`You poor child! I don't wonder now that you've been unable to give your thoughts to any form of amusement, with a thing like this on your mind. But have you no idea at all what this threat might be, or who these enemies are from whom your father is hiding you?'
`No. I've cudgeled my wits for hours about it, but I haven't a clue. I've never done any grave harm to anyone. Honestly I haven't. And I can't think why anyone should want to harm me.'
After considering the matter for a moment, Molly asked, `Are you by chance a very rich girl?'
Oh no. Father left me ample money to pay for my stay here, and he gives me a generous dress allowance; but that's all I've got.'
`I really meant, are you an heiress? Has anyone left you a big sum of money into which you come when you are twenty one?'
'No: no one has ever left me anything. I don't think any of my relatives ever had much to leave, anyway.'
`How about your father? Is he very well off
'I suppose so. Yes, he must be. We live very quietly at home, but all the same he must make a lot of money out of the factory, and all the other businesses in which he is mixed up. But why do you ask?'
`I was wondering if there could be a plot to kidnap you and hold you to ransom.'
The big brown eyes showed a mild scepticism. `Surely that sort of thing happens only in America? Besides, my father is no richer than scores of other British industrialists; so I can't see any reason why kidnappers should single him out for their attention.'
`What does he make at his factory?'
Motor engines.
The reply instantly aroused Molly's instinct for good thriller plots, and she exclaimed, `Then he may be one of the key men in the rearmament drive. Perhaps he holds the secret of some new type of aircraft. It may be the Russians who are after you, in the hope that he will betray the secret as the price of getting you back.'
With a shake of the head, the girl swiftly damped Molly's ardour. `No, Mrs. Fountain, it can't be that. He only makes dull things like agricultural tractors.'
Again Molly pondered the problem, then she asked a little diffidently, `Before you left England, did you go into a private nursing home to have a minor operation?'
`Yes.' The brown eyes grew round with surprise. `However did you guess?'
`I didn't. It was just a shot in the dark. But since you admit it that may explain everything. The probability is that your father brought you out here to hide you from the police.'
`I can't think what you're talking about. Having an operation isn't a crime.'
`It can be, in certain circumstances,' Molly replied dryly. `Well, I'm sure they don't apply to me.'
`They might. Is your mother still alive?'
`No; she died when I was six.'
`Have you any elder sisters?'
`No, I am an only child.'
Molly nodded and said gently, `That makes what I have in mind all the more likely. Even in these days quite a number of girls, particularly the motherless ones, reach the age of nineteen or twenty without knowing enough about life to take care of themselves. When you found you were going to have a baby and your father put you in the nursing home to have it removed, he evidently decided that you had quite enough to worry about already without his telling you that such operations are illegal. But they are, and if the police have got on to that nursing home they are probably investigating all the operations that took place in it. Everyone concerned would be liable to be sent to prison. As you were an innocent party I don't think you need fear that for yourself; but for having authorized the operation, your father might get quite a heavy sentence. So it's hardly to be wondered at that he wants to keep you out of the way until the police have got their evidence from other cases and the danger of your being drawn into it is past.'
The girl had listened in silence, but as Molly ceased speaking she began to titter; then, with her white teeth flashing, she burst into a loud laugh. But, catching sight of Molly's rather aggrieved expression, she checked her laughter and said quickly
`I'm so sorry, Mrs. Fountain, I didn't mean to be rude, and I'm awfully grateful for the way you are trying to help me get my bearings. But I couldn't prevent myself from seeing the funny side of your last theory; and you would, too, if you knew the way I had been brought up. I learnt all about sex from other girls, ages ago, but up to last December I've spent nearly the whole of my life in schools including the holidays. And in all the schools I've been to we were as carefully guarded from everything in trousers as if we had been nuns; so I haven't even ever had a boy friend yet, let alone an illegal.'
Molly felt slightly foolish; but, hiding her discomfiture, she smiled. `I'm glad to hear that, but what sort of operation did you have?'
`I had my tonsils out. During January I had a rather nasty sore throat, and although the local doctor said he didn't think it really necessary, Father insisted that it should be done. He put me in a private nursing home at Brighton for the job and made me stay there for three weeks afterwards to convalesce. He collected me from there to bring me straight out here.'
`It rather looks, then, as if he has been attempting to hide you for some time, and used the excuse of your tonsils to get you out of the way as early as the end of January.'
`Perhaps. At the time I was rather touched, as I thought he was showing an unusual solicitude about me. You see, to tell the truth, although it sounds rather beastly to say so, he has never before seemed to care very much what happened to me; and I am quite certain that he would not risk going to prison on my account, as you suggested just now. In view of what has happened since, I think you must be right; but the thing that absolutely stumps me is why he should be taking so much trouble to keep me from everyone I've ever known.'
Her heart going out more warmly than ever to this motherless and friendless girl, Molly said, `Don't worry, my dear. We'll get to the bottom of it somehow; but I'll have to know more about you before I can suggest any further possibilities. As you have had such a secluded life, there can't be much to tell me about that. Still, it's possible that I might hit on a pointer if you cared to give me particulars of your family and your home. To start with, what is your real name?'
