The Golden Lion

by Pamela Haines

  She gave up, did not think the battle worth fighting. So many people now she must guard herself against, so few to whom she could open her heart. Perhaps that was why, around that time, she fell in love with art. Her emotional life became completely bound up in it. She had no talent of her own – any attempts she made were heartbreakingly bad. She cursed her inability to capture in watercolour the gentle yet sometimes violent colours of the Yorkshire landscape: subtle greens shading into brown, yellows both muddy and brilliant, the slash of purple in late summer. She hated her stiff dilettante efforts.

  Gradually as she came to know more about technique, she was able instead to marvel at what others had achieved. And most especially in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence. All her gift money went on albums, reproductions, histories. Giotto, Cimabue, de Fabriano, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Botticelli, Filipo Lippi, da Vinci, Raphael. Madonnas and Venuses jostled for space on the walls of her bedroom. She feasted on them, tried to enter them. Heard them as if they were music. It seemed to her that they had life and breathed. Or rather, that she only breathed when she looked at them. She would feel afterwards as if she had gulped fresh air.

  Ah, those colours, the brightness falling into her drab life. How she longed to visit Italy and most especially Florence. Perhaps if she had asked Father directly, he would have said Yes? But the project, the desire, had been so secret she hadn’t been able to voice it. (To have had Mother mock her …)

  Within a year of the move Father died very suddenly, of a heart attack. In his Will, he left her Park Villa – and Mother. Park Villa was to be Mother’s home for the rest of her life, Eleanor never thought of the house as other than a gift on paper. While Mother lived she was, if anything, worse off. She had little or no money of her own: a handful of stocks and shares about which she knew nothing and which she would not have dared to sell. For everyday pocket money she had still to ask Mother. If she were to marry, her husband would have to live at Park Villa.

  But she did not expect to marry. She felt certain of this. It was not enough to be ‘handsome’.

  Once, before the move to Yorkshire when they were living temporarily in London, Basil had brought home a fellow student. A slight, intense boy with a shadowed face – not unlike Dick Grainger. She had felt his eyes on her all during the evening. It was a strange sensation; it had not happened to her before. He was to be a priest, so, she thought, it could not be that he was interested in her. Too shy to look at him, she felt nevertheless a great need to mother him, to tell him that it, that everything, was all right. When he left she felt a sudden desperation that he should be going and she might never see him again. Often it was on the tip of her tongue to ask Basil about him. When she at last did, she learned that he had gone to a mission in China. For years she felt irrational guilt about this wicked love, desire, if that was what it had been. A priest. A priest to be. How wicked.

  ‘Anything more to go in Basil’s envelope?’ Eleanor asked. Smell of hot wax. She stamped on the Dennison seal.

  ‘How careless you are with the wax … The Grainger boy is on leave – you knew that, I suppose? They say he’s very nervous. About what, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘He’s at the controls of a plane,’ Eleanor said sharply. ‘That should be enough. Home Defence.’

  ‘Fooey, Eleanor. Flying in England – it’s hardly the trenches, you know.’ And when Eleanor didn’t answer: ‘Always the best that go – James was a splendid boy. No wonder Maimie Grainger is so shattered still. I told her, “I know what you’re suffering – I lost my firstborn, a firstborn is special.” ‘

  I know, I know, Eleanor thought. Those who come after are also-rans. She waited. But instead, another predictable:

  ‘A priest now – a priest is rather special. And then a daughter who marries –’ She lifted the sock: ‘Time to turn the heel already … Grandchildren, a gift. Margaret has more than made up for you –’

  Eleanor stood up. ‘I’ll walk to the post –’

  ‘Don’t interrupt me, just because I suggest you are less than perfect.’

  ‘I’m very imperfect, I know. It’s not for want of your telling me.’

  ‘That tone again – I don’t know what’s wrong with you, unless it’s constipation. I suspect jealousy.’

  ‘Jealousy?’ She stopped by the door. ‘Jealousy? Of whom?’

  ‘Basil, of course. For being a priest. God’s anointed.’

  As she changed into her outdoor shoes, she smelled lunch cooking. Savoury oatmeal pie. Because of the wartime food shortage, today was a meatless day. A wave of disconsolate hunger swept over her, merging with her anger at Mother.

