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

by Ursula Bloom

  Madeline got to know Isobel Joyce, who was fond of children, and spoke to her one day when business was slack, and Miss Joyce happened to be sunning herself in the doorway. Always with an eye to wafting in semi-reluctant customers, of course, as was the routine! The friendship ripened, budding into the supreme tax on Madeline’s perspicacity one hot July day, when the girl had been staring in at the frocks, and suddenly Miss Joyce came out and beckoned hastily to her.

  ‘Come in,’ said Miss Isobel Joyce.

  To ‘come in’ was Heaven indeed. Madeline had only caught passing glimpses of the shop, and now she stepped in and on to the carpet, saw the thin gilt chairs, and the three customers, with their gentlemen friends (who had been brought inside to do the paying and who stood about uncomfortably).

  ‘This is the child,’ said Miss Joyce to Mr. Rozanne.

  Mr. Rozanne was in a dilemma. He said, in very broken English, ‘You know the shop Elfrida by the Wardour Street turning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You take them this note? Yes, and bring back the ’tresses. Two of them, and look sharp, see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madeline; off she went.

  Rozanne’s shop lived on the stocks of other people. Customers were enticed inside by the beauty of a single creation and it was hoped would ask to see others. Immediately messengers would be dispatched to fetch from surrounding stores. Like this the single arctic fox became multum in parvo, and had even developed into ermine coats and mink ties. The client’s attention would be arrested pro tem by the modest display of their own resources, and the airy chat of Miss Isobel Joyce and Miss Marjorie, well versed in this art. But messengers were difficult to obtain, and Isobel Joyce had noticed Madeline and had gathered that clothes interested her.

  ‘She looks promising,’ she told Mr. Rozanne, ‘and comes from the grocer’s shop round the corner.’

  To-day they gave her a job.

  Madeline went running down Shaftesbury Avenue, and into Elfrida’s. Elfrida’s was a larger place, and catered for a less obvious class of client. Elfrida was run by a Miss White, who for years had been the mistress of any reliable but necessarily rich man who could supply her with the mode of life to which she was by birth entirely unaccustomed. But she looked with contempt upon the women of the street, and considered herself to be superior. She could afford good stocks.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said to Madeline.

  Madeline waited a minute in the hallowed room; she liked the long mirrors, in which she saw herself from all sorts of different angles, she liked the thick carpet, and the even slimmer gilt chairs. If only she could work in a place like this, how happy she would be! She desired beauty, and pretty things. The Venezia Restaurant was not pretty in the same way, though the pink shaded lights and the pot palm gave Nonna and Mamma the idea that it was. Madeline wanted beauty applied with a paintbrush.

  Miss White brought out the frocks, covered with a drab dust-sheet, and laid them over the girl’s arm. ‘Now don’t let them drag, and tell them to look sharp with them.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ Off she went.

  She carried them as though they were indeed precious, bearing them triumphantly into Rozanne’s. Two more prospective buyers had arrived, and fourrures were in demand. Miss Joyce grabbed the frocks, and gasped, ‘We want you to nip round to Cecil’s. Ask Mr. Rozanne,’ and then hurriedly to the client, ‘This is straight from our workrooms, Moddam,’ and she sprawled the rose-and-gold dress before her on the carpet.

  Madeline wished that she could do that, but she had to find Mr. Rozanne in a little cubicle at the end of the shop. Mr. Rozanne, who was perspiring profusely, came from behind a curtain, the front of his suit all crumby, because he was trying to get down a hurried meal. Mr. Rozanne (his real name was Levi) was always eating meals out of paper bags, and swilling them down with cups of tea in thick coarse china brought him from the restaurant round the corner. They charged small prices, which he liked; besides, if ever he slipped out for a proper meal it meant that he might miss some really good business, which he hated. So Mr. Rozanne resorted habitually to this primitive, if rather messy, method. He wiped down the front of his coat with a fat hand (dabbing rather than wiping), on the little finger of which an enormous brass ring was well rutted in.

  ‘I vant you to go to Cecil’s. You know Cecil’s?’

  ‘The frock shop at the corner of Rupert Street?’

  ‘That is it. Oh tear, everything is in such a ’urry. There will be a parcel, take this note and be quick. Ve’y quick.’

