The Girl from the Paradise Ballroom Read online

  “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.

  In November the fascio opened its new premises in Charing Cross Road. The Casa d’Italia had taken a year to renovate, and it was large and imposing, with a vast atrium lined with marble.

  Antonio accompanied his father and brother to the opening ceremony. As a rule he did not like going to the fascio. The sight of the men in their black shirts disturbed him. He was anxious that one of them would fix upon him, needling him into an argument, or else trying to convert him to the fascist cause. Tonight, though, was different. Plenty of people would be there out of curiosity, to see the new building. Besides, thought Antonio, if I show willing this time it will stop Valentino from nagging me for a month or two.

  “It is a pity that Bruno cannot be here with us,” Valentino said, as the three men were preparing to leave. “He would have been thrilled to witness this great day. At last the fascio will have a building worthy of our cause.”

  “Will you be long, Antonio?” asked Danila in a plaintive voice. She was sitting beside the stove with Filomena, her knitting needles click-clacking like an automaton. The day before her gait had changed, and she had begun to waddle, as though the bulge of her stomach was suddenly too great for her slender legs to bear. Antonio found her lumbering slowness infinitely touching.

  “Not long, I promise.” He stroked the hair from her forehead. “Don’t be afraid. If anything happens, Filomena will come and f
etch me, won’t you, Mena?”

  Filomena nodded. She too was knitting, counting stitches furiously under her breath. Unlike Danila she was always making mistakes. Everything she finished had a hole here, a ragged edge there.

  Valentino was already at the door, impatiently stamping his feet. “Nothing’s going to happen, Antonio. Come along. It would be disrespectful to be late.”

  —

  The opening ceremony for the Casa d’Italia took place in the marble atrium, known as the Sala dell’Impero, the Empire Room. It was seething with people, mostly men, embracing, calling out, shuffling to get into position near the dais. Several greeted each other with the fascist salute, the raised fist that, according to the duce, had been used by the ancient Romans. On the edge of the balcony were embossed the words Credere, Obbedire, Combattere: Believe, Obey, Fight.

  “Look!” Enrico pointed, an awestruck expression on his face. “There is the ambassador himself, there is Count Dino Grandi.”

  Dino Grandi had been Mussolini’s ambassador in London since 1932. He had a spadelike beard and his dark hair was swept heroically back from his face. You could not have called him handsome, but he had about him the silky luster of power. He was surrounded by a cohort of burly, black-shirted men: his bodyguards. There were tales that he never went anywhere without these guards, even in London, ever since the communists had tried to murder him in 1920.

  “He was converted to fascism by the duce himself,” said Valentino. “As a young man he was seduced by the false doctrine of communism, but the moment he met the duce he saw the error of his ways.”

  “Mussolini is always right,” said Antonio. “That’s what they chalk on the walls in Rome, isn’t it?”

  His brother glanced at him doubtfully, suspecting irony, but Antonio’s face was bland. “We should do this more often: the three of us, united in a single cause,” Valentino said. “Alone we are weak, but together we can be strong. Isn’t that so, Papa?”

  Enrico nodded, stirred by the grandeur of the occasion. “Valentino is right. It is too easy for us to forget our national pride, while we scrape our living here in Britain. But we are Italians. We must always remember that.” He said it half-accusingly, as though their failure to remember was somehow Antonio’s fault.

  All faces were turned to Dino Grandi now, high upon the dais. The air was electric. “To accept a revolution and regime is no longer enough,” he was saying. “We must have the courage and the responsibility to bind our personal destiny, however great or small, to this revolution and to this regime.”

  Antonio glanced at his father. He did not like Enrico’s burst of enthusiasm. If my mother were alive, he thought, she would put a stop to it. She would not argue, she would simply nod and be silent, and half an hour later Enrico would see his own foolishness. As he was thinking this he caught sight of a squat familiar figure, threading her way toward him. It was Renata Bonetti, their upstairs neighbor. Antonio’s heart turned a somersault.

  “What is it, Renata? What has happened?”

  Renata was staring goggle-eyed at Count Dino Grandi, and it took her a moment to answer. “Your wife’s gone into labor,” she said at last. “Filomena sent me to tell you. The midwife’s on her way.”

  Antonio pulled at Enrico’s sleeve. Like Renata, he could not keep his eyes from the ambassador. The man held him in a trance, as a stoat holds a rabbit with its swaying lethal dance.

  “I must go home, Papa. Danila will be wanting me.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” whispered Valentino. “It’s women’s business, we should stay out of it. Tell him, Papa.”

  Enrico shrugged, without shifting his gaze. “There will be nothing for you to do, my son, you will only be in the way. Go home when it is over.”

  “But if Danila asks for me—”

  A couple of the black-shirted men hissed at him to be quiet. On the dais Count Dino Grandi was still speaking.

  “We do not need the permission of Britain to be great. Our glorious victory in Africa has scotched that myth. We have challenged the dragon, and we are winning.”

  Valentino whooped and raised his fist high in the fascist salute. A moment later so did Enrico. Antonio closed his eyes. The roars about him echoed through his body, and he felt a flutter of panic, like the fear of drowning. Then he pushed his way out of the Sala dell’Impero.

