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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘I’ve never been to Italy, though. I was born in Hertfordshire.’

  ‘Italy is lovely.’

  ‘You’ve been there?’ she asked with interest.

  ‘Yes. Rome is the most fascinating city in Europe. Its art treasures have to be seen to be believed, you’d love it. Florence is unique. They say, “See Naples and die”.’

  She looked at him with interest. When Nonna had told her of Italy it had been of the food and the wine and the money one could make, but this man told her of its beauty, and it appealed to her. ‘I’d love to go there.’

  ‘You will, I expect. Don’t your people want to go back?’

  ‘I don’t think so. My father is dead (he was English), my mother has married again and runs a restaurant which is doing quite well, and that seems to be all that matters to her. My Nonna has a shop. You see, they are all settled here, and I’ve never heard them mentioning going back.’

  ‘If you’ll excuse my saying it, you don’t look like the settling sort yourself.’

  She wasn’t, but suddenly she knew that she had needed him to show this. He had held up a mirror to her, and in it she could see her own reflection quite clearly, for the first time. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said rather uncomfortably, because it had been so true.

  He changed the subject. ‘I live in the block of flats at the end of the street.’ He indicated an expensive building, a place that people like herself could only covet but never afford. ‘You are in digs?’

  ‘Yes; they aren’t so bad really. Until now I’ve had to live with the family, and that has been awful.’

  ‘I didn’t think you had the herd instinct; I haven’t either. Thank Heaven, served with the R.N., which means a cabin to yourself, except, of course, when you sling as a snottie.’

  ‘You’re a sailor?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You’re not now?’

  ‘After the war they had no use for chaps like me. The Geddes axe, you know. But I suppose that I’ve been lucky. I’m in the F.O.’

  ‘F.O.?’

  ‘The Foreign Office, that little place in Whitehall. Commander Thane, very much retired R.N.’

  She stared helplessly, then she said, ‘I must seem rather silly, but then the Royal Navy and the Foreign Office are right outside my world. I work in a frock shop; it’s ordinary, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, somebody has got to work in a frock shop. I wouldn’t let that worry you.’ Then, ‘Do you come out here often?’

  ‘Every night! When it’s hot.’

  ‘Then I hope that it’s going to be a really fierce summer. I shall come out here too. Let’s call this our seat, and make it a trysting place?’

  ‘Let’s,’ she said, colouring.

  It was a very hot summer, that intense summer of 1921. Every night they met in the square and the greenness of the grass faded to a mud-coloured patch, and the trees rustled like paper before their time. It was delightful to have a friend; not just the ordinary friend, whom one met or parted with without comment, but a stimulating, exhilarating friendship. Chester was of another world, far beyond her own, but she could listen by the hour to him, and he was an amusing conversationalist; hitherto she had never met anyone who could talk, and that in itself was intriguing. He told her of his childhood in a country vicarage in Norfolk, and she exchanged confidences from her labourer’s cottage. He had little anecdotes of the prep school in the county town, the bug-hunting craze, the stamp-collecting craze, and later on, with many caustic comments, the public school, and the girl craze. How he laughed about it! He talked sentimentally of the Navy, and Madeline, coming face to face with tradition (another ‘first time’ in her life), was deeply impressed. She wondered what he had looked like in uniform? Handsome, of course; but then he was handsome, and the eyes, set too closely, seemed to be farther apart now that she knew him better.

  She knew that she must not fall in love with him. She was knowledgeable enough to appreciate this danger early in the friendship; something warned her that he was not the kind who settled down, but a stronger emotion carried her away. Chester kept stressing the point that they could very happily pass the time together, but there was no permanency.

  ‘Permanencies are the mistake,’ he said; ‘immediately anything becomes permanent it is spoilt.’

  She said yes, of course, and didn’t know what she meant by it. Only that she mustn’t fall in love with Chester, he was too grand for her, too different.

  Then one day she met Luca, walking down the Tottenham Court Road, looking taller and leaner than ever, but in a new mood, for he stopped at once, seeming to be pleased to meet her once more.

