The Golden Lion

by Pamela Haines

  She couldn’t answer at all. She twirled the stem of her wineglass. Her toe tapped under the table, almost of its own volition.

  ‘You don’t have to answer at once … Whether you could ever feel for me what’s needed for us to make the rest of our pilgrimage together.’ He nervously crumbled his bread roll. ‘If I hadn’t sensed a natural sympathy between us, I wouldn’t have even suggested … a gap of twenty years or so is quite considerable. Not to be jumped over lightly –’

  ‘I think it’s rather more than twenty years,’ she said.

  ‘Surely not?’ He hesitated. Tore a little more of the bread roll and crumbled it. ‘My forty-eight to your –’ He coloured. ‘One doesn’t ask a lady her age, but twenty-seven, twenty-eight?’

  ‘Twenty,’ she said. ‘I’m only twenty.’

  ‘How utterly stupid of me. I had thought …’

  ‘I was singing professionally at seventeen – perhaps that gave you the wrong idea … But didn’t you wonder that I had no war history?’

  ‘No, no,’ he repeated, covering his embarrassment. ‘I have just been unbelievably stupid …’

  She said gently, ‘I can’t say how honoured I am … but I think, somehow, it wouldn’t do.’

  ‘No,’ he said, still a bright colour. ‘No, no, of course not. How can you forgive me?’ He reached agitatedly for the menu and wine list. ‘The créme caramel looks awfully good … I thought a Barsac with our pudding would be rather nice …’

  ‘My colonel proposed to me,’ she told Dermot on his return. ‘It was rather touching.’

  ‘Did he, by Jove,’ Dermot said. He surprised her then by his strong reaction. ‘Bloody cheek. I mean, for God’s sake, an old fogey like that. Must be all of fifty. I hope you gave him the brush-off?’

  She surprised herself also. His indignation touched her. Excited her even. She hid her feelings.

  ‘I said a polite no, if that’s what you mean …’

  ‘Bloody cheek, all the same – poaching on other men’s territory –’

  ‘You never thought you might be poaching on Adrian’s?’

  ‘Well, hardly. His problems never wear skirts. Unless they’re Scots, of course.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said in a small voice, thinking only how naive she’d been.

  For several nights the Colonel didn’t come down to the bar, then one night he reappeared at his usual time. Terry (there were bad clocks about again) hadn’t arrived. She was alone, laying out potato crisps in saucers.

  ‘Oh hello,’ she said. ‘A J and B coming up in a minute.’

  He sat down awkwardly. Looked around. He said, ‘I just wanted you to know … I think your refusal was a sign God wants me after all. Isn’t that the most splendid answer to prayer? I prayed that you would say yes. But the answer was no. The answer was – give myself to God. It’s wonderful.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘My colonel is to become a Benedictine,’ she told first Adrian and then Dermot. She told Adrian of Dermot’s strong reaction.

  ‘But what do you expect, dear heart? You’re rather dense. He wants you for himself.’

  Christmas worried her. She could not go to Maria. The fragility of their reconciliation would not stand living in the same house. She did not know if Eddie would be there. Or where he was at all. Even to think ‘I have no news of Eddie,’ was to stir up all the heartache. She did not want to go to Dulcie and Jenny again, and was quite prepared to spend it at the Club. ‘I don’t get on with my adopted mother,’ she had told Dermot, and others. ‘There was a frightful row, and things haven’t been right since. I wouldn’t dare to spend the festive season with her.’

  ‘Oh, come to us,’ he said at once. Delighted and excited. ‘Why not? They’ll love it. And we’re always one short because of Bridget.’

  The Vinneys: belittling Dermot, as ever. Dermot, she thought, my protector, whom I must protect – from his family.

  This time the brilliant Michael was there, being rude about life in The Hague. He was totally unlike Dermot, dark and dashing with unnaturally bright eyes beneath bushy eyebrows. If he wasn’t brilliant, his eyes were. He made a great fuss of Helen, flattering her in a slightly patronizing manner. ‘I never thought my little bro would find himself a dazzling blonde.’

