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

by Ursula Bloom

  The bag was packed. There was the feeling of blessed relief that she was leaving England; she went to the glass and powdered her face carefully, outlined her lips with a chunky stick of carmine (nowadays she felt undressed without make-up), then she went to the station where she was meeting Frank.

  In the late spring evening the busy station was flecked with gold, giving it an unreal light, so that a filigree seemed to hang in the blue mist above it, and Madeline looked at it with delight. Frank was there in his old chestnut suit, standing by a miscellaneous assortment of luggage, most of it with burst straps, pock-marked from use. An easel lolled against a bulging bag, and he had a queer old ulster hanging over one arm, brilliantly green like a colleen’s coat.

  ‘Hello?’ and he greeted her with effusion. ‘You look fine! Obviously you can pack, and I can’t. I always find so much that I ought to have with me at the last moment. The train’s in, we might as well take our seats now. I thought we could dine en route; it would be rather pleasant.’

  They dined in leisurely fashion at a table for two, with the Midlands flying past the window in lovely undulating lines. Hertfordshire beflagged with little fields, Lincolnshire and the fens, and eventually they came to the big port in the hazy twilight, with a strong salt scent on the air and the ship lying alongside. It was a mailboat (for Frank despised liners and preferred to travel this way), and as they went aboard Madeline’s heart missed a beat; she dared not confess to him that this was the first time that she had ever seen the sea.

  She lay in her cabin for a long while, unable to sleep because she was disturbed by the unreal mechanical purr of the engines, and the movement, which, although it did not actually make her feel ill, was disconcerting. Next morning they walked the deck with a smooth sea running, and the exhilarated feeling still in her heart, for she knew that this was one of the few things that mattered in her life.

  Frank said, ‘I don’t want to touch on old sores, and you mustn’t get the wrong idea about me. When we get there it’ll be so much easier if we call one another Mr. and Mrs. It’s funny, but if one is honest and goes there as Mr. and Miss, everybody asks questions. Give them the good old Mrs. and they’ll believe you every time.’

  ‘Meaning?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that, Madeline, I’m not a ladies’ man. I’ve never wanted to marry, but I like companionship; I want someone to talk to, but nothing more. Is that understood?’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  He became communicative, telling her something of his early life. Frank had been born a couple of months after his father was killed in a drowning fatality, and his mother had always yearned for a daughter. She had set her heart on this little girl Francesca, so that when the baby turned out to be a boy, she had been bewildered and for a time had treated him as though he had been the desired little girl.

  ‘Sometimes I think that has made me effeminate, for in lots of ways I am. I realise it myself, and it always surprises me.’

  ‘Are you? I thought you just amazingly sympathetic and kind.’

  ‘Sympathy and kindness are the feminine qualities. Women are always more considerate than men; they forgive and make excuses, whereas a man condemns and ignores.’

  She had to admit that he was right.

  Frank had been born near Porlock, and had run wild. A delicate child, he had been quite young when he had shown signs of T.B., which had horrified his mother. He had lived like a wild creature on a beach; he doted on the whitewashed cottage with the fuchsia hedge, and the clematis that grew up under the eaves and in July spread wide purple flowers. He had never been to school (his lung had forbidden that), but he had had governesses (how he and his mother had laughed over some of their funny hats, their drolly long skirts, and in particular the one that wore galoshes. ‘Jemimas’, she called them). Ultimately there had been a tutor, a young clergyman, who had taught Frank to harness his love of beauty. Mr. Richey had shown him the blue light on the cedars, and the bronze glow of the beeches in autumn. He had pointed out the silver rim on October cabbages after the first frosts, and had bought the boy his first paint-box. Frank was absorbed in painting and it came readily to him; later he went on to Paris to study ‒ he laughed as he told Madeline that he would never forget the scene his mother had made about it, nor her agony of mind when she came out to see him, and found him with a broken head from a beating-up in a Montmartre café. He had never wished to marry, he had never met the woman whom he wanted to live with for ever, or even for a short time, though he had met dozens who amused him conversationally, and he had taken several on trips with him. He made a habit of taking a companion with him on holiday. Once it had been a lusty young fräulein on a Wander-Vogel through the Black Forest; another time a woman years older than himself on a visit to Grasse, where he had been trying to catch the blue and gold lustre of the Alpes-Maritimes and to transfer it to canvas. There had been that lanky girl in Russia and the little fat but merry girl in Florence one spring.

