Soon they were speaking of real painters.
‘You haven’t been to Italy? Oh, but you must,’ Dulcie cried. ‘I went first about your age, and although the art was of course quite wonderful – the fashions also. I am quite mad, don’t look at me, I am quite mad and frivolous about clothes, and shoes and hats. Maimie, my sister, has no patience with me at all.’
Suddenly in the room, caught in the air, a scent only, of danger. (Was it to do with Dulcie, and the excitement she brought in with her? Did it come perhaps from Eric?) Dick spoke from the tea-table:
‘Dad, next time we go walking, can Miss Denson please come with us?’
Eric, looking up, smiled. ‘Of course. Any time. Whenever she wants to join us.’ For a few seconds she felt flattered, needed. And then in her moment of happiness, she remembered. Mother, left in unexplained anger.
‘I have to go, I really must, at once.’ She stood up awkwardly, the words tumbling out. A schoolgirl again. Everything suddenly spoilt.
Later, she was able to relive and treasure the afternoon. Holding it safe even when Dulcie came to call the, next day, ignoring Mother’s criticisms (‘a frivolous little thing’). Dulcie, who wanted to be her friend. Meanwhile, Eric was as good as his word: she was invited to walk with them for the remainder of their summer visit, and then again during autumn weekends.
But loving Eric – what of that? Why, when it happened, did it surprise her so totally? Of course, she was to think later, I should have been loving someone. Her heart: the trouble had been with her heart. Somehow in the years since Babs’s death, and Guy’s, her heart had shrivelled. A heart, smaller than it should have been. Unoccupied too. Perhaps that was why, she thought later, she had been so eager, so quick to give Eric not just a place in it, but the whole of it.
Although it happened suddenly, she could look back and see that it had been coming. They had all been out walking. It was late autumn. She was behind yet again with Dick who wanted to gaze down into the quarry. Ida and James were far ahead. She saw Eric stop for something. As she and Dick came up, he was crouched down. Standing behind him, she saw the width of his heavy jacket, the collar half up, half down. Without thinking, she reached out to arrange it – then drew her hand back as if burnt. In her confusion, she said hastily,
‘Here we are! Not so far behind –’
‘I found this, Eleanor dear.’ He was rising to his feet. She saw cupped in his hand a sprig of bell heather, still with its deep purple. He looked directly at her. ‘Take it.’
She knew then suddenly that she was dear to him. Part of the family, another daughter perhaps – but dear. Something happened in her heart as he spoke. She took the heather, stammering her thanks. She had to look away. She blushed like a fourteen-year-old girl.
For the rest of the outing she was torn between wanting to be with him, and wanting to be alone so that she could think of this momentous thing that had happened to her. I love Eric Grainger. She passed a night and then a day of such beauty. Instead of walking, she floated – no longer the awkward Eleanor. The wonder was that Mother didn’t notice. Every minute she could feel her heart growing, swelling, with love.
Except … what could Eric want with her heart? He hadn’t looked, never would look at her, as a woman to be loved (as she, for ever and ever, would love him?) And nor was there any way that she could ever tell him her secret.
Opposite Mother at the dining-table that next evening, curtains drawn against a sleet-filled sky, she saw that it was all quite quite hopeless. A pastel of Guy, aged eleven, faced her on the dining-room wall. She imagined she saw reflected in the glass, Eric’s eyes, crinkled as they were when he smiled. Smell of cologne, cigar smoke. Eric held out his hand and touched hers. It was warm as he clasped her fingers in his palm. ‘I found this, Eleanor dear –’
Sitting at the table, she gave an involuntary jump, as if burnt. Burnt. Of course she would burn. Loving Eric was a sin, a mortal sin. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. It was so clear, the commandment: it meant – she had never realized it – nothing less than this painful longing. So why, oh why, had she not thought? How could she, a good Catholic girl, love, long for, desire (oh, beautiful wicked word), a married man?
The need now, this icy night, to declare her passion, was overpowering. She began to imagine that the whole fiasco, the taking of the wrong way, the being lost in a fog, was destined so that she could unburden herself, confide in this boy she had known from childhood. That what she could never say to Eric she could somehow tell his son. But what would he do with such a confidence? Would it not add horribly to all his other worries? Would she ever be able to speak to him again, alone? To look him in the face?
