The Golden Lion

by Pamela Haines

  By tacit agreement, they spoke rarely of Eddie. There were never any signs of him in the house. ‘He’s still a great success with the Italians,’ was the most Maria said. Sometimes in conversation she would speak of ‘When I was married …’ The past. Maria’s past. A great sadness would envelop Helen then.

  Maria loved both the children. There was never a hint of favouritism. Whereas I, Helen thought, I… It would be wrong to love Daisy the best – and of course, she did not. But she liked her more.

  Benedict. Ah yes, Benedict. Her heart bled for him. He favoured the Connors family: with his small wiry body, his peaky, often querulous face, she was reminded again and again of Billy as a child. (The adult Billy, known only from photographs and infrequent letters, ran a successful garage in Dunedin. He was married himself now, and planning to visit England in the next year or two.) The Vinney family remarked on it, saying that except for his eyes, which were Dermot’s blue, he was very much Helen’s son. They said that especially because he whinged. He seemed always to have whinged. He was a mother’s baby, Mrs Vinney said. Clinging to Helen, at the sight of anything new, any strange person. At other times he would be over-bold, cheeking and defying, or rushing around as this afternoon, trying to use up limitless supplies of manic energy. He irritated Dermot, who felt Helen should be able to deal with all this. (And if we should have another, she thought again – willing and willing the twinges of pain to become a period.)

  She didn’t care for his name. Dermot, through his family, had chosen it. It had been his grandfather’s, and Cakey so far had not used it. So it would be appreciated if …

  ‘You let them decide everything,’ she had said angrily, but weakly. So soon after the baby and with early feeding difficulties – oh, what the hell, she thought. Now, the name seemed to suit well enough. And she had grown to like it. She was not allowed to call him Ben.

  But when twenty months later, they had a daughter, she felt it was her turn to choose a name. Looking at the serene expression (unlike Benedict, she seemed glad to have arrived), the smooth red cheeks, the feathering of reddish gold hair she’d thought for no reason – Daisy. The Vinneys, as soon as they heard, told Dermot, no – it was foolishly quaint, Cakey pointing out that it wasn’t a saint’s name, so wouldn’t do anyway.

  Helen said Daisy was often a diminutive of Margaret, or at least Marguerite. She could be baptized Margaret, but she must be known as Daisy. ‘Whose daughter is she anyway?’ she asked, forgetting for the moment that Dermot didn’t like the name.

  How different was Daisy from Benedict. In many ways, a Vinney. Yet oddly, disliking the Vinneys, Helen could see only beauty and good things in Daisy. Daisy with the solemn, grave face, the composed expression, the sweet easy nature. Thick straight red-gold hair, milky white skin dusted with freckles. And some of the same air of vulnerability which had first drawn her to Dermot. But there perhaps the likeness ended. In childhood photographs, while physically resembling Daisy, he had looked anxious, striving, as if already faintly disapproved of. Daisy’s face wore an expression of almost adult gravity. She loved order. She loved to tidy things. Newly arrived post would be stacked in a neat pile, shopping would be unpacked and the packets and tins arranged in an orderly pattern. ‘Daisy tidied,’ she would announce. On the sallies into Erdmute’s room, while Benedict stuffed himself with Polo mints, she would be found arranging Erdmute’s shoes in a neat row, or lining up her gramophone records.

  In this devotion, this desire to help Helen, and others, Helen saw, though it was so different, some of herself and Mam all those years ago. (Wanting to make Mam happy – and all right and well again. And not being able to.)

  A wet February afternoon. The children’s half term. She was carrying in the washing, now even wetter, when the telephone rang.

  ‘Helen, dear heart, is that you?’

  ‘Adrian –’

  ‘I didn’t recognize your voice – so mature. Have you taken up smoking? Look, I’m staying not far away. In Spellbury. I’ve come to value some paintings …’

  ‘Can we see you?’

  ‘The thing is, I’ve only tonight – then off at crack of dawn. Dinner here tonight, I have to attend … But I’ve wangled you both an invitation – can you get over? What about the sprogs? Can you leave them?’

  She said, ‘Dermot’s away, Adrian. It’s some sort of Scottish campaign. He’s in Glasgow.’

  She asked where the dinner was? Yes, she said, she had an au pair she could leave the children with, and of course she wanted to come, but she had no car – and couldn’t drive anyway.

