The Golden Lion

by Pamela Haines

  ‘What are you going to do? What shall you do?’

  ‘I arrived here three days ago – after spending six weeks alone in Paris, staying away from the apartment. I need time to think. Here, with Maria, it’s a good place for thinking … But yes, it’s all over. For certain.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘What else can one say?’ What else could she say? She remembered Laura, not seen for over ten years now. Beautiful, impassive Laura. Strange Laura.

  She asked him now to tell her something of what had happened to him. Why exactly he had left so quickly.

  ‘You don’t mind that you’ll be reminded of Marcello and all that? I’d hoped that was buried for you. Forgotten.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she said.

  He explained about the extortion. Of the danger to Laura and the girls. And later, to himself.

  ‘Those Dominicans. One of them you met out at the Tarantino-Falletta villa. Five of them. Quite on their own. No one else powerful behind them, whatever they hinted. You can imagine the horror of the Chapter in Rome, who knew nothing of all this. To the outside world, the five of them had the appearance of such sanctity. Such learning. On official visits from their superiors they dissembled wonderfully … A positive factory of evil. Flourishing far in excess of the green bay tree – to the tune of millions of lire. I was trapped. Foolishly thinking I was being given information by one of their enemies. I was simply being set up by them. The Prior’s nephew of all people. Coming from a long line of experienced villains, I should say. And I believed every word … But I’m here to tell the tale. God must have something worthwhile in mind for me – I certainly wasn’t meant to be still around … The time fuse in the engine or whatever went off within minutes of my leaving the car. I must be one of the few men alive who thinks of a puncture with gratitude and affection …’

  ‘And they’re still at large?’

  ‘They’ve in fact been arrested. All five of them. And the Monteleone nephew. Plus some others. There’s to be a trial – but not for many months. Maybe years. I hold out no hope whatsoever of a satisfactory, fair or just conclusion …

  ‘But there, well,’ he said. ‘That’s enough of all that. Now you’re going to let me cook you a meal … And by the way, we’ve got field mice – rather a lot of them. It’s the intense cold. We were expecting to be snowed in.’

  Guy asked her, ‘What do you think of their farming ambitions – Jenny and Maria? I think it rather splendid. Maria’s been spending weeks at a time living over at what used to be Reeves’s farm. The sons were all killed in the First War, but the daughter married someone who took over. Now their son farms it. Maria’s been staying with them and learning. She said it’s the best way of all. She gave me a wonderful account of some ram sales. She has the language perfectly already …’

  The fire in the sitting-room. Log fire. The same fire she’d made up so often. Baking cakes for Uncle Eric, eating tea together. Honey from Eleanor’s bees. ‘What’s the news from Tunisia?’ Worrying about Guy. Turning on the wireless for six o’clock. (And there stood the wireless still, in its walnut casing, to the right of the fireplace, on the table with the shelf underneath for the Radio Times in its Florentine leather cover.) And here were blue hyacinths standing over by the window, and on the centre table, just as she had pictured.

  Guy said, ‘Let me pour you some more claret. It masks the rather odd flavour of my sauce. You don’t have to be polite. I should have let you cook – except it’s hardly a break for you …’

  ‘Oh, but it tasted good … Of course I don’t cook always now. Bridget does a lot of it.’

  Tell me about Bridget. Since you won’t tell me about yourself –’

  ‘She began the tale of the Carmel. Bridget’s letter. The Carmel itself. The Vinneys. And then back, and back and back. It was good, very, very good, just to talk. To tell.

  ‘So,’ she said, ending up, ‘things aren’t right. Not really right.’

  ‘No, they don’t sound it. But perhaps they can be made so?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘for someone who wouldn’t tell, you’ve told quite a lot.’

  She said suddenly, ‘Do you remember when you came to meet me at Palermo that time in 1950? When I was so dreadfully unhappy. You said then, “Tell me,” and I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said.

  ‘The married man was – Eddie.’

  She didn’t look at him when she’d said it. She felt shock waves of late guilt. (Why did I speak? Why have I told him?)

  ‘Well, yes – I knew that.’

  ‘Did Maria? I thought … You see, it was all pretty hidden, pretty disgraceful.’

  ‘She told me a few years ago. No, I didn’t think anything terrible –’

  ‘No, no. Well, if she’d told you. That’s all right, I mean. You obviously talk a lot together.’

  ‘Nowadays, yes. One of the reasons, perhaps, why … why we are so close. I’m Maria’s child, you see. Maria is my mother –’

  She wanted to say, ‘She’s my mother too.’ But then she took in what he’d said.

  ‘I’m Maria’s child,’ he said. ‘It’s a long story. But perhaps if we’re exchanging secrets …’

  ‘Exchanging secrets,’ he’d said. At the end, and they’d been talking it seemed for hours, she didn’t know what to think of anything.

  She said when he’d finished, ‘Maria wept when she first saw Benedict.’

  ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Not now.’

  She began to clear the table.

