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

by Ursula Bloom

  And, as she walked out of the gate, with the darkness of the dusty evergreens on either side of her, Madeline conceived a new world, a world entirely different and apart from this one, in which she grew up.

  Three weeks later, when she returned from school, the thready blinds of the cottage were drawn and about the whole place was a gloom. The child reacted at once to the atmosphere, ran up the path and in at the kitchen door. The hum of living which had always surged through the building was stilled. The heat of the oven was no longer a shock as she entered on this hot summer’s afternoon, for it had cooled. Her mother sat on the tired sofa, slumped into a heap, her dark head rested in her hands, her apron crumpled and wet. Instantly Madeline knew that something was wrong, and flung herself on to her mother.

  ‘Mamma, Mamma, what is it?’

  Yolanda looked at her daughter. ‘Papa is dead,’ she said.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘It was the hay wagon; the wheel went over his lungs and crushed the ribs in. He died before they got him to the hospital.’ She spoke mechanically. For now Yolanda knew that she had loved her husband. These years of marriage, the fretting of time and difficulties, were all forgotten on the instant, and in death again he was her bridegroom.

  ‘But, Mamma …?’

  ‘Oh God, what shall I do?’ she moaned.

  The child cried with her. She had never really known her father because he was too reserved, but there had been moments when it had seemed that she just pushed the door between them open, and had caught a glimpse of the man himself. She felt that she had peeped at him between the crevices.

  Mamma cried noisily; she wept for the husband cut off so young, and more so because when the farmer came in to see her, he said that the cottage would be needed and that she could not stay on indefinitely. She had nowhere to go. The furniture could be sold, but it would fetch very little, and she knew it; their savings were merely a few pitiable shillings, and she had no idea what to do next. Then she remembered Soho. Sitting here in the sprawlingly untidy kitchen, with the view of the June garden beyond, Soho seemed to be increasingly attractive. She thought of it with hunger. Her mamma making the risotto and the gnocchi; Mamma bustling about, the warmth of the streets, the smell of spices and garlic, the gratifying chianti which she had never tasted since she came to this detestable village. The life there had been communal, all were Catholic, sharing the same joys, the same sacraments, the same promise.

  ‘I will write to your Nonna,’ she said.

  She wrote at once, forgetting the way she had left them, and that perhaps Madeline’s Nonna would not forgive so easily. On the afternoon of John Robinson’s funeral a hire fly appeared up the village street, bowling majestically to the cottage from which the funeral would start, and Madeline, hearing the horse tittuping up the lane, peered round a corner of the broken blind at it. Out of the fly came Nonna in voluminous black; she had put on weight, and was now a little pyramid of a woman, with a great deal of black veiling, and a definitely foreign-looking bonnet dripping with crepe. She carried an enormous wreath! Behind her came her second son, Uncle Luigi, in a black stuff suit and hat, with another wreath. The effect that this strange-looking couple made upon the village was staggering. Yolanda, in her plain black frock and small widow’s bonnet, opened the door to them, and a burst of broken English greeted her. Madeline held back shyly. Then in came the little black pyramid of a woman, using the enormous white wreath as a walking-stick.

  ‘Madeline,’ said her mamma slowly, ‘this is your Nonna.’

  TWO

  That was over.

  The train bore them away from the village with its full June tide of flowers and young green, with its bird-song and yellow sunlight. Afterwards Madeline could only remember it as a picture vividly emblazoned on her mind, and she looked back on it as having been beauty. Of course there was Miss Sheila (she’d never forget Miss Sheila), and also there was Fred Arnold, looking at her tenderly as though he could give her something precious and something satisfying that as yet she did not understand.

  Soho was different.

  The street was noisy, rattling with milk-carts and butchers’ carts; there was always the sound of dogs barking, and cats fighting, and the children squabbling in the gutter. Madeline saw the shop with amazement, for it had done well. Nonna knew what she was about, and speaking the most execrable pidgin English, traded on this. People thought that she was a poor old fool instead of the shrewd old lady that she really was. Nonna hoarded money, she thought of nothing but money; her dark eyes, sunken into their sockets, sparkled with the thought of savings. She did not mind what work she gave herself, nor how tired she might grow, as long as she could make money.

  Madeline liked the smell of the shop, she wanted to run her fingers through the sacks of macaroni and spaghetti, but she was bustled along.

