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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘Rest, my bambina,’ said Nonna gently, helping her on to the bed. ‘Rest, on the great big pewtiful bed, so comfortable, that your old Nonna buy.’

  How could she tell Nonna that to rest here was impossible and that she hated it all? The gentle hand and the kind heart that prompted her were so willing that Madeline could not refuse them. She lay here in her misery. She was back where she had started from; wearing a lovelier frock, with her face painted so that it was much more attractive, she had come back.

  EIGHT

  Time passed on.

  The blue water of the fjord lapped to Madeline’s feet, as she sat placidly eating cherries and able to look back without tears. She could now accept the past much as the Norwegians accepted the blueness of the peaceful fjord that flowed by their doors. There was the smell of hay, and the red glow of cherries against the brown timbers of the merchants’ houses beside the little quay.

  ‘Mrs. Greyston is content?’ asked the landlady graciously.

  ‘Mrs. Greyston is very content,’ replied Madeline.

  She had gone back to work at Rozanne’s, of course, because at the time it had seemed to be the only possible thing that she could do. There had been no need to explain. She gathered from their attitude that her youthful efforts to hide a very ordinary situation had deceived nobody. Both Isobel and Mr. Rozanne had guessed that she was not married, and the only one who was difficult about it was Miss Bates, who was one of those women who insisted on her rights and wrongs being in definite colours of black and white. Miss Bates thought that it was ‘ever so awful’ of anyone to give themselves when not properly married.

  ‘A lot of good marriage has done you,’ said Isobel coldly. Warming to Madeline, she had been the go-between who had sponsored her return to the shop.

  Mr. Rozanne had looked at the girl indifferently when she applied for a job and he had shrugged his shoulders. He had got over the affair of Lilith, who was doing remarkably well in America with the band leader; he believed now that it had been an episode, and, looking back on it, thought that he himself was far too kind to her. He’d never fall in love again, he promised himself. When salaries were discussed, he dropped Madeline’s by a few shillings.

  ‘Times are bad,’ he said.

  ‘But, Mr. Rozanne, I have to live.’

  He looked at her with those half-blind eyes behind their thick lenses; the eyes suggested something to her; she did not understand what he meant, but she knew that he had seen something about her bearing which he had not noticed before.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, and accepted the lower salary.

  Nonna said that it did not matter. Nonna had raked into her savings, and had given Madeline a five-pound note. Her delight at having the granddaughter back was childish; she preened herself like a fussy old hen. But returning to work with Mr. Rozanne was not happiness! Now Madeline found that she despised the shop, hating the work, but whilst busy mercifully she could not think about Chester. To think of him was agony.

  In the life of Soho there was no privacy, nowhere to weep, and most of the time her eyes burned with unshed tears. She had been secretly praying that Chester would seek her out; for weeks one half of her was ever on the alert for the sound of his step, until the memory of its echo grew blurred and indistinct, and hope lost its first poignancy. Then she fretted that with Chester she had lost so much that she had long desired, the warmth and sunshine; the sheer beauty of living. She wanted her flat again; she ached to sit on the little seat into which somebody had cut those two forbidding words. She wanted to wake to see the sunshine filtering through the green silk curtains and to smell eau-de-Cologne, and bath salts, not the intimate fetid smell of merluzzo and Nonna. But for all these lost joys there was nowhere to weep.

  She plodded on at the shop. Occasionally Mr. Rozanne came from behind the curtains of his cubicle, and stood watching her as she worked, so that she felt uneasy. Mr. Rozanne was uncertain of her morals, and she knew it.

  ‘If you ask me, he’s got his eye on you,’ said Isobel.

  ‘On me? Good Heavens!’

  One late February night Mr. Rozanne beckoned to Madeline. It had been a good day, fourrure had been in demand, and he looked pleased. He said, ‘What about a leedle dinner together? It would be nice, I think? The Trocadero does you vell.’

  His whole manner had changed; now he was as ingratiating as if Madeline were a customer, and he fawned on her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but Nonna is expecting me back.’

  ‘Winnie can take a message to her.’