  ‘We’re brother and sister now,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Luca, wasn’t that row awful?’

  ‘Awful. I haven’t seen Papa since, and I shall never go near that damned Venezia again.’

  ‘Nonna says that Mamma is going to have another baby.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, she is. Secretly Nonna is angry about it, but she doesn’t say anything.’

  ‘I think it’s rather beastly.’

  ‘I do too.’

  Luca said, in a hurried mumbling fashion, ‘I want you to know that although I rampaged at the time, I know now that it wasn’t your fault telling your mamma about Poppy. Poppy wasn’t any good, and she let me down; she took all she could get, and then cleared off. Never fall in love, Maddy.’

  ‘No, of course not. Don’t be silly!’ But it was too late, and in her heart she knew it.

  ‘You haven’t met anybody? Anybody like that?’

  ‘No.’ How could she tell him about the man in the garden of the Square, and the loveliness of the hot tranquil nights when they talked together, and she seemed to be reaching out her fingers to touch the rim of another world?

  Luca said, ‘Let’s go into a shop and have a coffee, or a sarsaparilla, or something?’ He looked embarrassed about it.

  ‘All right.’

  She didn’t want to go into a café with Luca, although for months she wished to see him so that she might put the quarrel right; now, when they did meet, she wanted to be rid of him because she was afraid that she might give herself away about Chester; but she wasn’t quick at devising excuses, and before she could think of one they were sitting down on a couple of chairs on either side of a table in a café that smelt of coffee; and stewed tea, and hot bread.

  ‘Where are you working now, Luca?’

  ‘Jermyn Street was no good. I gave that up and came to Charlotte Street. Just at first I thought maybe it was pretty near, though I remembered that Papa always said that Charlotte Street was the wrong end of Soho. He swore by Old Compton Street, and stuck to it, never going much farther afield. The restaurant I’m with now isn’t too bad, and I’ve got a decent job there.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘What have you been doing? Still at Rozanne’s?’

  ‘Yes, but I left home; it got dreadful.’

  ‘I never thought you’d stand it for long.’

  She watched him ordering the coffee, brought to them in a brown china percolator on a small steel-coloured tray. She poured it out. It was something to sit comfortably on either side of the table, and not to be huddled up as they had always been behind the shop, nor picnic like she had to do in her new room.

  ‘I suppose you’ve got boy friends?’ asked Luca. It struck her that he was rather suspicious.

  ‘There hasn’t been any time. The shop tires me; you wouldn’t believe how maddening women could be choosing clothes.’

  ‘I would. I think women are dreadful. You just hear the way they treat waiters. Bully you, and chivvy you about, “Come here”, “Go there”. But one of these days I’ll get it back on them all, you’ll see that I will.’

  As he said it she realised that his affair with Poppy l’Amour must have gone deeper than she had thought. It was not merely a trivial flirtation, which Madeline had always supposed came more easily to men than women, because to them marriage is of less import
ance.

  ‘Poor Luca,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get on, I’ll have a restaurant of my own one of these days, and that’ll teach Papa what’s what, more than anything else.’

  ‘Of course you’ll get on.’

  They drank up the coffee, going out again into the street, and now she felt happier for having met him, and confident that she had been clever and that he had not guessed about Chester. ‘Maybe one night you’d like to come round to my digs and let me make you some coffee?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I would like that. I get off nearly every Friday.’

  ‘Then we’ll make it next Friday?’

  ‘All right.’

  Madeline made coffee for themselves in the percolator that Nonna had given her because it was cracked. She made it the next Friday night, with a breathless hush over London, thundery-hot from the spent day. Everywhere was sticky.

  Last night she and Chester had talked about his time in the Navy, and she had been thrilled. She would have given much to have seen him in uniform; stupidly childish of course, but she could not help it, and every time she met him now she knew that she liked Chester better, and hated the thought that none of it was any use. Girls who wore their hearts on their sleeves were only courting trouble, so for this Friday evening she put Chester out of her mind, fused the percolator, and when everything was ready ran down into the square to meet Luca.

