The Lonely Heart

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance; Historical Romance

Synopsis

An enthralling story from the 100-million-copy bestselling Queen of Romance, first published in 1930 and now available in eBook for the first time.

Release date: November 21, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 224

Sample

WHEN Verona rang the bell of Stephen Best’s studio at four o’clock that cold afternoon in November, she was conscious of the fact that it was for the last time.

She would not be coming to see Stephen any more.

She had come here so often that everything about that door and the staircase up which she had just climbed (Stephen lived at the very top and there were one hundred and ten steps) was familiar to her. It was all shabby and dusty. A converted house in a shabby square near the Brompton Road. The paint was peeling off Stephen’s door. One glass pane was broken. A piece of brown paper was pasted over the square. Verona remembered the night on which that pane was broken. One of the many gay happy nights she and a lot of the students from the Art School had spent up here with Stephen who was the oldest and the most talented of them all.

For three years, Verona had attended the same classes and lectures as Stephen. There were a number of them who were friends. They knew each other well and went to each other’s homes. None of them had any money. Some of them, like Verona and Margaret Shaw, lived with their parents. The twins, Noel and Evelyn Turner, shared a flat not far from Stephen’s. Geoffrey Harland and his wife—both painters and newly married—had a maisonette in South Kensington. Each in turn held little parties … beer, sandwiches—or sausages. Nobody expected anything better. Nobody could afford it. Apart from the rationing troubles, the pennies had to be saved up for expensive artists’ equipment. Paints, brushes and canvases and framing, were far from cheap these days.

Stephen was the most flourishing of them all, but seemed always the poorest. Most of them were in their early twenties. He was twenty-eight. He had been in the navy for five years of war and had been demobilized with a gratuity, three years ago, after a month in hospital with a slight wound. He had since taken up the life for which he had always longed. An artist’s life. Stephen wanted to paint. He had always painted, and Verona and the others knew that he was marked for big things. He had the flame of genius in him which not even war service and a few gruelling experiences in submarines could extinguish.

But he had by no means ‘got there’ yet. He was still learning; although, in Verona’s opinion he could teach some of his masters.

Stephen did a bit of commercial work—illustrations—book jackets—in order to live. But his ambition was to become a portrait painter. He had painted all the girls in their set in turn. When they were not working, themselves, they sat for him gladly. Everybody wanted to be painted by Stephen. And Verona had sat for him more times than any of them. Everybody knew that. He found her an ideal model. She was his ‘type’. The slender Rossetti type of girl with creamy skin, reddish-brown hair, high cheek bones, large limpid eyes, rather gentle, wistful expression. And the most beautiful hands, Stephen declared, that he had ever seen on any woman. Not only Stephen but all of them had, in turn, drawn Verona’s long slim hands with their perfect oval nails.

Verona, herself did not touch oils. Water colours … delicately expressed landscapes and paintings of some of the old beautiful squares and streets in London, with great attention to detail, were Verona’s speciality. She had no particular belief in herself but she adored painting. It had taken up the whole of her life since she had left school.

At the Academy they said she had promise. Stephen said so. That was the greatest encouragement of all. Stephen of course, was in love with her. Everybody knew it. Verona knew it. And that was what made this afternoon so difficult. So sad. For she was going to marry somebody else. Stephen and her art, her old friends, her old life, would have to recede into the background now. She had chosen a new and quite different sort of life for herself.

This was her farewell visit to Stephen.

She had set out from her home in Hampstead in good spirits and with a certain air of defiance. She was aware of the opposition she would receive from Stephen. She had already had it from some of her friends, who told her frankly that she was about to make an appalling mistake and that she had chosen the wrong man. But she was prepared to stand on her own ground and make her own decisions. And as she travelled in a bus to the Brompton Road, she thought of all the things she would say to Stephen; the arguments with which she would convince him that she was quite right.

But some of the defiance and self-confidence ebbed as she rang that bell outside that well-known door. It wasn’t going to be so easy. She had realized that, when she had told him, on the telephone last night about her engagement to Forbes Jefferton.

He had seemed stunned. There had been none of the usual comeback which one expected from Stephen when he was thwarted or annoyed. No passionate protest. Only that stunned silence. Then he had said:

“I don’t believe it.”

When she had assured him that it was true, he had said, abruptly, that he must see her at once. She told him that she could not get along to the studio until four o’clock on the following day, because Forbes, her fiancé, was staying with her family and not leaving until then. So Stephen, after another silence, had merely said: “Very well … four o’clock tomorrow.”