  The thirteen-year-old Maureen went in for hero worship, following Helen round: ‘Can I ask you a worldly question? It’s about eyeshadow / mascara / night cream / suspender belts. The girls at St Mary’s don’t really know, and Cakey couldn’t care less about these things …’

  They went beagling on Boxing Day. The whole family. Helen hated it and had not brought any suitable shoes. She was lent Maureen’s spare wellingtons. In their generally jolly way the Vinneys didn’t notice she wasn’t enjoying it. Only Dermot, who didn’t enjoy it either, was sympathetic.

  In the train going back to London, he asked her to marry him.

  ‘Can I think about it?’ But she knew even as she spoke that she was going to say yes. She couldn’t explain her certainty –how could she use the word Love for what she felt, hungry as she was for the days, before Eddie, when she had been good –when she had been loved? She could not imagine her life now, without Dermot. (What else was that but a kind of love?)

  They celebrated her saying yes by a visit to the pantomime where one of his cousins was in the chorus.

  ‘I haven’t told the family – except I’ve written to Bridget at once. I hope you don’t mind. She’s my favourite sister as I expect you’ve guessed.’ Over supper they arranged to go down to Amersham the following weekend to tell them.

  He explained that they would have to save money, and that they could not afford to marry for about a year. She had not thought of having to wait. He talked too about birth control – or rather, not being able to use it.

  That was something else she had not thought about. With Eddie (why do I always, and only, think of Eddie?) she had not thought at all – and supposed he knew what he was doing. Now it appeared she had been impossibly naïve and ignorant. Dermot, the prudent and knowledgeable. She was to chart her periods from now on. Although they would have a baby straightaway, do nothing to stop one, all the information she gathered would be useful later. Soon there was something new and more reliable coming, with thermometers, he told her.

  At Easter, they travelled north to visit an uncle of Dermot’s, living in Northumberland. She arranged to come straight from the Bellarmine to meet Dermot at King’s Cross. While she was waiting for him, she browsed in the bookstall. There was a glossy gossip magazine, Bandwagon. Leafing through its pages, a paragraph caught her eye.

  Eddie Sabrini, the crooner, idol of the ‘thirties but not much heard of since (he was interned during the war), is an idol once more – in Italy! A record he made of a number called Perdoniamoci, for a little-known company, shot to number one over there, where it’s stayed for over two months now. Scenes not unlike those that greeted the American Frank Sinatra on his recent visit to the Palladium greeted Eddie at a concert in Turin last week. Screaming and swooning girls, clutching at his garments, crying ‘Give us Eddie!’ And it’s the same story all over Italy. Asked how it felt to be the object of such worship, Eddie (49) said, ‘Well, I don’t think they see me as a father figure …’

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ Dermot said on the journey.

  She thought: I shall never sing again. She felt suddenly such a sense of loss. As if, a singing bird, she had been shut in a cage, the key thrown away.

  By next day, the mood was gone. All that remained of it, that overwhelming sense of loss, was a sad, sore feeling. A nugget of unease. (Oh, Dermot, take care of me.)

  She had been afraid to tell Maria about their engagement, at the same time relieved to have such news. She put it off until she could do so no longer – telling her only the day before announcements were to go into The Times and Telegraph.

  ‘That’s good,’ Maria said. ‘That’s a happy ending.’ She appeared glad, even kissing Helen. To an outsider, there could hav
e been nothing untoward in her reaction. Just the expected joy and congratulations. And yet I know, Helen thought. It is there. A stone, the stone of anger and unforgivingness. Oh Maria, love me again …

  17

  ‘Deus, qui proprium est miserere semper…’ The clear resonant voice of Father Clemente beseeched God, on behalf of the soul of His Servant Chiara Maria Clementina Agnese Tarantino-Falletta, that she be taken up by His holy angels and borne into Paradise.

  Some might think themselves already in Paradise, Guy thought, so dazzling and glittering was the silverwork, the jewels – rubies, emeralds, diamonds winking from the great chalice; the crimson velvet of the altar frontals backing a great burst of silver rays. The Madonna, crowned in sapphires and tourmalines. The crucifix, studded with gems.

  And standing in the aisle of the Tarantino-Falletta chapel, the coffin, surrounded by its four tall yellow candles. All that remained of the Contessa.