  She ran all the way and back again, and was rewarded by his pleased smile. He called her a good girl and congratulated Miss Joyce on having found her.

  ‘When you want a shob, you come back to me,’ he told Madeline.

  ‘I’m leaving school at Easter!’

  ‘Easter?’ This was a remote feast in Mr. Rozanne’s programme, save as a chance to get rid of last season’s leftovers re-ticketed as ‘New season’s models’. ‘Vell, come and see me then.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised.

  She was back next day, not such a busy day, and there had been trouble about a suit that a client had returned, saying that it made her look fat. With the war in its last year, curves were not so well in favour. The return of the suit had nettled Mr. Rozanne, who foresaw speedy ruin for them all. Acting on Miss Joyce’s advice, Madeline disappeared, but she came back on the Saturday morning when the shop was packed, and she ran several errands at top speed, in and out of Elfrida’s and Cecil’s, and up and down the Avenue. Saturday was always a big day. Saturday-night trade was brisk for lady clients and warranted a little outlay. At the end of the morning the blinds were drawn, and the shop locked for the week-end. Madeline found Mr. Rozanne occupied with some crumby interlude in the last cubicle of all, in company with an out-of-date treadle sewing-machine, several broken coat-hangers, and a huge account book.

  ‘About the job?’ she asked.

  He said that he could not pay much for messengers, and his whole demeanour was grudging. She did not realise then that he suffered a positive phobia about salaries. Later she was to know that he had so beaten Isobel Joyce down on her pay that she sometimes sold frocks for more than the price marked and took the difference for herself to make life worth living at all. Miss Marjorie had her own unoriginal means of supplementing her income. Miss Bates was a languidly attenuated woman, with chronic catarrh and protruding stomach, amazing on one so slender. She drew a commission on all alterations, and although she complained a lot she got more than most of them. He offered Madeline five shillings a week, which looked like riches to the little girl.

  Coming out into the sparkle of Shaftesbury Avenue, she ran into Luca. It was a bright March morning, frosty, with a white rim on the Shaftesbury Theatre. Luca was lounging along, his hands in his pockets.

  He said, ‘What were you doing in that shop?’

  ‘I’ve just got a job there. Now I shall have to tell Nonna and Mamma, and they won’t like it. But it does mean that I shall be what I want to be, and that’s something.’

  ‘I thought you were coming to us?’

  ‘I don’t like restaurants, Luca; I don’t like the smell of the food, and all the running about. I want to work with frocks.’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, rather gloomily.

  They walked up Frith Street side by side. She saw for the first time that perhaps he was unhappy in his home life, and that he disliked the Venezia.

  He said, ‘You know how they feel about us? You and me, I mean? They want us to make a match of it.’

  ‘I know, but I want to work at Rozanne’s.’

  He said, in a sudden burst of confidence, ‘Yes, and I’ve got a girl of my own. I daren’t tell Papa, he’d be furious if he knew about it. She’s in the chorus at the Shaftesbury; they say she’ll be a big star, and she looks like it to me. She’s beautiful. So blonde, and with blue eyes.’

  Madeline wasn’t jealous. ‘Nobody knows about it?’

  ‘No,
and you must swear not to tell them.’

  ‘I’m not a tell-tale.’

  ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ and he touched her hand. Luca needed a friend, and she knew that now.

  As they drew near the shop the sound of voices came from within, for a row was in progress. Uncle Luigi had been growing more difficult of late, he drank more than usual, having fallen in with a host of devil-may-care friends, of whom Nonna disapproved. Uncle Luigi had access to the cash register. Nonna paid him a salary, and if this was not enough he did not quibble, but helped himself out of the till. Nonna was usually very quick to notice anything that was missing, but in this she was not as quick nor as clever as Uncle Luigi. She suspected it, but her brain was slowing with the years. Every now and then he went out drinking, and had to be brought home. This had happened only last night. When the family had drifted bedwards, the noise of Uncle Luigi’s return had stirred them to action. Time had taught Nonna of the unsuitability of an argument with an inebriated son; in her sere years she had learnt that a far more forceful lesson could be preached in the morning, when the throat was parched, and he had so violent a headache as to be incapable of argument. Nonna had started to talk.

