

  ‘She has come to lay her eggs and die,’ said his mother.

  ‘Must she die? She looks so pretty that it seems a shame.’

  ‘I know. When I was a little girl I was told a legend of the painted lady, that she cannot live without sunshine and warmth. She needs them all the time, and, centuries ago, before the Ice Age, when England was tropical, the painted lady loved it. She still remembers it, believing that we are still living in those times, and flies here for warmth.’

  ‘It’s very warm to-day,’ said the boy, wiping his freckly forehead with a soiled handkerchief.

  ‘Yes, but it won’t last. She thinks that it will stay warm for ever, but England cools, and then she realises that she has flown North only to die.’

  The butterfly flitted from them; she poised for a moment above a may tree, which was weighed down with its thick, cream foam of blossom, then she rose, and, spreading her radiant wings, flew away.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ said the boy, regretfully.

  ONE

  Madeline had been born in the village which lay outside the little Hertfordshire town; she had never known any other home. The cottage stood aloof from its fellows, and, being tumbledown and shabby, it should have been condemned years ago, but it stood on as though weighed down by the years. Its kind old garden was senile with time, and stretched out to a meadow, which, in turn, ran down to a shallow brook, where in summer Madeline played and paddled amongst the reeds. In spring the meadow was lush with verdure, the buttercups cloaking it in gold, and the old garden blossomed, for the lilac trees, grown thin about their trunks like spindly-legged old men, put on white and purple feathers, whilst a tired laburnum dripped a golden rain.

  In the cottage, although Madeline’s mother worked hard, she was for ever in a muddle, and under her breath cursed the overlarge, sprawling kitchen, the draughty front room and the four bedrooms above approached by the creaking stairs. Madeline’s mother came from London and she hated the country.

  ‘It’s all so cold down here,’ she complained when her husband came in from his work on the farm. ‘Why can’t we live somewhere more comfortable?’

  ‘My father lived here before me,’ he said.

  ‘If you ask me, your father wore the place out. I’d give a lot for a nice modern villa or a flat.’

  ‘You don’t get flats in country places,’ said her husband with no interest. He was a thickish short man, with fair hair and grey-blue eyes, whereas her mother was very dark, with a swarthy skin and a vividly red mouth.

  ‘That’s because I’m Italian,’ she said.

  ‘What’s Italian?’ asked Madeline.

  She discovered, of course, when she was old enough to go to the village school in charge of Polly Smith, a good-natured big girl, who took her and fetched her back for a penny a week. The other children teased Madeline about her black hair which was so much darker than their own, her tawny skin and her red mouth; they teased her also because her mother had pierced her ears when she was quite a baby, setting tiny gold rings in them and turning them round every day so that they shouldn’t ‘grow in’.

  ‘Gipsy!’ said the children.

  ‘Go on! She isn’t a gipsy, she’s just an Italian,’ said the others.

  Madeline discovered that Italy was another country, because, curious as it might seem, there were other countries beyond this Hertfordshire village. Once she had thought that the whole world was encompassed by these few hills. In fact her world had been, but it grew, expanding as her own small mind expanded, widening with her own body.

  Italy was a long way off, it looked like a boot on a map, and her mother had never been there. Her parents had come over in their twenties (asset, one hokey-pokey cart with a striped awning), and they had peddled their ice-cream up and down the streets of London, sleeping under the arches, and scraping a few pennies together as best they could. They had made money. In time they had saved enough from their scrapings to acquire a small grocery and wine store in Old Compton Street, a little place that smelt strongly of garlic, pimento and merluzzo, and was stacked with sacks of spaghetti, and the merluzzo which hung in the doorway and smelt stronger than anything else.

  There the children had been born, nine of them (for more than half had died), and there were left Antonio, Luigi, Giovanni, and the one girl Yolanda, who later had become Madeline’s mother.
All of them had been born in the single room behind the shop, without a murmur from their maternal parent; their playground had been the grim little back yard stacked with packing-cases, but the Gorrenzi family survived after a fashion, and the parents worked from dawn until long after midnight and made money, which was their only interest. It was there that the old man had died (obviously from overwork), but his wife carried on.

