The Golden Flame (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘But it is wise! He is afraid of us. He would not want to buy our restaurant save to destroy it,’ she urged.

  The colour had come into her face, warmly vivid, her eyes shone.

  ‘I doubt if he will speak to us again.’

  ‘I doubt it too, but the day will come when we shall be able to buy the big restaurant at the corner, and when we shall be proud and rich as he is.’

  ‘You look too far ahead, Matina.’

  ‘No, I have faith in you, I have confidence in this place. We shall triumph here, I feel it in my bones.’

  She stooped and gathered the little one into her arms. He crowed and laughed; a fine child, with much of his father in him, the same dark lustrous eyes, the same sun-warmed skin and black hair, and perhaps his mother’s little sensitive mouth.

  ‘One day,’ she said, ‘he will be very proud of you.’

  ‘One day,’ said Jan, ‘we shall be very proud of him.’

  Two

  I

  Mr. Campretti could not see them these days. He pretended that there was no gay little restaurant with vividly striped curtains, and when he sat outside his own doorway to read the papers as he did early on a Sunday morning, when there was no business, he refused to look up if Jan should pass by.

  They knew that he spoke contemptuously of their restaurant, but that did not worry them. There was something infectious about Matina’s determination to make good. She was putting her very life blood into this restaurant, and she was reaping her reward. Patrons came again and again. It was cleaner than most Italian places, and they appreciated that. It had a quality, a freshness of outlook, and the people themselves were not too pushing, yet were always ready to be helpful.

  At the end of a year there was money in the till; Matina drew on it for small improvements which, until now, she would have considered to be an extravagance. Jan trusted her entirely. There was a hired girl to help Tessa with the cooking, for Tessa complained (and it was true) that nowadays with so many more clients it was more difficult for her.

  Jan kept back a certain percentage of the profits. He was saving for a particular reason. It was Christmas time again, and then he would be able to show that reason, he explained.

  He went out shopping alone.

  ‘You are mysterious,’ said Matina, who was busy making a little crib for the restaurant window. She had bought small plaster figures of the Holy Child, and the Mother, and the three wise men on their camels. Her idea was to make a little crib in the window, and light it with the single light of the guiding star. ‘People will like that,’ she said.

  Jan went into the streets full of shoppers, and busy with the commercial confusion of Christmastime. The bright lights fascinated him. It was crisply cold with none of that dampness which always made him feel so ill, and so sick at heart for Amalia, where it was never damp.

  He went from shop to shop, searching for what he sought, and eventually he came to a second-hand shop. It was not cluttered as most of these places were; it had no horsehair sofas, and old china about it, but he had seen what he wanted through the window. It was a small rosewood piano. He went inside.

  ‘The piano?’ he inquired.

  The salesman came forward ingratiatingly; he said that it was a very good piano.

  ‘Let me hear it,’ said Jan.

  He had expected that the ivory keys would be yellow with age, and that the sound it made would be wheezy and tinny. Instead he was agreeably surprised. The piano had belonged to a lady who had loved it; she had cared for it, and it had repaid her kindness. She had had to sell it because hard times had come to her, but it was quite plain that she had treasured the piano.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  The man named a price well in excess of what he anticipated getting for it.

  ‘That is too much,’ said Jan, and made as though he would leave. He was well versed in the art of barter, because in Amalia he had had to barter for everything.

  The man called him back.

  For the next ten minutes passers-by could have seen them through the frost-scarred windows of the second-hand shop, where furniture was closely packed together, and where a paper chain had been trailed to show the time of year, and a couple of tinsel stars had been stuck.

  They bargained until the piano came down to the price that Jan wanted. He said: ‘I will take it.’

  ‘How can you take it?’

  Jan said: ‘Have you no conveyance? No means of getting it to my place? It is in Soho.’

  The man considered for a moment, then said that he had a boy with a handcart. He went to the back of the shop, and called into an inner room, fetid, with closed windows, where an old woman was boiling a kettle, and where there were garments airing on strings along the ceiling, and mixing strangely with paper chains and tinsel.

  ‘Is Ben there?’ called the man.

  Ben came shuffling out, a lanky youth at the age when no clothes fitted him, and while in places they hung in bags, in others they girt him badly.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Could you manage the piano on the handcart?’

  ‘How far?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Soho.’

  Ben glanced at Jan, sizing up whether he supposed that he would tip well or not. He accepted it grudgingly.

  ‘I will come too,’ said Jan.

  He waited until the two of them had shipped the piano on to the handcart and then they started down the street with it, Ben pushing, and Jan walking beside it, one hand laid possessively on the piano itself. So they arrived at the restaurant, where Matina was still arranging her crib in the window, and setting the little plaster figures in amongst the sand that she had chosen for a desert, and small wisps of straw for the manger.

  ‘Stop here,’ said Jan to Ben.

  He went inside, and to Matina where she stood, with the Holy Child in her hand, and her eyes shining.

  ‘Matina,’ he said, ‘I have a secret. This is the time of year when all the world has secrets! Will you go into the kitchen with Tessa for a while. Not come out until I ask you. Will you promise me?’

  ‘But why?’ she asked.