  The shop had been very busy, for it was Saturday when suburban housewives came to lay in a store. Nothing ever came before good business to Nonna, even personal feelings were always second to the making of money, so that she had postponed the lecture. Business trailing off, and Yolanda having departed for Confession, the row had begun with Uncle Luigi upsetting a sack of spaghetti down the stairs of the cellarhead. This had enraged Nonna, and she began her raucous tirade, and was getting on with it when Madeline and Luca appeared in the doorway.

  ‘I work for you, I toil my poor old fingers to the knuckle for you, and what do you do for me?’ demanded Nonna, arms akimbo. ‘You get drunk. You get very drunk. It cost money to get drunk, my money,’ and she tapped her breast significantly.

  ‘You had given it to me,’ said Uncle Luigi, which was not entirely true, for last night he had helped himself to a soiled ten-shilling note out of the till.

  ‘You cannot get so very drunken with what I give you,’ announced Nonna, who had wit enough to appreciate this point. Then she saw Madeline with Luca, whom she hoped to get as a prospective grandson. She thawed. ‘Ah, the bambini,’ she said.

  Luca was not tactful. He said, ‘Madeline has got a new job for after Easter.’

  Nonna’s face wreathed with fat smiles and the earrings tinkled in her ears. ‘I always did say that the Venezia was for my carissima bimba. Now to go and for to fix it behind my back. How good! How clever!’

  ‘I’m not going to the Venezia, Nonna.’

  ‘Not going to the Venezia? What? But it is arrange. I arrangement make.’

  ‘Madeline wants to go to Rozanne’s,’ said Luca.

  ‘No.’ Nonna’s voice rose. ‘I am her Nonna and I say No, No, No.’ The little pyramid of a woman became an impassable mountain. She was immediately enormous. That was when Uncle Luigi struck. Uncle Luigi’s morning had been a miasma; he was coming to by intervals, and his head was clearing. His realisation of the awful fate of all that beautiful spaghetti had pulled him up like a cold douche. He felt that if he had much more of Nonna he would go mad.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ he said sharply. ‘You drove Tony away like that; and Yolanda, and Giovanni. Leave Madeline alone.’

  ‘What?’ gasped Nonna.

  ‘You try to run us all; you want to manage everything. Let her go to Rozanne’s; it’ll do her a lot more good being what she wants to be, than being stuck down in that rotten old Venezia, and that’s a fact!’

  Nonna came to. ‘You drunk pig!’ said Nonna. ‘How dare you push yourself in? It is no’ting to do with you. You are not her father.’

  ‘Neither are you. Get to hell out of it!’ said Uncle Luigi. His large pasty face, generously plastered with sweat, gleamed at her from behind a counter littered with chutney bottles. This was more than Nonna could bear and, yielding to the temptation, she leant across the counter and slapped the large pasty face with a resounding crack. Uncle Luigi screamed like a girl, then, completely losing his temper, he picked up a handful of macaroni and threw it at his mother.

  Much later that night Madeline knew that her Uncle Luigi had won a major battle for her, and that she would go to Rozanne’s.

  THREE

  At eighteen, Madeline had grown up.

  She was not very tall, but rounded; her skin was dusky, her eyes lustrous and dark, and about her there was the gentle beauty of the damask rose. In character she was gentle, too, and loving, for as yet her tempestuous Italian ancestry lay dormant within her. She was deeply generous, both of herself and her belongings, and gave readily of emotion. But she had always been alarmed by the horrifying scenes that she was obliged to witness in the shop, by the atmosphere of untidiness, by the starvation for real beauty. As yet she had not developed, but was shy and retiring.

  Once the first disappointment had been overcome, Nonna had behaved well about Rozanne’s. She produced some of her savings, and escorted Madeline to B. & H.’s, to buy her a suitable frock. Nonna did not stint. The frock must be black satin and of first-class quality. Nonna took her time about choosing it, fingering every dress, her bird-like eyes dancing; finally one was selected, and Madeline came away, her arm linked in Nonna’s.

  ‘Ah, you see, I am not so very bad,’ said Nonna gaily, ‘no, not really, and when you marry Luca your old Nonna will buy you a lovely wedding-dress from B. & H. Si. Even if it cost five pound, old Nonna will buy him.’

