A Postcard from Italy Read online

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

  Copyright © Alexandra Brown 2019

  Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

  Cover photographs © Evelina Kremsdorf/Arcangel (Landscape, front), Shutterstock.com (Stamps, flowers and back cover)

  Alexandra Brown asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008206666

  Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008206673

  Version: 2019-05-16

  Dedication

  For all the people who care for other people

  Epigraph

  ‘The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.’

  Audrey Hepburn

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Betty’s Truly Scrumptious Babka Cake

  Read on for a Q&A with Alex …

  About the Author

  Keep Reading …

  Also by Alex Brown

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Tindledale, in rural England, 1939

  The flip of a coin is all it had taken to seal seventeen-year-old Constance Levine’s fate.

  ‘Heads, she goes to Aunt Rachael in Manhattan,’ her mother had declared, barely able to even look at her ‘wanton’ daughter, the word she had used on first discovering Connie’s condition.

  Manhattan. In America. That might not be so bad … Connie remembered thinking as she had dared to lift her downcast eyes to look at her father’s hands, one stacked on top of the other, primed to reveal her destiny, the scent of his sandalwood cologne permeating the air between them. But then it had all gone wrong. The coin hadn’t displayed the King’s head. And that was that. So there would be no sailing to New York and visiting exciting American landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty, which Connie had seen pictures of in her Britannia and Eve magazines. Or maybe a show on Broadway where she could watch professional dancers move with the grace and elegance that she always aspired to in her weekly dance classes. But none of it was meant to be. Not now the course of her destiny had changed for ever.

  Instead, she had been dispatched on the next train from her home in Blackheath, London, to the countryside where nobody would know her. To stay with her grandfather’s sister, Aunt Maud, in the sleepy little village of Tindledale, surrounded by undulating fields full of lumbering cows and oast houses flanked with rows of hop vines reaching almost up to the sky. Aunt Maud was a dour woman who Connie had never met until the day she arrived here. But that was the point. Banished before her parent’s influential and, more importantly, highly respectable friends found out what she had done and shame was brought upon the whole family.

  ‘No, the matter must be dealt with swiftly and discreetly,’ is what her father had instructed when she’d tried to venture an alternative solution. That she marry her sweetheart and they live happily ever after. But Jimmy wasn’t Jewish and so her parents had forbidden any such union, plus he swept floors at the packing factory in Deptford, and that would never do.

  Connie had met Jimmy at the funfair one Saturday evening on the heath when she’d gone with her best friend, Kitty. Jimmy and his best friend, Stanley, had been seated on the painted carousel horses behind them. It had been a gloriously balmy evening as they rode round and round and up and down with the sound of melodic organ music floating in the breeze, making Connie feel carefree and happy. Later, after winning a coconut and a fluffy pink teddy bear for her on the rifle range, Jimmy had walked Connie home, making her laugh with his range of silly accents and slapstick humour. His sweep of hair, as black as treacle, bobbing into his impish green eyes, had her swooning when he’d winked and tilted his head after saying goodnight at the gate like a proper gentleman.

  They had arranged to meet by the duck pond the following afternoon and, just before she had to leave to be home in time for tea, he had swept her up in his arms and kissed her with such passion that she knew he was going to be the one for her. Love had blossomed for them in the weeks that followed; meeting in secret, of course, as her parents had taken an instant dislike to Jimmy. They hadn’t even given him a chance to show his worth when he called at the house one time with a beautiful bunch of wild flowers that he’d picked himself from the hilly field section in Greenwich Park. He’d even bought a jolly yellow satin ribbon from the haberdashery shop near the station to tie around the bouquet, but Mother had refused to even let him into the house before sending him away with a flea in his ear. And then later, right after Mr Chamberlain’s wireless broadcast declaring war on 3 September, Jimmy had signed up to do his duty for King and country, and it was as if the light had gone out in her life.

  Connie had promised to wait for him to return, and had prayed every morning and evening that her darling Jimmy would stay safe and come back home from wherever it was they had sent him. She couldn’t bear to even consider the possibility of a different outcome for her truelove, and believed in doing so was only to tempt fate. Although Jimmy hadn’t replied to any of her letters since he went away, or even sent one of those miniature, colourful postcards like her best friend, Kitty, had received from her own sweetheart, Stanley. Kitty kept it tucked inside a compartment in her handbag so as to feel close to him, and Connie so wished she had a postcard too. A few words from him to hold on to. To keep Jimmy close to her always. All she had was the pink teddy bear. If she had heard from Jimmy, then perhaps she would have found the courage to tell him about their unborn child before now, instead of waiting until he came back to her. Or maybe it was better this way. She would be eighteen soon and knew that Jimmy would marry her right away when he heard about the baby … and they wouldn’t need her parents’ permission after all.