  Beside him knelt Laura. He thought with terror that one day she would die too. (As will I, as will I.) And to the right of her, their jewels, Silvi and Titì. This Christmas of 1959, Titì eleven, Silvi almost thirteen. Who is like Laura, who like Maria, who like me? And Grainger blood? He saw in Titì, a young Maria. (Maria, the same age, snatched from the sea by my grandfather. Maria in the photograph albums that first summer of 1915, a bold face, hiding heaven knew what depths of bewilderment and loss.) And in Silvi, when she was anxious, a little competitìve perhaps, wasn’t there something of Dick? He thought now: I should like to have known Dick better. By the time we were ready to sit down and have a conversation, I was off to the wars. And then geography separated us. Dick, three years dead now. Far too early a death. For all that he conquered his drink problem – and it appears it was quite severe – it had been too late, if not for him, for his body, his liver. His going spelled the end of the foundry as a family concern. All bought up, taken over. Young Peter (my half-brother), considers himself Canadian, and plans a brilliant future in the law, aided no doubt by his prominent stepfather. One day perhaps we will take a look at each other. But since I could never speak …

  But in Silvi, wasn’t there also a look sometimes of Tomaso? Her grandfather, who will come to spend Christmas with us, the seedy chain-smoking Tomaso – still absurdly young-looking, still adored by and adoring of Laura. And all right for money –although it was to Laura that the faded Amelita had bequeathed her all.

  ‘… Qui Mariam absolvisti, Et latronem exaudisti, Mihi quoque spem dedisti …’

  It didn’t seem long since that other funeral. The last remains of Amelita Varelli (who, meeting her in 1943, would have thought she had another sixteen years to live?) and such a collection of never-before-seen relatives, gathered round like vultures. Laura, who had not loved her, pale as ever, in tight-fitting black. And then the Will. To Laura, the family fortune.

  So, we are not short of money now. Shall we stay on here? Who would have thought anyway we would stay so long? Laura who had wanted to live in Paris (but never in London), surprising me by her tireless work for charity. Out more often than in. Seemingly reconciled to Palermitan life.

  And he himself? He taught at the university now. He had stopped working for the British Council when it had wound up here, with the Institute handed over to an anglophile society. He kept his connections. But otherwise …

  ‘Munda cor meum ac labia mea, omnipotens Deus …’

  Titì whispered something, in a loud hiss, to Silvi and was reprimanded by Laura. They were sitting now, listening to the funeral panegyric given by another of the Dominicans, Father Pasquale, pale, podgy, soft-voiced.

  The Dominicans were much in evidence. Four of the five were present. Besides the preacher, there were the slight and white-haired Father Cirillo, the large burly prior, Father Alessandro, and of course Father Clemente – first met that visit to the villa when the nausea of pregnancy had kept Laura at home. Occasionally met since, mostly in the days when Laura had taken for a confessor Father Cirillo – a religious phase that had not lasted long (the result, he had thought at the time, of the scare over Marcello). Marcello, fourteen now, never referred to his ordeal, but spoke occasionally of ‘Miss’, of ‘Ellen’. He would visit her, he said, when he travelled through Europe, which would be as soon as he could persuade Ruggero to let him go. (Helen, married and with a son that very same age Marcello had been when …)

  Sitting at the front, nearest to the coffin, was the son from Rome. Unmarried. Some way behind Guy could see Dr Anello, Paolo Anello. And Mendola the lawyer whom he had not met for some years now, with his wife. Sitting two benches forward and almost as upright as ten years ago was General Abbate, a widower now. Eighty, perhaps more? The Contessa had been eighty-six and only in the last two years had she been unable to walk, slowly, very slowly, in the garden with him. Sitting on a marble bench by the fountain, talking of this and that. Mostly reminiscences now. And never again as frankly as that first time. The girls were bored by her memories, Laura too, as she harked back more and more often to turn of the century Rome. The happy days. Ices at Latour’s. Paper chases on bicycles. The Baron and the whipped cream … Silvi and Titì were always a little alarmed by her. Gradually he had seen what they saw: the little wizened face, growing to resemble more and more the mummified bodies in the Capuchin catacombs. Dying perhaps fifty years earlier, she would have had her niche, dressed maybe in the brown silk with ornate lace collars she’d favoured so in her last years.