She started to say something else but he rang off.

She knew, of course, that he was upset.

Later that evening, her greatest friend, Margaret Shaw had telephoned her and protested that she could not possibly marry Forbes. It would smash Stephen’s life. She said he had taken it for granted that she belonged to him. That had upset Verona, but she had immediately parried Margaret’s protests by saying that firstly, nothing could really smash Stephen’s life which was his art, and secondly, that no one had any right to take anybody for granted. She did not belong to Stephen. Just because they had been around a lot together and their friendship had, at moments, become sentimental, there had never at any time been any question of marriage. In fact, Stephen, when he had discussed marriage in general, expressed a distaste for what he called ‘that unhappy state’. In his opinion artists, in particular, should not marry. So often Verona had heard him air views of that kind and state openly that he meant to remain a bachelor until he was at least forty. Then having established himself as a portrait painter, he might consider settling down with a wife and having a family.

“But preserve me from domesticity!” not so very long ago Verona had heard him exclaim, when they had been discussing the forthcoming wedding of a mutual friend. And he had enlarged upon the horrors which awaited the said young painter who had no money, and two furnished rooms. The miseries of domestic drudgery, and possibly, a child. A screaming baby in the studio. No peace, no privacy, no time in which to paint.

Besides, he had said, artists make poor husbands and it would not be fair on the wife. No, Stephen was not a marrying man. Margaret and the others could hardly blame her, Verona, for finding herself a husband.

Yet she felt nervous and even miserable as she waited for Stephen to open the door. She rang twice before he came. Then he flung the door open wide, scarcely looked at her, turned his back, and rather rudely walked back into the studio, palette in one hand, long brush in the other.

“I’m just in the middle of something. Will you excuse me a moment?” he said.

“Certainly,” said Verona.

But her spirits sank even lower as she closed the front door behind her, shutting out the cold biting air and walked into the one and only room in which Stephen worked, slept and ate.

She knew that brusque note in Stephen’s voice. He had never, as far as she could remember, used it to her before. But she had heard it when he spoke irritably to, or about others who displeased him.

She bit at her lips, as she drew off her gloves, dark blue coat and silk scarf which was tied over her head.

It was raw and cold. October had been a warm month but now, the first week of November, the temperatures had suddenly dropped. One might almost have thought there was snow in the air. There had been a slight fog over Hampstead when she left home.

She stood a moment gazing doubtfully around her. It was a very big room, with a skylight, but the light was rapidly fading now. Stephen ought to have stopped painting some time ago, she thought. No doubt he had forgotten to put a shilling in the gas meter, so that he could not turn on the fire. Usually when she came to tea, he had a fire and the kettle boiling all ready for her and had smartened himself up. But there was nothing smart about him today. He wore those old grey flannels which, she had some time ago laughingly told him, were fit for the rubbish heap, and that favourite yellow jersey with the polo collar, which was torn in places and smudged with paint.

She had never before seen him look so slovenly. Yet her heart warmed toward him as she gazed at the tall figure—so much too thin—stooping a little. He wore horn-rimmed glasses through which he peered at the canvas as he worked. His dark rough hair stood up on end. There, Verona thought, stood Stephen the artist … the lovable, highly strung, highly intelligent man with his white-hot love of beauty, his enthusiasm for all things artistic, his dislike of the conventions, of pettiness and meanness and, in particular, of discipline.

His five years of war service in the navy must have been torture to him. Every instinct in him rebelled against service life. But of his own free will he had laid down the painter’s brush and offered himself to a Recruiting Office. He had never held a commission nor wanted one. He served all through as an A.B. His life at sea—fighting against continual sea-sickness and the subjugation of all his ideas and feelings about liberty, independence and peace—had almost beaten him. But he had got through it, grimly refusing to be broken until he was actually carried on a stretcher into hospital, with his wounded leg.

He had courage, and tremendous will power, thought Verona! It was physical strength that he lacked.

How she would miss him! There was nobody else quite like Stephen. She would miss their close association and exchange of ideas. And sometimes she had been near to loving him in the way that he wanted. So passionately and completely that she could almost believe as he did, that marriage was not a necessity and that they should become lovers without any binding and irrecoverable ties.