  Pressing the palm of her right hand into the small of her back, Connie carefully lowered herself into the high-backed chair next to her bed in the spartan bedroom. Aunt Maud was a frugal woman who saw no v
irtue in home comforts or niceties, preferring to live a martyred existence that Connie was also expected to endure for the duration of her incumbency. Her punishment, it seemed, for falling in love and then allowing Jimmy to be intimate with her that one time. If only she had known their moment of passion would make a baby, then she would have held out until their wedding night.

  So now the joy of being with Jimmy, the music and gaiety, cushions and comfort and glorious indoor bathroom that Connie had grown up with at home in London’s exclusive Blackheath, were all mere memories. There was no softness or joy in Aunt Maud’s world. With an outside privy at the end of the long garden, which even in the summer months was grim and cold, making the chilblains on Connie’s toes itch and throb with pain. The inside of the cottage was no better either, with its hard stone floor and damp walls, and so it was as if all the colour had drained from Connie’s life. When she had first arrived in Tindledale, Aunt Maud had let Connie take a walk out into the village where she had met a couple of farm girls sitting on a bench in the village square sharing a bag of chips. Sisters Winnie and Edie were around the same age as Connie, and so she had enjoyed chitchatting with them and pretending, if only for a short while, that everything in her life was still the same. Happy and gay. But Aunt Maud had stopped the trips to the village as soon as Connie’s fecund belly had started to round, and so she hadn’t had the pleasure of Winnie and Edie’s company since. Aunt Maud had even instructed Connie to remove her jaunty but ‘sordid’ magazine cuttings from the bedroom wall, so they were now confined to an envelope inside her diary that she kept hidden in the groove behind the headboard of the bed.

  At least it will all be over soon.

  I’m going to be a respectable married lady.

  Mr and Mrs J. Blake.

  And a mother, to boot!

  Connie held on to these thoughts as she felt around the headboard. Then, after slipping the diary from its hiding place, she propped it up on the mound of her swollen belly and took the fountain pen from its holder. She checked the date before drawing a line through another day. Only a few more weeks to go. She couldn’t be sure though. Her mother had said it would take nine months, or thereabouts, for the baby to be grown enough and ready to be born, but Connie didn’t know when to count from. Was it afterwards when she had lain in Jimmy’s arms feeling all dreamy and on top of the world, with her body still tingling from his touch? Or the first time her monthly didn’t appear? And she hadn’t dared to ask.

  But Jimmy would be home soon, bringing with him an end to her feelings of fear and shame. She had to believe this. It was all she could do, because Connie had never felt so alone as she did right now …

  London, England, present day

  Grace Quinn loved her job at Cohen’s Convenient Storage Company. In fact, it was the only thing that gave her real pleasure these days. Alongside her knitting and a large mug of hot chocolate with a dash of cherry brandy dropped in of an evening as she escaped into one of her favourite old films. She loved the classics. The feeling of being swept away into a world of nostalgia and glamour, where nothing bad ever happened, or so it seemed. Musicals especially, with plenty of dancing. Fred and Ginger. Doris Day. Whipcrackaway! She was a big Doris Day fan and had learnt so much about timing and precision from watching Doris, which in turn had helped Grace hone her own dance skills. Gene Kelly too. Singin’ in the Rain. She’d never grow tired of watching that masterpiece. Although her absolute all-time favourite was – of course – the legendary Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. It really was ’S Wonderful, ’S Marvellous, as Audrey and Fred sang in the Technicolor scene where they floated down the river in the grounds of that idyllic chateau in Paris. But the magic could never happen for Grace until her bedbound mother, Cora, had eventually fallen asleep, which recently had been getting later and later.

  So, slipping her shoes on as she brushed her hair, and then wound her rumpus of copper curls up into a more manageable bun, Grace kept one ear out for Cora upstairs in her bedroom, silently praying that she’d make it out the door to work without her mother bellowing again for more breakfast cereal and toast. Grace had already taken her a large bowl of cornflakes and two rounds of butter and jam, but the shop had run out of the extra-thick crusty bread, ‘so it takes more to fill me up, Grace’ is what Cora had said on calling out for yet more toast. And recently, Cora had been yelling too for the lamp right beside her on the cabinet to be switched on because her own hand, mere millimetres away, was ‘playing up’ again. That had happened four times last night.

  But it wasn’t to be.

  ‘Grace. Grace. Grace. For the love of God where are you?’ Cora thundered in her dense Irish accent, thumping the floor with her walking stick and making the plastic lightshade, hanging from the ceiling in the lounge, sway precariously above Grace’s head.