  At the post office, Mrs Clarkson, the postmistress, told her: ‘There’s a telegram come for Reeves.’

  Eleanor hesitated. ‘It’s Tom gone, isn’t it?’ When Mrs Clarkson nodded, she said, ‘I’d hoped … Mr Grainger tried to do something, you know. To get him transferred.’

  ‘I ken. But there it is. Four gone in three year. And now Tom. I’d thought Vicar’d mebbe break it them, but he’s ill abed – And this telegraph business, I don’t reckon nowt to it. Lad’d never get a bike over t’moors.’

  ‘Someone should walk over there. I could.’

  ‘It’s a way, Miss Dennison. Alone?’

  ‘No,’ she said, suddenly thinking of it, ‘no, I shall ask one of the Graingers.’

  Dick only was at Moorgarth. He agreed at once. ‘I’m only idling,’ he said, ‘and already tired with it.’ They decided to set out as soon as possible. ‘Two hours to cross the moor,’ he said. ‘An hour there and two to return – We should be back before the light goes.’

  ‘Daylight saving, tampering with the clock and upsetting people, will be some help,’ Eleanor said. Home again, she ignored her mother’s protests, saying: ‘It’s the least I can do. Tom was our gardener.’

  They set out at a steady pace. If he kept back for her, she didn’t sense it. The going was hard: as they left the fields behind and began climbing the moor to the west of the dale, they made their way through boggy patches and sedge grass. Damp, beaten-down bracken fronds clung to their boots. The sky was the grey of winter, shading from pale to metallic. But the moor still hinted at autumn with its strong russet tones.

  She said, ‘I think we do right to go in person. A woman should be there – and you, Dick, you’re a familiar face.’

  ‘The Reeves lads,’ he said, ‘when I was in short trousers, they were like gods to me. They could order people about. Tom had the most authority of all. I envied him.’

  ‘But now –’

  He interrupted, his voice sharply bitter, ‘Oh, but some might. For him it’s all over and done with. They can’t shoot him down in flames, can they?’

  They sat half an hour at the farmhouse. Eleanor had suggested the kitchen, but almost at once after hearing the news Mrs Reeves had sent her grieving daughter Ada to lift the blinds in the parlour, and set a match to the fire. Stiff with cold and sorrow, she sat with her guests. ‘I can’t rightly believe it,’ she said over and over.

  Ada brought in a tray of tea and hastily made griddle scones. ‘You’ll take a bite, a sup?’ Mrs Reeves asked anxiously, as if to clutch at Eleanor. They could not have left without seeming heartless. But when they stood up to go she saw that it was already quite late, and the light beginning to go.

  A bumpy grass track led away from the farmhouse. The air in the darkening sky seemed heavy, pressing down on her. Walking beside Dick, she felt an immense tiredness: the weight of sharing for a little while someone else’s sorrow. She wanted to say something of this to him, but could not find the words. She said instead, ‘I shouldn’t care for this walk back if there were snow.’

  Dick said, ‘We’ve often walked in snow, you and I. Long family hikes – except there doesn’t seem to be family now. We all go, we have to, our separate ways … Will the world ever be the same again?’

  ‘How can it be?’ She sensed the anxiety in his voice, but didn’t know how to allay it. She asked
him the time and he took out his watch, but the light was so far gone that he had to strike a lucifer.

  ‘Later than we thought,’ he said. ‘We must hurry. I don’t like …’ he sniffed the air: ‘a smell like fog.’

  They were trudging the rough grassy road still that linked the Reeves’s and other scattered farmhouses, at the point where the enclosed land ended. In the distance, scarcely visible now against the darkening skyline, was Thackton Rigg. Along the top of it a road ran directly to the village. He said:

  ‘Once up there, even if there’s fog or mist we’ll at least be able to find our way.’ They left the track and began to make their way slowly uphill, walking at an angle through sodden heather, Eleanor stumbling occasionally, Dick asking, ‘All right? Take my arm.’

  And then the mist fell. As suddenly and as totally as a blanket of snow. One moment the Rigg could just be made out. The next, in front of them was only a cold swirling. Eleanor put a hand on Dick’s coat. She said as calmly as she could, ‘I can see you – just.’

