The Golden Flame (Timeless Classics Collection)

by Ursula Bloom

  All that was past.

  He was standing watching the girl that he had never really loved at all. Watching her climb up his stairs to her own room.

  He was startled at the feelings it aroused in himself. He cared for her more than he thought!

  ‘It won’t do,’ he told himself as he turned into his small spare room, ‘it won’t do.’

  IV

  In the next couple of years Luis developed. At that particular moment on the stairs, Jan had wondered whether his whole life and thoughts would not ultimately centre around Matina, but they swerved suddenly, and centred on the child.

  He showed remarkable progress.

  By the time that he was six, and it never seemed that a whole six years could have gone by since that night in Amalia when he had been born, neighbours spoke of his cleverness with his little violin, and sometimes, on high days and holidays he stood up in the restaurant, and played for clients, whilst Matina accompanied him on the piano.

  The clients approved, and Jan was only afraid lest they should spoil the child, and give him too great a sense of his self-importance. He needed no encouragement along those lines.

  Quite early in his life Jan had found that there was some elusive quality about this boy. It was the curious feeling that they could never meet. They seemed to be apart, and unable to bridge the gulf. It might have been that he did not understand the child, it might have been that the child did not understand him. Whichever it was, it had the same effect, and they could not meet on mutual ground.

  ‘As he grows older, you will grow nearer,’ said Matina.

  But Jan did not think that would be so; he thought that they would grow further part, for he had an idea that Luis had set his heart upon a star, the star of music, and that in his soul he despised the little restaurant where Jan and Matina worked so hard, so that he might have suitable music lessons, and training for life.

  Luis was not a child of humble things; he did not like them.

  ‘One day I will be rich,’ he told them.

  ‘And then,’ said Matina, ‘you will buy me a beautiful silver fox fur to keep me warm in cold England.’

  ‘I will buy the most beautiful violin in the world,’ he replied.

  She glanced at him wonderingly. Surely, she told herself, it could not be that both of them were setting their hearts on a child who would, in the end, betray them.

  ‘But you love us?’ she asked him.

  He said: ‘All children love their parents.’

  There was so little of Jan or Josette in him, and sometimes she wondered if perhaps he had not inherited something from Jan’s mother. Often they had talked of the time at Villefranche, and the frowsty room, and the woman who had had too many children and who could love no more.

  ‘He is like your mother,’ she said to Jan once, but he denied it quickly.

  ‘He is going through phases; all children go through phases; he will change,’ he said.

  The restaurant flourished.

  There were difficult moments, because all the time they were faced with the bitter resentment of Mr. Campretti in his big, but old-fashioned restaurant, at the corner of the street. Now, Jan knew that Matina had been quite right when she had said that he was jealous, and that he would not want to buy the little place unless it threatened his own trade.

  Yet all Soho was made of restaurants, streets of them, jostling one another, nudging one another, a host of little cluttering restaurants, why in the world should Mr. Campretti be so grudging about this one?

  One day he had a man distributing handbills outside in the street. The man was supposed to stand actually outside Mr. Campretti’s, but he moved downwards in the gutter, and Jan saw him actually outside his own door, offering the little bills to his own clients. One was brought into the shop; the client laughed about it.

  ‘You’ll have to look to your own laurels, my lad,’ he said, ‘that fellow down the street means to get your trade!’

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ said Jan.

  However he could not have a tout in the gutter offering handbills about another restaurant actually at his own front door, so that evening he and Matina wrote a note to Mr. Campretti, and asked that he would not do it again. They were polite. They said that they realized that a mistake had been made, and that the man had overstepped his instructions, but would Mr. Campretti see that it did not happen again?

  ‘Surely he will not be angry?’ said Matina dubiously, because she was afraid of annoying him.

  ‘That can’t be helped,’ said Jan.

  Mr. Campretti was extremely angry.

  Not only did the man continue to stand in the gutter with his handbills, and give them away, even to Jan’s own customers, but Mr. Campretti himself came into his own doorway with the baskets of smilax, and the fresh white paint, and the smell of risotto and fritto misto coming gently out into the street, and there he would openly laugh at them.

  It could not go on.

  One day Matina took the law into her own hands, and she went to see Mr. Campretti, without telling Jan anything about it. She went in the middle afternoon, when lunches were over, and she found Mr. Campretti sitting in the back of the restaurant, drinking strong black coffee and reading a foreign newspaper.

  Nobody else was about.

  Matina went in very quietly and she came to a standstill beside Mr. Campretti’s chair. She had deliberately made herself look her best, and was wearing her Sunday frock, and the vivid blue shawl, which she kept for high days and holidays, but she wanted to give him the impression that their little restaurant was doing very well.

  ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ she said, ‘but could I have a word with you?’

  Mr. Campretti had not heard her come in. He looked up and stared. He had had a comfortable lunch, and a patron had been kind and had treated him to Napoleon brandy. Mr. Campretti always found that brandy gave him a feeling of delight, and inner satisfaction. He liked it enormously. He was now in that state of bliss when nobody could have irritated him.

