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

by Ursula Bloom

  ‘But you ought to have married,’ said Madeline.

  ‘If you ask me, marriage isn’t so good. It means hanging round after some man, washing his bits, superintending his home, and getting no fun.’

  ‘But where is all this leading you?’

  ‘I don’t see that matters, for where does any life lead you, if it comes to that? This is fun, and I’m a lucky girl to be living here with you.’ She was holding on to the share in Madeline’s household, determined not to let go.

  Madeline felt her own loyalty glow with pride. She knew that whatever happened she couldn’t possibly turn Sheila out, because she owed her that much. Half of her was very proud.

  The work at Elfrida’s was hard, they expected more of their employees than Rozanne’s had done, and made fewer excuses for shortcomings. But Madeline settled down into the job, working hard at it, only to find, in an incredibly short time, that both Isobel and Mr. Rozanne knew that she was there. Well, she might have foreseen that. He came round to congratulate her.

  ‘You have done vell for yourself,’ he said approvingly. ‘A clever girl, a very clever girl,’ for he appreciated people who did well.

  Remembering the forthcomingness of Mr. Rozanne, Madeline was cautious, but Isobel told her privately that she need not be alarmed, because Mr. Rozanne had found a new charmer, a large, full-bosomed woman, at least twice his height, brilliant-eyed, the owner of a profitable hat shop in Wardour Street. Mr. Rozanne was paying attention to her; they went out to dinner often, they did theatres, and they appeared to be getting on very well together.

  ‘Well, that’s one good thing,’ said Madeline, thankful that someone else was taking him from her. She went round to see Nonna a good deal later, when everything had settled down a little. The shop was unchanged. There were Nonna and Uncle Luigi with the interminable work of serving the customers, and the same old rackety conversation flowing through the place; there was the same smell of merluzzo and spices. Nonna hailed her ecstatically.

  ‘Oh, my bimba,’ screamed Nonna, ‘for how long is it that you have forgotten me? Where have you been, and your poor mamma so ill?’

  ‘What? Not again?’

  ‘I did always said that it was not good to have the bambino in that wicked, wicked hospital. We never have it so before and it is not nice. Your mamma have to go back for the operation.’ Nonna gripped her own stomach closely, with two embracing hands, and controlled herself into a gesture significant of extreme agony. ‘Oh, it is so bad, so bad,’ moaned Nonna, ‘but she is more well now. Maybe you see her?’

  ‘Of course I will. What has been the matter?’

  Nonna then waved her hands upwards in the manner of an excavator dragging up sludge from a ditch. ‘Everything he come out,’ said Nonna, ‘all of it. No more bambino. Not’ing. I say they make your poor mamma only ’arf a woman, and that is no good. Oh, that hospital!’

  ‘But I am sure that they did their best for her.’

  Nonna shook her head. ‘You, like all the rest, stick up so for that hospital. I know better. We never have a bambino in the hospital before, and now what ’appen? The bambino die. Nobody fault, you say, they do their best, but the bambino die. So.’

  Madeline tactfully changed the subject, ‘And how are my uncles?’

  ‘Uncle Luigi is well, he’s always well, but he drink a lot, and he spend a lot. Uncle Tony not well, never well; the delicatessen no good, says Uncle Tony; I say Uncle Tony no good. That the trouble there, not’ing no good! Now Uncle Giovanni ‒ ah, your Uncle Giovanni. He is a monk now, he says many prayers and sings many Aves. The abbot say that Uncle Giovanni will be a saint.’ She smiled in supreme satisfaction.

  ‘Oh,’ said Madeline.

  She told Nonna that she had a flat, and that a girl friend was living with her; Nonna thought that was very nice, and said that she must bring the girl friend to supper, and they would have the best chianti, and a beautiful chicken done only as Nonna could do it in lots of oil and garlic. It would be a festa, and the chicken would be very delicious, said Nonna beaming with self-praise.

  Madeline went to the hospital to see her mamma, and was quite shocked at the change that had taken place in her. In the hospital bed lay Mamma, gone very thin, her warm apricot skin suddenly wrinkled and sallow, grown old, and, worst of all, crowned by hair streaked with grey. Mario was a vile husband, she told Madeline, and she had been a fool to marry him; he was mean with his money and thought of nothing but the Venezia, expecting her to work harder than ever Nonna had done, and God alone knew that was hard enough!

