The River Within

by Karen Powell

  In Helmsley, the church hall was packed. Even with the magnifier in place over the television set screen, it was hard to see what was happening. The little ones were restless, wanting their party food before it was time, and Miss Price had her work cut out, making sure they didn’t embarrass themselves in front of the host school. Danny hadn’t been much interested in the whole proceedings before, except as a distraction from lessons for the day. Miss Price had spent the last few weeks trying to cram their heads with facts about what was to happen and its place in history and although he knew that it was supposed to be big and important, it didn’t seem to have much to do with his world. He’d been far more excited to hear the news announced that morning that Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing had reached the summit of Mount Everest. The school kids on the television screen were shouting and waving on either side of a street that was as wide as a field, but he couldn’t share their excitement. He knew they weren’t really grey, it was just the television that made them look like that, but it was how he imagined London to be and, come to think of it, there had definitely been a kind of grey look about the ones that’d turned up here in the war, as if the dirt and the bomb dust had been ground into their skins.

  But the grandeur of it all got to him in the end. Once they showed you inside the Abbey with its great aisles and all those people processing. He’d never seen a building so enormous, though he’d been to York Minster on another school trip, felt he might fall backwards when he craned his head and stared up into the space of its central tower. There was something too about the young woman in the middle of everything today, that solitary figure, with her Snow White skin and her eyes all dark and serious. She had a steadfast look upon her face but Danny felt something swell in his chest. He wanted to protect her. He could not explain why, only that she looked alone and brave. Then the choir sang out:

  ‘Zadok the Priest!

  And Nathan the Prophet!’

  And he felt his heart soar with pride and great hope for the new Queen.

  The man on the television said: ‘Then shall the orb and the cross be brought from the altar by the Dean of Westminster . . . ’ and Danny thought it an odd way of speaking, the words as jumbled as the day itself. The room was overheating from too many bodies crammed in together and his attention began to drift again.

  ‘How heavy it must feel,’ said a voice next to him, and he saw that the crown was being lowered onto the Queen’s head, and also that Lennie was right beside him. ‘Imagine having no choice like that.’

  He couldn’t think of a sensible thing to say, but it didn’t seem to matter. Lennie continued, staring intently at the screen. ‘Everyone expecting so much and you didn’t ask for any of it.’

  ‘Maybe she should have stayed in Kenya.’

  The King’s death had been broken to Princess Elizabeth while she was in Africa, staying at a place called Treetops Hotel. None of them would forget because Miss Price had sent them home from school that day and the newspapers had been edged with black.

  ‘With the elephants and leopards, you mean?’ said Lennie, smiling in that slow, gentle way of hers. ‘How lovely.’

  The room was hotter than ever.

  ‘She can do anything after this,’ Danny said. ‘Go wherever she wants, being Queen.’

  ‘Yes, but they’ll always find her now, won’t they?’

  The trestle tables were cleared away, plates washed, tablecloths folded, and then it was time to get the children into their costumes. In the adjacent street, someone had plugged a radiogram into the lamppost and dancing had already started. Bunting fluttered and flapped at every window as the wind picked up.

  How gentle Lennie was with the little ones, never pulling or tugging at them or pinching at them to hurry as they put on their wings and beaks and patiently helping them back up onto the truck again. When everyone was in, Danny and Jackie Bracegirdle unfurled the cream canvas and spread it over the domed metal framework above their heads, while Jim Madgwick drew back the central section and tied it with several lengths of rope.

  ‘Well, there may not be not four-and-twenty of ’em,’ he said, jumping down beside Miss Price when he was done. ‘But that’s not a half-bad pie.’

  ‘Quiet for now please, blackbirds! Smooth it down at the bottom!’ said Miss Price who was, everyone could sense, becoming increasingly worked up. Robin Hood and his Merry Men, complete with an overstuffed Friar Tuck, had just passed the top of the street, and the rumour in the church hall had been that Hartsby school had got up a tremendous The-Old-Woman-Who-Lived-In-A-Shoe float. ‘And can you roll the edges back a bit more too, so it looks more PASTRY-like? Watch out for the bunting though. Does everyone have their FLAGS?’

