by Ursula Bloom
Forty is Beginning
Ursula Bloom
writing as Mary Essex
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 1952 as Forty is Beginning by Mary Essex
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
One: GENESIS
Two: EXODUS
Three: THE START
Four: CAP RABAT
Five: BEGINNING AGAIN
Six: BLISS
Seven: LES PAPILLONS
Eight: ROMANCE
Nine: FINAL CURTAIN
Preview: Three Sisters 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
One
GENESIS
The trouble with Miss Marvin was that all her life she had been hallmarked as an old maid. She was nice. She had a most charming faith in life, and would have done anything to help anybody, really a great deal more than the over-attractive blondes who wed amorous gentlemen and who at heart are cats and all claws. Miss Marvin would never have been a cat, but also she would never marry. At forty she was slender, a little wispy, and her hair was always self-shampooed and self-cut. She had dabbled little in the gentle art of make-up, which during her lifetime had become a cult, and she knew absolutely nothing of how to purchase the sort of clothes that give men ideas.
Being a schoolteacher, she believed that make-up was ridiculous and definitely out of place; a pale pink lipstick was used only with the greatest caution, and a mere dusting with apricot powder was all she ever turned to, unaware that the powder should have been peach. She had delicate light brown hair of the tint and texture to which ambitious young women who look ahead give that occasional peroxide cocktail which rapidly produces the gay gold of youth. Miss Marvin was not the sort to do anything about the gay gold of youth, believing that once you had lost it, it had gone for ever. She had nice principles. She wore white blouses, washing them herself every other night at her digs to make sure that they were really white. She wore suits, with the sort of little hat that goes with everything ‒ or nothing! Straw in summer, felt in winter; serviceable and very useful, but not becoming.
Her Christian name was Alice.
There was nothing imaginative there, but she had come from unimaginative parents who, having been married some twelve years, were surprised, if not horrified, to find that a baby was on the way. It was not in the least what they had expected.
It all happened in a small house built on the side of Lavender Hill at Clapham. It was a true-to-pattern little house in mushroom brick with slate-coloured roof. They had gone there to live when newly wed, and had indeed spent their honeymoon distempering the back bedroom, and getting the narrow piece of garden ship-shape and orderly.
Edgar Marvin worked in the post office. It was not a highly paid job, it was not one of those jobs which the best marriage bureaux would put under heading of ‘having prospects’ but it was comforting to remember that there would be a nice little pension when his time was up, and his wife had plans to take in lodgers to eke out the pension.
The house was of no set design, but they did their best to make it comfortable, buying a little more furniture every few weeks until at last they had arrived at the enviable stage when not only could they both sit down at the same time, but could ask in a friend and have him sitting down as well.
Their lives were orderly and simple.
They attended the chapel on Lavender Hill twice every Sunday, because that was right and proper. They took the parish magazine, and about twice a year the Minister came to tea. They lived good lives.
At first they were disappointed that they had no children, which had seemed to be the correct outcome of happy marriage, but as they settled down with each other, they arrived at the conclusion that perhaps after all it was a good job, for the best babies howl all night, and crow all day; also, they are a very expensive luxury, as often as not retiring out of your life when they grow up, with never a thank you for your continual goodness and self-deprivation on their behalf. Having decided that they would undoubtedly have no family at all, they arranged to take a lodger, and in due course Mr. Reginald Pilkington came to lodge with them.
He was a commercial traveller, regular in his habits, and as little bother as one could expect. His weekly money adding to the family exchequer, so now Mrs. Marvin was no longer jittery that the housekeeping money would not meet its creditors. She was almost glowing. She liked Mr. Reginald Pilkington very much indeed.
Therefore, having settled into a very enjoyable married life which was now unmolested by any thought of a little stranger, becoming known in the select neighbourhood of Lavender Hill, and digging themselves into a niche that they liked, it was very annoying after twelve peaceful years, suddenly to find that Mrs. Marvin was pregnant. In fact she burst into tears when the doctor told her, and wept pathetically, saying beseechingly ‘What ever have I done to deserve this?’
She took against Mr. Marvin. It was, she said, his fault. He had done it to spite her. Why had they taken such outrageous risks?
‘Why,’ asked the doctor, ‘haven’t you been caught before? Anyway, you have had twelve years’ run for your money, for which surely you ought to be grateful?’
Nobody was grateful on Lavender Hill just then. Mrs. Marvin would hardly speak to Edgar, and actually took some of those pills claimed ‘never to have failed in the relief of female anxiety’, as advertised in a Sunday paper, but this was one of those occasions when the pills certainly did fail and the female anxiety went on with a vengeance.