  They walked across Soho Square, with the pale sunlight of spring, and the scavenging dogs scrounging in the dustbins. Madeline did not mean to marry Luca. She did not want to marry anyone at this particular juncture of her life, she wanted to interest herself in Rozanne’s, and the smartish women who came and went.

  ‘I do understand,’ said Nonna, with some impatience. ‘When I was your age I had been married t’ree months. Never mind. You wake up soon.’

  Madeline settled in at Rozanne’s.

  Before very long, Madeline had learnt much of the business behind the scenes. Mr. Rozanne was a hard-working little man, married to an extravagant wife, who had once modelled for a big house. Night and day he toiled to keep his wife in luxury. They had a flat in St. John’s Wood, she kept a spectacular borzoi dog which went everywhere with her, and she wore outrageous clothes to draw extra attention to herself. Nothing but the best for Mrs. Rozanne, and whilst her husband sweated and worked, chafing against the petty difficulties of the business and the clients, he was for ever fretted with the thought that one of these days she might meet a lover. Mr. Rozanne had no illusions about his physical attractions, his small stature and the short-sighted peering little eyes which needed such thick lenses or he could see nothing.

  His life was absorbed in the shop and harassed by it. He lived behind the thready curtains of that cubicle, in company with the tired old treadle machine, the wisps of patterns, and an ash-tray advertising a brand of beer and filled with pins. One day maybe his Robes, Chapeaux and Fourrures would be taken to a Bond Street shop, and then Lilith, his wife, would be satisfied.

  Miss Bates, who was really Mrs. Arthur, lived in Hoxton, spent her life running up little frocks, and running down the clients. ‘No better than what they ought to be,’ said Miss Bates with conviction. Her private life was sordid, but distressingly respectable. Her husband worked on the railway and came home at odd times, which often meant that she had to ask to leave early so that she might be back to get him a meal. Emma Bates worked hard for Mr. Rozanne, who would never get another woman to put in the amount of effort that she did, and he knew it.

  Miss Marjorie, second saleswoman, was a Jewess. She meant to do well for herself. She had yielded to the temptation of a certain Ikey Cohen who had ambitions in gents’ tailorings and all manner of plans for the future. Miss Marjorie was a second Mrs. Rozanne, she wanted physical attention and comfort, she put luxu
ries on her altar, and worshipped them.

  Isobel Joyce was twenty-seven, hard in many ways, for life had made her wide-awake to the mistakes that others had made, and she tried to avoid them. Unless a girl wanted to work all her life, there were but two royal roads to success, to marry a man, or become his mistress. At seventeen she had fallen desperately and ill-advisedly in love with the wrong man, and the affair, becoming too big for her, had left her facing a tragic mistake. She wanted to possess a shop of her own, but had not the capital. Saving the salary that Mr. Rozanne paid was difficult, also she had taken a plunge a year ago and had got hold of a pleasant little flat. She had taken the flat because she was sick to death of living with relations, who either sponged or criticised, and she didn’t know which was the worse.

  She confided this to Madeline one night, when Madeline in turn had told her about the difficulties with Uncle Luigi and now the horror that Uncle Tony was coming to stay.

  ‘It’s my firm opinion that we were meant to be like the animals, and get out as soon as we are big enough,’ said Isobel Joyce. ‘I got out. If you take my advice, you’ll get out.’

  ‘How can I?’

  ‘Well, later on you’ll be able to. A landlady is better than your ma, I always say. You can leave a landlady.’

  ‘Yes.’ The idea had not occurred to Madeline before.

  ‘Maybe you could share a room with someone?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Madeline, but knew that she had no one to share with.

  Uncle Tony’s visit was a mistake. He arrived with his Protestant wife and three children, all formidable. His delicatessen in Bristol had taken a turn in the wrong direction, and Uncle Tony had come to make peace with Nonna, in the hope that perhaps she would lend him something to go on with.

  ‘She’s got plenty,’ he told his wife, ‘and could afford to fork out, if she would. But one day she’s mean as they’re made, and the next’ll give you anything. We’ll have to wait and catch her on a good day.’