  At last the little ones were all in their correct positions beneath the pie crust, and older ones took their places behind the float. A brass band passed the end of the road and then the truck thrummed into life, cloaking the older pupils in a bluish petrol haze, and set off towards the High Street, where they would join the coronation parade.

  ‘This whole thing looks a mess before we’ve even started!’ cried Miss Price, coming to an abrupt halt at the head of the procession. She was, Danny noticed, bright pink in the face now, the colour travelling all the way down her neck, to the V of her bosom. Damp semi-circles were spreading beneath the armpits of her blue, shirtwaister dress. ‘All of you find someone to hold hands with please!’

  The older classmates looked at one another in horror but their teacher was already moving along the procession and forcibly pairing them up.

  Before she could reach him, Danny found his way to Lennie. She looked down at her hand in his, as if surprised to find it there, but made no attempt to withdraw it or to find an alternative partner.

  ‘Thank you!’ said Miss Price, approving the new tidier arrangements. ‘Now blackbirds, TWEET!!’

  The truck turned onto the High Street, slotting into a row of other floats and the fifteen or so Starome blackbirds poked their heads out of the rolled-back canvas and shrieked and cawed and flapped their sheeted wings at one another for all they were worth. In the chaos, Dennis Dewsnap’s beak was broken in two and Milly Marwood was poked in the eye and promptly burst into tears. Just then the storm that had been threatening all morning broke with a great clap of thunder overhead, and a light but determined downpour began.

  ‘Keep marching! Straight on,’ said Miss Price. She had spotted the towering cardboard roof of the Hartsby school float up ahead, heard the cheering of the crowds. They marched and the rain began to thrum on the canvas pie-crust, as if some heavenly tap had been turned on. Onlookers lining the streets began to retreat into doorways, beneath shop awnings. Miss Price ran ahead of the procession and clambered up onto the truck, trying to do something about the poor show of soggy beaks and wailing, flapping wings going on inside. Just for a second, Danny thought he felt a pressure from Lennie’s hand, a tightening against his. Another clap of thunder; another turn of the tap.

  ‘Back beneath the canvas! Quickly now!’ Miss Price said, making herself heard above the rain, and the crying and the sullen rumble of the truck’s engine. ‘Everyone!’

  The little ones did as they were told, just as a great tumble of rainwater freed itself from a fold at the top of the pie, slid down the canvas pastry and onto the heads of Miss Price and all the screeching little blackbirds within.

  Danny was about to help but there was pressure on his hand again. No doubt about it now, and then Lennie was tugging at his arm, pulling him from the procession and into the straggle of stalwarts at the roadside sheltering themselves as best they could under a rag-tag sky of leaking umbrellas and dripping oilskins.

  ‘Are you ill or something?’ They had found their way to a clearer space at the back of the thinning crowd. Her hair was soaked to her scalp, dripping over her shoulders and down her back, like some lovely river creature. She shook her head. There was something in her eyes he didn’t u
nderstand. She smiled and then she was gone, breaking into a run down a side street. He had to sprint to keep up with her.

  There was a moment, sheltering under the trees by the bus stop, when he might have kissed her.

  Why did you leave?’

  She shook her head. ‘The noise and everyone marching together like that for no reason. Like some terrible rally.’

  The bus rattled as it sped along the back roads to Starome. Sunlight had broken through the rainclouds and ahead of them the tarmac steamed. Lennie looked pale and worried.

  ‘They’ll be awful trouble, I expect.’

  ‘We’ll say that you twisted your ankle or something. That we lost everyone in the crowds. Don’t worry.’