  ‘And the lung?’ asked Madeline.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I ignore it.’

  ‘Oughtn’t you to have treatment?’

  ‘I don’t like treatment. Sanatoria are vile, “Do this” and “Do that”, and I am not one of those men who can live by rule. They always tell me that I’m an undisciplined creature, and I suppose that’s true.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘I’m not infectious, if that is worrying you.’

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me. I was only anxious for you yourself.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I never think that I’ve got it badly. Almost everybody carries some pet germ about with them. I’m safe,’ and he smiled. She liked that tenderly womanish smile, and recognised with a pang that in Frank there was a beauty that had never touched Chester.

  She was going to be very happy with Frank.

  They came up the fjord in a small boat, having left the steamer at Bergen, with the Floyen Mountain rising benignly behind it, and the quay in a clutter of commercial confusion. It was raining hard, but then Frank told her that it always rained in Bergen. Because of the rain they could see nothing of the place, but went on by train, ultimately joining the little boat and chugging merrily up the fjord, bright with summer-sunshine; with the fir forests reaching down to the water’s edge.

  ‘Like it?’ asked Frank, sitting on the prow of the boat nursing all his luggage, which overflowed from his lap to the floor.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘I think it is nice myself; what is more, it is real. So many foreign countries are not real at all, but this one is. This and Bruges and the Hartz Mountains are all very real indeed.’

  ‘You’ve been to them all?’

  ‘Yes, many times.’

  The village lay at the end of the fjord, with a little hotel, built like a Swiss chalet and standing at the water’s edge; beyond it there was a sparse handful of houses, tall and slender, and a church with a pale-blue spire which rose thinly from a full graveyard. The boat came alongside the garden of the hotel, where the June lilacs flowered and the marguerites flowed on a tide of large yellow eyes that stared unblinkingly to Heaven. The landlady came running out to greet them, a youngish woman, blonde, with a flushed pink face and eyes so blue that they reminded Madeline suddenly of the Miss Sheila of her youth. She spoke excellent English.

  ‘To welcome Mr. Greyston again,’ she said and smiled, helping him ashore with his lapful of luggage. ‘You always bring so much and all so difficult,’ she said.

  ‘This is Mrs. Greyston.’

  ‘I am happy,’ said the landlady, ‘it is indeed a privilege, for we always hoped that one day Mr. Greyston would bring a wife with him, now we are overjoyed.’ She went on ahead towards the hotel, a suitcase hanging from one hand and the easel dragging from the other; she seemed to have no intention of sparing herself.

  The two of them followed her through the over-furnished hall, up the stairs on to the wide landing, which had a formidable-looking heater in the centre of it; she opened the double doors
on to a large room, with another smaller one beyond it. They were comfortable rooms, with an exquisite view of the fjord and the opposite mountains, whilst the sound of a sheep-bell came clanging in through the open window. Soho was dead. It had abruptly ceased to be; Chelsea also. Here time did not pass.

  ‘I’ll have the little room,’ said Madeline slowly. She was not sure of herself, because she had not supposed that the rooms would connect, and she was suspicious. The moment that the landlady had gone, Frank called to her.

  ‘I can imagine what you are thinking, but when I wrote I asked for two single rooms and had no idea that she would give us these. I’ve always slept on the other side of the hotel before.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Well, I feel that it does. It’s worried you.’

  ‘No, please don’t think I imagine you planned it. I’m sure you didn’t, and I’m quite happy about it.’ She went into the far room, shutting the door behind her.

