‘The voice – what sort of voice?’
‘Oh, very cultured. Soft. Slightly anonymous.’
‘And why you, do you think? Apart from this idea of great wealth. There are plenty with fuller coffers –’
‘We don’t know – maybe some of them too – but it’s kept quiet … Giovanni Serio – his son was kidnapped in ‘47, ‘48 –for stopping contributions to the Separatist movement.’ He paused. ‘At one time I donated substantially to the Christian Democrats – then stopped, for what seemed to me good reasons. A few months ago I received an anonymous letter – which I ignored. The threats in it were very vague – and solely to do with my business …’
The muscle in his eyelid was jerking again.
‘My God, this country, this country … that we are so afraid, cowardly, corrupt, weak, tyrannized. It could be someone big behind this – or someone very small. Anything can be anything … But do you call someone’s bluff when it’s your son’s life?’
He added: ‘And this is nothing new – the situation is as old as the hills. It’s when it happens to you …’
Guy said, ‘At least, since July, we know it can’t be Giuliano’s gang … He’s dead and buried, after all.’
Laura and Helen reappeared. Ruggero asked, would Helen like to go back with Guy? ‘Another English person – it might help.’
But Helen didn’t want to go with them. She was worried about ‘Ginia, she said. And yes, she’d be quite all right.
She wanted to know what had happened. Ruggero promised Guy he would tell her as much as he thought right of the telephone call.
‘Ring me up,’ Guy told her, ‘if you need an ear …’ Looking at her, he thought: Maria’s little waif and stray, contrasting the forlorn, bruised face with the smooth one of Laura. He wished Maria bothered about her more. Disapproval of an adulterous love-affair wasn’t really enough.
‘I’m frightened,’ Laura said. As they lay in bed, her body felt stiff, hard. She clung to him. He thought how their love, hers for him (his for her?) seemed to flourish in the heightened atmosphere of danger.
Early the next morning, Ruggero rang to say that Virginia had given birth to a son. Stillborn. It was the shock, they said –otherwise at eight months, weighing six pounds, it would have had every chance.
Ruggero received two more phone calls. The first one agreed to terms – eight million was accepted and arrangements made for payment. The second call – late at night – said that Marcello would be waiting just after midday the next day, beside the bandstand in the Giardino Inglese. ‘Thanks to your good sense and co-operation, it is not after all time for him to go to Jesus.’
He was there. Sitting on a bench, with a bag of caramelle, and a Topolino. He said very little. Deliberately, he was asked few questions. Guy, who accompanied Ruggero and Helen, saw the father holding the son close.
He had not been ill-treated, after the first shock. He spoke of, ‘a little room with white walls. And toys and books.’ A man in glasses had read to him. ‘They said I could telephone. You can speak to your papa, they said. Tell him we need a lot of money if we are to get you home again.’
Bad men had taken him. Good men had looked after him –and brought him back.
Back, safe and sound. Except, Guy thought, profoundly shaken, disturbed, who now was safe? Who, sound?
16
‘… And a request now for Mrs Hannah Wilson of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. She wants me to play “any Eddie Sabrini record”. We don’t often get Eddie on Housewives Choice, Mrs Wilson. Don’t know why that is, I remember him as quite a heart throb. Mrs Wilson says, if I read her handwriting right, “His voice could make you go all gooey.” Hum, Mrs Wilson … Anyway, here is Eddie Sabrini, with Al Coleman and his band, Time on my hands …’
Helen snapped off the radio. (Battery-powered transistor in a green leather case. Very smart. Farewell gift from the family whose children she had just been looking after.) Housewives Choice. She was hardly a housewife, and now that she lived at the Bellarmine Club, she hadn’t even to make her own bed. One of the chambermaids did that. Nor did she have to start work till ten. Flicking a comb through her hair, she looked in the glass to see if she appeared neater than she felt, and hurried down to the dining-room. Nine-twenty.
It was warm this June morning, but cool in the basement dining-room, leading out into the small town garden.