  In bed that night, beneath the eaves, Danny told himself that it could have been anyone. She might have taken anyone’s hand for the procession. But all he could think of was the pounding of their feet on the cobblestones, puddles that brimmed and bubbled like shallow cauldrons, and Lennie’s laughter echoing down the narrow street like the call of a bird, high and wild. He pictured Hillary and Tenzing high above the rest of the world. They stood either side of a summit sharp as a pencil and topped with snow, its point so delicate that it could snap off at any moment, their footing so precarious that with one wrong move they might fall into thin air.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lennie, August 1955

  I’m taking you out.’ Alexander stood at the door of Gatekeeper’s Cottage. The car engine was still running on the driveway behind him. ‘Come on,’ he urged, ‘your father’s up to his eyes in table plans up at the house with mother. I’ve rarely seen him so ecstatic.’

  Lennie looked down at herself. ‘I’ll need to change first.’

  ‘Well do hurry. I’m starting to suffocate around here, what with all the fuss about mother’s party.’

  Lennie thought she’d never seen anyone less in danger of suffocating than Alexander, in his freshly-ironed clothing, a cigarette resting between his lips and a sweater slung over his shoulders, but she hurried upstairs anyway.

  ‘I’ve champagne from the cellar!’ he called after her. ‘Half the county’ll be guzzling it on Saturday so we must be sure to drink as much as we can.’

  He drove them out of the village, turning north as they reached the main road, and soon they were heading towards the foot of the North York moors which swelled to a green crest ahead of them, as though a great hand had ruffled the earth’s surface.

  As well as the champagne, Alexander had charmed cold chicken and a basket of apricots from the girls in the kitchen. Sheltered by the heather that spread across the moors from horizon to horizon, vibrating with the hum of bees, the two of them stretched out on the bank of an icy stream. They ate and then Alexander sunbathed with his eyes half-closed against the high summer sun, while Lennie wriggled down the bank a little so that she might dabble her toes against the cold, round pebbles on the bed of the stream.

  It had been last Easter when it had begun, only a few short months ago. Lennie had run up to the Hall in search of her father in his workplace and come face-to-face with Alexander instead. He was standing by the vestibule of the chapel at the far end of the Hall, a gloomy corner even on the brightest of days. He looked so sad and she wondered whether he had been praying for his father, so recently buried, and how that word sounded like itself, buried, all heaped-up darkness. But Alexander did not believe in souls, he’d once told her, and she felt embarrassed for him then, as if she had caught him in the act of something dishonest. She turned to leave but he seized her by the hand. She stood quite still while he lifted a lock of her hair, gazing at it as though it were some entity altogether separate from her.

  ‘It’s almost unreal in this light, Helena, this colour. You must have Nordic blood in you.’

  How he loved to look at her that springtime when honeydew dropped from the limes and the goslings were sulphurous balls of new down, slithering down the river bank for the first time, instinctively drawn to the great rush of water. She was a Viking child, he said, a changeling, Artemis of the moon, a fairy creature that had strayed from the woods. He invented ever more ludicrous descriptions just to make her laugh, but when, at last, he had kissed her, beneath a horse chestnut candled with snowy blossom, its soft umbrellaed leaves sheltering them, she had barely been able to breathe.

  And then he returned to college and she didn’t hear from him until halfway through term. ‘I need to see you.’ His voice echoing on the telephone line at the Hall, where she’d been summoned to take the call. ‘Your father’s visiting Thomas and you must come too.’

  Her father fussed over train tickets and connections and room bookings, while Lennie, who had never travelled further than Leeds, gazed out of the window as the Cambridgeshire skies broke open above her, vast and blue. She felt herself becoming more and more insubstantial, as if she might dissolve into the wide air. Had she made a mistake, she wondered, leaving the safety of home where her pretty new dress had made her brave and real enough for anyone?