  He said: ‘I tell you, it is the time of year when all the world has a secret! Let me have my secret and be happy about it.’

  ‘Very well,’ said she, and went off to the kitchen to Tessa.

  He and Ben lifted the piano from the handcart, and staggered to the stairs with it. They were difficult stairs at the best of times, small and curling like lighthouse stairs themselves. They had the greatest difficulty getting the little piano into the front room where Jan wanted it to spend the night. When eventually they got it there, both of their faces were shiny with sweat.

  He paid Ben the money, and the boy looked at it contemptuously, and went away grudgingly. But Jan had himself lived by tips, and he knew the value of them. He did not underpay, but at the same time he did not overpay. He was too wise.

  When he went downstairs Matina was all excitement. ‘You must wait until it is Christmas morning,’ he said.

  They filled a stocking for the bambino, with little toys that he had gone to High Holborn to buy from the pedlars who stand along the pavement edge there, and sell all manner of amusing gifts. An engine, with a piston that throbbed as it went along; a pop gun. A ball of bright colours, a top that spun delightfully and hummed a tune as it did so.

  Matina had her own little present.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘he will like it.’

  Jan opened the parcel and peeped inside. It was a little violin in a miniature case with a bow, and even with resin. ‘He is too young for it,’ he said.

  She shook her head. ‘Surely you knew that the bambino loved music.’

  ‘All babies listen to music.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Josette danced. Luis has inherited that talent from her, but he does not dance, he makes the music for dancing.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked, surprised that she should understand his son so much more than
he did.

  ‘I do know,’ she answered.

  II

  Early the next morning, the bambino woke and climbed to see his stocking. He could say anything that he wanted now; he was a sturdy little chap with a firm determination to get about the world alone. He was independent. He opened his stocking, and examined it carefully. He took the engine in between his fingers, and stared at it, surprised at the noise that it made when the piston went up and down. He liked the top, but he could not make it spin. He liked the gun, and shot through the bars of his cot at imaginary lions. Then he saw that Matina was awake and watching him.

  She lay there studying him carefully.

  ‘Happy Christmas, bambino,’ she said.

  He shrieked for joy.

  Then slowly and laboriously he opened the parcel which she had thrust into the very toe of the stocking for him, and which contained the violin. He had seen an old man playing a violin in Soho Square, and had stood absorbed with wonder to watch him. He pulled the fiddle out of its case, and set it under his chin. He knew that much about it.

  He took the bow in his hand and drew it across the strings. It made a strange noise like an amorous cat in the little back yard at night. He tried again. All the while upon his face there was a look of absorption. The violin was to him a lovely live thing. It was the most exquisite toy that he had ever had.

  ‘You like it?’ she called.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ cried little Luis, ‘it is mine! It is mine for ever. It is beautiful.’

  She said: ‘It is yours for ever, of course, and you must learn to play it.’

  His small fingers groped for the notes. There was something more than instinct in the way that he struggled with the toy violin. She remembered that once she had read a story which spoke of men and women who had lived previously, and, coming back to this world, found themselves reborn with some of the old knowledge which they could not outlive.

  That, the story said, accounted for the geniuses who came to this world to live again.

  She stared at the child sitting in his cot, and trying to play the toy violin, and for a moment it struck her that here might be genius!

  She got up and drew a shawl round herself. She said to the boy: ‘Take your violin to Papa, and show him how you can play it,’ and gently guided him to Jan’s door. As she dressed she could hear the sound of the strings coming from that room, and she knew that even in these few minutes the boy had learnt something about the fiddle. It was no longer making the noises of the amorous cat, but it was tuneful and melodic.

  Jan mentioned it over their coffee.

  ‘You were right, Matina; he does like his violin and he will learn to play it.’

  ‘He will be a great musician, Jan.’

  ‘Perhaps we think our goose a swan.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. He is going to be somebody of whom we shall be immensely proud. I know that. He will play for the world, and not for us only.’ She smiled. ‘Funny, that I should always have wanted to be great, and was so ordinary with my music. He will be great, and I shall glory in his greatness.’

  ‘You were never ordinary, Matina.’

  ‘Oh, I was! The Maestro was kind, and the clients were kind, and you were very sweet, but I was ordinary and I knew it.’

  ‘I never knew it.’ He smiled and touched her hand, she did not draw it away but he saw that she quivered. ‘Those nights when you played with the Maestro in Amalia. La Bohème. Marriage de Figaro. Faust. You were never ordinary.’

  ‘I would have given all that I had to be great. Inside me was something that lived music, but could not be it! I don’t know. That sounds muddled, and queer, but it was true. I was never what I wanted to be.’

  He asked: ‘Do you regret your piano?’

  She held out her hands, worn with working for him and for the child, and the little restaurant which was being so successful.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I would rather do this for you than play; but in my heart there is nostalgia for my piano, a yearning. Some day I shall outgrow it. Some day, but not yet.’

  His hand tightened its grip upon hers, and he got up, taking her with him. ‘Come,’ he said.

  They went upstairs, turning and twisting with the funny little staircase, and he opened the room where only last night he and Ben had struggled with the piano.