  ‘No, not to-night. I ‒ I’ve had a terrible headache all day’ ‒ it was the first thing she thought of.

  Mr. Rozanne fumbled in a coat pocket, to produce a small phial, the label scratched away and a clumsy attempt to write ‘Two at a time’ scrawled on the remaining tag. ‘These are very good,’ he said, dropping two into an already moist palm.

  She stared helplessly. ‘Really, I must go home. It’s very kind of you, but I want to lie down.’

  She turned her back on Mr. Rozanne, and as he went back into his cubicle, knew that her heart missed a beat and that her mind was filled with a heavy apprehension.

  ‘You’re going to have trouble with him,’ said Isobel Joyce, fastening the belt of her coat.

  Madeline loathed Soho.

  She kept telling herself that she had got to get away, but how? She tramped the vicinity looking for a flat or rooms, but London was full, and the districts where she wanted to live were too expensive. One day she saw a tiny one-room flatlet to let in Jermyn Street, a locality that she disliked, but desperation sent her inside to have a look at the room. It was surprisingly good. Situated high up in the building, it had a round window that looked across to the Surrey hills, and it had been newly decorated in quite good taste, with pale-grey painted walls, and plain but good furniture and mats. The landlady was wispy and furtive, a foxy-faced woman quick to gauge a prospective client, but her price was reasonable.

  ‘And I ask no questions,’ she said meaningly.

  The room represented escape from the shop, it would give Madeline some privacy, some niche, and for that she was willing to forgive much. Although she disliked the fact that no questions were asked (because it meant that the other tenants were women who could not answer them), she was prepared to overlook anything to have a place to herself.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she said.

  There was the old trouble of having to explain to Nonna that she was going. She waited till the last moment, then finding that Uncle Luigi was drunk again, which sent Nonna into a temper, so that, after all, it was a bad moment. Nonna said that she did not understand girls, she never knew what they wanted nowadays. Here was a good home and every comfort (Madeline had been glad enough to avail herself of it when she came home last autumn in that trouble, glad enough, insisted Nonna), now the moment that she could get away, off she goes again! Nonna railed for half the night, and if Madeline left this time, she left for good, she insisted; it was all so much upsetting, never knowing! Yet, later on, when the dawn struggled dimly into Soho, and Nonna left off snoring raucously, she sat up in bed to pull on her stockings and prayed Madeline to stay.

  ‘I’ve got to get away,’ the girl persisted.

  Nonna could not keep her meddling fingers out of other people’s lives. Had Madeline seen Luca? Had she seen Mamma? What was behind all this? Was there yet another man?

  ‘No,’ said Madeline. ‘No, no, no.’

  Madeline told Mr. Rozanne, just as she was leaving that evening, because he had asked her to bring him over some gnocchi from the shop to-morrow.

  ‘I’m not going to the shop. I’ve engaged a room out.’

  ‘Very good idea, Madeline. Where is it?’

  ‘In Jermyn Street.’

  His face lit up, a strange expression crossing it and vanishing again. ‘I vould like to see your room,’ he said. ‘Is it a nice one?’

  ‘I haven’t moved in yet. Later on,’ she promised vaguely, but she knew that Jermyn
Street had given him the wrong idea. The painted ladies of the King’s Highway lived there in abundance, but she herself was strong enough to live alone, where she liked, and to be what she liked.

  When she got to her room with her small bag she spent the evening putting the place to rights, and rather enjoyed it. She produced Chester’s photograph; she had never brought it out in Soho because she had been so conscious of the unfitness of that background for it. The sight of the familiar features made her heart ache, inducing a distressing wave of sentiment, and she sat back, giving herself time to think about him, and wondering if she should have handled the situation differently and why he had never sought her out. For he had loved her! She was convinced that what he had felt for her had been a deep emotion, and she had a hunch that one day he would come back, when he had had time to think about it.

  She stopped crying to tidy the room more thoroughly. Under the divan the previous tenant had left a wad of old newspapers, handily enough, Madeline thought, for she could now line the drawers with them. She folded them with laborious care; it was good heavy paper, not the cheap kind that Nonna read on a Sunday evening. Madeline glanced at the outside sheet of a Times, refolded it, and as she did so a name caught her eye. She saw that it was a marriage notice.