  Thomas and Alexander met them at the station and Lennie’s father was sent ahead to the little hotel on Parker’s Piece where they were to stay. It was awkward at first—questions of bags and taxi fares—in a way that it had never been between the three of them before now. How much did Thomas know? She could not be sure, started to think she should not have come. Soon though, her brother had to go to his college to meet his tutor and Alexander grasped her by the hand and remade everything just for her. He took her for tea, and they walked along Trinity Street and King’s Parade, stopping only briefly to talk to acquaintances of Alexander’s who were, on the whole, perfectly ordinary young men, with only the occasional earnest, non-intimidating kind of girl wearing nothing as pretty as a cornflower-blue dress. On this rare warm day of early summer, Cambridge became his gift to her, a magical place of sunlit alleyways and enclosed worlds behind doorways, of secret gardens and the plash of green water beyond the meadows. A place, Lennie felt, where it was splendid to be young and lovely.

  ‘It’s different in winter,’ said Alexander as they crossed Clare Bridge. ‘The wind comes off the North Sea and straight over the Fens and you’re never quite warm enough, even with the fire going all day long. It’s still beautiful, of course, only more austere.’ He sniffed. ‘If you want pretty you go to Oxford.’ They stopped on the apex of the bridge, looking down at the water, mild and green beneath them. ‘I suppose I should take you punting. Everyone does at some point.’ She merely nodded, not wanting to appear straightforward like other people but secretly longing to be taken. And it had been perfect, that hour they’d had upon the river, her head resting upon a cushion and Alexander standing above her, the sunlight behind him and the slender punt sliding forwards, noiseless in the quick shadows of the bridges. Fingers touched peeling varnish, the leaves of the weeping willows that grew along the river bank above; sun-dazzle, eyelashes, supple branches.

  They moored near an inn and Alexander brought them beer to drink and lay beside her with his arm resting around her shoulders, his cigarette smoke drifting lazily in the sunshine. She smoked some of the cigarette too. When he kissed her they tasted of illicit things.

  Only an irate porter could have marred that day, insisting on their return that Alexander had not signed out the craft in the correct manner.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, the punt’s been stolen,’ he said, jabbing at the log book and looking around the Porter’s Lodge as if seeking witnesses to the crime. Lennie’s instinct was to placate—the porter reminded her of her father, wanting everything to be in its right place—but Alexander was proud and she dreaded a row. To her relief, he spread his palms in mock-submission and walked away.

  Later, he took her to the hotel. ‘You’re my girl now, Helena,’ he said, kissing her fiercely. ‘My good girl.’

  CHAPTER 8

  Venetia, 1932

  Escaping?’

  The voice came
from a window ledge behind a trio of palms, belonged, she saw, to a dark-haired boy she’d noticed earlier in the evening. Venetia smiled as if in agreement, though it was more that the ballroom was small and a little too crowded. Seeing glass and cool greenery on the far side of the hallway, she’d stepped out in this conservatory for a little air.

  ‘It’s like a big, hot coffin in there, isn’t it? All that wood-panelling, I mean.’ The boy stood, confirming what she’d spotted before: he was one of few there who could match her for height. ‘James Richmond,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you all evening—to tell you how elegant you look in that dress.’

  He was neatly-built despite his height, and with a delicate edge to his features. Venetia had spent half the evening in the company of boys she’d known for years—nice enough in any other setting, but red-faced and boisterous tonight. She could hear shouting from the ballroom and it emphasised some gentle quality in her companion.

  ‘My mother chose it.’ Venetia pushed aside the fibrous palms and took a seat on the window ledge. ‘I didn’t particularly want to come.’

  It wasn’t quite a lie and it felt like a friendly thing to say, something that this James with the uncertain look in his eyes would like to hear. She had been riding all afternoon and it certainly had seemed a bother to bathe and change and have one’s hair smoothed down and waved, but she liked the look of herself in the mirror once she was done, her brother Freddie clowning around beside her pretending to be an awestruck beau, and her other brothers coming in, curious to see how she had turned out. It was later, arriving at the McAndrews’ hunting lodge which was lit up like a theatre, that she started to think she might have been better off staying at home.