  ‘What about Luca?’ asked Madeline.

  Mamma did not melt; she said grudgingly that Luca appeared to be happily married to Maria, the daughter of the wine shop, and everything was going excellently. It was a great pity that Madeline had not married him, because he was quite a nice boy ‒ at this point Mamma appeared to forget conveniently that her mischief-making had been the reason why Luca and Madeline had quarrelled. Luca was expecting his first child in the autumn, and very pleased about it. Then she returned to her own troubles; because everything had gone wrong with Mamma she loathed life, and the inside that gave her so much trouble, and the husband who was such a slave driver.

  Madeline left flowers and fruit, all accepted apparently as a daughterly duty by Mamma, who looked at them avidly, having obviously thought that they could, with advantage, have been more.

  She came away.

  At home Sheila was entertaining; Madeline knew it the moment that she opened the door, for she heard a suspiciously male voice, and was immediately sorry that she had returned so soon. She didn’t want to catch Sheila out at the peccadilloes which she hoped were mere suspicions in her own mind. As she went into the sitting-room she saw Sheila and a strange man sprawled on the sofa and laughing. Neither of them heard Madeline enter, and when they did, he looked up rather uncomfortably and then sprung to his feet.

  ‘I must be going now,’ he said.

  A parcel arrived from Copenhagen; it had been delayed on its journey, and when she opened it Madeline saw a string of clear amber, very large, pale as thick honey, and transparent.

  A fairing for my darling, was the message with it, and, at the bottom of the card Frank had scrawled, Life is all surprises, isn’t it? I’m going to the States on special work, it has all been fixed now, and you’ll see I’ll come back famous.

  Madeline was worried. She hated the thought that the Atlantic would lie between them, for it seemed that her own life had suddenly taken a plunge away from him. She had cared for him more than she had really known; a quite futile love, because Frank was not a marrying man.

  In some ways she envied Sheila, who could always forget a disappointing yesterday in the joy of to-day. Yet Madeline was appalled by her laxity. Sheila had no morals at all, though she did manage to wrest joy from living, floating through a seventh Heaven of delight, or sinking back into abysmal depths from which she expected to be rescued.

  Worried about her mother, Madeline paid dutiful but dull visits to the hospital to listen to the tale of woe which never lessened. She went to see Luca, and met his wife, a large-eyed Italian girl, amiable and obviously a most suitable match. Madeline tried to persuade Luca to speak to his father about his treatment of her mamma, but Luca was most unwilling. He said, with truth, that one got no thanks for interfering with other people’s matrimonial affairs, even if the other people happened to be parents; surely Madeline understood that? Madeline realised it, but felt that an effort should have been made on her mother’s behalf, and was disappointed in Luca. He had put on a little weight, he looked better and prosperous, and had an excellent house in Greek Street, with a surplus of overpowering furniture and fanciful pictures, and a couple of pot palms left over from the Venezia. But the place was airless, and as she left, Madeline felt that there was only the smallest link left between her and the man who had visited her in her Bloomsbury room and had sat drinking coffee and eating Philippino biscuits so short a time ago.

  When
she got home she again had the feeling that someone was there. She heard Sheila laughing in the bedroom; the laugh was girlishly irritating, and made Madeline wince. She wished that Shelia would not do this sort of thing, yet hadn’t the heart to turn her out because her loyalty pulled so hard. Going into the sitting-room, she saw a completely strange young man sitting there, looking at her in uncomfortable surprise. He was slight and clear-shaven, with prominent teeth, and had intelligent eyes.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.

  ‘Are you a friend of Sheila’s?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. My friend is in there with her, and I’m waiting.’ He had the grace to redden.

  ‘It’s my flat,’ said Madeline, and she was very angry.

  ‘Sheila lodges with me. I ‒’ She stopped short. ‘Oh, I do wish she wouldn’t do this sort of thing!’