  She sat on the window-seat, with the white polar-bear rug on the floor at her feet, and she stared down the fjord as it lay below her. This was real beauty. She could smell the strong rich scent of the marguerites intermingled with the fragrance of the lilac, and she could see the snow-peaks against a sky of almost unreal cobalt. The hot sunshine gave the snow the lie. Sun, warmth, and beauty, and as she stared she felt not unlike the butterfly that had flitted to the hay-field so long ago in search of all these things.

  From that moment, Norway because a series of dazzling pictures which she could never forget. Climbing the mountain with Frank in search of something that he could paint. Climbing past the houses, with the sledges and skis stacked beside the door, reminders of dark winters; as they rose, the fjord would grow darker indigo beneath them, until, when they had climbed really high, the blue water was almost black.

  Driving in a stalkjorei to a far lake, then walking beside it and talking to Ola, their driver, who, although he thought Norway divine in summer, lamented its dullness when winter came.

  Going up a glacier, with every breath becoming sharp, and the air cuttingly cold. Visiting a Laplanders’ camp, noting their leather-like faces, their voluminous skirts and the old reindeer, moth-eaten at this summer season; beside the tents.

  ‘They can never wash?’ she told Frank as they drove back.

  ‘No, of course they can’t; that’s the peculiar smell that hangs around them. Whilst with them you try to believe it’s the reindeer, but of course it isn’t really!’

  It was interesting choosing subjects for Frank to paint: a fir bough against a clear sky; the misty vapour of a waterfall like a silver artery cut in the dark side of the mountain, or the cherry tree fruiting against the old timbers of the merchants’ houses on the quay.

  As they went about together she learnt to know Frank better. He was very different from anyone she had ever met before, a child in some moods, always tender and considerate, always sympathetic. She grew to care for him. Frank never flew into tempers, neither did he become irritable, refusing to be annoyed by petty trials and with the most optimistic outlook. Gradually she was forgetting the pain of loving Chester.

  ‘I’m feeling better about it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad, because Chester wasn’t worth remembering.’

  ‘I loved him very much.’

  ‘We all love our first loves too much; we’re made that way; that’s life, but it passes.’

  ‘Your first love?’ she asked, knowing more of him because she was becoming inquisitive about him.

  ‘I never had a first love save my mother; she was the first. Such a darling!’

  There must have been women, she kept thinking, because Frank was not unattractive. He looked like an apostle with that reddish beard and the mildly reproving eyes; surely there must have been women in his life?

  One evening, when the sun was still shining though it was almost midnight, they walked to the head of the fjord, and there, without explanation, he turned, put an arm round her and kissed her. His kiss was an enquiry and she recognised it as being such. ‘I don’t know why I did that, Madeline; it’s queer, but I just don’t know.’

  She put her arms about his neck. ‘Perhaps you like me?’

  ‘I do; you’re a darling girl and a grand companion. I’m lucky in having met you.’

  The answer was unsatisfactory. It was an empty compliment, for she had no wish to be a ‘darling girl’ in his life, she wanted to be the one woman. At the same time she was ashamed to be prompted by so natural a desire, more so in that she knew that Frank did not reciprocate it.

  ‘Frank, I wish that you liked me better?’

  He was so tall that she had to tilt her head back to see him, and he smiled down at her. ‘I do like you; if I hadn’t done I should not have brought you here with me. One of these days I want to paint you with a hankie tied over your head, and the blue beads that your Nonna gave you. I shall call it “Virgin Emotion”. That’ll be you!’

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said chokily.

  They walked beside the fjord, she nuzzling against his coat, the one that was green like a colleen’s, and she was ashamed to be so dissatisfied in her relationship to him, because she did not know what she really wanted.

  ‘You’re not happy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I am, I’m very happy. I’ve never been as happy as this before; how could I be anything else with all this loveliness about me?’

  He said, ‘I wondered if you were finding me a bit disappointing? Other women have felt the same way, they want life to progress, they want event and episode, and I have the capacity to stay still. I don’t want event and episode, I only want to be happy.’