  ‘Now come, come,’ said Nonna, leading her into the back room.

  The back room was now a sitting-room, for the people had left from the first floor, and that had been made into three bedrooms. ‘All very pewtiful, and most nice,’ said Nonna, fussing with a coffee percolator.

  Uncle Antonio had married, and had gone to Bristol where he ran a delicatessen. Nonna dismissed him with a shrug of her shoulders. Uncle Antonio had obviously been a disappointment, but she was one of those women who could triumph over disappointments, treading them underfoot and passing gaily to pleasanter topics. Uncle Giovanni wished to be a priest. He was at a monastery with the lay brothers, said Nonna. It was all very religious, and undoubtedly Uncle Giovanni would make the successful priest. ‘But there is not money in it,’ she said, percolating the coffee with poised fingers. ‘It is foolish that! No money! And he has nasty boils on his neck. The food is bad, very bad; Giovanni does not say that, but it is so. And he is used to good food and good wine!’ That gave her an idea. ‘We will have the best wine to-night, Luigi. This is indeed a festa.’

  She sat Madeline beside her own chair at the table, and the child had never seen so much food. There was sliced liver sausage, and salad by it; there was ravioli, and a fat bottle of wine, and Nonna still busy with the percolator. Mamma had taken off her new bonnet, settling down as though she had never left this for the cottage. She had gone back in life, and was a girl again, completely forgetful of the newly-made grave, beside which she had stood this very afternoon, and which was now closed for ever, and, atop it, her own few flowers and the pompous wreaths that Nonna and Uncle Luigi had brought with them. Nonna and Uncle Luigi had forgotten it too. They considered that John Robinson had been a poor sort of a fellow (anyway, he had made no money) and they dismissed him easily. It was Madeline who thought of him with a yearning tenderness, the man that she had known and they had never understood, for as yet she wasn’t part of this new world.

  Mario Lugo came in from the Venezia Restaurant in Greek Street. He was from Padua, and had arrived in England with only the clothes that he stood up in, and a waiter’s coat, so Nonna said. But he had made money! The Venezia flourished behind its seedy net curtains, he had a palm in the foyer, and crude pictures of the Campanile and San Marco hanging inside. Mario came bursting in in a hurry. Apparently the Venezia was full, but the hors-d’oeuvre was in a parlous state. What an ’ell these Englishmen made of those little dishes, what an ’ell! Sardines? demanded Mario!

  ‘My daughter,’ said Nonna, indicating Yolanda, ‘and my granddaughter.’

  Mario looked at the funereal black enveloping them all; he had ignored the huge crepe bow attached by Nonna to the door-handle outside, for although Nonna had disliked her son-in-law in life, in death she was getting the best out of him.

  ‘Bereavement?’ enquired Mario, with suitably macabre expression.

  ‘Alas, a bereavement!’ said Nonna, and out came her handkerchief. ‘We have lost a beloved son.’

  ‘Not Antonio? Or Giovanni?’

  ‘No, not one that you did know,’ said Nonna, and whisked the handkerchief back so that she might do business. ‘You want somet’in
g?’ she asked.

  ‘Sardines,’ he told her, and led her into the shop. There was some fumbling, apparently the sardines were produced, and a price named. The price was obviously unsatisfactory, because Nonna’s voice rose in protest.

  ‘But they are pewtiful sardines, the best, the most best. Never will you get them so sheep in other place in all Soho. I tell you, nowhere so sheep.’

  ‘But how I make money if I pay so much? My guests eat the one, the two, the three, and the three more!’ Mario’s tone was rising too.

  ‘Sardines,’ said Nonna vehemently, ‘are never sheep; not so good sardines are not so sheep. You not take them?’

  ‘I pay you less for so many?’

  ‘No.’ Now Nonna shrieked violently. ‘You come into the drogheria and call me when I am with my very good supper. My daughter is a bereavement! You break in on my bereavement, and try to force me to sell my pewtiful sardines so sheep. No. No,’ and she appeared back in the doorway, her body shaking, her hands raised to Heaven, and the little tin earrings tinkling in her ears. ‘Mother of God!’ said Nonna.

