The Golden Flame (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  The Golden Flame

  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 1941

  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

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  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

  PART ONE

  IN ITALY

  One

  I

  The little restaurant stood in a back street from the small sea-port town, which was making a great name for itself. In summer English artists came, and tucked their easels in the cobbled streets and painted. In winter aristocrats from Rome and Pisa, and the great cities of Europe came, because it was the right thing to do and the climate was so obliging. It was always spring in Amalia!

  The streets which led down to the sea were cobbled, and small canals threaded their way in and out of them, so that one might almost imagine it was a miniature Venice. Bridges spanned the canals, and on them the idle stood, and chatted by the hour. There was a fresh breeze here; it never grew stuffy like the Queen of the Adriatic; that was why people liked it so much, particularly honeymoon couples, who found it an auspicious background to their romance. Since it had become fashionable, grand casas had been built, where red geraniums brimmed over pale blue and green window boxes, and petunias were puce and royally blue, and flaunted their colours against white walls. There were magnolia trees in the roadways, and they blossomed in the summer and sent their heavenly verbena essence through the little place, so that people, even long after they had gone home, if they smelt magnolias would say: ‘Ah, that reminds me of Amalia.’

  It was fashionable. It was select.

  That was the belief which had brought the Padrone here to open his restaurant, with a golden galleon swinging before its doors, with little clacking shutters the colour of the skies, and an entrance hall banked with flowers, where he bowed to the ground to welcome honoured guests, or bowed perhaps not quite so much to the ground, if the guests were less honoured.

  The Padrone was a hard man in dealing with his staff, and he expected them to work. He was rich. He knew that his little Galleon restaurant would make a very great deal of money if it were handled with care, and no one could say that he was not careful. Some there were that he allowed to eat here without asking for a single lira in return, because he knew that their faces were well known, and that people would come from far to see the famous. Particularly film stars. People are so stupid about film stars.

  ‘It is the advertisement,’ he would say when his generosity was questioned.

  There was the silver grill with the golden flame under it; it was a fascinating flame, on which, it seemed, the whole well-being of this little restaurant depended. It flickered this way and that with the wind, susceptible to every breath that was breathed.

  There was the Maestro on his raised dais, and he was rather an old man, with kindly eyes, their blueness dimmed by years, and a smile on his sensitive mouth, which was whimsical with dreams. He played the violin, and he played because he loved it. It reminded him of those far off days when he had been a boy, in the woods of Tuscany. There had been such flowers there, such woods, such happiness! He had gathered daisies with large eyes that he had threaded together, looping stalk through stalk, and it had made him very glad. He had come here because the same daisies grew on the hill-sides and sometimes, when nobody looked (he was oversensitive to laughter) he would creep to the hills alone, and thread daisies again. His fingers had become curiously clumsy. He wished that he were more agile. Others would think that he was senile, but it was only the desire to recapture dreams that sent him to the green hills when the daisies grew there.

  He had travelled all over the world, and had studied at the great academies, for music was his life. He could hear the sound of C sharp minor in the dripping of a tap. When the waiters poured out Chianti into the big round glasses with the dancing figures cut into them, he could hear the exquisite harmony of A flat. That was music!

  ‘He is, of course, a little mad,’ said some, and tapped their heads significantly.

  Some might have thought that he had sunk in life to come here to this little restaurant, to play only to a crowd, some of whom did not even know the value of the violin which he tucked so lovingly under his chin; but they were wrong. He played because here he could play what he wished.

  ‘As long as it is music, good music,’ said the Padrone, who knew nothing of such things.

  So the Maestro played as he wished, and the chords quivered from his violin, and the girl at the piano listened wonderingly, because she recognized a genius. She was quite a poor girl, who had gone without food to learn music, and although she did not play very well, she would do always what the Maestro asked, and was very sweet. Her name was Matina.

  The waiters hurried to and fro, mostly Italians, but Jan was not Italian; he was younger than the others, with large dark eyes which asked questions of life, and a mouth which held promise for some woman.

  He had been born in the South of France.

  II

  Jan’s people had been poor fisher folk at Villefranche. Villefranche lies curled into the Cote d’Azur, with the mountains rising behind it, and the little tabacs at the street corners, and the fortress where Les Petits Chasseurs live, to the right.

  Jan’s people had been so poor that they had
been in the habit of sending Jan round to the hotel in the evenings when the dinner was over, to buy scraps from Madame there. She was good to the poor. She would shuffle scraps into a paper bag, and sell them for a few sous, and there would be enough for a whole family from those scraps, even though they were a strange assortment.

