The Twisted Way
Page 9
The children came twice more to stay with Janet after James had left her. Janet coped with them with mounting dismay. Things did not improve.
‘I can’t have your children again,’ she told Richard after a gruelling few days with them in the first school holiday after James had left her. ‘I have a large house and garden to look after and a new post as deputy head. I need to do a lot more preparation and paperwork for the school. James isn’t here to help and life is difficult. You are responsible for them, Richard.’
The children were an unwelcome burden. She thought with burning resentment that James had done enough to ruin her life and she needed to move on. She certainly did not need his unpredictable niece and her young brother in her life. The only person she wanted now was John Lacey.
Richard’s Aunt Dolly too was finding Felicity increasingly difficult.
‘Bert,’ she would grumble to her husband day after day, ‘I’m getting too old to cope with a kid like Felicity. I just can’t do with it now.’ She would sigh and groan. ‘Richard will have to make other arrangements. Ronald isn’t too bad, the poor little devil would be better on his own.’
Richard despaired. It would cost him hard-earned money but he agreed to send Felicity to a boarding school in a small village outside Bristol. He hoped it would be worthwhile. At least it would give him and Aunt Dolly some breathing space. He looked forward to concentrating on his latest girlfriend, a young busty blonde who had just joined his work team; a relationship that was promising and had even prompted him to think about marrying again one day.
The boarding school classes were small and the atmosphere friendly but Felicity made no attempt at first to befriend other girls or learn. This was her father’s way of getting rid of her and separating her from her brother. A deep resentment almost consumed her and twisted her thinking. She endured the lessons and cheeked the staff as often as she could. The majority of the teachers became exasperated with her but her fees were paid on time and that was the Head’s chief concern, at least at first.
The school boasted a small commercial department, consisting of a tiny room with four typewriters, and an inexperienced young woman, Miss Badley, who had little teaching experience, in charge. When she was fourteen Felicity opted for the commercial course. It must be better than French she told herself, and the French mistress Miss Lamont cheered when she realised that the disruptive Felicity would no longer be a member of her class. Felicity had spattered ink over the textbooks, spat in other pupils’ faces and made herself objectionable during the time Miss Lamont had tried to teach her. Letters of complaint to the Head from parents and a string of detentions and threats of expulsion made no impression upon Felicity. She would have been delighted to have been thrown out of the wretched school, especially that boring French class.
‘Come on Felicity, you could become an excellent secretary one day,’ the pretty, young and somewhat naive Miss Badley told her. ‘You have a natural aptitude for commercial subjects.’ She was unaware of Miss Lamont’s unusual jollity and pats on the back from other colleagues in the staffroom. In fact, Miss Lamont produced a bottle of good French wine to share with her colleagues when Miss Badley was not around, something she had never done before. Until she met Felicity she considered that she was an excellent disciplinarian.
‘That girl is really something,’ she declared with passion to her fellow teachers. It was a sentiment they all endorsed.
Felicity thought Miss Badley was a soft touch and liked the attention she received. The woman was in her opinion a tad dopey but she would go along with the commercial course for a while. To her amazement she discovered something she liked doing. Her fingers flew over the typewriter keys and she even managed to pass three examinations and reach an advanced standard. She was too busy and intrigued to be a nuisance. Her English skills were weak but she managed with the help of a dictionary to improve her spelling and achieve a reasonable command of punctuation and grammar. She made a conscientious effort to write shorthand but that proved difficult for her, though she boasted later on when filling in job applications: ‘I have almost achieved verbatim standard.’ She actually had difficulty in deciphering any of her so-called shorthand notes and more often than not resorted to writing quickly in longhand and hoping that her translations were acceptable. Miss Badley, as she had anticipated, didn’t notice, or pretended she didn’t. Felicity relaxed and her behaviour improved.
Simple accounts were no obstacle. At least she understood the difference between debtors and creditors and the necessity to make accounts balance. The dream of obtaining a secretarial post with a handsome wealthy boss who would want to marry her sustained her interest in her studies. A secretarial post could be her passport to riches in the future.
She fantasized. He would be rich and handsome and she would walk down the aisle in a white satin dress. They would live in a large mansion in the country. She looked forward to the day when she could live in perfect luxury. She longed to have money but so far she had very little experience of possessing much or the security and pleasures in life that she imagined it could bring. Many of the girls in the school had wealthy parents, snobs she labelled them, and on occasions envy shot through her, twisting further her already muddled thinking.
Some of the teenage girls were quite worldly and they chatted at length about their sexual experiences and life abroad during the school holidays, and bragged about their affairs to the innocent Felicity.
‘When I return to Africa with my parents in the holidays I have sex with several men,’ Betty Smart boasted frequently when the lights had been turned out in the dormitory at night and the girls chatted quietly so that Matron would not hear them. Her voice would quiver with excitement. ‘I am going to marry one of them when I leave school. He owns a big farm and is a rich and handsome fellow and has promised to buy me a big diamond engagement ring.’
Hmm … Felicity thought. It’s probably all lies, he only wants to sleep with her.
Felicity’s bed was next to Betty’s in the dormitory they shared with three other girls. Betty would describe her experiences to the other girls in minute detail.