  ‘Sit down,’ said he very affably.

  ‘It is about our little restaurant, the Amalia,’ she said simply, and sat down opposite to him.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ said Mr. Campretti, and he was very calm. ‘What I’d like to know is, what you are doing there with that young fellow. You’re not his wife.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I knew his wife.’

  ‘A dancing girl, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She did dance,’ said Matina slowly. She knew that Mr. Campretti was not the kind of man who would understand that sort of thing. He had no emotional depths. Josette’s dancing was something that he could not have grasped.

  ‘What do you want to see me about?’ he asked.

  ‘Those handbills. It is not fair of you to offer them just outside our door.’

  Mr. Campretti began to laugh, and, when he laughed his fat rolled about, and his eyes became smaller and more slotted than ever.

  ‘So that’s it,’ he said, ‘the young man sent you round; found his silly letter did no good, and so sent you round to see me!’

  ‘Jan doesn’t know that I have come. This was my own idea.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mr. Campretti, and he poured himself out some more black coffee, and drank it noisily.

  ‘It is so unfair on us, we would not do it to you,’ she said gently.

  ‘I can offer handbills as I wish.’

  ‘But not to our clients outside our very door.’

  ‘They were my clients once; you took them from me.’

  ‘Never deliberately,’ said Matina, ‘we bought the place and opened it up; if they came, it was of their own free will, we did not badger them.’

  ‘No, but you got them just the same.’

  She saw that it would be useless to quarrel with him, and changed the subject.

  ‘All our savings are in the Amalia, Mr. Campretti.’

  But he was not thinking of what she was saying. ‘You are a good-looking girl, aren’t you?’
he said.

  ‘Good-looking? Certainly not, I am very plain and ordinary, besides that is nothing to do with what we are talking about.

  ‘It has everything to do with it.’ He drew his chair a shade closer, and smiled at her. The smile was horrible; it struck her that there was something quite sinister about him at this particular moment. ‘I have a proposition to make. It is now some years since my wife died.’ He crossed himself religiously.

  ‘I only want to talk about our restaurant,’ urged Matina, with a sudden realization that this was going further than she had intended and that she was much disturbed by it.

  ‘I want to talk about you. I will stop the handbills. I will stop trying to worry your trade, but you must be nice to me.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

  ‘You must be nice to me! Come, it is no use pretending that I shock you. I know that you have come over with this man, and are not his wife. I also have no wife.’

  She got up, aware that her knees had gone very weak, and that she was not sure whether her legs would hold her up at all. She felt terrible. She stood there for a moment, clutching at her shawl and swaying as though in truth those legs would not carry her. Then she spoke, and her voice had gone thick with anger.

  ‘I would never do what you suggest. I would never come near your horrible shop again. There must be some way of stopping your interfering with us, and our trade, in the way that you are doing, some other means. I shall go to the police.’

  He still sat there eyeing her with those cunning little eyes of his, and fingering the cup of coffee, with the smear where it had run up the side as he had put it into his mouth.

  ‘It is your word against mine! You have no witness. I have a right to say what I will, and I tell you, you have made a big mistake refusing. Now I will harm you. I will ruin you, and your man, and drag you into the gutter. You will see. I will ruin you!’

  She walked to the door, and she had the feeling that the floor was a long way off, and somehow in some fantastic manner her head had grown close to the ceiling.

  ‘I am not afraid,’ she said.

  Only when she stumbled into the street was she aware of the delicious coolness of the air, and how hot it must have been inside that fetid little restaurant. She did not know what to do. She was alarmed to tell Jan the truth in case he rushed into Mr. Campretti’s, and knocked him down; she was terrified for the future.

  It was worse that Jan should see her coming, for he was in the doorway looking up the street as it was time that Luis returned from his violin lesson over the milk shop. Jan knew at once that something was wrong, for the legs refused to hold Matina up properly and she dragged herself along.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I am all right.’

  He took her into the little house, and sat there chafing her hands, and slowly she told him the story, making him promise first that he would take no action. He was extraordinarily self-controlled. She knew that the dark red blood had suddenly flowed to his face, and that his hands had turned hot and gripping, and that he was very angry.

  ‘I want to go in there and knock him down,’ he said.

  ‘If you do, Jan, you will put everybody in the wrong. That is the very thing that he wants you to do, you know.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I should go to the police. It cannot be allowed that he distracts our customers with the handbills in the gutter.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Jan, ‘I will go now. I will go right away.’

  In the doorway he hesitated for a moment. It would have given him such infinite satisfaction if he could have gone striding into the restaurant, and have landed his clenched fist straight into the pulpy face of Mr. Campretti. At the same time, Matina was right, and it would be madness. Exquisite madness, but craziness, just the same.

  He went to the police station.