  She saw him from a long way off, walking tiredly in his indifferent mufti. She knew that the heat in the restaurant must have been gruelling, as he went from service table and back again.

  ‘Luca,’ she called as soon as he was close enough, and then, ‘Come and sit in my room. You’ll feel better there.’

  She had done her best to make the little meal attractive. It was a poky little room, smothered with an ornate paper of much too large a pattern, but, situated as it was on the north side of the square, it was pleasantly cool; already she thought of the winter with apprehension. The broken bed was covered by a vividly-coloured blanket (another gift from Nonna), and Madeline had draped it, in an attempt to make it look like a sofa. They had to sit side by side on it, because the only chair had been broken long ago, and could now be used as a table, provided the enamel soap-dish was propped under its defaulting leg.

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Luca. He was a serious young man, quietly earnest; not like Chester, who took life gaily, and liked it to have a veneer on it.

  Madeline lit the gas-ring. The necessitous makeshift of the place had never worried her, for it was so much more luxurious than anything she had ever had before. She reheated the coffee; she had called in at Nonna’s on the way back, and had some brightly-coloured sugar, and some Philippino biscuits. ‘Here we are,’ she said, and as she set the tray on the broken chair she saw that the small anxious lines seemed already to have faded from Luca’s face. He looked less hot and harassed.

  Just as they were finishing the last drop of coffee and eating the final Philippino they heard heavy footsteps on the stairs and the door opened suddenly, with no preliminary knock. It was Mrs. Staines, the landlady, her large face red and angry, and her shoulders shaking with indignation.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this, I’d like to know?’ she asked. ‘Boys in the bedroom? I never thought as how you was one of those.’

  She had heard Luca come into the house, and had climbed the basement stairs to peer at him. When he had gone into the bedroom Mrs. Staines had lingered, brooding over how she could concoct a likely story. She was convinced that there was sin in this. Mrs. Staines adored sin; herself a very chaste woman by lack of opportunity and the tradition of her class, she liked nothing better than to espy faults in others, the very faults that she had no chance to commit personally. A drunken husband and seven abortive children had soured her. She burst open the bedroom door hoping to see something very different from two harmless young people sitting with the coffee tray before them, the young man calmly smoking a cigarette. They stared at her dully, then Madeline reddened because she was afraid.

  Luca said to Mrs. Staines, ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I’m having no boy friends in my bedrooms. This is a respectable house, this is, and I’m a respectable woman.’

  ‘But Maddy is my sister.’ He said it coolly, so coolly that Madeline realised how he had changed. Luca was now grown-up.

  ‘Yes, I’ll say, and I’m your Aunt Emily. I’ve heard that tale before.’

  ‘If you don’t believe me, then go and ask at the Venezia Restaurant.’

  Mrs. Staines paused. Now that she came to think of it, they were alike, both dark, with that nasty foreign darkness. Dropping her aggression, she started to whine. ‘She never telled me as how you was coming.’

  ‘It’s a fine thing when a girl has to let her landlady know every time that her brother comes to see her.’

  ‘I don’t hold with it.’ Mrs. Staines was not going to be defeated. ‘As you’re here, I suppose you’ll have to stay for a bit, but I’ll have to think it over,’ and she shut the door noisily. On the stairs she was indignant that she had been cheated out of her big scene, and went back to the basement kitchen, very angry indeed.

  ‘What an old fiend she is,’ said Madeline, her swarthy little face blanched.

  ‘Why do you stay here?’

  She tried to explain that it was Heaven after the shop, he knew what Nonna and Uncle Luigi were like, and Bloomsbury represented something that she had never had before. She couldn’t and wouldn’t go back to that lack of privacy.

  ‘But you could find somewhere else?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. It’s all very difficult.’ She knew that, of course, he couldn’t come here again. The pleasant harmless evening sitting chattering together, with the dark summer leaves of the plane tree outside the window, was something that was finished with. They walked down the street together much later, both realising what had happened; both were very sorry.