  All this meant nothing to Madeline, and the fact that Tuscany had been the root from which her mother had sprung was a point that she never thought twice about. Nor did she query the strangest part of all, which was that her father (an English farm labourer) should ever have found himself at a loose end in Soho, and should have met the Italian girl there, and more so that he could ever have persuaded her to come to this shabby old cottage to share his impoverished life.

  But love moves in a strange manner.

  John Robinson had come to London one day with the choir treat, and, being unused to London, he missed the treat in the station, deciding that he would make a ‘do’ of it for himself. It was a wet summer’s day, and he felt unreal in the suit that was usually kept for Sundays. At the beginning of the new century, classes were closer niched, clothes also. London was no place for farm labourers, as it jingled with its saucy hansom-cabs, its pavements gaily cluttered with bright women, and he went where his feet led him. Used to the ploughed lands, and the soft carpeting of fields, he found the pavements uncomfortably hard.

  John Robinson came to Soho, wet and tired, and thoroughly disappointed with himself and his day’s treat. He had glanced inside one or two cafés, coveting a cup of tea for himself, but the cafés were so smart that they frightened him away, or they were so full that there wasn’t room and he felt awkward, so entirely outside his own particular world that he did not dare to venture farther. Not knowing why he was there, or even where he was, he found himself outside Gorrenzi’s, with its strong spicy scent, and its crowded friendly window of foreign imports, most of them new to him.

  He saw the vivid face of Yolanda looking out at him between the rolls of Viennese bread (a queer way to make bread, he thought). The dark bright eyes smiled at him. He scented her encouragement, it was the first sign of interest that he had seen since his arrival in London, and, following his instinct, he went inside the shop.

  ‘You don’t know where I can get a cup of tea?’ he asked in a strong Hertfordshire accent.

  In spite of ancestry, Yolanda spoke perfect Cockney English; although her parents had never mastered anything but a broken accent, the girl had no trace of Italy in her talk. ‘I’ll give you a cup of coffee,’ she said.

  That was how it had started.

  John Robinson thought that the shop, the room behind it, and the overcluttered back yard were incredibly dirty, as in truth they were. He was amazed that such places could be, as was Yolanda, when ultimately she found the spreading chill of John’s cottage in Hertfordshire. But the first time that she visited it it was May, and the tulips were spattered in a rainbow stream of colour down the garden, there was home-made cake and thick yellow butter on the bread, and she loved it all. Yolanda loved John for his physical attraction for her, his yellow fair hair appealed and the steady grey-blue of his eyes, whilst he found her darkness something that he could not resist. The two fell in love at first sight, believing that they had laid their hands on the immortal emotion, to find too late their mistake.

  For, although she did not know it, Yolanda was entirely part of the little shop, with its spiced smells; and although she believed that she hated all the chatter and quarrels, the indolence of hot afternoons, and the increased noise of the evenings when Mamma opened the chianti and life really began, she did not hate it, because it was part of her.

  She eloped.

  ‘Oh, the wicked, wicked girl!’ screamed Mamma. ‘Oh, the so very wicked, ungrateful girl, throwing herself away like that on the stupid farming fellow too.’

  But Yolanda had already gone.

  She came to the cottage, so large that it made her black eyes glisten, and she found herself mistress of it. Mistress in May.

  It was one idyllic month, when Yolanda basked in her husband’s love, believing that suddenly she had entered a tranquil little Heaven that was to be her own for ever. She made ravioli, gnocchi and spaghetti, and John liked them. He treated her well, far better than an Italian husband might have done, but with less passion, which she did not understand, but believed that eventually it would come. Yes, she told herself, it is sure to come.

  The first trouble occurred with the priest. The priest arrived solemnly on his bicycle; a pale little man, looking ludicrous in his pompous hat and the bicycle clips fastened round the ankles of his shabby trousers. The priest made Yolanda realise how serious this marriage to a Protestant could be, because she had received no blessing from her Church, which meant that this was no real marriage in the eyes of God. Yolanda had an idea that her mamma, devout Catholic as she was, had set these inconvenient wheels in motion, but naturally could say nothing.