  He looked at her in aggrieved surprise. ‘I rather wish my friend wouldn’t, and then cart me along with him, and leave me like a spare parcel in the sitting-room. You must admit that it is pretty low of them both.’

  Madeline perched on the arm of a chair and brought out the shagreen cigarette case that Frank had bought her in Bergen. She offered a cigarette to him. ‘Sheila was the vicar’s daughter in my home village,’ she explained.

  ‘They always are, I believe.’

  ‘You think that isn’t true? Well, it happens to be perfectly true. I was a village child and admired her; then I met her the other day doing this sort of thing, and it may sound silly, but I wanted to reform her. I dare say that sounds like a lie too?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘There isn’t a chance of reforming her.’

  He was staring at her and trying to sum her up. Was she or wasn’t she? He couldn’t be sure, but rather thought that she wasn’t, which made it all the more awkward. It was unusual for Val Peters to doubt his own perspicacity, but he had to admit that this girl had him beat! The setting, too, wasn’t the usual flat of the light lady, and, damn it all, what she said might be true. Sheila might be the vicar’s daughter, though he thought that was a bit hackneyed! Val, in his own language, had considered himself to be a judge of vintage and virginity, but suddenly he was at a loss. She isn’t, he told himself.

  ‘What would you do?’ asked Madeline, blowing the smoke down her nostrils. She was too madonna-like for the cigarette, he thought.

  ‘I’d tell her I wouldn’t have it.’

  ‘I have done, and she laughs. If I had not this disturbing sense of loyalty to her it would be so much easier.’

  ‘You must have extraordinary standards.’

  ‘Compared to yours?’

  He laughed at that. ‘I’m a poet, and everybody knows that poets have no standards at all. Besides, I drink too much; I always have done, I always shall, I like it. I’ve drunk too much ever since I was a kid. My mother didn’t like water, thought it was bad for one, unless it had brandy in it, so that gave me the idea.’

  ‘But if you persist in drinking too much it’ll kill you?’

  ‘I know, but I’d rather die comfortably pickled than just ordinarily stone sober. We’ve all got to die at some time. Damn it all, it’s my own life, why shouldn’t I jeopardise it if I wish? Any man can choose pistols or swords.’

  ‘I’d hate to die young,’ said Madeline.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t; that is one of the foolish beliefs that people pretend to foster. Those whom the Gods love die young! I’d rather go out with all my faculties, in my hey-day, than dodder into the slippered pantaloon of senility.’

  They sat on talking; she found him most attractive. He told her a little about himself. Val Peters was the playboy son of an old man, who had doted on him and had spoiled him, believing that everything he did was clever. Val had always been too rich. His mother dying when he was thirteen, his father followed soon after, since when Val had managed his own life in his own inimitable way. Believing that he had a call in that direction, he had gone into Fleet Street and had quickly got into the routine of the Cheshire Cheese, the Cock and the Mitre. Drifting from journalism to literature, he made the right friends. His first book of poems had an instant success, but the chance of a great future had never intrigued him, for, by then, the seeds of drink were sown within him that he could not concentrate on much else.

  Listening to him, for he talked amusingly, Madeline forgot Sheila in the next room; she forgot everything save that she had the morbid premonition that all men came into her life too late to be saved. Chester, who ought to have been saved from himself; Frank, with his perilous lung disease; and now Val, with this strong trait that he petted and coaxed and did not intend to forget.

  Because she knew even then that Val had come to stay.

  It was Val who rescued her from Sheila.

  They went out and about together, and he was knowledgeable on London. He read her his poems, and in them she saw real beauty which she had until now never realised was possible in the written word. She had been able to see it in pictures, in the fecund meadow behind the Hertfordshire cottage, in Frank’s art in Norway, in a spring wood, but suddenly Val showed it to her in black and white on a printed page, thumbnail sketches into which beauty was so crowded that it astonished her.

  ‘You’re very clever,’ she said humbly.

  ‘No, I just have a kink that way. It is all a matter of using the eyes to see with, not to sleep with,’ and he laughed.

  A shame that so brilliant a young man should be dying on his feet, she thought, because she was horrified at what he could drink.

