The Girl from the Paradise Ballroom (5 page)

Filomena had not
been close friends with Lucia Ricci, but she was shocked by her banishment. As she set off for work the following morning she remembered how Lucia had arrived in Soho, a gauzy-cheeked girl of twelve. Many of the Italians brought their relatives to London when they were of school age so they did not have to apply for work permits. The ploy was not always successful: sometimes the British authorities sent the children back once they reached fourteen. Now Lucia was on the long train journey home, her eyes red and swollen. No doubt a brother or a nephew had been sent with her, a surly reminder of her fall from grace. Men can be so self-righteous, thought Filomena.

That morning Filomena was making the journey to Goodge Street alone. Generally she walked with Renata, the Trombettas' upstairs neighbor, who also worked at the laundry: a satisfactory arrangement, in their families' view, since the two girls could chaperone each other. Filomena did not mind Renata, but she wished she was not such an infernal chatterbox. Both her parents were dead, and nobody—certainly not her uncle Mauro—had taken the trouble to arrange a marriage for her. As a result she was constantly reviewing the single men in the community, asking Filomena what she thought of this one or that, sighing to think she might never be a wife or mother. She had even cast her eye upon Valentino, although he snorted with laughter. She's a good sort, Renata, I admit, he said, but when I get married it won't be to a dumpy girl with a mustache.

Renata was particularly in awe of Filomena's status as Bruno's
fidanzata
. You are so lucky, she would say, Bruno is a fine man, and a patriot too. You must be so eager for him to come home from Abyssinia. At first Filomena had replied to these remarks, but she soon realized that Renata did not want to hear: she was imagining herself in Filomena's shoes, with a
fidanzato
who would come back any day to sweep her off her feet. This fantasy made Filomena uncomfortable. The truth was she did not think about Bruno very much. No doubt he would return from Africa, and no doubt they would be married, but there did not seem to be much point considering it until it happened. When she did picture Bruno's return it filled her with a curious blankness, as though a dark curtain were falling about her, and she pushed the thought away.

Filomena had reached the corner of Soho Square, where St. Patrick's church stood. St. Patrick's, consecrated in 1792, was the first Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation, and it was huge and solid, with an elaborate white marble porch. The energetic priest, Padre Barbera, held services in Italian there and organized a host of activities besides: a youth club, and a mobile library that came to the church every Sunday. Filomena glanced up at the redbrick bell tower. It was Italian in style, as if to cheer her compatriots with memories of home. Her mother, Mariana, had been a devout Catholic who went to mass at least once a week, no matter how tired—or, in her last months, how ill—she was. Filomena had gone with her, but it was out of tenderness for her mother, not religious belief: her own faith had died, quietly, when she was fifteen. It seemed to her now that Mariana's remembered presence was slowly fading, as smoke fades from the air. Soon, thought Filomena, soon we will have forgotten all the small, important things about her: the sound of her voice, the powdery smell of her skin, the way she rolled her eyes behind Papa's back whenever he was ranting.

As she drew close to Oxford Street Filomena caught sight of a policeman, examining the frontage of a pawnshop. Her heart quickened.

“Miss Trombetta,” said the policeman, in a gruff voice. He was a young man, wide faced and sturdy, with straw-colored hair.

“Constable Harker.” Filomena inclined her head to acknowledge his greeting. She did not pause, though, but continued to walk in the direction of Goodge Street.

“Your friend is not with you today, I see,” said the constable, falling into step with her.

“No,” said Filomena, “not today.”

After that they did not speak again, but walked in silence side by side, their strides perfectly matched.

The morning after the party in Kingly Street, Bernard Rodway sent Olivia a huge quantity of dark red roses. They looked rather silly in her bedsit. She only possessed one vase, a chipped green jug purchased from a junk shop, and the rest of the flowers had to go in jam jars and empty Rowntree's cocoa tins. Olivia eyed them with a tired worldliness. She was quite sure that she understood Bernard's intentions toward her. Well, she thought, I'll be careful this time.

It was five years since Olivia had moved to London. That wide-eyed girl now seemed to her an entirely different person, made of a different element. On her arrival she had had a starry notion of becoming a dancer in the theater. That would show them, she thought, with a ferocity that she did not recognize as grief: the shrewd aunt in Croydon, the frail, self-centered ghosts of her mother and her sister. In her best hat and coat she marched around stage doors in the West End, asking in a refined voice if she could speak to the show's producer. The first two doormen laughed in her face; the third squeezed her bum and told her not to waste his time. It was the fourth man she saw, a tawny-haired stage manager at the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus, who finally, briskly, chucked her dreams into the dust.