And yet … ‘Dick, I –’ she began. ‘Your father –’
‘What did he tell you about me?’ His anxious boy’s voice. ‘That I’d never be like James? That I’m reckless with the motor?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that.’ I cannot say it, she thought. Must not. It is he who must talk. What had he said only this afternoon, about death in flames?
‘You’re frightened,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘That we shan’t survive the night? If we hadn’t been able to find a hollow …’
‘No, Dick dear. About – flying.’
The damp fog was a heavy grey blanket, pressing them down into the wet heather. Teeth chattering, he told her of his nightmares. ‘I don’t often talk like this.’
‘But you ought. You must have someone to whom you can say it. You cannot expect to be brave and heroic all the time.’ She thought of Dulcie. ‘Your aunt, have you spoken to her?’
He said simply, ‘I couldn’t bear she shouldn’t think well of me. When anyone criticizes me at home, she says, “Dick is all right.” My mother, I couldn’t speak to. And Ida thinks all men are brave – she’d show breezy common sense if they weren’t.’
They lay huddled together in the ling bed. She thought: I am sleeping the night with Eric’s son.
She talked of her love for art. ‘If only I could paint or draw … I plan to go to Italy,’ she told him. She did not mention money. How could she afford a trip when she was dependent on Mother even for a packet of pins? ‘It’s a long-cherished dream to go to Florence. To see the Fra Angelico, the true colours –’
The slow coming of daylight found them unbelievably stiff and cold. But they could see, even if not very far. And after a little, they heard below them the sound of a horse and cart. The carter giving commands. The rattle of harness.
They made their way down painfully, following the sound, Dick calling: ‘Holloa, whoa, holloa.’ The moorland was rimed with frost. He went ahead of Eleanor. He called back then that they had been noticed.
The carter helped them up. They sat exhausted, aching, humped against the sides of the cart. He offered to turn at once for Thackton. They went to Moorgarth first, at Eleanor’s insistence.
There was a lamp on downstairs. A distraught Dulcie: ‘Eric set out at first light. He has some searchers. You can’t imagine what we’ve been thinking. The very worst … Eleanor, you must go at once to your mother, dearest …’
‘How could you have upset me like that, Eleanor! Rushing off after luncheon with scarcely an explanation. And then to have caused such worry. It shows a person totally devoted to self.’
‘Really I need to go to bed – or if the water can be heated, a bath …’
‘Is that all you have to say? After my night of suffering?’ ‘I’m tired. And very, very cold. We might have died, you know –’
‘Are you telling me what the worries should be? Eleanor, I despair. I cry to Our Lady in Heaven. Eleanor, what are you for? What is your purpose?’
‘I don’t know. Or care. And am going straight upstairs –’
‘Don’t care. Yes, that is it. I must care for you since you are not married. Better you should be a nun. If they would have you. Though I doubt they would take anyone of so little help to them. But you are afraid to ask, are you not, in case they r
efuse you?’
‘Mother, I don’t want to be a nun. I just want a bath.’
‘There you go again. Creature comforts before anything else. A fine nun you would make, Eleanor.’
4
When Aunt Maimie came into the room, Maria did not show her the letter, although it was usually difficult to keep anything from her. Aunt Maimie sat down heavily, then plumped the cushion behind her. ‘Perhaps you’d ring for Elsie, dear. She could bring me a nice cup of tea.’
The letter was from Rocco. Between the ill-written pencilled lines, already faint, she saw his face. Heard his voice. He and Gaetano were fighting. Uncle Eric had shown her on a war map the exact line of the Italian front. Rocco wrote that the life was hard and that he envied Gaetano who stayed doing everyday tasks and chores at base. He grumbled, ‘I didn’t know about fighting, this sort, when I made my decision …’
‘And what has the postman brought little Maria?’
I don’t have to tell her anything, Maria thought. But already it was a summer afternoon spoiled.
Summer of 1918. In March and April there had been terrible reverses in France. Towns and villages evacuated, the line going back. But now the Americans had landed and begun fighting. She had seen them in an illustrated paper in their high, broad-brimmed hats, looking so smart, so confident, so new to it all, and had had a sudden fit of longing for America.
