Lovely Shadow (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  Lovely Shadow

  Ursula Bloom

  Copyright © The Estate of Ursula Bloom 2020

  This edition first published 2020 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1942

  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 image © Everett Collection (Shutterstock)

  Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  TIMELESS CLASSICS COLLECTION

  by Ursula Bloom

  Wonder Cruise

  Three Sisters

  Dinah’s Husband

  The Painted Lady

  The Hunter’s Moon

  Fruit on the Bough

  Three Sons

  Facade

  Forty is Beginning

  The Passionate Heart

  Nine Lives

  Spring in September

  Lovely Shadow

  The Golden Flame

  Many more titles coming soon

  www.ursulabloom.com

  Ursula Bloom: A Life in Words podcast

  Listen to the free, five-part podcast series based on the autobiographical writing of Ursula Bloom. The podcast covers Ursula’s life as a young woman on the Home Front in the Great War, and her rise to success and fame in the publishing world of the 1920s to 1940s.

  www.ursulabloom.com/ursula-bloom-a-life-in-words-podcast

  Contents

  PART ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  PART TWO

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom

  Preview: Youth at the Gate by Ursula Bloom

  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

  Timeless Classics Collection by Ursula Bloom

  Strange to relate, but wonderfully true

  That even shadows have their shadows too.

  Charles Churchill.

  Part One

  One

  Hugo would always think affectionately of the walnut tree. It stood behind the house, where the lawn rose swiftly into a little hill, and the tree itself spread high out of a tussock of nettles ‒ dead nettles, with their heavy cream flowers, and the fragile wild oat grasses. The lawn-mower could never cut right to the round, lichened bole of the old walnut tree, and there the weeds thrived and grew long and lustrous and plentiful. The tree itself was stunted. Years ago the crown had been blown away in a spring gale, and now only the dwarfed tree remained; yet it grew very strong, with the smell of warm, resinous leaves reminding Hugo in some queer way of spring-cleaning, with its furniture polish. The leaves were shaped like green, beckoning fingers, with the sunshine dappling through the big boughs.

  As a child Hugo would lie on the high hillock of grass under the tree. He would stare up at it, and imagine to himself that it was a ship, spreading a cold etching of masts and rigging above him. In winter it was even more like a ship, and once, defying Emily, his nurse, he ran out in the November dusk and saw it then, and was thrilled to see how real it had become. He had always loved ships. He had loved them as a baby, and later, when at six years old he had had scarlet fever, and had gone afterwards to stay with Emily at a Southsea boarding-house, he had become even more fascinated by them.

  He would run across the common to the water’s edge, and watch the ironclads making landfall. There were always ships at Southsea, and bluejackets arming their girls along the common, and the more dashing ‒ but none the less picturesque ‒ Marines sitting on seats, invariably with fair companions and always looking primly self-conscious.

  Hugo envied them all; not for the girls ‒ he was too little for that ‒ but for the uniforms, the dark blue, and the little round caps on top.

  One day he would go to sea.

  He knew it first at Southsea, when he played on the shingle, while Emily talked to the pleasant, fresh-faced sailor whom she had ‘got to know’ one Sunday morning on the Clarence Pier. Of course Hugo’s dream had not really been born at Southsea, it had been born under the walnut tree at home, lying there and looking up at the branches, pretending that they were masts; only then he had not known that he would be a sailor. He knew it first of all at Southsea.

  Home was thirty miles outside London, on the Herts and Bucks border. It was an Edwardian house that his father had bought, and it stood well back from the road, adjacent to the golf links which could never be built on. It was made of red brick, with white-painted, ostentatious verandahs and balconies, and a couple of pepper-pot turrets which had no point in the general design. It looked good, Mr. Blair thought.

  He was one of those men who believe in giving a good impression: he never took any action without hoping that somebody would notice it and realise that he was the type of man who always did the right thing. Lynton Lodge had been the first purchase he had made after his wife had died in 1915, when Hugo was born.

  James Blair had come down to the country to view a couple of properties that had been offered to him. Lynton Lodge was the first one that he saw, and he liked it. There was no point in looking further, when he had already beaten the owner down a couple of hundreds for it, because James Blair appreciated a good bargain.

  The house was large, with the servants’ quarters suitably shut off behind baize doors. There were unpretentious kitchens and bedrooms in contrast to the opulence of the front part of the house: the entrance hall, with one of the new parquet floors, had alluring stained glass in the windows, heavily framed in white painted woodwork. There was a drawing-room (seldom used), and beside it a study, which opened on to a verandah, which consequently made the room dark. Hugo was always to remember it as smelling of leather and smoke ‒ the thick, fruity smell of the cigars that his father always had sent to him from the City, in boxes with garish pictures of full-busted Havana maidens on the lids.