  —

  Danila had been quarreling with Filomena when her labor began. They often quarreled when they were on their own, usually about trivial things, although they both knew that the struggle between them was not trivial at all: it was a battle for supremacy.

  In the beginning Filomena had welcomed her new sister-in-law. She was glad to have another woman in a household packed with men, and she felt protective toward Danila, transplanted so abruptly from her home in Lazio to the seething foreign streets of Soho. Besides, it pleased her to think that Antonio, her favorite brother, had such a pretty wife. Filomena had no illusions about her own looks, her squared-off face, her strong, serviceable body. People told her that she had beautiful eyes, and she knew that it was true, but she also knew that they said it as consolation, not a true compliment. She would never be a beauty like Danila.

  Little by little, though, she realized that beneath her air of sweetness Danila had a will like iron. Although she was supposed to help Filomena around the house she was always too tired, or, since her pregnancy, too sick. When she did come into the kitchen she insisted on doing things her way, taking over the cooking and expecting Filomena to clear up after her. Afterward when one of the men—usually Valentino—complimented her she would melt and blush as though she, not Filomena, had done all the work. If Filomena confronted her, her eyes would widen with injury. But I did make the ricotta dolce, she would say. I know that you mixed them, Filomena, but I did the frying, or most of it anyway, and that’s the difficult part, everybody will tell you that.

  That evening they had been arguing about the proper way to make gnocchi alla Romana, her cousin Bruno’s favorite dish, according to Danila.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t know that, Mena,” she said, comfortably patting the bulge of her stomach. “He always used to ask my mother to make it for him, back home in Lazio. With tomato sauce and a good pinch of black pepper.”

  “Papa likes it with nutmeg,” said Filomena, as she hooked a dropped stitch from her knitting. Her sister-in-law was always talking about Bruno, how he liked this, how he thought that. It made Filomena feel trapped. She did not know if it was from annoyance with Danila for laying claim to Bruno, or another, more troubling fear: that one day her life would be governed by Bruno’s wishes, Bruno’s whims.

  Danila’s smooth forehead twisted into a knot. “I know you make it with nutmeg, Mena, but it’s not really correct.”

  “Oh, Bruno will get used to it.”

  Filomena bundled up her knitting and stuck the needles through the ball of wool. Then she slid her hand into her cardigan pocket to touch Stan Harker’s note. He had dropped it off at the laundry three days ago. Same time, same place next week, it said, in his skewed ugly handwriting. Cheerio till then.

  “Don’t you think you should learn to make it the way Bruno likes it?” Danila’s voice was deliberately patient. “I’d be happy to show you how. You put the pepper in right at the end, so that it is still sharp when you eat the gnocchi.”

  Filomena did not answer, but began to clatter at the stove, opening the iron door to feed the fire. She was not listening to Danila: she was thinking about Constable Harker. She had first encountered him when he came to sort out a squabble between two of the women at the laundry. Now they met once a week, and if Renata was not with her they would walk together from Soho Square to Goodge Street. There was nothing wrong in their friendship, she was certain of that. It was not like Lucia Ricci’s flirtation with Valentino. She and Stan did not even touch, except once when he had pulled her out of the way of an errand boy’s hurtling bicycle. My conscience is clear, thought Filomena, jabbing the poker into th
e red and gray embers.

  “There’s no need to sulk.” Danila pressed her fingers daintily to her lips. She was prone to wind now that she was in the ninth month of her pregnancy. “I am trying to be helpful.”

  Her voice to Filomena was like the buzzing of a gnat. She wished that Danila would be quiet and leave her free to daydream about Stan. She pictured his face, neutral, unruffled. It’s my copper’s face, he said. You acquire it, being in the force. It means you don’t have to get involved. Whenever she thought of that face Filomena had the feeling that everything would be all right. She remembered how he had rescued her from the errand boy’s bicycle, his arm quick and confident about her waist.

  Danila was gazing at her reproachfully. Filomena straightened up from the stove. “I’m not sulking,” she said, “but rest assured, I do know how to make gnocchi alla Romana. I’ve been feeding this family for the past eighteen months, ever since Mama died.”

  “I want to advise you, Filomena, that’s all,” said Danila. Her pretty mouth was quivering. “I may be younger than you, but I’m a married woman, I understand what it’s like to have a husband. You have to learn their tastes. It is complicated. I wish you would let me explain.”

  “I do not need you to explain. I will find out soon enough, if I marry Bruno.”

  Danila frowned. “What do you mean, if you marry Bruno? You are engaged to him, he is your fidanzato.”

  Filomena realized that in her impatience she had gone too far. “All I mean is that Africa is a long way off. The climate is not a healthy one, and there is fighting in Abyssinia still. Many things could happen—”

  “Are you saying that you think my cousin will die?” Danila’s eyes were like saucers.

  “No, of course not,” said Filomena. Then she stopped short. Bruno had gone to fight the Abyssinians. It was entirely possible that he might die. Why did they pretend otherwise?

  Danila looked as if she had been hit but was too startled to feel any pain. Filomena crouched beside her chair, penitent.