“You girls,” he said, shaking his head as though he had seen it all a dozen—no, a hundred—times before. “What makes you do it? You haven't trained, you're not a pro, you wouldn't survive for two hours onstage, never mind eight shows a week. I daresay you're a virgin too, aren't you? You'd do better to go back home to—where is it?—East Grinstead?”

“Uckfield,” said Olivia. By this time she was footsore and thirsty, and she could not help the tears springing to her eyes. The stage manager, whose name was Jimmy, sighed, and took her to the nearest café, where he bought her a currant bun and some milky coffee. Then he told her several rude, gossipy tales of life backstage, which made her laugh, and he advised her to look for a job as a dance hostess in one of the city's ballrooms.

A week later, in Jimmy's tiny room high above Romilly Street, Olivia lost her virginity, between the matinée and the evening performance. It seemed to her a bold thing to do, like coming to London and changing her name. Besides, she was disarmed by the fact that Jimmy appeared to want her. She could hear Wilma's astonished voice in her head. Are you sure, Olive? He's really quite attractive. Maybe he just feels sorry for you.

Sex was not in the least what Olivia had expected. She was startled by the animal strangeness of it, and yet it seemed that very strangeness created a bond between her and Jimmy, like sea voyagers who have survived a storm. She was beginning to wonder if, remarkably, this was love, when Jimmy announced that his wife was coming back, and they would have to call it a day. His wife was a bottle-blond dancer named Gloria, who had been touring the country in a production of
The Gay Divorce
.

“What did you expect?” Jimmy said as Olivia sat weeping in bed, the sheet pulled to her armpits in belated modesty. He said it with a harassed air, as though things like this were always happening to him and it really wasn't his fault. “Don't make a scene, there's a good girl. You know as well as I do that this was just a bit of fun.”

The girls at the dance hall said the same thing, sitting in the smoke-fugged changing room. What did you expect, girlie? That's what men are like. Don't lose your heart, don't lose your head, and for gawd's sake don't get pregnant. One of them, a blowzy young woman with a mellow contralto voice, warbled a Sophie Tucker song: “
If your kisses can't hold the man you love, your tears won't bring him back.
”

Olivia listened in silence. The following week she agreed to go out for dinner with one of her dance partners, a commercial traveler from Cardiff, a freckled smiling man with a pencil mustache. They went to the Lyons Corner House in the Tottenham Court Road, where they had what the dance hostesses, always hungry, called a slap-up meal: lamb chops and gravy with a mound of mashed potato, followed by syrup sponge. While they ate, the commercial traveler talked without stopping, which was just as well because Olivia could not think of anything to say. I come to London every four weeks or so, he remarked in his lilting Welsh accent, implying that this could become a regular arrangement. Afterward they went to a drinking club for a couple of gin and Its, then to his hotel, a cheap one that smelled of gas and boiled cauliflower. Oh, well, thought Olivia, as listlessly she unrolled her stockings, it doesn't matter. None of it really matters at all.

For their first
dinner, Bernard took Olivia to Quaglino's, near Piccadilly. It was plush and glamorous; no less a person than Hutch—Leslie Hutchinson, the handsome black cabaret star from Grenada—was singing at the piano. Olivia was astonished. She had expected a discreet restaurant in Soho where nobody would recognize Bernard, and the waiters would wink at him conspiratorially when they thought she wasn't looking.

“Do you like champagne?” Bernard asked. He was slouching in his chair as though he dined here every night.

“Of course,” said Olivia, who had never tasted anything more exotic than sweet Moussec, brewed in Rickmansworth. She glanced at the menu, which was in French:
oeufs pochés piémontaise, paupiettes de veau.
She would have to point disdainfully and hope for the best.

“Oh, don't worry with the
carte,
” Bernard said, seeing her frown. (What in the world was bouillabaisse? Would she be able to swallow it?) “I never do. I just ask for what I want.” Blithely he ordered Dover sole meunière and roast pheasant, and he turned back to Olivia. “Which of your parents was fond of
Twelfth Night
?”

“What?” said Olivia.

“Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night.
I imagine that's why they named you Olivia.”

The champagne flush on Olivia's cheeks deepened. “As a matter of fact, I chose it myself. I was christened Olive: Olive Johnson. I decided to call myself Olivia when I came to London.”

Bernard began to laugh. “Oh, how charming,” he said. Olivia bridled, afraid of being patronized.

“I don't see why that's funny.”

“No, no. That is not what I meant. I think it was a clever thing to do. To make a new start, to re-create yourself. I like it. It shows originality.”

Olivia said nothing. She suspected him of humoring her, and she did not want him to think that he could flatter her into bed. If that was where the evening was destined to end—and quite probably it was—she intended do it with her eyes open, undeceived.

“We'd all like to be original,” Bernard went on, as the waiter brought their fish on thin white china plates. “Not many of us can achieve it, though. I've been struggling with it since I was at Cambridge, but I fear I'm simply a Jack of all trades, master of none. The only thing in my favor is that I'm enthusiastic.” Deftly he applied his fork to his fillet of sole. “And where did you live before you came to London?”