But she had never quite reached that point. Once or twice during this last summer, his kisses, his caresses, had stirred her to a response which she had found frightening in its intensity. But she could never entirely lose control. She did not share Stephen’s views on marriage, and easy outlook on two people living together in what the Victorians call ‘sin’. She had been brought up in a conventional family and, although herself an artist, she had a strong moral sense. Young couples living together without marriage in a Bohemian atmosphere always seemed to her untidy … and cowardly. If two people loved each other, she believed that they should face the difficulties and drawbacks of married life together courageously. If they were not prepared to do so, they were not really and truly in love. Today as she stood watching Stephen paint she felt even more definitely that she was right and that he was wrong. Yet she had, she frankly confessed to herself, been tempted more than once to throw her cap over the mill and come to Stephen, as he wanted, without reservation.

She remembered the first night that he had ever broached the subject. It was after one of their cheerful parties. The others had gone. She had stood waiting for him to take her home. He had come up to her and with that disarming smile which transformed his thin, pale, rather bony face, he had taken her in his arms and said:

“Don’t leave me, Verona. Stay. All day I have been working on your portrait. I know intimately every detail of your face, your hair, your throat and arms. Every shadow and texture of your skin. All your beauty which is so unearthly. But I want you. All of you. I love you, Verona. Stay and love me. It will be heaven for us both.”

Almost she had stayed, wooed by his voice, the whole unusual personality of the man; the touch of his fine sensitive artists’ hands, his experienced lips. But fighting with her passion was her belief in a way of life which was not his and in her virginity, the importance of which she could not express in mere words; it was just important, that was all.

Terrified of herself, she rushed away from him that night. Next time they met he was as sweet and friendly with her as ever, but coolly apologetic.

“I am sorry about last night,” he had said. “I hadn’t the slightest right to ask you to spend the night with me. You’re a nice girl, Verona, and I am not what is commonly known as a ‘nice man’, I have no morals … at least not what your family or you would call morals. I have my own code of decency. I know what I consider a man should or should not do. In my way, I think I am a decent chap. But I do not believe in marriage and as you are obviously not in accord with that view, I have no right to make love to you.”

For days afterwards she had been unhappy about it, still tempted to give way to him but, always, she managed to keep her head above water. She could not do as he asked. Yet she had a certain amount of sympathy with his views which were largely the views of their friends. She knew that she and Stephen really could not afford to marry. A wife, for instance, in this one room of Stephen’s was unthinkable. And if Stephen was to get on, he must have no ties. He must be able to remain the penurious artist, free to devote himself to his art until he reached the top of the tree. But decent he was … oh, she knew that! However unconventional, Stephen most certainly had his own codes. Nobody could be more kind or more generous. She had seen him spend his last shilling helping to buy materials for a young painter less well off than himself. Neither was he promiscuous. So far as she knew, during the years of their friendship, he had never been interested in any girl except herself. He was extremely fastidious.

And since that night when he had begged her to stay here with him, he had never repeated it. He had made love to her lightly—and without demands. But always he had intimated that one day he hoped she would change her mind and be fulfilled as a woman through him and his love.

Yes, she could see that he had taken her for granted … maybe through his colossal egoism, perhaps only because he wished to believe it.

Whichever way it was, the whole thing was tragic. Because if Stephen had wanted to marry her, she would have married him a long time ago. She had wanted to be completely absorbed in him and possessed by him as he desired.

There was something about Stephen that had always attracted her. Perhaps because he was older by eight years and had seen so much more of life than she had, as well as because she recognized the genius in him, and because he was her master; her intellectual superior. He had taught her so much about art and had been patient with her ignorance, even if aggravated at times by the one great weakness in her character which was her indecision. Not only Stephen but her own family, accused Verona of procrastination; a reluctance to make up her mind. She liked to have it made up for her, and there were moments when this trait made even Stephen cross with her.

“For lord’s sake don’t ask me what I think all the time. Form your own impressions. Shape your own destiny irrespective of anybody else’s opinion, my dear child!” he had cried on one occasion.

Then relented, as he always did with Verona, unable he said, to resist the wistfulness of her beautiful grey-blue eyes and that exquisitely fragile slender grace which was really a snare and a delusion, for Verona was physically stronger than Stephen. During all her twenty-one years she had never suffered from more than the odd headache. But somehow she managed to make people want to protect and advise her, and Stephen most of all.

“I know you but I fall for it, all the time,” he would laugh.

‘Well’, she thought, as she stared at Stephen’s stubbornly turned back. ‘He told me to make up my own mind. And now I have, he can’t blame me.’