  ‘Frank, you make me very happy.’

  ‘Then that’s good. Very good.’

  On that night when the snow flushed rose, with the reflection of the midnight sun, and across the face of the sky would blow the clouds that looked as if they were threaded through with fire, orange on ice-blue. ‘Oh, Frank, I never believed that anything could be so perfect! It seems a whole world away from that dreadful life at home.’

  ‘It is a whole world away. That was a dream and this is reality, that is the difference.’

  ‘Or is this the dream and that the reality?’

  ‘Heavens, no!’ and, laughing, he kissed her gently with the timid caress of a woman who hopes to please, but is uncertain about it.

  There was that night that they went down the fjord in the motor-boat, the sun having set for a few brief minutes (all too short), a sinister darkness about the forests, and the echo of the waterfalls crashing down the face of the mountains. They went to see the Seven Sisters, where seven falls roar down in a demanding silver cascade. With the approach of winter the roar breaks like the voice of an old man who, in senility, returns to the boyish falsetto of youth. Gradually the sound dies away until the last trickle is caught by the fast hand of winter, and held in silence until the spring. The first sound of the approach of that spring is recognised in Norway not by the bird-song of other countries, but by the tinkle of water down the mountainside, growing in crescendo to the full-throated roar of summer.

  Frank spoke of it as they sat together in the prow. ‘It must be tremendous when the first little whisper is heard,’ he said.

  ‘Very awe-inspiring when the last sound dies. I’d be afraid of the silence.’

  ‘Indeed, because silence can be more cruel than any sound.’ And at that moment, as if to give the lie to the statement, there came the death shriek of some terrified animal caught in the fir forest. It violated the air, stopping with a deadly abruptness. ‘You see,’ said Frank, nodding, for the silence that had come after had been infinitely more dreadful.

  Madeline sat still. She had been reminded of the wicker baskets of chickens stacked on the handcart outside the Soho poulterer’s; she wished that she had not recalled them.

  The boat turned a corner of the fjord, showing a wooded headland which jutted out into the widening water. The stars, glowing like pale lamp
s in the sky, were distinctly reflected in the water. They looked like immersed flowers.

  ‘Frank, I don’t think I have ever seen anything more beautiful.’

  ‘Nor I! I’ve got to remember it to paint it.’ He stared in silence. The Norwegian stopped the engine and the boat drifted, but always before them was the picture of the sky and the water studded with these pallid drowned stars. ‘I think I have memorised it,’ he said, and, the boat starting up again, they turned for home.

  Yet, as far as she knew, he never painted the stars in the fjord, but he painted Madeline in a dark-red shawl with the blue beads at her throat.

  He worked methodically, setting up an easel in his room and painting there for an hour each day. He never asked her to keep closely to the pose, because he liked her to keep on talking. ‘I want to avoid your getting a fixed expression. I like to see you as you are.’

  For three sittings he refused to let her have a peep, when, the fourth time, he said suddenly, ‘Come and see it. I want your approval,’ and watched to see how she received it.

  ‘I’m not as lovely as that, Frank.’

  ‘You are to me.’

  ‘But you’ve made me a beauty,’ and then, ‘Isn’t the lipstick heavy? It’s almost as though my make-up showed.’

  ‘I like it that way; also you’ve got to remember that it isn’t finished yet.’

  ‘Why don’t you paint more portraits?’

  ‘Because I only want to paint one person,’ he said lightly.

  Madeline found the little doctor, who arrived as another guest at the inn, quite unexpectedly one evening. It was Monday, the day that the motor-boat came up the fjord, but being here she lost the sense of time. The little doctor was Scottish, short and stocky, with wide shoulders and a short neck; he was sitting in the sitting-room with its closely packed ornaments, and he looked apprehensively at Frank and Madeline as the only other guests. Frank was the friendliest of souls, and welcomed him immediately, and they all got talking. Sandy Mac had come to Norway to fish.