  Adrian said he’d arrange something. ‘Leave it to me, dear heart.’ He called back half an hour later to say that Colin Gilchrist who lived in Westmill Green and was absolutely charming (’you’ll love him’) would have to pass through Shalford.

  ‘He’ll bring you, and take you back … How little I’ve changed, dear heart. Not only clever, but kindly and efficient too …’

  A slightly sulky Erdmute who for once had an invitation of her own. She had arranged to go to the cinema with Vibeke and Karen. She gave in with bad grace. Helen felt selfish.

  Colin Gilchrist, who came for her at seven, was very tall and gangling with short curly hair. He drove a small MG into which he only just seemed to fit.

  ‘Hallo, I’m your escort for the evening.’

  They were talking soon. They talked the fifteen miles of the journey, or rather he asked the questions and she answered them. He asked her all about herself. Past, present, future. She told him of Benedict and Daisy, Dermot, the Bellarmine Club, a little of Palermo, and then, passing over them quickly, her dance band days.

  She said without thinking, ‘But that’s what I really liked doing. I was never so happy –’

  ‘Well, it’s a funny thing,’ he said quietly, ‘I was sure I’d seen you before. And now it fits. Did you – was it you –?’ When he mentioned the medical ball of 1949, she felt sick again with the memory.

  Eddie getting the bird. (All that ribaldry, shouting, singing.) Eddie in tears. Fucking berks …

  ‘Yes, it was me,’ she said.

  ‘I’m really ashamed. I was at the time. Can I apologize for us now? We got disciplined, you know, banned this and that. All sorts of upsets.’

  ‘It got forgotten pretty quickly,’ she said. ‘None of that’s anything to a real trouper. There are worse places to have died. And anyway the next round of applause cured it.’

  ‘As you’ll have gathered, I left medicine anyway. I wasn’t really cut out for it, and the family business was in need of young blood. So … But most of my companions then, they’re pretty reformed characters now. There was a reunion at a wedding lately. I took my fiancee along and she was most disappointed. Hell wasn’t raised at all.’ He said, ‘So you were a success then? I was really sorry at the time not to hear you sing. Eddie Sabrini, wasn’t it? I’ll never forget. And what were you called then?’

  ‘Helen Connors.’

  ‘You should never have been brought on, little Miss Connors. You were too tantalizing, that was the problem. A glimpse and then whisked away … But you were obviously quite a success later. What fun. Though I suppose marriage put a stop to it all?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘marriage put a stop to it.’

  The house where they were to dine was large, and full of art treasures. A gold cherub stood in the hall, and paintings seemed to cover every inch of wall. Their host was loud-voiced and dictatorial, his voice booming the length of the dining table.

  Adrian had not changed. Happy to see her, teasing, proprietorial. He was determined, he said, not to monopolize her but he must hear everything.

  ‘You haven’t told me, dear heart – how you fare in the wilderness? The rural depths. And scarcely to have been in touch … I thought I was going to be godfather. Fearful disappointment. Next time?’

  She could say nothing, remembering now, angrily, Dermot’s decision. ‘We can’t … Benedict wouldn’t want a queer for a godparent –’ And wh
en she had asked indignantly, why ever not? he had said, ‘By the time he gets to know him, he’ll be an old queen. It could be embarrassing. And then of course, it’s not really in the spirit of the exercise.’ Against such a brick wall, which she suspected of being a Vinney one, she could only murmur, ‘Well, he did introduce us …’

  Also at the dinner table tonight were an old mother with a wandering deaf aid, for whom everything had to be repeated (the origin perhaps of her son’s loud voice?), and two daughters of about thirteen and fifteen, who found anything done or said by Adrian absolutely killing – dissolving into breathy giggles. Neither of their parents noticed.

  Helen felt unhappy, uneasy, the feelings of sickness making her certain there was to be another baby. Before leaving yesterday, Dermot had said, ‘You should look at your chart again – perhaps you’ve miscalculated the days?’ But she had not.

  Pudding was being served, a créme brülée, with a jug of fresh cream. A dish she would normally have enjoyed. Indeed she would have enjoyed the whole meal, but she felt now only acute nausea.

  Talking went on around her, over her. Suddenly she realized that she was the subject.