  They dined out a good deal at little restaurants. The White Tower, Josef’s, the Chinese Restaurant, going from one to the other in the early autumn evenings, and very happy together.

  He said, ‘You ought to get rid of that girl friend, she’s no good to you, you know.’

  ‘But where can she go?’

  ‘Where do such women go?’

  Madeline disliked the allusion ‘such women,’ it distressed her. ‘Please don’t talk of Sheila like that.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Sheila is like that; she can’t help it, and I’m not blaming her, but if she will behave that way you simply must give her up, or get yourself classed as being in the same boat.’

  He was right; she knew she was a fool to cling to the tattered remnants of loyalty in the way that she was doing, but it was something difficult to overcome. She could not interest herself in Elfrida’s these days as once she had interested herself in Rozanne’s. Perhaps she was changing and had grown past frock shops; Frank and Val, in their connection with the three arts, had lifted her away from the places that once she thought had represented sheer beauty. Everything worked by steps in her world; Nonna’s to Rozanne’s, Rozanne’s to Chester, Chester to Frank. But Frank and Norway were the highest step of all, standing for something above all else in her life, something that she was afraid she could never touch again.

  She did not see Val actually drunk for a long time, because he was one of those men who never showed what was happening to him; then one night, when they were dining out, he suddenly put his hands over a face gone chalk-white and said, ‘Afraid it’s got me, Madeline. I’m ashamed of myself, but it’s got me cold, and I’m drunk.’

  It was in Josef’s at very close quarters with one’s neighbours, for Josef’s was small, though luckily they had booked a table near the door. She got the waiter to call a taxi, and bundled Val into it. It wasn’t easy, because his body sagged, the energy seemed to have gone from his legs, his arms dripped, reminding her of a couple of clothes pegs that had turned round on the line in the Hertfordshire garden, and now hung in a dangling, ineffective way. The waiter had to help, he had to be tipped; she thrust her hand down into Val’s pockets for the money. Then, because she didn’t know where to take him, she took him home with her.

  Mercifully, Sheila was out and she managed to get Val up the one shallow flight of stairs into the sitting-room; she laid him down on the sofa, getting water for him, and for a time he sprawled there, s
till with that unreal whiteness and his lips blue, staring up at her as though he did not recognise her. Afraid of the blueness, she fetched a hot-water bottle and put a blanket over him. Then took up her vigil beside him, because he fell asleep.

  His pocket-book slipped on to the floor and lay open; retrieving it, she saw a half-written verse. It was one of the most beautiful verses that she had ever read, a crystal of thought, awaking in her own mind a hundred responsive raptures. It seemed incongruous that this drunken man lying on her sofa could for a moment have conceived so fair an idea. He was worth saving, she told herself, much more worth saving than Sheila, and she had never realised it before.

  It was one o’clock when Sheila came bursting in, in a noisy, cheery mood, having said ostentatious noisy goodbyes to somebody in the street below the window. She stopped dead on seeing Val. ‘Oh, my goodness! A debauch!’ said Sheila, and began to giggle.

  ‘Please don’t.’

  Surprised at Madeline’s seriousness, she pulled herself together. ‘Oh, so you’re going to be glum about it. He’s drunk, isn’t he? I wonder you have not met him that way before.’

  Madeline said coldly, ‘You’ve had enough too.’

  ‘I dare say, but at least I can move about. Thank God I may get tiddly, but my legs and arms still work.’

  ‘Sheila, this can’t go on. After to-night I want my flat to myself. I’ve done my best for you, but it hasn’t worked. I wanted to save you because once you were kind to me, and I have thought of you for years, and ‒ and in a funny sort of way ‒ loved you. But I can’t help you, because you treat me like this, and you must find somewhere else to go.’

  Her tone sobered Sheila up. She shook with nervousness, and fortunately she took the wrong method of attack, for she was torn between bursting into tears and throwing herself on Madeline’s mercy (which would undoubtedly have worked the oracle) or bullying her way through; the drink that she had had made her bully. ‘So that’s it,’ she said, ‘posing as being so good, and all that, and you want your flat to yourself for you and him!’ She indicated Val, who had completely ceased to take any interest in the proceedings and might as well have been a corpse for all the good he was to an argument.