  She put down the brush. Gripping the edge of the mantelpiece with both hands, she closed her eyes, dipped her head momentarily and inhaled deeply before letting out a long breath, searching every fibre of her being just to find another iota of resilience somewhere within her. She was tired. So tired. After opening her eyes, Grace inspected her face in the mirror and saw bloodshot flecks around her green irises from lack of sleep and her fair, freckly skin seemed even paler, if that was even possible. Cora had had a bad night and Grace had been up until almost 3 a.m. This would be the third day in a row now that she would be late for work; even though her boss, Larry, was very understanding, he was also getting on. And after his knee surgery last year it wasn’t so easy for him to do the rounds, walking the length of the warehouse corridors, checking the temperature controls and pushing the heavy metal trolleys back to their place in the bays beside the lift. Yes, he had been good to her, so the least she could do was to turn up on time. Grace really didn’t feel it was fair to leave it all to him.

  But then nothing much was fair these days as far as she could see. Not for Larry. And not for her. How could it be fair when none of her siblings helped out? Cora had four grown-up children, yet it had been left to Grace, the youngest, to care for their extremely demanding mother, single-handedly. Apart from the occasional visits from her best friend, Jamie. He lived in the terraced house next door and they had grown up together here in Woolwich. He worked as a midwife now at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and popped in whenever he could to help turn Cora and pick up a pound to buy her a scratchcard. Cora loved a scratchcard and was convinced that her ‘big win’ was just around the corner. And when that day came she was going to ‘employ an expert carer and book into a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London where they know how to do things properly’.

  Grace had heard it all before a million times over and, if the truth be told, she really hoped that ‘big win’ would hurry up and happen soon for both of their sakes. Cora flatly refused to consider a council-run care home, claiming only a high-end one, akin to a five-star hotel, would do for her, and she wouldn’t let ‘riffraff’, aka strangers, in the house to help out either, so it really had all been left to Grace to deal with. And Grace knew that she was crumbling under the strain of caring for her mother and trying to hold down a full-time job, but couldn’t see another way. Especially since Cora had flatly refused to be assessed for any sort of carers’ allowance, so Grace’s income was all they had to get by on. Grace had tried getting her siblings involved, but they had moved away or had important jobs in banking in the City of London … well, more important than her job at the storage company on an industrial estate in Greenwich and only ten minutes to get to on the bus, is what they really meant. So Grace ploughed on … because she couldn’t just abandon her mother, turn her back on her when she was unable to leave her own bed unaided due to her health problems exacerbated by her bulk.

  No, Cora needed her.

  ‘What is it, Mum?’ Grace asked, on entering Cora’s bedroom, near choking on the foggy air, thick with the fragrance of lily-of-the-valley talcum powder.

  ‘What did you get this one for?’ Cora complained, her doughy face wobbling into a f
rown.

  ‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Grace scanned the room.

  ‘Look!’ And Cora lifted up the corner of the duvet. Her fleshy bare legs and arms and nightie-covered body were coated in white talcum powder. Grace’s heart sank. It was twenty-five past eight, according to the gold carriage clock on the chest of drawers, and she was supposed to be at work by nine. There was no way she could sort this out in time – strip the bed, being careful to turn her mother as she did so – just as the care assistant from social services had shown her, and then replace the talcum-powdered sheet with a clean one. Before finally washing the powder from Cora’s body and finding a fresh nightie for her to wear. Grace had taken the last nightie from the drawer earlier this morning before putting a load of washing in the machine, ready to peg out on the line to dry when she rushed back home in her lunch break. But she couldn’t leave her mother like this for a whole morning. Cora was already wheezing from inhaling the powder and her skin would sweat and then get sore which would involve more creams and extra-frequent turning to avoid painful bedsores.

  So, resigned to letting Larry down again with another late start, Grace pulled her mobile from her jeans pocket and swiftly tapped out a text message to him before galvanising herself into action. If she moved fast and Cora complied with her instructions to hold the handle of the hoist when she rolled her onto her side, then she might be in with a chance of making it to work before ten o’clock.

  ‘So how did this happen?’ Grace asked tentatively, because her mother was prone to rages and that was the last thing she needed right now. Cora would never help her then and the whole routine would take twice as long.

  ‘You bought the wrong one!’ Cora accused. ‘I said to get the nice Marks and Sparks one, not the cheap Pound Shop one. So the lid fell off when I shook it.’

  ‘But why were you putting talcum powder on, Mum? I did all that for you after your bed bath this morning,’ Grace reminded her as she made a start on pulling the corners of the sheet away from the mattress.