  Thane. Hellgarth. On December the third at St. George’s Kensington, Chester Thane (retired R.N.) to Hélène, only daughter of George Hellgarth and the late Mrs. Hellgarth, Windsor Terrace Gardens, Kensington.

  He had been married almost three months.

  When Madeline knew that Chester had married Hélène (and almost certainly for her money) some emotion ceased to live in her. She didn’t stop loving him, she couldn’t do that, but her attitude to life changed. That was when she dined out with Mr. Rozanne.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ said Isobel. ‘I can’t think what’s come over you.’

  Mr. Rozanne supplied Madeline with a special little dinner frock for the occasion, prune silk with lapis bindings, and she wore a vivid lipstick, knowing that men turned to look at her. Mr. Rozanne was a fussy host, and she realised how his anxiety to please must have galled Lilith. He had the waiters hovering about them, was choosy over food and wine, and made Madeline’s head ache from his sheer inability to take the outing placidly. He told her a great deal about Lilith that she would rather not have known. He had never really cared for her, he said, and could not think how he had ever accepted her condescension. He supposed that he had been blinded by her physical attractions; it was strange how that could influence a man, and he peered meaningly at Madeline. He spoke of Chester, kindly and sympathetically, so that the girl’s heart warmed to him. Everyone else had been so hard about him, Nonna and Uncle Luigi, Isobel Joyce and Miss Bates (most particularly Miss Bates), but now Mr. Rozanne was kind.

  It took all sorts to make a world, said Mr. Rozanne, and men in love did funny things. Chester couldn’t help not having been able to get his divorce, could he?

  ‘But his wife died,’ said Madeline, ‘she was killed in a motor accident, and then ‒ well, he went and married someone else.’

  Mr. Rozanne took a large mouthful of mousse speculatively, then he said, ‘I’m very sorry, Maddy, very sorry that this should happen to you! Ve vill make up for it one day; you are too young and pretty to suffer. Poor little girl!’ very kindly indeed.

  She could withstand flattery, but she could not steel herself against kindness. Helplessly she found her vision blurring, more so because the orchestra played ‘The Maid of the Mountains’ (Chester’s favourite tune) and she could hardly bear it. Mr. Rozanne saw her underlip tremble, and tactfully changed the subject.

  ‘The very first time that I saw you, Maddy, I knew how I felt about you. I knew. I said to myself, she is a child but she vill be beautiful. You are beautiful, you know, and any time you vant a frock, or a chic little hat, or, if you are very nice to me, a fur, I vill help you.’

  He called for coffee and liqueurs and bought himself an enormous cigar, determined to do the thing well. With the liqueur he soliloquised about his own childhood, his first love affair, a petty little seduction in a country lane, his feelings for Lilith, ultimately his feelings for Madeline. When he paid the bill, he glanced at her hopefully. ‘Now you vill show me your flat?’ he asked.

  They went out into the street, the myriad coloured lights of Piccadilly about them, with the headlamps for ever swirling round in a fiery circle. He took her arm over possessively.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t a flat really, it is just a bedroom.’

  ‘Vell, vat’s the matter vith that? It’s in Jermyn Street, isn’t it? Most of the flats there are only bedrooms.’

  ‘Mr. Rozanne, you’ve got this wrong. I can’t take you back.’

  He came to a standstill under a light, his face puzzled. Arriving at the conclusion that he had rushed his fences, he played for time. ‘Vell, if not to-night, some other day? I’m fond of you, Maddy, I’m villing to spend money on you.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ she answered quickly. ‘I ‒ I’m not what you think. I’m an ordinary girl who has had one unhappy love affair, so please don’t run away with any ideas about me.’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’ But obviously he was at a loss to understand what had happened.

  When they parted at the corner of Jermyn Street, she felt dismayed, because, as Isobel had said, this could not continue. She lay awake for hours listening to a suspiciously male voice arguing a shrilly female one in the bed-sitter next door.

  Now she did not know what to do.