Except that she was quite happy to be at Thackton. It was Thackton all the time now, which would have been lovely except that Aunt Maimie was there too – behaving as if she feared at this late date a German invasion (Aunt Dulcie, laughing but exasperated, said, ‘It’s not Germans worrying her, it’s germs.’) The germs that scared her were Spanish ‘flu, already an epidemic among the Fleet in northern ports. It was a swift killer: healthy men, dead with pneumonia in a couple of days. ‘Middlesbrough is a port, of course,’ Aunt Maimie had said. ‘The germs will travel by trawler.’ It had been all Uncle Eric could do to stop her removing Peter, Maria and Jenny from school.
But even Aunt Maimie, walking restlessly round the house, irritating dear Aunt Dulcie, even she couldn’t spoil the beauty of these summer months. This afternoon Miss Dennison would be taking her bees up to the heather. Two hives. They were to go with Thompson the carter. After Mass on Sunday, Miss Dennison had invited Maria to come too. The bees would be left to make honey on a stretch of moorland near Goathland.
Maria went out often, and usually alone. She just walked. This aimless wandering soothed her. High up on Thackton Rigg, she could worry in peace about Rocco and Gaetano. Dick too. Seeing swallows, flying high because of the hot weather, wheeling and screaming in the summer evening, she would think of him in the air. She picked harebells, taking them home to press. She put some in the exercise book where she’d copied her version of The Golden Lion. Pale in the strong sun and the wind, they took on a deeper blue as they dried.
She wandered too by the river Esk, sometimes taking along her crochet. At the water’s edge, she watched cows on the opposite bank. Midges rose in a cloud about her straw hat. She was bitten by horseflies. ‘Clegs,’ Elsie called them. ‘Nasty dratted things … Clegs,’ she said over and over, making them sound like Germans who bayoneted babies and crucified Canadians after they’d cut nuns’ breasts off, as they did in Aunt Maimie’s stories.
Sometimes she sat on the moors, pretending she was a shepherd. The blackfaced sheep, thick shaggy fleeces overhanging their spindly mottled legs, ambled past or stared without curiosity. They didn’t seem to know or care that she was perhaps only here on a visit. (Or so it seemed to her sometimes. For tomorrow it might all go. Tomorrow Uncle Eric might lose patience, find displeasure in her, wish he’d never adopted her.)
Rocco’s letter: some of the pencil was quite lost, two lines censored. He thought of the family a lot, he said, especially Mamma. What sad, bad times there had been – so much sickness and death. ‘If I live, if, I don’t know whether to take a chance in our home again or go to ‘Merica –’
‘Maria.’ Aunt Maimie’s voice: ‘Maria, I’m speaking to you.’
‘I rang for the tea, Aunt –’
‘The Unseen Hand, Maria, dear. Our secret enemies. Pro-Germans. You remember my telling you? And now there’s worse – a conspiracy to spread vice here, Maria.’ She paused, breathing heavily, ‘You know what vice is, dear?’
‘Sure.’ Then proud of her way with words, ‘It’s being vicious –’
‘I don’t like “sure”, Maria. It sounds a bit Irish even if you picked it up in the States.’ She folded her hands on her lap. ‘They plan to make our boys at the Front no good through venereal disease. And then to spread terrible vices all over England …’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘OK! What language … You know what venereal disease is, dear?’
Maria moved uncomfortably. The room was unpleasantly hot. Outside in the courtyard Trimmer gave several sharp barks.
‘Revolting, dirty illnesses which women catch from men, and men from women who … You see, the poisons enter through certain parts …’ Her face was flushed, excited. ‘There is the Black Book – put together by them. Nearly fifty thousand names, all British subjects who could be blackmailed through their weakness – mostly the vice that the Bible speaks of in Sodom. You know about that, dear?’
‘I might.’ She caught the faded, sweetish yet stale smell that always hung about Aunt Maimie, lingering even in her hats. She felt faintly sick.
