She smiled to herself at the memory. He coloured.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’
He wanted then, terribly, to punish her.
‘What am I going to do? I am going to tell you about a letter I received five days ago …’
As he told her, he saw her go stiff with fear. Her hand, motionless on the long cigarette-holder.
‘And what else? I’m going to send you away. You and Silvi and Titì –’
‘Where?’
‘Paris, London –I don’t know – Out of Sicily, out of Italy. …’
‘Paris, please,’ she said coolly. ‘Not London … When? Now? Before Christmas?’
‘As soon as possible afterwards.’
Lying beneath his anger was this terrible sadness. Laura, who was not Laura. Laura, mother of his daughters.
‘And the demand?’ She spoke through stiffened lips. A muscle in her eyelid flickered.
‘The demand? I shall pay it. Like Ruggero, I don’t wish to dice with death.’
‘Do you, shall you go with us – wherever we go?’ She sounded almost humble.
‘No, I stay here, for the moment.’ And when she raised her eyebrows in query: ‘I stay here – and expose them.’
18
The children laughed and pulled faces, and from the other side of the Carmelite grille, their Aunt Bridget, alias Sister Joan, wiggled her fingers and grinned obligingly.
‘Helen dear, Little Nell, I’m sure you tell them, “We’re going to see Aunt at the Zoo.”’
Dermot winced. Helen knew he would say after, ‘… just because Bridget’s so jolly about it … It’s a sign of her holiness – She can’t possibly think it anything but frightful.’
And Helen would say, ‘They’re only children. Dermot, they’re only babies.’
Benedict at six, was perhaps even more of a baby than he should be. He hadn’t four-year-old Daisy’s quiet composure. He was shy and easily moved to tears, to hiding behind Helen. Only here, with his aunt, did he seem driven to heights of confidence, jumping up and down and showing off. Doing cartwheels for her. Bridget spoke to him almost, one could say, man to man. Asking him the right questions. Then at some point in the visit, the urge would come on him and he would decide that after all, this was a visit to the Zoo.
‘Aunt’s a monkey – why can’t we feed Aunt? What do aunts –I mean nuns – eat?’
‘Food,’ Dermot said. ‘Meals, just like you do.’
‘But what meals, what food?’
‘Nun food, none food,’ Bridget said, giving a great peal of laughter. ‘It isn’t awfully nice. A bit like boarding-school, really. Very like boarding-school. I didn’t come here for the food …’
At tea in the convent parlour, Helen wrestled with another wave of sickness. But there were twinges of pain too, a welcome dragging sensation which might mean – (oh please God, a donation to any charity you care to name, fill the Poor Clares’ coffers, on my knees at Knock, the trail to Lough Derg, anything, but make it not a child). Perhaps it was something about the buttercream filling in the sponge, or the strong smell of the fishpaste sandwiches, which Daisy was solemnly squashing and moulding into shapes. The extern sister in frilly headdress poured out tea for them, and milk for the children. Helen thought that orange might have been better. They would be car sick for certain. The jellies were topped with suspiciously synthetic blobs of cream: Benedict stood his spoon up in one and twirled it. Dermot glared at her. Their manners, he seemed to be saying. The vein stood out above his brows that meant annoyance and nervous tension. And it was all her fault.
Back home wasn’t a long journey, but it was cross-country. A twisting and turning road. At the back of the Renault the children were edgily quarrelsome. Benedict over-excited, Daisy irritating him by not responding. She was bent over a wooden jigsaw puzzle on a tray.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Dermot said. ‘It’ll make her sick.’
Helen said, ‘It keeps her occupied. And gives us a bit of peace.’
‘You’re always talking about peace. Sometimes I think it’s the main word in your vocabulary – such as that is …’
‘I go on about it because it’s important to me. I need it –’
‘You should have been looking where we’ve just been. There’s true peace. In the Carmel.’
‘If that’s peace, they can keep it. The peace that passeth all understanding. It passes mine.’
‘I don’t get …’
‘With some of them, it’s not peace, it’s just arrested development.’