‘Just tea and toast, please,’ she said to the waitress. In half an hour’s time she would be sitting behind the reception desk in the hall. Opposite her, a large painting of Cardinal Griffin, Archbishop of Westminster, and next to it, one of Pope Pius XII, with the eponymous Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) making a third. She found the trio’s gaze hard to escape.
It was only her second week in this new job. Palermo, left behind at Christmas, seemed another world now. But she dreamed still. Her first night here – in the strange bed in the largish hotel-type bedroom – she woke up at two in the morning, bathed in sweat, shaking with terror. The dead body of Marcello grinning in an open grave in the Dominican Priory of Sant’ Anselmo (but I only visited there the once, twice at the most). She had been alone at the grave, till looking round she saw the face of the kidnapper. ‘Signorina Connors, Signorina Connors!’
‘Murderer,’ she’d called out in her dreams, rigid with terror … (Why him, why there?)
Then she remembered. The last weeks in Palermo. Driving with Guy and Laura along the approach to Sant’ Anselmo – Laura to go to Confession – she’d noticed a gardener lifting some plants. As they drove slowly past, he turned his face, for a moment only, towards the Fiat. Oh, but that’s him, she’d wanted to say, that’s him. And then had not. How could she hope he’d be brought to justice? She’d learned a little, a very little, of what passed for law and order here in Sicily. How distressed too and embarrassed the Dominicans would be. And worst of all, the whole terrifying episode resurrected, would she not have perhaps to go into court – albeit a mockery? She would have to bear witness. It would not do. She could not bear it … So she had buried the sight –and the memory of it. Yet not quite, for here it was back again, in a dream.
At the time, she had seemed to cope. Marcello, too. He had surprised her at first anyway, by his apparent recovery. Except that he looked behind him always before turning the corner anywhere, he seemed the same small boy (’Caramella, plis, Miss.’) It all might never have happened. Until the nightmares began, a fortnight after his return. As if he’d been in shock and suddenly come to life. Night after night his screams filled the apartment. Virginia, scarcely recovered from the stillbirth, would go to sit with him until Helen insisted that, if he’d allow it, she must stay with him. In the end, he had slept in her room on a small palliasse, with a nightlight. She read to him, sang to him … Her own terrors and distress put aside. Even Eddie, put aside.
Attention had to be given to Natali, who had caught some of the terror, and suffered from jealousy into the bargain. The nurse, Rosetta, who’d left a little after the kidnapping, had been replaced by another who was willing to get up in the night but whose face sent both Marcello and Natali screaming. It wasn’t until the beginning of December when a girl from Agrigento was taken on, who seemed to have at once a way with them both, that Helen felt able to escape. The original idea, to stay till Easter, was not now to be thought of.
With a sigh of relief, she’d packed up to go. To be back in England, in London, for Christmas (No, I cannot hope to see Eddie. Cannot hope even to spend the holiday, the season with Maria). She wrote to say she would be coming back. Maria sent a short business-like note, telling her that Jenny and Dulcie had invited her to stay, and that she was not to be short of money. Twenty pounds was being paid into Lloyds for her.
Traveller’s tales. Strange exotic places, just out of bounds of austerity holidays abroad. She had a lot to say. Jenny and Dulcie and their friends and visitors wanted to hear everything. About the kidnapping she said nothing, except when alone with Jenny and Dulcie, and then ve
ry little. She had made it clear she didn’t want to speak about it.
Immediately after Christmas she looked in The Lady for a post with children. She had to get out of London, away from any chance of seeing Eddie (who it appeared had embarked on a tour of Canada, coming rather low on the bill, she suspected). From what she’d heard, his career was now going nowhere, unless down. In the doldrums. Now when she thought of him something froze in her, as if all the longing and the damage, the hurt, the pain had solidified into some great lump of ice. Since her tears for him had made everything hazy, in the Catacombs, she had not wept for him. Nor indeed for herself.
Out of all the pages of advertisements, there were so many possibles even allowing for her lack of qualifications and her youth, that she felt she might as well prick with a pin. And this she did.