  His voice pierced the gloom. ‘We can’t go down again, you know. I wouldn’t trust us to find the rough road. And if we’re not on it we’ll never find the farmhouses. Any of them.’

  Eleanor said, ‘Logically we just have to keep walking slightly upwards. Then we must reach the ridge top.’

  But it wasn’t like that. From the first moment of cold white threads, muffling them, she had known they would become lost. She was filled with terror even before it happened. She had never realized how much she relied not just on the ground beneath her feet, but on the sight of expected things. Landmarks. North, south, east, west. Here now, was that terrifying game of childhood. Blindman’s buff (twirled once by Basil so ferociously that when he’d stopped, she had keeled over).

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Dick said. ‘We should have surely hit the road by now.’

  The fog was if anything denser. Soon the light would go completely. She was afraid she would lose him. ‘Don’t move far away,’ she said, her capable manner deserting her: no longer thirty-two-year-old Miss Dennison, but a frightened girl.

  They continued, still seeming to climb. Occasionally the ground would dip, puzzling, frightening her. Moorland she thought she knew well became now as foreign, as treacherous, as something in a fairy tale. When Dick said, ‘Eleanor – we’re lost,’ he voiced what she already knew.

  They linked arms. ‘We are,’ she said. ‘What shall we do?’

  Dick made a plan, cheered her, soothed her. She heard in his tones for the first time echoes of Eric. She had never thought him like his father. Only in James had she seen, though physically different, some of the easy charm that Eric must have had as a young man. He said, ‘I wish I knew where we’d gone wrong. I was leading, after all, it’s me who’s landed us in this mess. Our families will be terribly worried. Your mother –’

  Oh, let her, Eleanor thought angrily, still irritated with her from the morning. She said, ‘It will do her good to worry about me. I am with her too much, you see. Margaret makes a virtue of scarcity. And then she has given her grandchildren, which I have not. I am nothing –’

  ‘You’re not nothing to us. To the Grainger family,’ Dick said hotly. She could feel the warmth of his defence of her. He said sadly, ‘If I’d Eulalia here, she’d know the way home. She always did. I’d never to guide her back.’

  ‘How do they know? Smell?’

  ‘Smell. Instinct. Something we haven’t got or have lost. Look at homing pigeons. Carrier pigeons.’ But talk of carrier pigeons brought thoughts of War and the Front, messages winging to and fro. All that world that had been too much with them that afternoon.

  Dick’s plan was to search out a sheep hollow, preferably one with tallish heather around it. (Could it not have been sheep hollows deceiving them just now, so that they’d mistaken rising ground for falling?) Sheltering in one of these, they would make out as best they could until daylight.

  The griddle scones and the tea seemed long ago. But she wasn’t hungry. Only cold. Her coat was heavy and damp, her feet swollen as if iced in her boots. Her fingers, stiff inside her leather gloves, wouldn’t bend.

  The silence seemed part of the mist, as if any sound near them must be muffled by it. Once they heard sheep but so distant it might have been in another country. In the hollow where they huddled together, half-lying, half-sitting, Dick was so close she could feel his warm breath against her frozen face. He had offered her his scarf, wrapping it round so that just a space was left for breathing and talking.

  Dick, dear, dear Dick. In the stillness and the silence, the gaps, easy, between conversation during this long, long night, she thought: If I could only tell him. The fancy took her, the longing, compulsion almost, to say to him, ‘Dick, I love your father. I love him more than anybody or anything in this world or the next. He is God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. My love for him is every wicked blasphemy you can think of and it can only bring down on me retribution, but I am quite powerless. Every time I go to Confession – you’ve heard of Catholic Confession, Dick? – every time I go I know what I should say, because it is wicked and not at all permitted. But I cannot help it.’

  It was the summer of 1908 she first became friends with the Graingers. They had bought Moorgarth the previous winter. (She learned later that the deeds for the purchase had been a Christmas present to Maimie, parcelled up under the candle-lit tree in Linthorpe Road. At the time the story had seemed to her romantic; later, merely ironic.)

  The Graingers walked in all weathers. She discovered this one blustery July day, cold enough for March, when she met them up on Thackton Rigg. She was fleeing Mother, needing that day an escape that was more than just running to her room and immersing herself in Giotto.