  They were very kind. They understood the difficulty and suggested that they should speak to Mr. Campretti, and warn him that unless he changed his procedure, they would be instructed to take action against him.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jan.

  The next day the man was not giving away handbills, and Jan had the comfortable feeling of a battle won. But Matina was not happy about it. She thought that they might have made a deadly enemy.

  V

  No more handbills were given away, but Mr. Campretti had developed a trying habit of making insulting remarks about them whenever he saw them. They knew quite well that he alluded to them bitterly when talking to his patrons. He had told everybody that they were not married, and ought to be. He had laughed about it.

  Occasionally clients who went first to one restaurant and then to the other, would mention the fact that ‘old Campretti seemed to have got his knife into them’. It was a sharp knife, too, and he twisted it this way and that to his heart’s content.

  ‘But he will not be able to hurt us,’ said Jan with that optimism which the years had given back to him. ‘We will give our clients good food for their money, and they will continue to come to us. He has no Matina to play the piano at eventide for his customers, and no little Luis to play the violin,’ and he patted the child’s dark head affectionately.

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘we shall win through.’

  But at the same time the trouble with Mr. Campretti was one which she wished that she could have avoided, although it had been there from the very beginning.

  She would have given much at this particular juncture in her life to have had a word with the old Maestro who always gave such excellent advice, but he was in Amalia where, from his occasional brief letters, they gathered life was not what it once had been. People seemed to have less money, or to be more careful with it. Gone were the days of so much champagne, and notes sent up to the Maestro in delicate appreciation of his efforts on their behalf. Everything had changed, he wrote.

  Madame Hubac came across from the milk shop one afternoon. She dressed herself up with much of her past splendour. She did not mind the little boys who laughed at her as she sailed by, with her yards of black chiffon, and her tight fitting satin across her large bosom and the imitation flowers and the large picture hat.

  She came into the Amalia to see Jan and Matina.

  ‘It is about Luis,’ she said, and sank down into a chair.

  ‘Surely he has not been troublesome?’ they asked.

  She said, No! Luis was always the perfect pupil. He had never disagreed with her for a moment, and he was most apt at following her instructions. It was not that at all. It was that he was so clever that he had outstripped the teacher. Now it was impossible for her to teach him any more, and because she was an honest woman, and sincerely loved music, she came to tell them that they must send him to somebody who was more clever.

  But who, they asked, who?

  She named a very famous violinist. She said that he accepted very few pupils, but that if he would accept this child he could make him. She had brought the address on a piece of paper, which she produced out of an enormous handbag. She said that he might be expensive, but if once he understood how great a genius was the boy, undoubtedly he would reduce his fees. She produced another piece of paper on which she had written her opinion of Luis’s work.

  ‘You must show him this,’ she said, ‘he will remember me. We played once at the Opera House in Madrid. He must remember me.’

  ‘Jan and I will go to see him together,’ said Matina.

  VI

  Matina felt very tired.

  She knew that at this particular juncture she was losing faith with life; she was afraid for the future. She loved Jan so much that now all she asked was to serve him, but there were moments when it was an exquisite cruelty living here like this at all. Moments when she wanted to tear herself away, yet did not know how to do it.

  She could not go on sacrificing everything for a man who did not love her. Particularly not, when she loved him so much. The Padrone had warned her that it was mad
ness to come to him, but she had then been beset with the fever of love, and the knowledge that Jan wanted her and that her duty lay to him and the bambino.

  Unfortunately now she had chained herself to this life with all those sentimental chains which bind so hard. She could not see herself back at Amalia even if the Padrone would have her, and according to the Maestro’s letters times were difficult. She could not forget Luis, who was as her own child, and the little restaurant she had worked so hard to found. Besides her savings were here. The very curtains were those gay petticoats that she had brought with her from Italy.

  She could not uproot herself at this particular moment, she kept telling herself. It would hurt too much.

  Luis was her child, and Jan was her man, and even if he never loved her, she would have to go on here, working for him all the time. He was blind to her adoration. He did not know how much she cared. He feels, she told herself, that all this is based on pity.

  Together they went to see the famous violinist that Madame Hubac had mentioned.

  ‘Somehow,’ she told Jan, as they sat side by side in the bus, ‘I feel that this is wrong. I am not happy about it.’

  ‘But we must do the best for Luis.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘When he sees Madame Hubac’s letter, he will understand,’ said Jan.

  But the great violinist did not understand. He lived in an enormous house, and they were ushered into a great room where a grand piano curled along the wall, and set Matina’s heart throbbing, and at the far end there was a conservatory full of flowers. A plumbago climbed bluely among pink creeper geraniums. It was a pleasant sight.

  He kept them waiting, and then came into the room brusquely, an abrupt little man, with long straight black hair, and emotional eyes. From the first Matina knew that he would not understand.

  Jan explained the story. He had a son who was a great violinist and his teacher knew of the greatness of this man. Here was her letter in which she explained that she could teach the boy no more, and that he must pass to a greater master.