  ‘… Our dear Contessa, who at all times and in all places has supported Mother Church … faithful daughter of … worldly wealth never corrupted …’ The smooth voice purred on. ‘She married into a family who chose to lavish their riches, not as so many do, on vulgar luxuries – but on a religious foundation. And she was true always to this spirit… in the words of St Cyprian, Habere non potest Deum patrem qui ecclesiam non habet matre – Our beloved Contessa could not have had God for her father, had she not had the Church for her mother …’

  He walked a little by himself in the garden, down past the cypresses and the carob trees, to the rose-garden, where the yellow-orange ever-flowering roses were in bloom. Titì ran down after him, saying, ‘I want to be with you.’ Laura was cross, she said, because she had whispered and giggled with Silvi during the ceremony. ‘She says I start it always.’ And, ‘Well, you do,’ he said. But she must have known it was a statement of fact only, not a judgement. (Oh, how I wanted to be naughty, he thought, and how good I was – until St Boniface’s. So far there was no fighting Miller in Titì – or Silvi’s life …)

  There was a bird pavilion, standing on thin red brick pillars, wired, and with sheet glass on one side. Inside, the songbirds, safe from the sportsman’s gun, fluttered and swooped. Singing always. He and Titì stood a while looking at them. ‘They’re safe in there, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘No one can shoot them.’

  Back in the villa, Laura was talking to Mendola and his wife. They sat all three on a brocade sofa of unbelievable length and depth. Mendola’s wife seemed less aggressive, holding out a hand to Titì, and saying, ‘But what lovely hair …’ Vincenzo Mendola talked easily. Guy got the impression he had more work now, that things were less difficult. ‘Ah yes,’ he told Guy, ‘the law, always the law. I sometimes have other ideas, but then find I am not sure of their – advisability.’

  Paolo Anello joined the group. Although he looked no older, it seemed to Guy that the eyes had grown more cold, the neat features a little pinched. But the voice was the same as ever. And the hands.

  The Prior, Father Alessandro, came over to talk to them. He made a fuss of Silvi, who ‘soon will be as beautiful as her mother’. He was pleasant to talk to, if a little self-important. ‘Father Pasquale preached well, did he not?’ He added, ‘And a man of such learning. As am I.’ But smiling as he said it. (Guy saw Laura repress a smirk. Boasting did not attract.) He spent as little time in Palermo as possible, he said, although invitations to preach were so numerous they could not be refused. ‘What would St Dominic ha
ve thought?’ But he would rather by far be out of the city. ‘I am a man of the countryside. It is in my blood … My grandfather came from a mountain village.’

  Father Clemente joined them now. The son from Rome, at the far end of the long salotto, could not hear their conversation, so – what did they think, he asked, what changes might be expected from this son? ‘It is certain he appreciates the work I have done on the Tarantino-Falletta history. A history full of surprises and interest. 1897 has been reached so far … But now we are within living memory it is both of more interest and greater complexity.’

  Silvi said, ‘I mean to be a scholar,’ (Titì pulled a face). ‘A wandering one, though. I should like to wander and … and …’ her voice tailed away, her eyes took on a dreamy look as if she were already far away. (Face of Laura, reading Leopardi in the Varelli dining-room …)

  ‘What dear little girls they are,’ Father Clemente said, a little later. Guy, with whom he’d been discussing not just the son from Rome, but the provenance of some of the earlier manuscripts in the library, warmed to him. Not because of the compliment but because he had always found him pleasant. Forgetting some of the pinpricks of irritation on their first meeting.

  ‘I should like to call on you,’ the priest said, as they were leaving.

  ‘And we should like you to call. That would be very pleasant.’

  ‘Perhaps after the Christmas Feast?’

  ‘The situation is as old as the hills. It’s when it happens to you.’

  Guy couldn’t make up his mind whether to show Ruggero the letter. Laura, he would not dream of worrying with it. But here was the same sweat and terror he and Ruggero had shared nine years ago. Thank God I have no son, he thought. It was sons who were kidnapped, held to ransom. But the very vagueness of the threats filled him with terror. And he was as little able to run to the police with it as Ruggero had been. To do so might bring about the very thing he feared. His sick terror was worse because it was formless. You can fight the enemy you can see. But this nebulous grey menace, filling the air … He thought of sending Laura and the girls to the Di Benedetto villa in Agrigento, even though it was Christmas. The family wouldn’t be using it now. But with what excuse? And could not menace and danger travel as easily across the island?