`I'm sorry. I'll tell you anything else you wish, but that is the one thing I can't tell you. Father made me swear that I wouldn't divulge my name to anyone while I was down here. I chose Christina for myself, because I like it. Would you very much mind calling me that?'
`Of course not, my dear. Start by telling me about your father, then, and his reasons for always keeping you at school. We might get some clue to his present treatment of you from the past.'
Christina fetched a packet of cigarettes from the hideous mock Empire sideboard, offered them to Molly and took one herself. When they had lit up, she began
`I can't say for certain, but I think the reason that Father has never shown me much affection is because he didn't want me when I arrived. He was then only a working class man a chauffeur who had married the housemaid but he was always very ambitious, and I think he regarded me as another burden that would prevent him from getting on.
`I was born in Essex, in the chauffeur's flat over the garage of a house owned by a rich old lady. You must forgive me for not giving you the name of the house and the village. It's not that I don't trust you, but we live in the house now ourselves, and everybody in those parts knows my father; so it would practically amount to breaking my promise about not telling anyone down here my real name. Anyhow, the house had no bearing on my childhood, because when I was only a few weeks old my father chucked up his job and bought a share in a small business in a nearby town.
`We lived in a little house in a back street, and it was not a happy household. I don't remember it very clearly, but enough to know that poor Mother had a rotten time. It wasn't that Father was actively unkind to her at least not until towards the end but he cared for nothing except his work. He never took her for an outing or to the pictures, and he was just as hard on himself. When he wasn't in his office or
the warehouse he was always tinkering in a little workshop that he had knocked up in the backyard of the house, even on Sundays and often far into the night.
`Within a year or two of his going into business one of his partners died and he bought the other out. But that did not content him. As soon as he had the business to himself he started a small factory to make a little motor, many of the parts of which he had invented, and it sold like hot cakes. When I was five we moved to a bigger house in a somewhat better neighborhood, but that did not make things any better for Mother. He had less time to give to her than ever, and he would never buy her any pretty clothes because he said he needed every penny he was making for expansion.
`There doesn't seem any reason to believe that Mother was particularly religious as a young girl, and she was only twenty eight when she died; so I suppose it was being debarred from participating in all normal amusements that led her to seek distraction in the social life of the chapel. My memory about it is a little vague, but I know that she spent more of her time there during the last two years of her life, and that for some reason it annoyed Father intensely that she should do so. I was too young to understand their arguments, but I have an idea that she got religion and used to preach at him. Naturally, he would have resented that, as he is an agnostic himself, and does not believe in any of the Christian teachings.
`Eventually he became so angry that he forbade her to go to chapel any more. But she did, and on my sixth birthday she took me with her. That proved an unhappy experience for both of us, as I was sick before I even got inside the place, and had to be taken home again. She made a second attempt a few Sundays later, when Father was out of the way seeing some friend of his on business, but again I was sick in the porch. Undaunted, she seized on the next occasion that he was absent from home on a Sunday morning, and for the third time I let her down by being as sick as a puppy that has eaten bad fish, up against the chapel doorway.
`Why chapels and churches have that effect on me I have no idea. I think it must be something to do with the smell
that is peculiar to them; a sort of mixture of old unwashed bodies, disinfectant and stale cabbages. No doctor at any of the schools I've been to has ever been able to explain it, or produce a cure; so I've always had to be let off attending services. I suppose it has become a case of association now, but I am still unable to look inside a church without wanting to vomit.
`Anyway, after my mother's third attempt to take me to chapel, the connection between chapel going and being sick must have been quite firmly established in my mind. No child could be expected to like what must have appeared to be a series of outings undertaken with the deliberate intention of making it sick; and, of course, I was still too young to realise what I was doing when I spilled the beans to Father.
`I let the cat out of the bag at tea time, and he went absolutely berserk. He threw his plate at Mother, then jumped up and chased her round the table. I fled screaming to my room upstairs, but for what seemed an age I could hear him bashing her about and cursing her. She was in bed for a week, and afterwards she was never the same woman again; so I think he may have done her some serious injury. It is too long ago for me to recall the details of her illness, but I seem to remember her complaining of pains in her inside, and finding the housework heavier and heavier, although it is probable that her decline was due to acute melancholia as much as to any physical cause. By mid summer she could no longer raise the energy to go out, and became a semi invalid. Naturally her chapel friends were very distressed and used to come in from time to time to try to cheer her up. The pastor used to visit us too, once or twice a week, when it was certain that Father was well out of the way, and sit with her reading the Bible.
`It was one of his visits that precipitated her death. Father came home unexpectedly one afternoon and found him there. I was out at kindergarten, so I only heard about it afterwards. By all accounts Father took the pastor by the shoulders and kicked him from the front door into the gutter.