She wrote to Mrs Beverley of Chipping Peverel, a small village near Gloucester (car driver preferred). She was telephoned the next day. Jennifer Beverley, twenty-two, so only a few years older than Helen, had two small children and was expecting a third. She was small and pretty and very harassed. Pregnancy made her nervous of driving the car with the children in it, but she thought if Helen came along too it might be all right. Her husband was working out an Army contract in Libya and she was frightened and lonely.
The village was small, the house, once a vicarage, was old and rambling. The children were sturdy and noisy and demanding, but happy to demand from Helen instead of their mother. ‘Oh ask Helen – she’ll do it / get it / find it / make it for you …’ In the evenings, after the children were in bed, she and Helen sat together knitting, occasionally listening to the radio but more often chatting, and often, giggling. They were like two schoolgirls, or two sisters. Jennifer had left her girls’ public school one July and married in October. Her husband had been a returned POW, with nesting fever. ‘My cousin brought him to the Tennis Club the first day of the school holidays, and it just went on from there. And of course I don’t regret it.’
But after about three months, when Jennifer was nearly six months pregnant, her (very trying) mother who’d been in the habit of ringing up every night and fussing, arrived with her luggage. She was going to stay, she said, and ‘look after silly little Jennifer’, until the baby was born. No protests would send her away. She gave the children so many treats and presents, undermining all discipline painfully built up, that they clung to her. ‘Some little people love Granny …’
She had been against the marriage in the first place. Now the absent husband came under fire. ‘I don’t know what business Brian had going off and leaving my little darling like that.’
Jennifer, reduced to a frazzle, was no longer Helen’s friend and giggling companion. She became offhand and morose. Mummy spoke pointedly of getting ‘a good girl in from the village’. When by chance, and not in The Lady this time, she saw an advertisement about a Catholic social club opening up in London, with a post as receptionist and/or barmaid offered, she saw it as the perfect let-out.
She didn’t know how many were interviewed, but she knew from the first few moments that the job was hers. Mr Palmer was a retired maths master, who had taught with the Jesuits for thirty-five years. She mentioned Eleanor’s brother. ‘Yes, yes, of course. I know him well.’ Guy’s name came up. He’d taught Guy. ‘Dennison et al., My God, yes … When you’re next in touch, tell him I was asking after him. Palermo, my word …’
Perhaps others had these connections and more, but she was never to know because by the end of the conversation he was asking, ‘When would you be able to start?’
She shared the work with a middle-aged spinster, who was also on reception but not in the bar. On the whole Helen preferred the bar work.
Geoffrey Palmer wasn’t married. His sister Dorothy, once a prep school matron, came to live with him in the flat converted upstairs. She was the housekeeper and often, final arbiter. Because Helen lived in, and they worried that she might be lonely (although she explained she had relations in London), they had already twice invited her upstairs.
Dulcie and Jenny were pleased for her. She heard that Maria was too. She didn’t go round to see Maria. Not because she feared meeting Eddie (who, back from Canada, had gone now to Italy for the summer season. Singing with a hotel band, Jenny said), but because it would mean being alone with her. Will the wound never heal? she thought.
Dulcie thought the Bellarmine sounded the sort of place where Maria would have lots of opportunities to meet the right kind of boy. (Oh, ghost of Eddie – never mentioned.) ‘I know Catholics are meant to go out with Catholics if possible, which can’t be easy in this Protestant country. So you’re in a marvellous position …’
Helen and the Irish barman, Terry, got on very well together. Terry liked the job but often had trouble turning up on time, so that on three occasions already it had been Helen opening up. The first time he was very repentant. It had not been his fault. ‘There’s bad clocks about,’ he told her.
One Friday evening, the end of her third week, Adrian Croft-Jenkins walked in. She had her back turned, fitting on a measure, when a voice said:
‘Well, if it isn’t little Helen Connors! Last seen ‘neath a Sicilian sky … Dear heart, how goes it? Or rather, how went it?’
‘Not too well, really.’ Then she astounded herself by saying in a throwaway voice, ‘The son of the house was kidnapped –’
‘Never!’
