Alex Brown - A Postcard from Italy

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Alexandra Brown 2019

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollins Publishers 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

For all the people who care for other people

‘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

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.