  ‘No, leave that, please … Look what I found yesterday.’ He was over by the cupboard to the left of the fireplace. ‘Remember this? I’m sure you do.’

  Pale crimson cloth-covered book with gold title. He laid it, open, in front of her – where she had just cleared a place. He stood behind her.

  ‘There he is, the Golden Lion. Remember him?’

  ‘Of course –’

  ‘A much loved fragment of my childhood. And yours –’

  ‘And Dick’s,’ she said. ‘Dick coloured it in.’

  As he stood behind her, looking over at the book, his hands rested lightly on her shoulders.

  She turned the page and there was the colouring in. The place where Dick’s yellow crayon had missed the line.

  ‘I should have borrowed it for Benedict and Daisy. I still could –’

  ‘I was the Lion once,’ he said. ‘I was going to be so brave. Rescue princesses. Save lives.’

  His hands remained on her shoulders. She sat very still. Knowing that she could not move, would not move. She felt suddenly very cold. Warm only where his hands rested. She trembled.

  There was silence. Only the sound of the logs splitting, spitting in the fireplace.

  ‘I thought,’ she said, her voice not very sure, ‘I wondered about doing more singing. If I could fit it in with being a good mother. I mean, if Dermot – if Benedict …’

  She spoke very fast. Then faster. On and on.

  Guy continued to stand there, behind her, his hands never moving.

  21

  ‘First she takes your husband,’ Jenny said, ‘and then your son … And yet you love her still.’

  ‘Yes,’ Maria said. ‘I love her … very much. I don’t see how anyone who saw her in that sweet shop could do otherwise.’

  ‘But that business of Eddie –’

  ‘Oh, but I’ve forgiven her, I forgave her long ago. Over the years, gradually … With Eddie, my anger just burned out, the flame leapt so high it burned out. But with her … a stone. It melted. And yes, I loved her again. She became my child again.’

  ‘And now, what’s to become of her? Of them?’

  ‘I knew,’ Maria said, ‘I knew at once. I walked in here, and as soon as I saw them, I knew … What’s to become of them? I should frown on it – but I can’t. I’m just terribly, unreasonably happy – and concerned, anxious for them … I don’t know … I took my happiness. I defied both relig
ion and, to begin with, convention, for Eddie. And have never I suppose regretted it – through all the suffering. But here there are all sorts of difficulties … Children. The children mustn’t be made to suffer –’

  ‘How not in this case,’ Jenny said, ‘how not? Oh,’ she said, exasperated, ‘why can’t people get it right in the first place?’

  ‘Who are we to talk?’

  ‘Some people have it right,’ Jenny said lightly. ‘Prime examples of connubial bliss are darling Eleanor and her doctor. Late seventies, both of them, and last heard of walking in the Dolomites. It’ll be skiing next …’

  Then she said, ‘If we’re thinking about partnerships, aren’t we a funny, unlikely pair – starting out on new careers just a few years before we claim our pensions?’

  Maria said, ‘Fred Emsley, at Reeves’s farm, told me I had good hands for lambing. Small and strong. How’s that for a compliment?’

  ‘You think it’s going to be all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried about our making a success of it. I feel sometimes as if … in my bones … Are they so very different – purple hills and grey skies of Yorkshire, scorching Sicilian sun and barren mountains? Aren’t the aims the same, to wrest a living from the soil? We have more in common than ever I realized.’

  ‘Perhaps we should restore the silk mill here? We may do that yet … Unless one of us goes off and gets married.’

  ‘I don’t think of myself as not married. Even though it’s over. The woman, that Baronessa Eddie lives with – she sounds to be very adoring, whatever he’s up to on the side. They’ve been together nearly eight years now. I imagine he rather enjoys the Baronessa bit … And after all, though he’s not so big in Italy any more, he’s still a draw. I think he’s happy.’

  ‘You could still meet someone …’

  ‘I don’t think – for me. You see, I never wanted anyone but Eddie.’

  Snow lay powdered on the flagstones of the yard. A slate-grey sky, heavy with it, lowered above the Rigg.

  Jenny said, ‘Did you know you sleepwalked again last night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If only I weren’t so nervous … Noises. I think always – drunks, burglars, madmen … Ghosts even. But I came down and you were there in the kitchen. Just in your nightdress. You seemed to be searching. “Where’s Dick?” you said, “where’s Dick?” You sat down at the kitchen table. “O lovely princess, if you only knew what I have gone through to find you … Heart of stone,” you said. “No, heart of gold …” Were you dreaming? It didn’t seem to mean anything. Do you know what it meant?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Maria said, ‘I know. I know.’

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you very much, Marjorie Battcock, Tom Burns, Chris Ellis, Felicity Firth, Hal Haines, Tony Haines, Brian Higgins and Tiny Winters, for giving so generously of your time, your knowledge and your memories.

  For Nick and Sue

  A wedding gift

  This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © Pamela Haines

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  ISBN: 9781448205967

  eISBN: 9781448205653

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