‘What a foul thing to say – about my sister too.’
‘Some, I said. Some of them. Bridget’s –’
‘I suppose you’re an example of maturity? Maturity à la mode –’
‘Don’t try to be clever at my expense –’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I can see Bridget’s happy. It’s obvious.’
‘You can’t possibly tell, just talking about trivia either side of the grille.’
He said, ‘You’re always running down people, trying to make people like that less holy than they are.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t holy, or good. We were talking about whether she was happy. Fulfilled.’
‘Aren’t they the same thing?’
She was silent.
Benedict said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t. Mummy, Daddy, don’t argue.’ It was a new word he used a lot. ‘I think I’ll just go and have an argue now.’
But soon it was he and Daisy fighting in the back. She’d brought modelling dough with them, enough for both. It wasn’t supposed to stain or stick, and could be eaten. Benedict’s was a lurid pink. Daisy’s, green. When she’d moulded the fishpaste sandwiches she had really been wanting this dough. Now they fought over it.
‘Can’t you control them?’ Dermot said.
Daisy was sick. ‘Oh poor darling,’ Helen said, twisting round, leaning over, using towels.
She could see that Dermot was furious.
‘That upholstery’s had about as much as it can take. Aren’t there tablets or something? Next time, we’ll bring Erdmute, even if it means the children squashed up. Then she can take over the squalor.’
‘It’s only a car,’ Helen said. ‘A worldly possession.’ She wanted to say, ‘I think I may be pregnant.’
That seemed the history of her life nowadays. Worry on, worry off. Vatican roulette.
Bickering now, with Dermot, on the journey back, she was reminded suddenly of Maria and Eddie. How they had bickered and she had not wanted to know, had stopped up her ears. Our Lady and St Joseph, the Holy Family.
The Vinney family were no substitute. During nearly seven years of marriage, she had felt more and more oppressed by them. Dermot was oppressed too. Something she’d sensed on that very first visit, well before their engagement. It was no less so now. Although he was doing well in his own field of advertising (it was possible even to point to a slogan, and say ‘that was Dermot’s’), stimulated, animated in a way she didn’t often see at home – to his family, it was all still something he did while waiting for better things, or even, as they hinted once, because it was all he actually could do. That the writing of slogans, or contributing of ideas to a campaign might need talent, they couldn’t recognize. Lucky Dermot, they said, to be paid for playing around all day. And to show what a ludicrous occupation it was they continued feebly to call it ‘Sandwich-boarding’.
She seldom said anything, could not, although she hated to see Dermot put down in that way. Last time they’d been to the Vinney home, Michael (a first secretary in Paris for several years, but soon to be promoted) had said yet again, ‘How’s the sandwich-boarding, old chap? Still gulling the public?’ She had said then:
‘But isn’t that what you do in the FO? I thought that was your job?’
Michael had looked at her sideways. ‘She talks,’ he said. Helen stared back at him. ‘So sharp, you’ll cut yourself, as Nanny said.’ He laughed at her. The others
laughed with him.
Dermot looked embarrassed and asked her to please try and not make trouble. ‘Don’t go for Michael. There’s no point. Never has been.’
She really only liked Bridget, imagining her, if the timing had been better, an ally. They had got on well from the first meeting, not long after the engagement. ‘Little Nell’, she called Helen (she was very large herself), as well as the more sober ‘Helen dear’. In those meetings across the grille Helen never criticized other members of the family (Dermot would have been furious), but Bridget occasionally showed that she saw through some of them at least. (‘I hear Cakey’s expecting again. I wonder if she’s aiming for one of those Papal medals? Or a title – how exciting! Papal countess, perhaps, for the largest family in the shortest time …’)
The most children in the least time. The very same thought which had filled Helen with dread ever since she had said yes to Dermot. In those first earnest discussions he had explained that they must not (were not even required to) have more children than they could reasonably support: the question was how to stop them and still be good. The new temperature method – he was sure that was the answer. Helen was to go to the Catholic Marriage Advisory Bureau. They also bought a book and studied it, although there was no hurry, as Dermot explained. It was easier to have a baby straightaway. ‘Then we can do it as often as we want.’