  She had a particular fancy for little Jan, with his sturdy brown legs, and his big brown eyes, which looked up at her quite reproachfully.

  ‘Hey, mon petit,’ she would say, and tweak him under the chin, or ruffle his dark curly hair.

  Once she took him into the office and set him on the desk, where there was a poll parrot in a cage, and a lot of bills blowing about in the wind.

  ‘You like my bird, hein?’ she demanded.

  The parrot looked like an old lady without her wig. It stuck its head through the wires and screamed ‘Cochon, Cochon.’

  ‘Bad bird,’ said Madame, flipping him with a quill pen. ‘My clients, they come here, and the gentlemen they teach him not so nice a language. A pity! But there!’

  Then she looked again at Jan, and perhaps because she liked the look of him, she gave him a whole meringue to himself. There had been trouble about the meringues the previous night, and the guests had complained that the cream was sour. They were a finicky lot. Naturally Jan did not know of the complaints, and he was so young that he did not notice if the cream was sour. Meringues were something new to him; he believed they were angel’s food from heaven. He would never have believed that anything could taste so delicious.

  He sat there on the desk, with his sturdy brown legs dangling, and his small daring mouth covered with white wisps of cream. He thought then that when he grew up, he would work in a hotel where they had delicious things like that to eat. He would not be a fisherman and always poor like his father, who lived on scraps. He could see nothing attractive about going out in the trawler with the fish, which were always so cold and so wet, and somehow he felt sorry for them when they lay gasping and drying in the hold. They looked ugly. He was repelled by them.

  A fisherman’s life was rotten, he decided, because it was even less entertaining to be set with his mother and his sisters to darn the enormous nets sprawled out on the cobbles of Villefranche to dry. There the family would sit by the hour, and he had been taught to darn and to mend so that he could be helpful. Nets were valuable and must be kept in repair.

  ‘I hate it,’ he would say rebelliously.

  His mother would slap him because she lost her temper very easily and more easily since times had become so hard.

  ‘It is all nonsense,’ she told him, ‘sheer nonsense! You will have to be a fisherman and wear a blue jersey. All your father’s people were fishermen. It is no use kicking against it.’

  ‘I want to work in the hotel, because they give you meringues,’ he said.

  ‘Petit mechant!’ and she slapped him again more vigorously. ‘Do you suppose that they would give you meringues if you worked there?’ He had not thought of that, and because it worried him a little he preferred not to think of it. But the idea of working in an hotel had been sown on fertile soil, and he did not mean to give it up. He set it as his heaven, and he meant to get there somehow, even though all his family were determined that he should be a fisherman.

  As he grew older, Madame who ran the hotel was not so anxious to see him, because now that he worked with the boat he smelt of fish. He was a long, lean lad and he had to go out in the trawlers, which made it very difficult to get rid of the smell which Madame did not like. Directly he discovered how she felt, he made it a rule, before visiting her, to bathe in the sea. He swam well. He would run to the end of the breakwater and dive through the transparent blue water, cutting down to the very bottom and up again, shaking the water from his hair. Then he would put on his Sunday clothes, the ones which were kept for very best, and like that he felt that he could go up to the hotel for scraps.

  He had a long raggle-taggle family younger than he was, and his mother was very anxious to send little Henri to visit Madame, because he was an engaging child of five, with curly hair bright golden, which attracted people, because they thought that he looked so very English.

  Jan did not like the idea of Henri going to the hotel to see Madame, for he had his own plans.

  ‘I will always get more,’ he promised, and he proved this to be true. When he went in his Sunday clothes Madame greeted him with enthusiasm, and one day, when she felt to be in a particularly lavish mood, she gave him the chicken which nobody would eat because it smelt so badly. Then there was the sausage too; there happened to be a surfeit of sausage in the hotel, and a Spanish artist who paid very good money to come here, had thrown it in disgust across the salle a manger at lunch, and had said: ‘Curse all sausages!’ Madame had had a lot more ready in the larder, and because of this scene she gave some to Jan.

  Jan thanked her profusely and promised that God would bless her. She replied that she hoped He would, because she needed it.

  Jan was only sixteen that summer when there was trouble at the hotel, but he was a tall sixteen and good to look upon.