  Uncle Luigi helped himself plentifully to more gnocchi. Yolanda looked apprehensive, but only the child was disturbed. Her dark eyes grew round with terror, she did not know what would happen next. Then her Nonna came, and, standing beside her, stroked her hair with her work-raddled hand, on which the small wedding-ring was sunk between two hillocks of flesh. ‘They think that they would cheat me so,’ said Nonna. ‘Me, so honourable, so generous, so good! Always so generous, always so good.’

  Mario appeared in the doorway after her. ‘Grazie, I pay,’ he said. There was no time to haggle, and reason had overcome the natural bargaining of his soul. If he went down the street to another shop the sardines would be no cheaper.

  Nonna thawed. ‘That is my friend,’ beamed Nonna jubilantly. ‘That is my true friend, the most nice. You will drink with us? Just a little taste of chianti to wish us all the great happiness? Just a little toast to a good future, whilst I prepare the sardines?’

  Madeline did not know what to make of it. Her head ached dully, and she felt rather sick; probably it was the gnocchi. She sagged in her chair, remembering with unhappiness her father’s funeral and the coffin being pushed down into the raw earth grave, almost as though they were glad to be rid of him.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she said.

  She couldn’t run out into the garden to be sick, for here there was no garden. Her mamma whisked her upstairs where Nonna was so proud of the fine sanitation, but to Madeline this was but another alarming milestone on her road. She lay in bed later, listening to the Italian chatter of loiterers in the road, to the tittuping of carts, and of taxis coming to the neighbouring restaurants. She hated the smell of it all, the noise and the ferment. She wanted to return to the tranquillity of the country. She wanted Miss Sheila and her own father.

  After a while the memory of the country became blurred, and Madeline would not have exchanged Soho for the Hertfordshire village any more. Here she was not an object of ridicule, for she was nowise ‘different’. All the children were dark-skinned, it was not extraordinary to be a Catholic, and she went to Mass with Mamma, Nonna and Uncle Luigi, who occasionally proved to be a non-starter. The priest often came to enquire after Uncle Luigi, and Nonna would wring her hands, declaring that her sons would be the death of her, how did she come to bring into the world such bad boys? Not Uncle Giovanni, of course, because Uncle Giovanni was Nonna’s pet, and was going to be a priest; when Uncle Giovanni was a priest (and she wagged a warning finger at Uncle Luigi), let Uncle Luigi look out for himself!

  Hot summer came to Soho, and her people did not go to bed at nine as in the country, but waited until the cool, then walked the parched street, and the cat-scratched Soho Square, seeking fresh air. Madeline loved those evenings. Often she went alone with Nonna, and Nonna would tell her of when she had been a young girl in Italy, and the men had serenaded her under her window, and her papa had chased them away. Nonna laughed about it. She had married Franz, the poorest of them all ‒ ah, but what fools are girls in love! They had come to England with the hokey-pokey cart, and had walked with it all the way from Dover, selling by the roadside, but the English were suspicious of their very-good, all-right hokey-pokey! The foolish mammas called their children in, declaring that the so-very-good hokey-pokey would kill them. Such nonsense! Then, when they had some money, Nonna had bought two little lovebirds to perch on her finger, and a box with tiny fortunes printed on pink and white paper, like the paper the Turin sweetmakers wrap their chocolates in. The lovebirds had been a success, and the silly mothers had allowed their children to buy the very-good hokey-pokey, and had even come out themselves for the birds to choose a fortune for them. How Nonna laughed! Because the pink and the white fortunes were exactly the same. Oh yes, exactly the same! The one: ‘Good fortune awaits you, a handsome dark man will meet you soon and bring you great joy.’ The other: ‘A handsome fair man will meet you and bring you great happiness. Good fortune is yours.’

  ‘So amusing,’ said Nonna in the fetid tiredness of Soho Square at night. ‘Soon, you will have lovers, carissima bimba. You must marry well. I myself think that Mario’s son Luca is good. He will inherit the Venezia Restaurant. It makes very good money.’

  Madeline know Luca, because she had seen him at Mass, kneeling devoutly beside his father; he was dark, nineteen years old, with drooping shoulders, and Mamma had said that maybe he was tubercular. The Venezia was always so hot, and the house stuffy; everybody knew that tubercular people caught it from lack of air.

  ‘Oh yes, he may have the consumption,’ said Nonna, shrugging her shoulders, ‘but so do many. Why worry?’