He wanted to know, at once, every painful detail. So did everyone else standing around. She was furious with herself, awkward, almost tearful. She began instead to quiz Adrian, asking him what he’d been doing since Cambridge. Her voice brittle, hectic. She wasn’t attending to the drinks, and had to ask for an order of two Guinness and a bitter to be repeated for her. Terry, who’d been all agog when she mentioned kidnapping, now asked her nicely to pay attention to what she was doing.
Adrian had two friends with him, both almost twice his size. All three were drinking gin. They sat up at the bar. The others had moved away, now there was apparently no story forthcoming. Agitated still, she reproached Adrian flirtatiously. ‘Well, Adrian Croft-Jenkins, I never got asked to that May Ball.’
‘So you didn’t!’ He seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Anyway I was only there as cabaret. I took my sister, as it happened – so that she could have a chance to get off with a chap on my stair at college. She was madly in love with him after only a couple of glimpses … It seemed to work. They’re getting married this autumn.’
‘How romantic,’ she said.
‘Yes, he swam straight into the net. He’s an Hon. as well, so she’s getting a little handle to go with it. All most satisfying. If you’re not the catch being landed, of course.’
She was busy then for a few moments. When he saw her free again, he asked:
‘Dear heart, what’s the face that launched a thousand ships doing here? Tell me all, I’m wildly curious … A barmaid. Well I never.’
It was easy to adopt the same light tone of badinage. She was able to make everything seem to have been chance, and utterly delightful, and rather fun. Everything was ‘just for the moment’. Terry, passing her a cloth to dry the glasses, saying, ‘Till her Prince Charming comes along – isn’t that right now, Helen?’ He winked at Adrian, ‘Haven’t I told her that’s me? But she’ll not hear a word of it … I’m a broken man.’
Helen, busy fitting a measure on to a new vermouth bottle, blushed.
‘A simple homespun beer from your fair hands, dear heart,’ said Adrian. A square-faced boy standing nearby said, ‘Surely you mean home-brewed?’
‘Why, has she been making it on the premises?’ he asked all innocence. The mood was set for the remainder of that evening’s drinking. She did not have to bother about revelations.
It was only towards the end, just before the bar closed, that he referred to her singing. She had forgotten that Guy had told him about it, last year in Palermo. He told everyone at the bar. ‘One thing I bet you didn’t know … Helen’s a singer. No, not opera, no
t RCM. The real thing, a crooner. A real pro. Aren’t you, Helen?’
‘I was,’ she said awkwardly, coldly. She was embarrassed. And disturbed by how quickly it was taken up. Terry joined in. ‘Wouldn’t you sing a little song for us now?’
Several men, and two mixed groups at tables across the room, had pricked up their ears. Silence, while everyone waited for her comments, her answer. Explanations. Excuses?
‘I wasn’t top of the bill or famous or anything. Lots of the places I sang, they were any old places – anywhere that’d take us. It was all just for fun. I wasn’t any good.’
‘Let us be the judge of that,’ Adrian declared. ‘We shall certainly expect to hear … Didn’t you do it with that ‘thirties crooner, un peu passé, Buddy Sabrini or something?’
‘Eddie Sabrini. He was – is – my stepfather …’
‘Forgive me, dear heart. We all make gaffes, but Adrian’s floaters are the worst … Why not take it up again? There’re lots of sprightly, slightly absurd tunes about. Sparrow in the tree-tops’ he sang in a chirpy voice, ‘scared of going home because it’s so darned late… Know that one?’
Just before he left he said, leaning forward and clasping her hand, ‘I want you to come to supper with me – No, a theatre first, then supper, dear heart.’
She wasn’t sure what to expect, or what she wanted to expect. They went to King’s Rhapsody. She wore her new white piqué dress and bolero – made by herself with a Vogue pattern – of which she was very proud.
After the show, he took her to eat in the King’s Road. ‘We always come here when we go to flicks at the Classic. They have Kosher margarine with the bread rolls – it’s the nearest thing to butter these days … Don’t you long for butter, dear heart?’
It was the first of many outings that summer. He was good for her, even though his remarks would be suddenly piercing, as when he’d looked at her closely once and said, ‘Dear heart –yours is broken, isn’t it?’
The Golden Lion Page 43