  Yolanda promised to speak to her husband, explaining that they must remarry with the sanction of Rome. Naturally, said the good priest, the children of this marriage will be baptised into their mother’s Church? Naturally, Yolanda agreed. She had acted on the spur of the moment, and had been incredibly foolish, as she tried to explain this to the priest. A difficult afternoon with Mamma had forced the final break, and oh, how difficult Mamma could be! Mamma, spreading beneath her taut apron, had lolled back on a case of chianti, fanning herself with the evening paper, and had made caustic comments. Mamma, of a hundred moods, bitingly vituperative to coaxingly sentimental, had let fly her full gamut. Yolanda had made the gallant gesture of running away, shaking the dust of Soho off her feet, and the smell of garlic and gnocchi from her nostrils. At the time she had believed it to be a splendid defiance.

  ‘But of God!’ said the priest coldly. He was serious and dogmatic, maintaining that it was a wicked thing to have done.

  After all, thought Yolanda, it would be easy enough to ask John about it on his return; he could not quibble that she should ask for the ceremony to be confirmed in her own Church, and there should be no difficulty there. The priest praised her good intention, and, pursuing it with that routine follow-through of his kind, said that he would call the following evening when it might possibly be convenient for him to talk to them both. This would give the wife ample time to consult her husband? Yes, said Yolanda, but reluctantly.

  When John arrived home he was tired, for they were cutting the beans, and the sweet fecund scent of the flowers clung to his clothes. Because in her heart she was anxious, Yolanda did not choose a good moment in which to break to him the news of the priest’s visit. John Robinson was amazed. Why should his children be papists? When he had fallen in love he had blinded himself to the religious difficulties, and although his friends had warned him of the dangers of ‘marriage with a foreigner’ he had blundered on. He knew, of course, that the village had commented on the darkness of her hair and eyes, and the full swarthy glow of her skin, for Yolanda’s beauty was difficult for the village to understand; it was that of an apricot darkening in the sunlight against some mature wall. John had loved her for it, and also for the quickness of her hands and feet, and the bird-like movements and alertness which he had never found in his own countrywomen, but he was no papist.

  Yolanda was very well versed in quarrels. Seldom had an hour passed in Soho but Mamma had launched herself into some vehement argument which proved to be quite shattering to all around her, from which she would emerge, changing on the instant to a honeyed sweetness that in itself was even more disconcerting.

  But John Robinson did not fly into rages, he remained coldly adamant. Yolanda argued, using all Mamma’s methods; surely, she maintained, he would not insist that her Church should excommunicate her? He seemed to be peculiarly unmoved, and that night, for the first time, they lay far apart in the big flock bed, in which John had been born and wherein his old mo
ther had died. He refused to argue, sleeping heavily, the tired resigned sleep of a man exhausted by hard physical labour. But Yolanda, more volatile, more highly strung, lay there staring out at the stars through the open lattice, and smelling the faint yet lovely essence of the clematis wreathed about the window,

  her mind fermenting.

  By morning she was in a fury again, and only angrier that her husband should treat her tirade with unmoved indifference.

  ‘The priest will be here to-night,’ she said.

  ‘I want no priest in my house.’

  ‘Your own priest comes? He came when your mamma died, you said so?’

  ‘He is a good man,’ said John, and he knew that he had accepted the parson’s ministrations not so much by reason of his virtue, but because it was the right thing to do and the village would have thought it odd of him if he had not complied with tradition. It was for the same reason that now he did not want to have the Catholic priest propping his bicycle against the privet hedge at the gate, and demanding a papist blessing for Yolanda, and all the village saying I told you so.

  But whatever John chose to think, the priest was back that evening. Yolanda had cleaned the kitchen to receive him, and had tidied herself, putting her rosary beside the bed, and the brass crucifix that Mamma had given her at her first Communion (boxing her ears also, because she had fallen down in Frith Street, messing her new white frock). Yolanda put her house in order, to receive the priest with a snowy apron on her neat black dress, and every sign of proper respect. She explained that she did not know how her husband would receive him. The priest reminded her that he was well used to dealing with difficult husbands, and that she need not concern herself on his behalf. It would perhaps be better if they were left alone to get to know one another? So, when she heard John’s step on the well-trodden gravel outside, Yolanda retired to the washhouse, big and flowing with its copper like a brewer’s vat, and its clinging smell of wood smoke and hams hung in linen bags from the roof.