‘Roman Catholics don’t read the Bible, I know, but in Sodom –’ her voice was husky with pleasure’- the men committed their disgusting act with other men. Putting their – member in a certain place. Like animals, Maria. Beasts –’
‘Where is this book?’
‘In Germany, of course. But a lady was shown it by two British officers in a hotel here in Yorkshire, while they were having afternoon tea …’
Aunt Maimie’s voice droned on. She tried to snatch a glance at her letter. She thought of Rocco and America, and of how it had been.
‘I want you to come to me if there’s ever anything you need to know. After all, you are almost fifteen … How much do you know, dear, of what men do with women?’
When had she not known? Child in Monteleone. Sounds in the night, all sleeping in one room, how many to a bed? Animals were the same and what matter? She had always known. Only in America had it been perhaps different.
’Merica. That was to have been Paradise.
Dreadful voyage, dreadful landing. Sick, weak, confused, herded into the lighter. ‘There’s Ellis Island.’ Red buildings. Oh, so weary, climbing the long flight of slate stairs up to the Great Hall, its sheer size terrifying her. At the top of the stairs stood the white-coated doctors. Waiting. Watching out for the deformed, the lame, the breathless. ‘Hold your head up,’ Mamma said. They had to walk in circles. Fingers pulled at her eyes, poked her chest. Tongue out, tongue in. Undress, dress again.
The Verzotto family were all right. The son of the woman who on the boat had had the bunk above, his coat lapel marked with coloured chalk, was put aside in a cage with others. He was not all right.
Questions, questions. She had not understood half of them. The interpreter asked, was Papa an anarchist? Herded from one part of the building to another, they passed through in their thousands. As many as ten in a day. The sheep on the mountainside back at home had more dignity.
New York which they’d glimpsed across the bay. New York was ‘Merica. 340 East 108th Street. She scarcely knew her numbers but she had that pat. If nothing else it was, after its fashion, home. They shared with the Cusimano family from the boat. Sicilian but not from Monteleone. Eleven children in all. Herded together now just as they’d been on the boat. Neapolitan families mixed in nearby tenements. Natural enemies. Rocco coldly swearing death to them all. Gaetano following him blindly.
They were cold all their first winter. There were three rooms among them and a real lavatory in the hall. And water, that was the wonder, water always. Their only h
eat was the stove in the kitchen. Rocco and Gaetano and the Cusimano boys got used coal from the dumps. Any firewood they had was stored in the bedrooms piled high to the ceiling.
The two families were united against Neapolitans but nothing else. Mamma and Mrs Cusimano had a feud. Mamma had brought some bed linen with her from Sicily. Worn, mended, but still bed linen. Mrs Cusimano had none. Her family slept with sewn-up cement bags for bedding. Out of jealousy, Mrs Cusimano cut up one of the Verzotto sheets.
Her memories now were of noise. Noise. And fear. The teeming streets, the cluttered iron fire-escapes, cluttered and clattering – the shouting, clanking, banging. The language was familiar, the smells; washing, brightly coloured, was strung from window to window just as at home. But it wasn’t Monteleone. It was the big city. Thudding, jangling, whining, blare of motor horns, rumble of overhead railway.
At night there were bedbugs. They came off the wall. She was bitten badly. To escape, Rocco, Gaetano and the older Cusimano boys all slept down in the stables among the wagons. Better the flies off horse dung than bedbugs.
The iciness of the first winter, followed by the stifling heat of summer. No longer the relentless Sicilian sun but an airless, noisy, always noisy, heat. Papa, calling out his wares, pushed a cart loaded with cabbages, tomatoes, onions, squash. So, it seemed, did everyone else. In the fall Rocco and Gaetano left for Detroit with the three eldest Cusimano boys. Soon after Papa fell sick. He looked so small suddenly, seeming to shrink as they watched. There were medicines they couldn’t afford and which did no good. Mrs Cusimano boiled up herbs for him.
Lean times, bad times. When Papa got very bad he was taken to St John’s Floating Hospital. She did not see him again before he died. Pott’s Disease was the name of his illness. She had bad dreams for a long time afterwards.
Often she didn’t know what was what. Wondered what was happening. She was hungry still. Not as hungry as sometimes in Monteleone, but hungry.
The Golden Lion Page 7