  The dining-room lay behind the study, and its French windows led on to the lawn. The room gleamed with light oak furniture, and the full, glowing red of a Turkey carpet, whilst on the walls were too large, over-framed pictures which from time to time James Blair had collected.

  He liked to impress people with his worldly affluence and the fact that the tea office in the City was satisfactorily prosperous.

  Upstairs in Lynton Lodge there was the curving landing lit by the big skylight, through which the chimneys looked to be strangely close. There was James Blair’s own room, with its large, comfortable, but ugly furniture, three spare rooms, and the nursery to the front, running through to the back with a connecting door into the night nursery.

  Here Hugo lived.

  He remembered no other house, for he had come here at six months old, carried in the arms of Emily. He had been born in the house in Onslow Square, heavily porticoed, with a balcony above the porch, and long prim windows falling almost to the basement, where the servants were carefully segregated from the family. But
naturally little Hugo had no memory of that.

  He loved his nursery at Lynton Lodge, with the windows all round the walls, and he loved the view of the garden reaching to the road (it was called an avenue, with the first deference to suburban planning, and edged with little straight trees and grass verges, cut in spring by an urban district council man, whose mower made a pleasant noise). Hugo liked the night nursery behind, with Emily’s iron bedstead and his own small brass one beside it, fitted with arms, in case he fell out. Here were homely pictures: ‘Shoeing the Bay Mare’, ‘Cherry Ripe’, ‘Bubbles’ and ‘The Good Shepherd’. Emily had chosen them and they had gone into Hertford to buy them. He remembered the day, going in by bus and having tea at a restaurant, where Emily crooked her little finger and simpered, and was most unnatural, and the child, noticing it, became unnatural too.

  In the night nursery he would lie in the very early mornings and watch the pattern that the rising sun made through the leaves of the chestnut tree which stood just beyond the window. The pattern was reflected on to the ceiling in a lovely dappling, and he would make up stories about it, and tell them to himself.

  The dappling was like the sea, rising and falling, a restless wonderment of bewildered water.

  ‘Where is my mother?’ he would ask sometimes. Emily would reply: ‘She is in heaven, ducks,’ piously, very impressively, almost as though she were in church.

  ‘Why did she die when I was born?’ he asked.

  ‘Some ladies do,’ was the hesitating answer, for Emily realised that there were difficulties ahead, and hoped that she might be able to cope with them.

  ‘Did I make her die?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Emily; and then, remembering her duty, because she was a good-living girl and believed that a lie jeopardised the immortal soul: ‘Well, not so as how you could help it.’

  Hugo gathered that he must have caused his mother’s death, and was in some way blamed for it, even though Emily had tried to exonerate him.

  He was six when they went to Southsea, he and Emily in a blazingly hot July. He had had fever and had got peaky, and had to have sea air. So they went to Southsea.

  Hugo had never had a holiday like this before, and it was all the better because his father had let them come away alone. It was the gloriously hot summer of 1921.

  Hugo paddled and dug, whilst Emily sat with her interminable crochet and made lace for a vague something alluded to as ‘my bottom drawer’. At first the wonder of water to paddle in, and sand and shingle to play with, absorbed him. Then one day he saw a big ironclad coming in through Spithead. She was sailing close to the shore, towering and grey, and he could see the bluejackets lining her, and hear her Marines’ band beating out a gay tune that he knew. He sat very still. The water turned away from the bow of the great ship; she rode it magnificently; she moved like a victorious leviathan, and about her there was something that made the child’s heart throb faster and the pulses prick in his wrists and thighs. He knew that in his heart was the yearning desire to be up there on her bridge, working with charts and compasses, planning her next voyage, steering her up Spithead to the harbour. He saw her pass, and ride on majestically, with the island the other side of her, and he watched till she had gone beyond the Clarence Pier.

  ‘I want to be a sailor,’ he told Emily.

  ‘You shall be, ducks,’ said she.

  Naturally she was biased in their favour since she had met an attractive bluejacket that Sunday, and he had been only too wishful to be pleasant. She was meeting him every night, which could only be managed if Master Hugo went to sleep nice and early, so that she could get away in time.

  They stayed in Southsea for three weeks, and after a while Hugo was properly introduced to the bluejacket, who was called Mr. Binns, and who told the most engaging stories of the sea. Mr. Binns had a ferocious knife, and could do some natty little conjuring tricks with a lanyard, which Hugo found most entertaining. He and Emily and Mr. Binns visited the penny peepshows on the Clarence Pier, and more select entertainments on the South Parade Pier, where, so Mr. Binns said, ‘class’ went.

  At the end of the visit Mr. Binns saw them off at Fratton station, and bade a soulful if somewhat sticky farewell of Emily, who was almost in tears. Last of all Mr. Binns gave Hugo a present.

  ‘Open the parcel after you’ve started, son,’ said Mr. Binns. They had become very affectionate towards one another, although Emily had tried to stop it, because she felt that Mr. Binns was not being respectful. However, her interference had had no effect upon his familiarity: Hugo and Mr. Binns understood one another.