  ‘But he will die?’

  ‘Oh nonsense! What stuff! Luca will make very old bones. Good old bones. You will not be so merry a widow if you choose Luca.’

  The fact that Madeline would not be choosing Luca did not occur to her!

  In the winter they huddled over the fire with all the clothes on that they could muster, and Nonna deplored this chilly country compared to Italy which had a mild and comfortable winter. But, whatever the weather, Nonna was largely influenced by the fluctuating trade of the shop, which in good weeks sent her sky-high with joy, and chianti, and in bad ones dropped her into a veritable slough of despond. She knew no intermediate states, and was for ever planning ahead. Very soon Madeline gathered that Nonna schemed their complete pattern of living. It was her firm hand that kept Uncle Luigi a bachelor and forced him to help with the shop, yet never did she allow him to help so much that there was any risk of his competing with her authority. She had desired a son to join the priesthood, and because Uncle Antonio had behaved so badly (‘Oh, your so wicked Uncle Tony. Your Nonna will never forgive him. Never!’), in marrying against her wishes and deserting Soho, the choice had fallen on Uncle Giovanni.

  Gradually Madeline learnt that Uncle Luigi had refused. Celibacy and Uncle Luigi did not mix; although he had never actually said no to Nonna, he had made it obvious that nothing would make him say yes. Uncle Giovanni was a mild young man, several years Uncle Luigi’s junior, and the urge came to him during adolescence, when religion so often reaches a pitch of burning fanaticism. Having let Uncle Antonio and Uncle Luigi slip through her fingers, Nonna made no such error of judgement with Uncle Giovanni.

  In Soho Madeline realised that Mamma changed. She was a different woman from the Catholic outcast of the Hertfordshire village. She wore better clothes, silk for Sundays and a black cotton dress for weekdays; she wore new print aprons and smoothed her hair with oil. Yolanda seemed to have forgotten the past, and to be concentrating entirely on the present; she worked in spare moments for Mario Lugo at the Venezia, and was for ever extolling him and his son Luca.

  At first Madeline did not care about Luca, but she found him very congenial the night when Italy came into the war. She was thirteen, and in company with all Soho going mad, she linked arms with Luca, marching up and down the streets singing. He sa
ng longer than most, she noticed the dark shadow of incipient beard on his chin, and she felt suddenly, for no reason at all, rather proud.

  She was maturing young.

  It was the same night that Uncle Luigi returned almost at dawn, and very drunk. Somebody left him, as one leaves a parcel, propped against the door with the signboard above it, giving the name Gorrenzi, and details of the special delicacies to be purchased within at incredibly reasonable prices. Nonna went down to Uncle Luigi, looking more pyramid-like than ever, in thick austere calico, serviceably buttoned. Nonna tried to haul Uncle Luigi inside, but had to summon assistance.

  ‘Che tragedia!’ groaned Nonna, and she and Yolanda dragged him in, whilst Madeline peered over the shabby banister. They left him huddled in a corner of the living-room, with the newly arrived importation of noodles. Nonna was furious.

  When Madeline told her mamma about walking the streets arm-in-arm with Luca, Mamma said, ‘He would be a very wise choice for you, Madeline; his people are rich. Later on perhaps you could work in the Venezia.’

  ‘But I don’t want to.’

  ‘You’ll do what you’re told. You’ll work where you’re told and be quiet.’ Her voice rose. Mamma had been disappointed in life, and she turned querulous very easily. Mamma was having no nonsense.

  Madeline wanted to work in Rozanne’s.

  Rozanne’s was the little frock shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, small but discreet, and in the window three frocks would hang, with a white arctic fox (then the rage) sprawled at their feet and perhaps a couple of hats. Above was the single word ‘Rozanne,’ and in a corner the magic trio: Robes. Chapeaux. Fourrures. The single arctic fox providing the fourrures.

  Madeline had hung about Rozanne’s in her spare moments, and she knew that Mr. Rozanne was a Jewish man, small, almost dwarfish, with a great capacity for getting perspiringly hot, inside too-well-fitted suits. She knew that Miss Bates did the alterations in a stuffy corner at the far end of the shop, and that customers were served by Miss Marjorie, and Miss Isobel Joyce, all of a slightly dubious nature.