The sole was bathed in nut-brown butter, which tasted burned, yet strangely addictive. At the piano Hutch was singing “These Foolish Things.” For an instant Olivia remembered the Italian singer at the Paradise Ballroom, with his big shocked eyes.

“Uckfield,” she said, in an uncompromising voice.

Bernard laughed again, and reaching out he squeezed her hand. He did it in a friendly, natural way. “Don't look so fierce, my dear. I brought you here to have some fun, not to cross-examine you. Uckfield's in Sussex, isn't it? My uncle Dickie has a house in Sussex. Dickie Belvoir: you may have heard of him. He was a stage designer once upon a time. He worked with Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, the Russian ballet, most of the great names. Of all my relations Dickie is my favorite. He and I are the black sheep of the family. The rest are dull dogs, though I say it myself.”

Bernard's voice—relaxed, cultured, with a faint attractive wheezing—began to soothe Olivia. As he talked she ate: gamey pheasant, which, like the sauce meunière, was all the more exquisite for being so nearly unpleasant; a crème brûlée with its golden carapace of sugar; the chocolate truffles that arrived with the pungent coffee. This is how rich people live, Olivia thought. She wanted to mock—a free plate of sweets for well-fed diners?—but the deliciousness of it overwhelmed her.

“Would you like to dance?” Bernard asked. “I'd love it if you would, but I can see that it might be a busman's holiday.”

On the floor he held her loosely; he did not use the pretext of dancing to paw her thigh, or to pull her suffocatingly close. Olivia found herself relaxing in the haze of champagne and music and wonderful food. I could grow accustomed to this, she thought.

“Time to go, I think,” Bernard said, after their second dance. “There'll be plenty of taxis outside.”

In the vestibule Olivia pulled on her gloves. They were wearing out, creased from molding themselves continually to the shape of her hands. Things could not go on being flexible forever, she thought giddily. It did not matter how well you cared for them, oiling and nourishing them, drying them gently when they got wet; sooner or later there were bound to be cracks.

Bernard clasped her by the elbow, steering her toward the door. They had just stepped into Bury Street when a stout man in a homburg, crossing from the far pavement, exclaimed: “Bernard! Fancy running into you.”

Dismay crossed Bernard's face, but only for an instant. “Good lord. Lionel. I didn't know you were in London. You should have telephoned me.”

“Oh, I'm only passing through,” said Lionel. Close to, he bore a clear resemblance to Bernard, although Lionel was fatter and much redder in the face. “Don't worry, Bernard, I'm staying at my club, it's very convenient, much better than troubling you. And who's this?”

He fixed his stare upon Olivia: benignly, with curiosity rather than lust. All the same it made Olivia squirm. She might have been able to fake elegance in her evening dress, but her shop-bought outdoor clothes—the herringbone wool coat, the blue hat—looked shabby and garish.

“This is my friend Olivia Johnson.” Bernard was still holding her elbow. “Olivia, my brother, Lionel. My older brother, down from Cheshire.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Olivia, in her elocution-class accent. Lionel surveyed her once more.

“Well, I won't keep you. I'm sure you have plenty of exciting things to do. How does the song go?
The night is young, and you're so beautiful.
Bernard, a word with you, if you don't mind.”

Olivia waited on the pavement, passive, excluded. She thought of how Bernard had said
friend
, making it sound like a subtle, man-to-man code. My friend Olivia. She remembered the paraphernalia she had stowed in her handbag, the rubber diaphragm, the tube of evil-smelling jelly. It is always like this, she thought, it won't be any different this time. Why did I think it might be?

When he had waved off his brother, Bernard hailed a taxi. He did it with an air of authority, as though all taxis were his of right, circling the London streets like gleaming wheeled servants, waiting to be summoned. Then he handed Olivia into the car, gave some cash to the driver and prepared to close the door.

“Oh,” said Olivia, “but I thought—”

Bernard smiled. “I'll write to you in the morning,” he said, and he blew her a kiss. “Sweet dreams, Olivia.”

Baffled, Olivia gave the address of her bedsit in Pimlico. She had no idea what had happened. Had Bernard's brother said something to make him change his mind? Or had he changed his mind anyway, put off by—what?—Olivia's gaucheness? The realization that she was, after all, no more than a cheap dance hostess in a homemade frock?

In fact, what had happened was simple. Taking his brother aside, Lionel Rodway had whispered in his ear: “Really, Bernard, where do you find them? She's impossible. Why in the world can't you pick someone of your own class?” Olivia did not know that, though. Nor did she know—she could not conceivably have guessed—that in that moment Bernard Rodway had decided to marry her.