  Hugo opened the parcel in the train. It was a small model of a modern warship, something that he could put on the night nursery mantelpiece, and lie and admire on those mornings when he awoke so long before Emily.

  Driving home, he suddenly became poignantly aware of the austere atmosphere of the house, and it settled upon him as he went within, and more so after tea when he went down to see his father. This was a ritual. As long as Hugo could remember he had been taken down to the study, or to the drawing-room, after tea, for those ten detestable minutes, when he and his father met and talked.

  To-day he took his ship downstairs to show as a suitable souvenir of his visit to Southsea.

  ‘Mr. Binns gave me this,’ he said excitedly, ‘and I’m going to be a sailor when I grow up.’

  He saw his father standing there, with his back to the heavily built anthracite stove which looked so out of place in the hot 1921 summer. A short, stoutish man, with receding hair on his gnome-shaped head; hard eyes, like crude beach pebbles washed smooth by the sea; a nose that was fine and slender, yet bulbous towards the swerving tip, above thin lips. He saw that face change, and into those eyes there flashed a relentlessly cruel emotion.

  ‘You’ll go into the office,’ said James Blair authoritatively. ‘Whatever you may say or think, you’ll go into the office. I promised your mother that.’

  The tea office was in the city. It was situated in a small alley off Ludgate Hill, wedged in with tall houses on either side, in which multitudinous concerns did business. Here in 1800 old Josiah Blair had founded his tea business, and laid the foundation stones of prosperity for his descendants.

  To-day a notice hung over the doorway, in company with other notices, which read, in small but discreet lettering, ‘Blair and Son, Tea Importers’. The ‘and Son’ had been added more recently, for the paint was newer and in consequence brighter.

  On the ground floor of the high old building a publisher now had his office, with a waiting-room to the right, where innumerable authors languished after interviews, in various degrees of irritation, and tousled office boys went whistling through to the great man’s office beyond. The crooked stairs at the end of the small, dark passage climbed to an inadequate window, where a creeper, weighty with the grime of London, peered in indolent curiosity. There was a cloakroom of an evil-smelling nature, where water gurgled like a flatulent gentleman, and where the cleaning was never done; then four more steps climbed up to the landing. This was uninspiring, though strangely quiet after the noise of Ludgate Hill, and the whistling and door-banging that went on in the publisher’s office.

  A stern door repeated the notice ‘Blair and Son, Tea Importers’ and inside was the main office, equipped with three desks, one marked ‘Enquiries’, with a series of shelves rising behind it to the ceiling, and filled with dusty files. An inner door opened on to Mr. Blair’s own office, with its dark red carpet and polished desk. He prided himself upon the good impression that it made.

  There was the revolving chair where he always sat, and the heavy easy chair for the customers to deposit their persons on the other side of the desk, facing the prim window so that he could register all their expressions. It was agreeably comfortable after the unpleasant landing, and the outer office where the secretaries sat, and where Mr. Minch presided.

  Here for generations the Blair family had imported and sold tea. There had been a time when they had ow
ned the whole building, and when tall canisters had stood about, and there had been the acrid scent of tea clinging to the building and blending mysteriously with it. But to-day they had a separate warehouse at the docks, where the tea arrived, and whence it was dispatched. The office dealt only with the orders.

  Above it were two more storeys, in one of which a copper-plate engraver flourished, and above him a promiscuous young man ran a concern so closely approaching that of a bucket shop as to make no difference.

  James Blair had come to the tea office when he was a mere child, though he would have been affronted then had he been considered to be anything less than a young man. He was at the age which believes youth to be a folly, and yearns for grey beards; he was in the ambitious but peculiarly childish teens. Brought up in a rigorous school, into which sentimentality had never penetrated, he had respected his mamma and papa, and he and his two brothers came each in turn to the office off Ludgate Hill.

  It ought to have been situated in Mincing Lane. The sons were susceptible to comment, and hated confessing to the fact that the business was off Ludgate Hill, which seemed belittling to them.

  Robert, the second son, died in the influenza plague of 1875; Richard disgraced himself by running off with a pretty barmaid from the ‘King Lud’, and eventually dying in poverty in Winnipeg, whither his father had emigrated him. James, eldest of them all, was a prig. He aped his papa, and carried out every wish ever expressed by that highly respectable but emotionless old gentleman.

  When old Mr. Blair was laid with his fathers in the expensive vault in Brompton cemetery, James cared for his mamma. Nothing changed in the big house in Onslow Square. The seasons were only revealed there by the Nottingham lace curtains, or the dark damask ones which came on the first of October, when fires were started again, even though a heat wave prevailed. Everything went by rule. It mattered not that the old queen was dead, and that times had changed under the gayer regime of the new king. For James Blair, times did not change; he was the tea office.