  Madeline met Frank Greyston by accident in the street one morning in the late spring. He slouched over a canvas which was tucked under one arm and he smiled at her amiably. It was the morning that Madeline had learnt from Nonna that Luca was to marry the daughter of an Italian who kept a wine shop in Frith Street. He was making a very good match, said Nonna, because the wine shop would be of enormous help to Mario at the Venezia; they had always done good business together and would now do better. She nodded her wise old head to emphasise the point, for the business prospect pleased her.

  In one way Madeline was sorry that Luca was marrying; he had always been a friend, and this would take him away from her. When a man married, she knew that a girl felt differently about him.

  Frank was sloping along, blinking in the overbright sunshine which poured so joyously down Piccadilly. Seeing her, he stopped. Madeline had a morning off from the shop, and was spending it in making small purchases; Frank had only to dispose of the canvas, and then he would be free, so he suggested that they lunched together.

  They did not go to one of the more ostentatious restaurants, but to a little place off Shepherd’s Market, with windows open to the sunshine, and a clean pleasant atmosphere of its own. Unlike Mr. Rozanne, he chose food and wine without a fuss and he asked her about her life. He was easy to talk to, he had no veneer but was essentially real, and she could be frank with him. She told him about Mr. Rozanne.

  ‘Those men are all the same,’ he said. ‘It means, of course, that you’ll have to get another job.’

  ‘I suppose I’m queer, but I’m a sticker. I hate uprooting myself.’

  ‘That has been the reason for most of this world’s mistakes; all the same, I’d advise you to do it,’ and then, ‘I think the flat in Jermyn Street was a poor idea. I used to laugh at addresses; you know, the absurd people who can only live in SW1 or W1 and must get a Mayfair telephone number? All the same, when the only thing you know about a person is their name and address, both must act as some kind of tag.’

  ‘Yet I hated life with Nonna, it was all hugga-mugga, and I had to make a move somewhere. Rents were high.’

  ‘I’m afraid even that doesn’t make it the wise thing to have done.’

  ‘I can’t move again,’ she said helplessly.

  He looked at her with penetrating grey-green eyes. ‘Maybe you could take a holiday?’ he asked, and she remembered that she had never had one yet, and hardly knew the meaning of the word. ‘I
’m going to Norway next week,’ said Frank. ‘I go there to paint just before the snow disappears completely from the roadsides. I know a little hotel at the end of one of the fjords where it is rather amusing. Maybe we could go together?’

  There was silence; she wished that she was not speculating as to how much this suggestion entailed. He saw it.

  ‘No, Madeline, I don’t mean that. We would be companions and nothing more, because I’m not that sort of man. I’d like to give you the holiday. I’ve done well lately and can afford it; besides, it’s a bit dull alone. Do come with me, Norway’s a grand place.’ He saw the look in her eyes. ‘So that’s settled,’ he said.

  Madeline made no excuse at Rozanne’s. On the Monday she sent round a note saying that she wasn’t very well, and would have to give up her position there. That evening, when she was putting a few things together for the trip, she heard Mr. Rozanne’s voice on the landing outside, and the landlady piloting him and protesting at having to show him up. Hurriedly Madeline locked the door, and put out the light. She stood there, her back to the handle, pressing it firmly as though that would help her; she was quite unable to hide her consternation.

  ‘Maddy?’ she heard him say. He breathed heavily and she could imagine his bent, rather furtive figure in the dim light of the little landing. ‘Maddy? I know you are ill, but I have come to help.’ She did not stir. His fingers fluttered on the door, scrabbling like the scaling feet of a bird on a parapet. ‘Maddy?’ he kept saying. ‘Little Maddy?’

  It seemed to last for ever, she could hardly believe that he did not hear her heart thumping, until eventually he turned away, and began groping the rail down the stairs. It was a long time before she dared to continue with her packing.

  She told Nonna that she had the chance to go off for a holiday and Nonna did not ask questions. Uncle Giovanni had taken his final vows only last week, and Nonna was now in a ferment of dismay over it. All her plans had gone wrong; Uncle Giovanni as a monk was a failure, she lamented. In this mood she did not think much about Madeline.