  ‘Did the face that launched tell you about her singing career? Quite the thing, she was. Gave it all up to receive at the Bellarmine Club. I mean to say …’

  Then Colin, explaining about the medical ball.

  ‘But what a dreadful thing. Helen, dear heart, you never told me … Nothing of course to her life in Palermo. Didn’t she speak of that?’

  Please God no, she thought. For a moment, as she looked down the table, the faces, the figures, seemed as if cut-outs. Faces: kind like Colin’s, hearty like her host’s, despairing like the old mother’s, a little wicked like Adrian’s – but none of them real.

  ‘She never told you about the kidnapping? My dear, it was quite frightful – she was all but abducted herself. The little boy, you see …’

  The faces blurred for a moment, then as they reappeared they had a fuzzy edge, or halo around them. For a second she wondered where she was. Then, sharply, back again. Adrian’s voice:

  ‘… flung into a motor-car, which sped off into the night … no, I think it was afternoon. Helen, dear heart, it’s your tale –’

  She became sweaty with sudden fright. As she looked down the table, the eager listening faces of the two young girls blurred and vanished. For a split second she saw, heard, a Lancia screech to a halt. A voice, ‘Signorina Connors, momento…’ A foul-smelling cloth stuffed in her mouth, Marcello’s body against hers. Terror.

  And then suddenly Marcello’s face turned into Benedict’s. It was Benedict now, screaming and struggling. She tasted the foul gag, felt the rough hands that snatched at her. There was a crawling sensation at her hair roots – then clammy faintness. She had to stop herself crying out, ‘Benedict!’

  ‘Hey there, are you all right?’

  ‘I think I’m – not very well.’ Everything blacked as she slumped forward, hand clutching at the table.

  Immediate concern. An ivory fan waved in front of her face. Cold water to sip. ‘No stays to loosen?’ Adrian asked, his voice concerned beneath the flippancy.

  ‘No, all right really. All right in a moment … The wine, perhaps. Overdoing things. I’m …’

  She lay down on a leather sofa in the library. All she wanted to do was to get home. To undo the premonition. See that Benedict was all right. Tucked up. Asleep. Safe. The younger daughter, Annabel, came out to sit with her. ‘Mummy said it’s best I stay, in case you fall off or down, or get worse.’ They were going to send for the doctor.

  A few moments later Colin came out to her, saying that he was taking her home.

  ‘But you haven’t finished your meal. Cheese. Port.’

  ‘I can come here any time. The important thing is to get you back home and into bed.’

  In the car going back, she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry. I never do this sort of thing. Am never ill. I don’t know what it was. I had this horrible sort of… because of talking about the kidnapping, perhaps, a horrible premonition, vision. My son. That something’s happened to him.’

  ‘You’ll find – it won’t be anything.’

  ‘So clear. So terrible. So horrible.’

  He said, ‘I don’t think you’ll find there are too many Sicilians breaking into Shalford Pelham houses, abducting little boys … You’ve been overdoing it maybe?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m worried too. It could be that.’

  ‘About what?’

  She amazed herself by saying (I feel I have known him all my life): ‘Worried I might be having another baby. I feel I couldn’t cope. I know two’s not many. But somehow … And now, you see, I should have had a period five days ago … So …’

  He said, ‘It’s an unlikely bit of information for an ex-medic student, only I think I picked it up there – but just before a period – I’m sure I remember, it can make you very heightened, not psychic, but sensitive. Christine, my fiancée, she dreams, the most fantastic … Horror movies, you know. It could be just that.’

  ‘It could be,’ she said.

  He said then, ‘You’re not – forgive my asking, but you’re not very happy, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’

  He said no more. She said no more. By now, though, she was sweating, trembling with anxiety. As they entered the village, she became at once more and more certain of disaster.

  But ‘See,’ he said, as they drew up outside the house. ‘It looks peaceful enough … I’ll come inside with you, though, just so you can see everything’s all right. Which it will be.’

  It was a little after half past ten. The lights were off in the hall. She could see the low watt bulb up on the landing. ‘I’ll hurry upstairs,’ she said. She was on the third step when the phone went.

  ‘I’ll answer it,’ Colin said.

  ‘Dermot,’ he said. ‘Your husband, I think. Dermot.’

  Dermot’s voice, against crackle and cackle. He spoke from some crowded room.