But what was it they did? He did? It was a nothing. An act. The act that made babies, that was all.
He had read books about this too, Catholic ones. He’d suggested, shyly enough, that she read them too, but when she declined politely, wasn’t put out. He seemed to think it was modesty. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ he said. ‘It’s probably better for the woman not to know too much.’
(Oh, what did I know before Eddie? And how quickly I learned. How slowly, if ever, I shall forget …)
She tried now never to think of the honeymoon, of those fifteen nights, but especially the first. How to fake virginity? In her misery, for she’d consistently put all thoughts of the wedding night out of mind, she found it easier than she’d thought.
Forget Eddie, forget Eddie – like an incantation, but unplanned, involuntary, as she lay beneath Dermot (carefully taking all his weight on his elbows). A Dermot who was delighted, relieved that after all, it was all so easy – although too soon over. He was very apologetic, ‘but the book said, when it’s the first time, and if you’ve been a virgin.’ (Cock virgin, she remembered the derisory term.) She had felt only relief, that it was all over. That it had been possible, not to forget Eddie (how could I ever?) but to isolate the memory of him. This inexpert fumbling had nothing to do with the Funchal nights. It had nothing to do with anything, and must be thought of as little as possible.
But then, fatefully, because he’d been reading the books, she had had after a little while to fake pleasure as well.
She did it of course to spare Dermot’s feelings, for after all she cared for him, cared enough to have agreed to marriage. But I did it too, she thought, to avoid more fumbling. Or worse – for now he was able to wait longer. Those tedious unbroken thrusts, which in all their lack of variety, their monotonous rhythm, she longer to be over with. So as soon as seemed reasonably possible, there would be her cry of pleasure – (One would do, one deceit. She knew from what he said, that he had not heard of more than one …)
Where was her body, her real body, all this while? Not in Eddie’s arms. The reality was so removed that no sinful fantasy would have been possible. Occasional flickers of memory, rarely, rarely. (Or even sometimes, a dream – Eddie and I, together again. So that she would wake up crying with happiness, only to realize …) In those years after the discovery by Maria, all through the troubled days in Palermo, her terror in the Catacombs, the kidnapping, she had quenched, stamped all that out, as if it had been a fire. It would take more than Dermot’s fumbling to rekindle it.
A lifetime of faking lay ahead. And worry too – about conceiving. Benedict born nine months later, a gap of twenty months and then Daisy. Since then, one miscarriage, greeted with relief, shame and heartache all mixed together.
And now here she was worrying again. Dread mornings when her period was late. Usually she had a shorter than normal cycle so that ‘late’ began earlier than for many other people. Once a month there would be a short-lived freedom from worry (and from Dermot, who thought it disgusting, those who took advantage of the safest time of all), and then back to the early morning temperature-taking.
She lay very still in bed, the thermometer inserted vaginally. She must not move at all. To get a good reading, Dermot thought it better she shouldn’t even speak. If the alarm had not woken him, she had to nudge him. By then a child might be in the room. ‘Can I get in with you, I want to get in with Mummy, Mummy, can I get in?’
And Dermot: ‘No, Mummy’s busy now.’ Then he would get out himself and creep off to wake the au pair. A difficult task, if it was Erdmute.
Ah yes, Erdmute. Latest in a line of au pair girls since just before Daisy’s birth. Five of them so far. Two Danes, a Dutch, a French and a Norwegian. And now Erdmute, from Frankfurt-am-Main.
Living in the country as she did, Helen envied friends in London or nearby Cambridge, places where girls would choose to come: where they came in such numbers that if one didn’t suit it was easy enough if done tactfully, to dismiss and start again. But in Shalford Pelham, with very little in the way of exciting social life and only the twice weekly language classes in nearby Bishops Stortford to look forward to (and that only after a trying bus journey), it was a different matter. Dermot spoke of getting a second car as an attraction – some of the girls were drivers. Helen herself had not learned, and kept postponing it – putting her reluctance down to first ante-natal, then post-natal fears.