  When she came back again, she saw, to her horror, that Mrs. Staines was standing on the step, looking frowsty and perturbed. She was still angry with herself. Because Madeline was so young, she did not know how to deal with the situation, and glanced nervously at Mrs. Staines, who stared stolidly back with resentment.

  ‘Good-night,’ said Madeline.

  There was no reply.

  Lilith had left Mr. Rozanne.

  One morning he was very late in coming to the shop and they all guessed that something must have happened, because the little man from whom their best silks were bought was calling from the City, and it was unlike Mr. Rozanne to miss him. The man came, and had to be fobbed off with some second-hand excuse by Isobel; and after he had gone she said to Madeline, ‘I bet it’s that wife of his. He ought never to have married her, she always treated him like dirt. I suppose she’s found someone better, and he’ll fret his silly little heart out over it.’

  At midday Mr. Rozanne came in, badly dressed, and almost running, armed with a bulging suitcase that was pockmarked with wear. His face was swollen and gleamed with grease, as he brushed past Isobel Joyce.

  ‘My vife,’ he said chokily, and made a bolt for the cubicle where he spent his life, becoming entangled with the shoddy curtains by reason of the extra large suitcase.

  ‘What’s she done now?’ Isobel followed him.

  Mr. Rozanne dumped down the case and threw his hat on to its peg, where it hung wrong way round, exposing a large dark hoop of moisture on the leather lining. ‘She gone! Left me. That musician …!’

  A terrifying thing happened. He sank back against the disused treadle machine and began to cry. He wept with childishly large sobs, which shook his massive shoulders, and he covered his face with a profuse silk handkerchief.

  ‘Better have a drink?’ suggested Isobel. She always relied on a drink in an emergency, and she sent Winnie round to get a pocket flask, because if Mr. Rozanne carried on like this the customers would hear, and suspect something. When Winnie came back with the flask Isobel poured some whisky into one o
f the tired cups that they kept for tea, stored in Miss Bates’s ‘pieces’ box.

  After he had drunk a little, Mr. Rozanne told her what had happened. The band leader had apparently received an offer to go to the States, and had accepted it; he and his band were off to make a fortune, under the name of ‘Giuseppe and His Boys’; and the contract being a good one, attracting Lilith to the new life, she had gone too. She had collected a marvellous trousseau out of Mr. Rozanne’s stocks, promising him that they’d go away somewhere together, and make up for past quarrellings, but that she must have some clothes for it. He had encouraged this, buying her lingerie from Weiss down the street, believing that he was doing everything towards a fresh start, and now she had gone. She had left a crude message propped on the mantelpiece, saying that she had always loathed him, and was never coming back. In his despair he had pursued her to the band leader’s flat, and had been thrown out for his pains by the porter. He was weak and protesting, taking the wrong attitude to it all, and believing to the bitter end that, had he treated her better, he could have retained her love.

  ‘Good Lord!’ said the indignant Isobel, ‘but she says you never had it.’

  He cried again, and his nose swelled; it was a large bulbous nose, anyway, and could ill afford to be larger.

  In the shop, Madeline served the customers and both sympathised with and despised Mr. Rozanne for the way that he was taking this. She sold four frocks, and one customer was coming back to see about the blue suit later. When she went out for her lunch hour Madeline called in at Nonna’s. Nonna was serving noodles, whilst several customers were grouped in the shop.

  ‘Ah; but there you is,’ said Nonna cheerfully to Madeline, ‘Uncle Luigi is at the back.’

  Madeline went into the back room, where Uncle Luigi was eating potato chips out of a bag. There had been no time to get a meal to-day; on rush days he and Nonna waited till the evening. He said, ‘Now, what is the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing. I only came in to tell Nonna that I saw Luca the other day.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Uncle Luigi, and then, ‘Giovanni is coming home. We’re all going to be very good, I don’t think. Nonna will have special foods for him, and ask blessings; the place’ll be like a blinking confessional,’ and he hiccoughed loudly, for last night had been a good one.