The Girl from the Paradise Ballroom: A Novel Read online

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  “Will you never learn, Valentino? You will bring shame upon our family.”

  It was a cold, dark evening in November. Enrico was planted grimly in the Trombettas’ kitchen, staring at his younger son.

  “I am sorry, Papa,” said Valentino. “It was only meant in fun—”

  “What has happened?” asked Antonio. He was preparing for his night’s engagement: not in a dance hall this time, but a local Italian restaurant, La Rondine, decorated with Chianti bottles and tinted photographs of Naples.

  Enrico jabbed his hand toward Valentino. “Tell your brother the mischief you’ve caused.”

  Valentino bit his lower lip. He did not accept censure without a fight, which made it surprisingly easy for him to wriggle out of it.

  “It was a flirtation, that is all. It is not my fault that Lucia’s family have taken it to heart.”

  “What? Lucia from Ricci’s café?” Antonio looked up from his accordion. He was wiping the keys with a chamois cloth, so the constant touch of his fingertips did not yellow the ivory.

  Enrico’s creased eyes were like chestnuts, hard with reproach. “Her father has packed her off to Italy, to be married to her cousin Federico. He is afraid that if she stays the story will get out, Federico will learn that she is damaged goods, and he will not have her.”

  “She is not damaged goods,” said Valentino. “I told you: it was a bit of fun. Besides, the Riccis should have taken better care of her. Any man could flirt with her, working in that café.”

  “And that is another thing. Carlo Ricci will have to send for his niece, to take Lucia’s place. There will be all the trouble of asking for a work permit. Long difficult forms to be written out in English, and no guarantee that the authorities will say yes. Carlo hates such things. It will make him sick with worry.”

  Valentino pushed back his chair scornfully. “These British. It is an outrage. They treat us like second-class citizens, when in truth we are Romans, with a heritage far more noble than theirs—”

  “Don’t change the subject. The customs of the British are neither here nor there. You must mend your ways, Valentino, do you hear? You are nearly twenty. You cannot play the fool forever.”

  Valentino’s lips flickered like quicksilver, as if to say, Why not? He guessed that he had gone too far, though, and he bowed his head. “Yes, Papa. I am sorry.”

  Enrico contemplated his son. Nobody could stay angry with Valentino for long. He did not have Antonio’s obvious good looks—he was lankier, with a thin, expressive mouth and a beaky nose—but there was a vitality about him that was irresistible. When you saw Valentino smile you felt glad to be alive.

  “Well,” said Enrico, “perhaps it was not entirely your fault. I did not say so to Carlo, but I have always thought Lucia a flighty girl. You must be careful all the same though, eh, my son?” He turned toward Antonio. “It is your responsibility too, Antonio. You should keep an eye on your brother, help him to stay out of trouble.”

  “Yes, Papa,” said Antonio. He had been taking an oblique sort of blame for Valentino’s antics ever since they were children. Like Filomena, Valentino had been born in London. He had been apprenticed as a waiter at Bertorelli’s grand restaurant in Charlotte Street, but he was always getting up to mischief there: breaking plates, mimicking the chefs, folding the starched napkins into phalluses and waggling them behind the customers’ backs. After six months the headwaiter told Enrico that it was no use, Valentino would never learn his trade. Enrico had been at his wits’ end when Bruno, Filomena’s fidanzato, had proposed Valentino for the barman’s job at the fascio, the Italian club. Antonio was troubled by the plan, but Enrico overruled him. Fascism is the only thing your brother takes seriously, he had said. Who knows? Perhaps he will do well there.

  Antonio watched as his father rinsed his hands at the scullery tap. Enrico himself had not joined the fascist party—he was not a political man, he said—but over the years he had grown to admire Mussolini. The duce’s practical achievements in Lazio impressed him: the draining of the Pontine marshes, so that they were no longer a breeding ground for malaria; the building of an orderly new city, Littoria, on the land that had been reclaimed. Lately he had begun to read the copies of L’Italia Nostra that Valentino brought home, and he would nod approvingly when his compatriots talked of how the duce had made them proud to be Italian once more.

  “I am going to Ricci’s,” Enrico said now. “I will explain to Carlo that you have apologized, Valentino. He is a man of the world, he will be satisfied.”

  Antonio slid his accordion into its leather case. “If Carlo wishes, I will help him with his niece’s work permit. I am used to these complicated British forms. They do not frighten me.”

  Enrico nodded and fastened the stud in his collar. Beneath his shirt he wore a gold chain with a crucifix and a coral horn, to guard against the evil eye. “Well, I will be off,” he said. “Tell Filomena I will be back for supper.”

  —

  When he had gone Antonio looked across at his brother. Valentino grinned, all pretense vanishing from his face.

  “Don’t give me the evil eye, Antonino. You’ve seen Lucia. Ripe as a plum. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been another man. So why not me? I know what I am doing, after all.”

  “It was not just a flirtation then?”

  Valentino shrugged. “She wanted me to speak to our father, ask him to arrange a match. Her cousin Federico is like a bear, she says, all rough and clumsy.”

  Lucia’s face sprang into Antonio’s mind. She was a docile young woman, not very clever. He felt sorry for her.

  “There was no point my talking to Papa, though,” Valentino said. “Lucia has been promised to Federico since she was twelve. Her father would never have agreed to a match with me, I’m not even from his village. And besides, I don’t want a flirt for a wife. I want a sweet honest girl like your Danila. An Italian girl, brought up in Italy.”

  The door opened and Filomena came into the kitchen. Her thick dark hair was tied in a checkered scarf.

  “Men’s talk, Filomena,” said Valentino. “Not for your ears.”

  Filomena pulled a face. Of all the family she was the most resistant to Valentino’s charms. “Talk as much as you like,” she said, taking her apron from its hook, “but if you don’t want me to hear, you’d better go somewhere else. I’ve got to make the supper.”

  “Never mind Lucia Ricci,” said Valentino, clicking his tongue, “it’s Filomena who should be sent home to Italy, to learn some manners.”

  “Lucia Ricci’s been sent home? Why?”

  “None of your business.” Valentino turned to Antonio. “I hope Bruno doesn’t find out what a shrew our sister is until after they’re married. We’ll have her on our hands for the rest of her life.”

  “Tcha,” said Filomena, clattering in the cupboards. She was a good cook but a noisy one, slamming the pots against the stove as though she wanted to punish them.

  “Isn’t Danila helping you with the supper?” asked Antonio.

  Filomena whacked the kitchen knife through an onion. “She’s resting. She says her feet have swollen up. To the size of watermelons, she says.”

  “What do you expect? She’s pregnant. She needs to take care of her health.” Valentino rose to his feet. He treated his brother’s wife with reverence, as though she were set apart from other women. “You should have respect for that, Filomena. What higher destiny can a woman have, than to produce sons for the Italian empire? As the duce says, maternity is to the woman what war is to the man. Well, I’m off to work. Are you coming for a drink later, Antonio?”

  “Not tonight. I’m singing at La Rondine tonight.”

  “You should come to the fascio more often. Mix with your compatriots, hear the news from Italy. It would do you good.” On the threshold Valentino turned to Antonio with a smile. “I tell you, there’s one thing I’ve learned from this business with Lucia Ricci. Don’t meddle with young girls. From now on it’s ma
rried women only.”

  —

  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 Oliv
ia 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.