  ‘I have a present for you,’ he said, and now his voice was trembling with emotion. He had saved for this moment, it meant a great deal to him, and he hoped that it would mean much to her. He opened the door with a nourish. ‘Look,’ he said.

  The little rosewood piano with its finely polished case was standing there. She stared dumbly. She did not seem to be fully aware of what she saw.

  Then she groped forward.

  ‘It cannot be for me?’

  ‘It is, Matina, I made up my mind that I would buy it the moment that I had the money! It is for you. Try it.’

  Her fingers were caressing the case, moving along it, opening the lid and staring down at the striped keys.

  ‘Try it,’ he insisted.

  She drew up a chair and her fingers settled themselves into a chord. They felt strange because the skin was rough and worn, but she went on playing a few bars of Il Trovatore and stopped abruptly.

  When he looked at her, her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Oh, Matina, I did not give you that to make you cry; it was to make you happy,’ he said.

  ‘It is happiness that makes me cry.’

  He took her face between his two hands, and stared down into it for a moment; then he stooped and kissed her tenderly, it was the kiss of a man who deeply respects a woman, not the kiss of a lover.

  As he moved from her, both of them were acutely aware of a sound from below. It was a child scraping at a toy violin. A child determined to master music.

  III

  There was no doubt whatsoever about Luis’s prowess for music. He and the violin became devoted partners, so that Jan saved up and by Easter managed to buy a real little violin from the same shop where he had bought the piano.

  ‘You are becoming a good customer,’ said the shopkeeper.

  ‘For a good customer you make excellent reductions,’ said Jan promptly.

  The piano had been a success, for sometimes in the evenings Matina played for the clients. She might not be the genius that she had always wanted to be, but she was infinitely ahead of the average English pianist. She had understanding. Her work with the Maestro had taught her sympathy, and she played with a tenderness that brought people back again and again to hear her. Sometimes they sent her up little gifts in appreciation, money which she set aside.

  ‘Why don’t you spend it on yourself, as it is for yourself?’ Jan asked her.

  ‘It is not for myself; it is for music; it is on music that it shall go.’

  ‘But you know so much music, you cannot want to buy more?’ he said.

  ‘It will not go on music that way,’ she replied.

  Luis was but a few months older, and had only just grown big enough to hold the real violin that his father had bought him (in the smallest size obtainable) when she arranged for him to have lessons. There was a woman who had played excellently, and who lived in a seedy apartment above the milk shop across the street. Matina had got to know of her through the neighbours. She gave early lessons in the violin, and had noticed the child who spent hours of the day sitting on the step and playing his violin to himself.

  ‘He will be a great fiddler,’ she said.

  Matina went across and saw her.

  It was a single apartment, cluttered with big photographs of great musicians, their names signed with a flourish, and all sorts of endearing messages written upon them. She herself was a sad-eyed, largish, woman, with too much thick hair like a bird’s nest on her head, and a dress which girt across the big bold bosom, and hung in folds about the hips.

  Matina arranged a price for the lessons, and after that, little Luis went across one day every week, carrying his violin careful
ly, and having a lesson with old Madame Hubac in her cluttered apartment above the milk shop.

  He practised in the attic at home, and he never grudged a moment spent with the violin. He worked very hard, and he seemed to have an ability for absorbing knowledge about music.

  ‘Once,’ said Matina to Jan, ‘I read that people have lived before. I think that Luis has lived before.’

  The restaurant was closed for the evening. The last of the coloured candles had been blown out on the tables, and the fire turned off. The two of them were standing in the doorway, with the scent of food coming out of the room behind them, and the cooler air of the street coming into their faces.

  ‘How do you mean, “lived before”?’

  ‘I mean that genius, so this story said, was the man reborn, who had learnt so much in his previous life that he could start again where he left off before! I think that Luis played the violin in another life, and has started again where he left off. It would be impossible for any child to learn so quickly as he has learnt.’

  ‘But you are absurd,’ said Jan.

  ‘I thought it absurd at the time, just a pretty fancy, no more. Seeing Luis I do not think that it is absurd. I am sure of it.’

  Jan said: ‘I do not think that I would like to believe that we had lived before. It would not seem that Luis was my child and Josette’s, but a stranger. I do not want him to be a stranger but part of us.’

  She said: ‘Yes, I understand, but I still think that genius is born that way, and Luis is going to be a genius.’

  They stood there, not speaking.

  The lights in Mr. Campretti’s restaurant were still alight but there were no customers. Lately he had not seemed to be so busy, and yet they had been busier than ever. They did not talk, but drank in the cool sweet air, and then closed the door and locked it.

  ‘Good night,’ said Jan on the stairs.

  ‘Good night.’

  She went on climbing round and he saw her, rather like a grey ghost. He stood outside his door wondering about her. Now, quite suddenly Amalia seemed to be a long way off, and Switzerland nothing but a dream; the passing of Josette had become like the passing of a butterfly. He had gone on. He could not believe that but a handful of years ago he had been the very young man in love at the Golden Galleon, and Josette had been the dancing girl, and they had been married, and had lain there side by side watching the turquoise sea through that window which was framed greenly by the leaves of the vine.