There came another u
npleasant moment when Mr. Pilkington strongly objected, saying that he never had liked children, and did not see how in the world he could stay on after the baby came. Mrs. Marvin argued, weeping bitterly, and vowing that she would never let the brat cry and that this unfortunate situation had never been her idea at all. Mr. Marvin went about in sombre silence, for whenever he opened his mouth he was accused of having done something awful, so he had decided on remaining silent.
But, as time progressed, they became accustomed to the idea ‒ as one does ‒ and even appreciated the thought that they would have a dear little boy of their own, making plans for a suitable name and a most ambitious career for him.
On November the fifth, the night when nasty little boys were letting off this and that, not only in their back gardens under the auspices of their fathers, but in gutters under their own auspices, Mrs. Marvin began to feel poorly, and towards dawn, no dear little boy, but a dear little girl, arrived.
‘Everything goes wrong with me,’ wailed Mrs. Marvin.
They called the little girl Alice Mary, after mother and grandmother, and although the nurse said that she was ever so lovely, neither of them thought her remarkable, and Mr. Pilkington was so offended that he would not even look at her. He had understood that she would be called Reginald, and that being now impossible, took offence.
There was some return of confidence at the christening, when the child wore a handsome frock, and behaved well. Whilst Mr. Pilkington, who had come round sufficiently to fill the role of godfather, gave her a Bible that smelt of naphtha balls, it having belonged to his mother and having been kept in store with her fur coat.
She was an amiable child. In truth little Alice Marvin could not have behaved better than she did, but the difficulty was that she had come into the world under a cloud, and the cloud hung close and refused to go.
Also, two years ahead, when she was cooing comfortably in the front room, her mother, sick to death of her stolid domestic atmosphere, packed her things and did a flit with Mr. Pilkington. In those days such events were, to say the least of it, a little unusual even in Belgravia, and on Lavender Hill they were disgraceful! In 1913 nice people behaved themselves, and that’s why they were nice people. Mr. Marvin was paralysed with horror lest as a result of this disastrous behaviour he should lose his job in the post office.
In 1916 he got a divorce, because his wife begged for it, she being about to have another baby. After that a lean spinster ran his home for him and Alice went to school, liking lessons did very well by them, and the lodgers added to their income, which was excellent.
Alice was a bright child, though she wasn’t pretty. She learnt ably, deciding early to become a schoolteacher, because at the time she was suffering from a youthful attachment to her form mistress. Miss Fortescue was beautiful. For a few desperate months Alice Marvin lived and doted and could not eat because she adored Miss Fortescue so much. She spent her few pennies on violets for her in the spring, and sick-looking roses bought cheaply in the market in summer. She tried to please by doing her lessons well. None knew of her absorbing affair, because she never mentioned it. None realised how great was her adolescent love and how much it meant to her. It was the foundation stone of her entire career, deciding for her what she would be, and gilding all her plans for the future.
There came the dreadful day when Miss Fortescue, not suspecting what was happening, became engaged to a young architect, and was so happy over it that her eyes became bluer, and her whole appearance radiated joy. The engagement was announced and she would leave at the end of the term. Dismayed, Alice Marvin could not believe that the beloved was now going out of her life for ever. Worse still, when the term had almost expired, the maths mistress went round with a subscription list for Miss Fortescue’s present and Alice had to subscribe. It almost broke her heart. And eventually Miss Fortescue was married and some of the girls went to see it, but Alice Marvin could not go, she felt too dreadfully unhappy.
Alice Marvin was not sorry to say goodbye to Lavender Hill when her father died. She was now qualified for a post, and she went north because she felt she had tried the south and did not like it very much. The north, she was to discover, was little better.
Unfortunately for girls like Alice Marvin, novelists and artists have a reckless tendency to rapturise romance; they desire only to light the world with a glamour that it has not got, and never did have. She read widely, ashamed to realise that at night she kept some remarkable literature under her pillow and revelled in it. She believed what the authors told her, and the authors ‒ bent only on producing interesting books ‒ lied, as they always do. She would have loved to be the heroine of some great romance, but she realised that she never would be; all heroines were beautiful, and she had inherited her mother’s mouse-brown hair and pale grey eyes; her lashes were mousy too, and did nothing to intensify those eyes. She was smally made, very much the modestly inconspicuous type, and what was so irritating was that the modestly inconspicuous types were out of date.