She found that she was shivering with cold, Stephen seemed to be unaware of her presence. She felt a little resentful and sorry that she had come. Her mother had never approved of her visits to Stephen Best’s studio but she did not interfere with her daughter. Verona was, as a rule allowed to do as she wanted. Mrs. Lang contented herself with complaining mildly that Verona was ‘a modern girl’, and, in her opinion, modern girls did the most shocking things. But she was quite sure there was no harm in them. All these young people seem to drift in and out of each other’s flats—both men and girls and of course there was no longer such a thing as a chaperone. Nevertheless Verona knew that her mother was thankful that this was to be the last time she would visit Stephen. The whole family had shown delight and even relief when she had accepted Forbes Jefferton’s proposal.

But although Verona had come here prepared to meet with reproach and perhaps sorrow from Stephen, she had not expected this cold hostility. It alarmed and even challenged her. She could never bear anybody to be angry with her.

Stephen continued to be absorbed in his painting.

Timidly, Verona moved up behind him and looked over his shoulder.

This was a portrait of Patsy, the child of the caretaker, who lived in the basement flat. A nine-year-old girl with amazingly light blue eyes, and a wild tangle of ebony curls; an elfin-like charm. She was always dirty and mischievous. Stephen had captured all the mischief and the beauty which had sprung from heaven knew where. Patsy’s father was a drunkard and her Irish mother a slattern. But the portrait was one of the most striking pieces of work that Stephen had ever done. Suddenly Verona had forgot her grievance. All the artist in her was stirred to fervent appreciation.

“Why, Stephen, this is marvellous. It will be the best thing in your exhibition.”

He did not turn to answer her but she saw his shoulders lift in a shrug. He dipped his brush into a jar of turpentine, wiped it on a rag, then stepped back a pace, knocking into Verona. He apologized, still without looking at her, concentrating through his half-shut eyes upon the portrait of the little girl.

Verona’s heart began to beat more quickly. Her pale cheeks coloured. Resentment was returning.

Suddenly she spoke to him with a voice of indignation.

“Can’t we have a fire? It’s icy in here, I am frozen.”

He swung round and faced her. With exaggerated courtesy he bowed and answered:

“I beg your pardon. I haven’t felt the cold. Of course I’ll light the fire at once.”

He took off his glasses, fumbled in his pocket and brought out two half-crowns and a ten shilling note. He scowled and muttered “damn” under his breath.

Verona immediately found her bag and pulled out a shilling.

“I have one, Stephen.”

He took it and then tossed one of the half-crowns into her palm.

She tried to give it back.

“Please don’t bother, I have no more change,” she said.

He refused to accept the coin from her, and busied himself by putting the shilling into the meter.

“Keep the one and sixpence and put it in the poor box when you go to church on Sunday,” he said in an ironic voice, struck a match and lit the gas fire which spluttered noisily. “I am afraid I am not being very hospitable today,” he added. “But I’ll soon put the kettle on, and make you some tea. I don’t think there is anything to eat. Do you mind?”

Verona bit her lip and her whole face screwed up as if she were going to cry. She said:

“What did you mean about me going to church on Sunday?”

He put his hands in his pockets and gave her a long sullen look.

“I presume you will become a regular church-goer, now that you have decided to break all ties with the pagan world of art and become the wife of a highly respectable officer of His Majesty’s Army.”

Verona caught her breath.

“You’re being rather unpleasant, Stephen, aren’t you?”

“No doubt. I can’t say that I’m in the mood to be agreeable.”

“And anyhow,” she added, “why should the world of art be pagan? Are there no painters who go to church?”

He laughed, but it was a bitter laugh, without humour.

“Oh, my dear child, don’t let’s become analytical. I didn’t mean to challenge you into a debate upon ‘should artists or should they not go to church’?”

“No, you were just being offensive,” she said.

“I am sorry,” he said briefly.

She was struggling now against the inclination to weep. She had not known that Stephen could be so unkind. Yet while her eyes, magnified by tears, reproached him through their long silky lashes, she saw suddenly how ill he looked. He was always pale. Today in the grey light of the fading day, he looked deathly. There were deep caverns under his eyes. He had not shaved. His chin showed blue. She was certain that he had not eaten any lunch. In the tiny kitchenette adjoining the studio, there were no signs of food or dirty dishes. He looked as though he had not slept all night, and as though he had been painting for hours in this cold bleak studio.

Stephen Best was never good looking in the accepted sense. He was too thin and angular. His skin seemed stretched over the bones of his face. He had a large nose and a wide mouth with a sardonic twist to it. The hazel eyes, alone, were remarkable. Very large, and of an extraordinary brilliance. One felt that Stephen Best’s eyes had an almost frightening power to penetrate into the depths of people and things.