Erdmute – the only girl she had not managed to like at all. She felt sorry for her. Away from home for the first time, spending long stretches of her day with two small children not her own, and because she was sitting the Cambridge Lower this June, much of the remainder studying. Lonely, and fat. She was perhaps one of the largest girls Helen had ever seen. Beside Helen, still tiny, still the sparrow after two babies, she looked even larger. She had been fat on arrival, but now after three months, she seemed to have doubled in weight. Her appetite was monumental and increased as she had more space to fill. The family meals weren’t enough (although she was rewarding in that she never spurned any dish, eating everything Helen cooked). In her bedroom she secreted buns, cakes, sausage rolls, chocolates, toffees, Polo mints for which she had a passion, and biscuits. Any and every kind of biscuit. As she went about, dusting, hoovering, washing up, she would keep a packet of ginger nuts or chocolate digestive in the pocket of her flowered overall. Her bedroom –she was an untidy girl – was a mess of half-eaten packets, mixed in with copies of Stern from home, gramophone records lying out of their plastic sleeves, and paper bags with stale Chelsea buns. ‘We’ll get mice,’ Helen warned her.
Loud music came from her room in her time off. They had put in there for her an old radiogram from the Vinney household. She bought records in Bishops Stortford when she went to language classes. Bobby Vee, Buddy Holly, Pat Boone. Black Dyke Mills Band, which seemed to stir her. An eclectic mixture. Helen, who never mentioned her past, dreaded sometimes that Dermot might.
Erdmute had no friends, except for two Danish girls, Vibeke and Karen, joint au pairs in the house of acquaintances a few miles away at Patmore Cross. These two, who had the use of a car, befriended her, but it did not seem to work very well. She trailed an unhappy third.
Once only she had been to a Young Farmers Dance, and for a week or two afterwards, a middle-aged red-faced man who gave his name only as Fred, called to see her. Each time she rushed to her room, banging the door shut.
It seemed to Helen the only time she did shut it. Otherwise she seemed incapable of doing so. When she was asked, it was always, ‘Iα, Mrs Finney, ja.’ But an hour later it would be open again. Although the children wo
uld not turn the knob for themselves, passing the door ajar was too much. Dermot had fastened a little bolt high up. (‘I Erdmute could just slide it when she goes out…’) But because the room was on the ground floor and next to their playroom, they went in, and ate the biscuits. There were scissors too, an open penknife, bottles of pills lying about. Hazards for a six- and a four-year-old.
Erdmute wore a striped woollen wraparound skirt, with a checked shirt, all covered by a large shapeless beige sweater or black cardigan. On top, in the daytime, one of six flowery overalls Mutti had sewn for her. Doing the housework, she was accident prone. She had broken six Hoover fan-belts already. She would drive the machine savagely over the children’s plastic toys, then: ‘Mrs Finney, Mrs Finney, the hoofer is once more kaput.’
‘At least she doesn’t smoke,’ Dermot said.
‘Perhaps if she did, she’d eat a little less.’
But Erdmute was good with the children. They loved her, partly perhaps because she let them steal biscuits from her pocket, and also because she would rather sit with them than do the housework.
My children, Helen thought, what to say of my children? Benedict, whose birth brought me closer to Maria again. (Herself, sitting up in bed at Queen Charlotte’s, Benedict in her arms. Maria walking in, her eyes filling at once with tears, then suddenly throwing her arms about both of them.) Before, Helen had thought Maria, who had had no child herself, might be jealous – but it had not been so. If they were ever to be truly reconciled (and perhaps they had gone as far in that direction as they ever would), then it would seem to be her children who would be the instruments of it.
Maria did not seem to care much for Dermot (and in fairness, nor he for her), but this did not matter too much. Maria, if not Our Lady these days, was still, as in the litany, a refuge. When she was up at Thackton, which she was increasingly now, ever since Uncle Dick had left her Moorgarth in his will, then Helen liked to take the children up there for a week or two at a time –not minding the long train journey.
The Golden Lion Page 47