  ‘Look, Helen, I’m downstairs in the hotel. Where were you? I rang at nine and Erdmute was as vague as ever. Quite incomprehensible. A man came, she said.’

  ‘Yes, well. You see, Adrian –’

  ‘It wasn’t Adrian answered just now. I know Adrian’s voice –’ ‘Dermot, don’t shout.’

  ‘Who have you brought back from wherever you’ve been? Go on, tell me. Two nights away and you –’

  ‘I didn’t. I got a lift. He, Colin – he’s just come in for a moment –’

  In the hall now, Erdmute, pale-faced, wrapped in blue fluffy dressing-gown, her hair clinging greasily to her broad scalp: ‘Mrs Finney, all is gut. Benedict, Daisy, they sleep gut.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she turned back to the phone. ‘That was Erdmute. Everything’s fine …’

  His voice was still angry, raised. She tried to ask him about the presentation today. ‘Do you think you’ll get the account?’ But he seemed scarcely to hear. If she didn’t know his habits she would have thought he’d drunk too much.

  She cut through his protests. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. Back around seven? I’ve Gillian and Rachel coming to tea. The Pitman children. Susie has to go to the dentist.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to Colin, as she put the phone down. ‘My husband got himself a bit worked up. He’s always like that when he’s away from home. He worries about us.’

  Colin said, ‘But all’s well upstairs. You’re relieved, at peace?’

  ‘Thank you. Can I offer you a drink? What about a whisky, or the port you missed? Some coffee?’

  ‘No, really. You need to get to bed.’

  Suddenly she felt enormously, frighteningly, dizzily tired. She could hardly stand up.

  On the doorstep, Colin said, ‘Now I know where you live, we must meet again. Christine and I – we get married in June. Why don’t you sing at our wedding?’

  It was raining next morning when she woke. She felt sick still, and hangove
rish, although she’d drunk only one glass of white wine at the dinner. Almost at once the memory of last night came to her in a confused replay. She had behaved badly, made a fool of herself. She pushed it all to the back of her mind, together with a fit of anger against Dermot. Queasy, still sleepy, she told herself to be reasonable, and forgiving. It was only his insecurity made him behave like that. There but for the grace of God … Events in her own early life made her difficult, Dermot said. Reminding her sometimes, ‘You’re bound to be disturbed, after that dreadful couple.’ (And oh my dear, if I should ever tell you of Eddie …)

  The church clock struck seven. No sound from the children. She thought of getting out to wake Erdmute, as Dermot did so dutifully each morning, but decided against it. She dreaded going into that cluttered room, with its biscuit crumbs, its dregs of hot chocolate dried in cups, and the mound that was Erdmute under the Federbett.

  Then she remembered the thermometer. Before you get out of bed, always … From habit she reached for it. Then as a wave of sickness came over her, she thought: It doesn’t matter, it’s not needed now. She dreaded having to tell Dermot tomorrow evening. ‘No, nothing. It must be almost certain.’ Dreaded even more his easy acceptance. ‘It would probably be rather nice. As Cakey said, two’s hardly a family …’

  Last time he’d made this comment, she had said snappily, ‘Two point four is. It’s the national average … perhaps we need to produce some sort of monster now, three-fifths missing?’

  ‘What horrifying bad taste,’ he’d, rightly, said. (Oh Dermot, I will not do. I really will not do.)

  She had thought that when the two little girls came, they might all go for a walk in the woods ten minutes’ walk away. Although it was still only February, several afternoons lately had been mild and sunny. But by the time she and Erdmute had given the children breakfast it had begun to rain.

  Daisy spent the morning with plasticine, her favourite toy at the moment. Her concentration and her dedication were that of a child twice her age. Pressed on to the tin tray were long delicate shapes, chains and coils, and roundish heads, with smiles. She put the smile in with a teaspoon handle. Although there was nothing there really to make him so, Benedict was jealous. It wasn’t the skills or the results but perhaps the dedication he coveted. His own ongoing Lego tray and box was the victim of his moods: constructive today, destructive tomorrow. A morning spent pulling apart what Erdmute had perhaps patiently fitted together. He had a fleet of Dinky cars and lorries which ran between Daisy’s legs, or in front of her as she went by. ‘Get away from my lorry, you stupid girl.’