'Most people take a pretty dim view about anyone laying violent hands on a man of God, and the episode might have resulted in a great deal of unpleasantness for Father, but on balance he got off very lightly. For one thing he was popular, at any rate with his work people and their families, whereas the pastor was not. For another, a story went round that the pastor had been Mother's lover, or that, anyway, Father had caught him making a pass at her. I don't believe that for one moment. I haven't a doubt that it was put about by Father himself in an attempt to justify his act, and that the real truth was that finding the pastor there had sent him into another of his blind rages against the chapel and everything connected with it.
`The affair cost him the goodwill of a certain number of his more staid acquaintances, and it stymied his standing for the town council, as he had planned to do, that winter. But it didn't prove as serious a set back to his upward progress as it might have done; and although the pastor had talked of starting an action for assault, he didn't, because in view of what happened afterwards he decided that it would be un Christian to do so. He was thinking, of course, of the fact that when Father woke up next morning he found Mother dead in bed beside him.
`It was generally accepted that she had died as the result of delayed shock. There can be no doubt that such a scene must have struck at the very roots of her being. When I was older, friends who had known her told me that she had regarded her pastor as inspired by God; so for her to have seen him set upon must have been like witnessing the most appalling sacrilege. At that moment, in her morbid state of mind, I dare say my father must have appeared to her to be the Devil in person, and the thought that she was married to him may have proved too much for her. She fainted and was put to bed by a neighbour. It was she who told me most of what I know about it, some years later. The doctor was called in and he was a bit worried because Mother would not answer his questions or speak to anybody; but he thought she would be all right when she got over the shock.
`It may be true that she didn't get over it, and her heart suddenly failed, or something; but she had been taking pills to make her sleep for some time, and when our neighbour came in next morning she found the bottle empty. She said nothing about it, but it was her opinion that Mother had taken an overdose to escape having to go on living with Father. Perhaps he knows the truth about what happened, but if so he is the only person who does.'
Christina paused to light another cigarette, then she went on, `For a time our neighbour looked after me. Then, in the autumn, Father brought a woman named Annie to the house. She was a big blonde creature, lazy but kindhearted, and he gave out that he had been married to her in London; but of course that wasn't true, and I am sure now that she was just a tart that he had picked up somewhere. Mother had been much too weepy and religious to inspire a passionate devotion in any child; so I had soon got over her loss, and I grew to love Annie. She said she had always wanted a little daughter just like me, and my life with her was one long succession of lovely surprises and jolly treats. No doubt she was common, rather silly and the sort who is too lazy to earn her own living except by haunting dance halls and shady clubs; but the nine months she was with us were far and away the happiest of my childhood, in fact the only really happy ones I ever had, and I was inconsolable for weeks after she went away.
`The affair broke up because Father was getting on so fast. He felt it was bad for business for him to continue living in the sort of house more suited to one of his own foremen; so he bought another out in the town's best residential district. To me, at the time, it seemed huge, but actually it was just an eight roomed house with a garage and an acre or so of garden. Still, as far as we were concerned it was a great step up in the world; and although Father may not have been quite as keen on Annie as he had been at first, it was mainly because she did not fit into the picture that he ditched her.
`It was a few days before we were due to move that I found her in tears. She told me then that they had never been married and that he didn't consider h
er good enough for him any longer. But she didn't make a scene. She had more natural dignity than many better bred women whom I've met, and I'll always remember her walking out, dry eyed and smiling, to the taxi that was to take her to the station. I never saw her again.
`For me, her going robbed the new house of all its glamour, and very soon I came to hate the place. Father never again made the mistake of getting married, or pretending that he had divorced Annie and acquired a new wife. Instead, he replaced Annie with a girl who had been one of his secretaries. They never bothered to conceal the fact from me that they slept together, but to preserve the proprieties she was given the status of governess housekeeper. Her name was Delia Weddel, and she had been brought up in quite a good home, but if ever there was a bitch she was one.
`She was another blonde, but the thin kind, and strikingly good looking, until one came to realise the hardness of her eyes and the meanness of her mouth. Why she should have taken a hate against me I have no idea, but she made my life hell, and she was so cunning and deceitful that neither Father nor the daily woman we used to have in to do the housework guessed what was going on.
`As a child I was subject to sleep walking. That meant if sounds were heard in the night someone had to get up and put me to bed again. Annie used to do that so gently that I hardly realised it had happened, but Delia used to put me outside the back door until the cold woke me up. While I was there she would go upstairs, strip my bed and throw the clothes on the floor; so that when she let me in, shivering with cold, I had to make it again myself before I could get to sleep. Next day, too, she always gave me some punishment for having disturbed her, and, of course, that only made me worse.
`Then there was the agony of lessons. As she was officially my governess she had at least to make a pretence of teaching me. But all she ever did was to point out a passage in a history or geography book and order me to learn it by heart, while she read a novel or went shopping. It was torture, because I wasn't old enough to master things like that. I had got to the stage of reading only fairy stories and books about animals; yet if I couldn't say my piece at the end of the hour I knew that I was going to get my knuckles rapped. I would have given anything in the world to be back at kindergarten with the common little children, singing songs and playing games with bricks. But at that age a child is absolutely at the mercy of grown ups; so there was nothing I could do about it.
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