It was the face of a man who had suffered, one capable of blind renunciation and, as a paradox, of extreme egoism and self-indulgence. A man capable of the best or the worst. But, above all, one who recognized the truth and had a hatred of hypocrisy.

It was this touch of the fanatic in Stephen which had first interested Verona and drawn her to him. She had found it wonderful to meet and talk with a young man who had such profound self-confident beliefs, and a total disregard for the opinion of those around him. He was a thrilling novelty after the ordinary, somewhat suburban types of men, whom she had met hitherto in her life. Once she had started to study art seriously, and come in contact with the other young students of her age, she had found them all quite interesting and sympathetic, and had developed rapidly along her own lines. But the development would not have been as swift and marked had she not become the constant companion of Stephen Best. He had had a tremendous influence on her. But never at any time had he shown her this roughness, this bitterness, which she found so alarming this afternoon.

Yet, as she became conscious of his changed physical appearance as well as his hostility, her heart softened. She could only suppose that he was ill because he was unhappy. He was harder hit than she had expected him to be by the news she had broken to him last night.

She stood gazing at him through the mist of tears, and felt a little frightened. She did not want Stephen to feel that she had, as Margaret put it, smashed his life.

“Oh, Stephen,” she broke out suddenly, tremulously, “Stephen, are you very angry with me?”

He set his teeth. Then he gave an ugly smile.

“What a foolish question, Verona. Why should I be angry. Is one angry because of a volcanic eruption, or a tidal wave, or a tornado? Angry is too feeble a word. No, I’m not angry with you. I am profoundly shocked, that’s all.”

She coloured to the roots of her hair. Her gaze fell before the feverish bitterness of his.

“Why shocked?”

He laughed again.

“I stand corrected. Why indeed should I be ‘shocked’. That is another foolish word—almost as inept as ‘angry’. One is not actually shocked by the volcano, the tidal wave, or the tornado. One receives a violent shock, which throws one off one’s balance. I am a little off mine today. Perhaps that’s why I’m so disagreeable. You look a bit pinched, my dear. Go and warm your hands by the fire while I make your tea.”

The tears dried on her lashes. His icy animosity and displeasure had a stultifying effect upon her. She gave him a desolate look, walked to the fire, knelt down and spread out her fingers to the red warmth which emanated now from the broken asbestos grill.

Stephen Best stood motionless for a moment. His gaze swept her in a hungry tormented fashion. The artist in him marvelled, as always, at the rare beauty of those long, slender fingers, which looked almost translucent in the firelight. At the same time he caught the sparkle of a new ring on her left hand. A discreet solitaire diamond. It was, he presumed, the engagement ring which Forbes Jefferton had given her.

Stephen was a man of acute sensibility and imagination. He visualized this other man, whom he had never met, slipping that ring on to the slender finger and then kissing Verona. Yes, he was certain to have done so in a nice conventional fashion; telling her that he was proud and pleased that she had consented to marry him. And Verona would have kissed him back, saying that she, too, was proud and pleased to become his promised wife. Stephen flayed himself with further flights of imagination. Verona’s fragile, boyishly slim body in Forbes Jefferton’s arms, her wistful mouth lifted for his kiss. The heavy silken lids closed; as Stephen had seen them close when he kissed her.

An almost savage jealousy flared up in the artist and possessed him so wholly that he felt afraid, afraid that he might dart forward, pull the kneeling girl on to her feet, tangling his fingers in that burnt chestnut hair which curled so luxuriantly down to her shoulders, and throttle her … squeeze the life out of that long slender throat which he had so often painted and admired.

“You have the sort of neck which they liked in the days of the Tudors my sweet,” he remembered once telling her. “A little neck like Anne Boleyn’s. I can see it meekly stretched on the executioner’s block.”

She had laughed and shuddered and told him not to be so horrid, and he had laughed with her and then kissed and stroked the beautiful swan-neck with tenderness. But he would never kiss it again. Never laugh with her again; and paint her; criticize her paintings which were of some merit even if they had no genius behind them. Verona was, in his opinion, not a bad artist and would have been better had she worked harder.

Now she was going to be married. Margaret had come here to tell him about it after Verona telephoned. Margaret had been quite upset in her own way. She was Verona’s best friend and she thought that Verona was crazy. She had only met this man a month ago through some cousin of hers who was in the army, and had served under Forbes. Forbes was a regular … he had just got his majority, was aged thirty, served with some distinction during the war, and had quite a row of medals. He had been wounded in the right arm when he was with the Eighth Army during the Rommel campaign.

Verona was crazy, Margaret said, to imagine that she could be happy married to an arm. . .