  The staff had been very discontented for some time. Madame considered that she was kindness itself to the poor, though she always insisted on a few sous to pay for whatever was doled out to them, and the material given in exchange for the sous was hardly of the first quality, and sometimes definitely bad; but she was extremely close with the staff. She did not believe in extravagance.

  For a long time the employees had grumbled about the length of hours which she expected them to work, and the poorness of the food which she required them to eat, but being poor and stupid they did not know how to effect a change. There arrived a man from Cannes, who was the chatty kind, and he told them of the lovely hotels there, where people give five pound tips (in fine English notes), and where there was good food, and excellent quarters, and hours off, all of which were intensely satisfying. Naturally, this unsettled the staff very much indeed.

  One of them made an expedition into Cannes to see an uncle of his, who was a hall porter in a big hotel. The hall porter, who had just been lucky in having a couple of millionaires stay there, sent him home with exalted ideas.

  ‘Come to Cannes,’ said the hall porter, slapping his pockets.

  To Cannes they went. Three lean-looking waiters, and Guillaume, the little washer-up, who was a hunchback and rather pathetic, but who had ambitions; also there was Louis, who helped with the luggage and had a gammy foot, which hindered him very mercifully, so that he could not fulfil his military obligations to the country.

  Jan heard of all this.

  He went hurriedly to the sea and bathed, coming up refreshed and shining, and quite sure that now he did not smell of fish. He put on his best clothes, and arrived at the hotel, which naturally was in a state of great confusion.

  Madame was rushing about, having recovered from the hysterics into which she had thrown herself immediately that she knew the bad news. She was indignant and weeping by turns, and she had armed herself with a bottle of the best Cognac in one hand, and a fan in the other.

  ‘Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!’ said Madame, and she panted for breath, whilst her big bosom, buttoned into shining jet, heaved riotously, as though it would burst its bonds.

  Jan stood there, his fisherman’s cap in his hand. He said: ‘I am here, Madame.’

  She stared at him. ‘You, mon petit; what can you do?’

  ‘I can wait at table. I have watched the way that it is done, peeping up through the flowers in the window-boxes. I know, Madame, and I want to be a waiter. Will you not try me?’

  Madame was in a flurry.

  She had this evening a most important patron coming to stay, all the way from America, where Madame believed that the streets were paved with gold, and that everything was exceedingly prosperous. She always did her best for Americans, because she knew that through them she could make ‘my little ’otel’ pay very well indeed. They did not look into the trickier details of bills; they w
ere very willing lambs to be fleeced.

  It would be ghastly to have the rich American appear at the hotel to-day, with no waiters and no washer-up, and nothing wherewith to greet him, as he should be greeted.

  She looked at Jan.

  He was good to look upon, for he had intelligent dark eyes, and an olive skin. He looked more like a young lover than a fisherman, and Madame was romantically-minded even though her waist had outstripped embraces.

  ‘You can wait?’ she asked.

  ‘Oui, Madame.’

  She did not hesitate any longer.

  She bustled him into the servants’ quarters, and because he himself had been brought up in a poor back alley of a house, it appeared to be like a palace. She rampaged through an old chest, bringing out clothes that she had put by. They had belonged to her husband, who had been a head waiter, who had swept her off her feet in her impressionable spring. She in her turn had swept him off his feet by such gentle and studied neglect that he went into an early decline. But ‘Bien,’ said Madame, who had disliked him later. ‘Tres bien.’ Now she brought out some of his old clothes and Jan thought the suit was divine. Trousers in fine woollen material, a white shirt, and a coat with long tails like a swallow.

  ‘Get into them,’ she demanded.

  He got into them, exchanging his jersey and blue trousers of coarse serge only too willingly. The things fitted him not too badly, and he believed that he looked to be quite a gentleman in them. Pride swelled his breast, as he surveyed himself in the glass.

  ‘So,’ said Madame approvingly.

  She had hired in old Pierre, who lived down the street. Old Pierre was bent double, but years ago he had waited at an hotel in Monte Carlo, where a certain Serene Highness had stayed, which gave him a cachet. It was a very famous hotel indeed.

  ‘You, Pierre, will direct him,’ said Madame, and indicated Jan in his new clothes.

  So Pierre directed Jan, and very to the point was Pierre. He insisted on this and that. If Jan had not been so crazy to get accepted for good into the hotel, he would have chafed against Pierre’s acid tongue, but he learnt quickly, and he absorbed the knowledge that he acquired, and did his best by it.