In the Victorian era, everyone had admired them immensely. To be modestly inconspicuous meant to be good, and chastity was the great virtue. To her shame, Miss Marvin was today not quite so sure about the sterling worth of chastity, for when she came to think about it she decided that it had gone a little bankrupt. In the 1920s and ’30s gentlemen abandoned nice quiet-looking girls and raced after those of a more flamboyant appearance. They delighted in the ones who painted their lips a bewildering scarlet, and outlined their eyes with violet pencils. The world had changed considerably with the world war, and the regrettable part was that Miss Marvin did not change with it.
Miss Marvin dug herself in in the north country town with its rattling cobble streets, its grey slate roofs and the smoke which seemed for ever to swirl up, leaving disgraceful smuts on everything. The only use for smoke Miss Marvin gathered, was to foretell the weather; if it went up straight it would continue to rain, if it slanted it might come out fine.
In Brestonbury it always went up straight.
She lived in digs.
Mrs. Bunce kept the digs; she was a serviceable woman, made like a barrel, with a couple of distorted hams slung in front to supply the need for a bust. Her hair was parted in the middle like the Madras muslin curtains at her windows, smarmed down into what had once been a bun at the back. It was not a bun any more; it was not even a fairy cake; it was practically a petit four, but no one had dared to tell Mrs. Bunce so.
All Alice Marvin’s life seemed to be involved with the female of the species, for in point of fact she met no men. She had arrived at the age when she did not expect to meet men, and ever since she had become forty last November, romantic hope had died in her.
She had had nothing from life, she knew. She wouldn’t get anything now. Every time she was paid her salary, she popped something into the post office savings bank, as an insurance on her old age. Old age was the next vista on life’s horizon; it is one of those unpleasant milestones that nobody wants to see, less still when you are unmarried, and have no reason to believe that this state will change.
Mrs. Bunce was a kind soul, but ponderous with it. She certainly would not have stood for any nonsense, and disliked the thought of gentlemen visitors. But then Alice Marvin never had any visitors, so that was all right. She attended the chapel at the corner of the street, and was a good Christian woman, priding herself on it.
In Miss Marvin’s bedroom there was a text which read ‘God is Love’ in forget-me-nots across its glossy paper, and was framed above her bedhead. There were times when she began to doubt if God was half so loving as He was portrayed; He certainly had done very little for her, and as the years went on she was more and more aware of everything that she had missed.
That spring something happened.
First of all, during the winter the young man at the grocer’s had initiated her into how to contribute to the pools. She had thought it very wrong, of course, and undoubtedly one of those things that the chapel on Lavender Hill wou
ld not have approved, but the time had come into her life when she really didn’t care that much for the chapel. She had been attending the one at Brestonbury less and less, because this sort of thing was dropping out of favour. Nowadays very few people went to services, and she really didn’t see why she should be one of them.
It was fun to sit and work out the pools, and greater fun planning what she would do if she won a fortune. Of course she knew that she would not win a fortune, but it was feasible to suppose that she might get one of the smaller awards, which would be lucky, but in her heart Miss Marvin believed that the pools kept the big sums to be doled out only to their special friends.
Everything changed when her friend Nancy Palmer bought a house.
Nancy Palmer was a teacher too, in much the same category as Alice Marvin; she would never go very far nor earn very much; certainly she would never be a headmistress, and undoubtedly she would not marry. She was ordinary, and although she had extremely high principles, they seemed to make her a good deal dimmer. Therefore what a surprise it was to find that Nancy Palmer, who had lived in ordinary digs for years, had suddenly had the audacity to sink her savings in a sweet little house. The little house had no slate roof, nor was it built of dull bricks, but it was one of those places where Queen Elizabeth might have slept. It had a low beamed sitting-room with a garden beyond where daffies blossomed in yellow profusion on a rising moss bank. Over the sitting-room were a couple of bedrooms with ceilings like Noah’s ark, and humpy polished floors. It had cost nearly all her savings, but Miss Palmer did not care.
‘I was determined to have something in life,’ said Miss Palmer.
The awful part was that Alice Marvin envied her. She, who had nothing, realised exactly what the little beamed cottage meant and burst with rage.
‘Life is a swindle, you get no reward for being virtuous, the whole thing is just a fraud,’ thought Alice going red with indignation at the idea.
Mrs. Bunce sensed that something was wrong, but decided that it was Alice’s age, for Mrs. Bunce was a great believer in ‘the age’ attributing every mood to it. Forty was the end of a woman’s life; she personally had gone downhill from the moment that forty began, and if a woman was sensible she expected it. The time would come when Miss Marvin would have to retire, and live on what she had got, adding to it with a little knitting, or babysitting, or something like that; not remunerative, but better than nothing. She ought to have married, of course, thought Mrs. Bunce, who had made a most regrettable marriage herself.