  How had Mother upset her? Through Babs, of course. Yet again, the reproach: ‘… that you should have gone to your bed and slept, when you knew she was dying. I had my illness, of course … But for you, it was possible. Coward.’

  White with anger and pain, Eleanor had left the room, slamming the door first, then striding out not too well shod, and regretting it. The weather growing worse and worse.

  Four walkers came into view. The Grainger family: father and three older children: James, Ida, Dick. She had met them once only under rather stiff social conditions. She could not recall much of the occasion. James, knickerbockered and tall, must be about fourteen, and Ida twelve. Dick, limping behind, could not have been more than nine.

  ‘It’s Miss Dennison, isn’t it?’ James said. He was in the lead. Their father and Ida joined him a moment later. Eric laughed, took off his hat. Ida, turning, called back to Dick: ‘All right, slowcoach?’

  James said to Eleanor, ‘Poor sort of summer weather we’re having –’

  Eric interrupted: ‘I can see Miss Dennison is used to it, and doesn’t need the heavy protection we do.’ Then as Dick arrived beside him: ‘Well, son, here is one of our neighbours.’

  ‘He can usually keep up,’ Ida said. ‘It’s a heel rubbed or something.’

  Eleanor said, ‘I’m not going any further. Not in this footwear – I mistook the weather. Why don’t I stay with Dick a while? Walk him down at his and my pace?’

  ‘That’s very civil of you,’ Eric said, ‘if we don’t put you to trouble.’ He turned to Dick.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Dick said, ‘If she – if Miss Denson –’

  ‘Dennison, Dick. Say it correctly, lad.’

  Dick and she set out well after the others. He had found a sheep skeleton he wanted to show her. They gazed a while at a mackerel sky growing slowly clearer, revealing the pattern beneath them of fields crisscrossing the hillside, the road below, and beyond that the dark form of the woods following the river as it twisted out of sight. She walked slowly to accommodate herself to his pace. The others could not be seen now. Dick took his boots off. ‘Otherwise I’ll wear a hole in my stockings. But I’ll have to go even more slowly now, because of the stones and turning an ankle.’

  Th
ey came to where the bracken, green now and toughfronded, brushed against their legs, calf high. They had to force their own path. Dick seemed not at all shy of her.

  ‘Did I tell you about my pony?’ he asked, pushing the bracken apart with his hands. She thought she had seen a black pony, grazing in the field behind Moorgarth. It was an early birthday present, he said. The others weren’t interested in Hero: ‘He’s all mine, he needs me to feed him. Tom or Ernest Reeves, they look after him when I’m in Middlesbrough.’ One day, he told her, he was going to have a cream mare. He would break her in himself.

  By the time they arrived at Moorgarth, the others had been back nearly half an hour. Easily, gladly, she accepted their invitation to tea. She sat in the warm oak-beamed room before a roaring fire. Behind the floral chintz sofa and armchairs was a white-clothed table laden with food, where Peter and Jenny sat with a nursemaid. They were joined by Dick, who’d had his heel dressed. It was more like a winter afternoon tea.

  She ate prodigiously – she who so often watched listlessly Mother chewing with precision her two muffins, her slice of seed cake. She ate scones thick with butter and newly made strawberry jam, victoria sponge, eccles cakes, potted meat sandwiches, ginger parkin. She was almost ashamed – and at the same time happy.

  Maimie Grainger was missing (‘Ma is resting,’ James had said), but Dulcie was there. Eleanor was half way through her second scone when this small, breathless, elegant figure came hurrying in: kissing Jenny, patting Peter’s head, exclaiming at Dick’s bad luck. Coming to sit on the sofa near Eleanor’s chair, and beside Eric who, legs stretched out, was reading the Whitby Gazette.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to call,’ she told Eleanor. ‘We met at the Crowthers’, so briefly though, and I spoke only to your mother, I think?’ Then began a conversation which seemed hardly to have stopped since. Dulcie, who had become her dearest friend. They talked about moorland scenery and watercolours and Dulcie’s terrible sketches. Eric looked up to say with a smile that, yes, they were rather dreadful. Eleanor comforted, said delightedly they could not possibly be as terrible as hers.