‘Come on Betty, what is it like?’ they would ask and the answers always provoked many oohs and aaahs. Felicity was convinced that she was missing something wonderful and the sooner she was able to leave school and indulge herself the better.
When she was just sixteen Felicity persuaded her father that she was ready for the big wide world.
‘I’m not going to learn any more here,’ she urged. Richard, after a chat with the Headmistress, was inclined to agree. The Head made it quite clear that she would like to see the back of the unpredictable Felicity and the sooner the better. Nothing it seemed could subdue the girl’s restlessness and often unpleasant behaviour. There had been too many occasions when ink had been splashed on the back of the blouses of other girls and broken pencils hurled with force across a classroom when Felicity had failed to understand some minor point in a lesson. Without the commercial course to fall back on she would have got rid of her long ago whatever the consequences for her father, who was a weak character in the Head’s opinion and should have taken that girl in hand long ago.
‘It may be sensible,’ she told Richard, ‘for Felicity to be assessed by a child psychologist.’ Heaven knows the girl needs that, she thought.
‘There is no point in having an assessment,’ Richard insisted. ‘I don’t want my daughter to be labelled mentally deficient by some quack. She is just high spirited.’
Richard was far from weak, he was just uninterested and was convinced that Felicity was not his daughter. The sooner she stood on her own feet, preferably a long way away from him, the happier he would feel. That day could not come fast enough for him.
With Richard’s help Felicity obtained a job in London as a typist in a Government Office, and a place to stay in a hostel for girls. She was lucky. So was Richard, at least he thought so. She did not stay long, however, there were too
many rules and regulations.
‘Be in by ten, keep your room tidy, make your bed. It’s like a damned prison,’ Felicity fumed. She was not very well organised and tended to put off tidying up her things, to the annoyance of two other girls with whom she shared a room. She couldn’t see any hope of getting out of the tedious typing pool so that she could enjoy bright lights, sex and true independence. She was not in any case earning enough money. The wizened old bat who supervised the typing pool was far from the handsome boss she had dreamed about marrying one day. She would leave. Richard despaired.
Felicity moved erratically from one job to another, insurance offices, solicitors, stockbrokers, estate agents and others, only staying a few months in each one until she went to Canada to work for a friend of her father’s when she was twenty.
‘He’s a good chap, my friend Bob,’ Richard told her. ‘He’s doing us a favour by taking you on. It will be a wonderful experience for you. Canada is a lovely country.’
It was Richard’s last desperate attempt to do something to rid himself of his difficult and trying daughter.
Bob had told Richard that he needed some secretarial help in his lumber business and he agreed to employ Felicity to repay a favour he owed Richard.
‘Any good, is she?’ Bob had asked. ‘Marvellous’, Richard had replied. ‘She’s a really good typist.’ That at least was true. ‘She takes shorthand and can handle all your accounts,’ he continued, with his tongue in his cheek.
Arrangements were made for Felicity to travel to Canada and Richard heaved a sigh of relief. It was worth every penny he had paid for her air fare.
After writing her a pleading letter, Felicity paid a brief visit to Janet a few days before she went to Canada and noted with interest that Aunt Janet’s new husband John was quite a spunk. Rich, too, she discovered and hoped that some of the wealth he had inherited would one day be passed down to her. Money was her greatest interest; she longed to possess it but so far it had eluded her. They have no kids, after all, she thought. I’ll keep an eye on this situation just in case I don’t meet my millionaire. She did not correspond often with Aunt Janet but needed a contact in the area to report to her from time to time what was going on at Primrose House. She had met a girl when walking along the river bank and they became friendly in quite a short time, which was unusual for Felicity.
‘I’m staying with my rich aunt in Primrose House,’ she said. ‘I’m off to Canada soon to work but would like to know how things are here, would you write to me? It could be in your interest too one day. I would love to have some news about Enderly.’
She had chosen her contact well. The girl, Pattie, who was about the same age as Felicity, was interested to hear about the residents of Primrose House and liked the idea of having a penfriend in Canada. Pattie was not very well educated and her family had worked on the land around Enderly for several generations. It suited both girls to correspond and they wrote to each other regularly over the coming years.
Pattie worked for a while as a hairdresser in Brinton, a small town about five miles away, before marrying a local boy who worked in the fields for a wealthy landowner, as his parents had done before him. They had one daughter Helen who when she grew up worked in the Everton office of Janet’s financial adviser. The fact that Felicity had said that Janet was rich was interesting to both mother and daughter. Helen, who should have been bound by the ethics surrounding client confidentiality, was in a position to observe Janet’s investments and was so impressed by their size she passed this information to her mother who was delighted to pass the latest figures on to Felicity.
Richard wrote to his friend shortly after Felicity had started work in Bob’s office in Canada and asked how she was settling in. He was pleased to receive a satisfactory reply. ‘A nice, girl, helpful and willing,’ Bob wrote. He did not comment on her lack of prowess as a secretary or her inability to make friends with the other members of his staff. Richard smiled with satisfaction. She is probably sleeping with him, hot little tart, he thought wryly, but what could he expect with a mother like Anne? His doubts about Anne and the parentage of their first-born had grown and festered like a rotting apple. The wretched woman died and left me with a demon in skirts. Felicity resembles Anne but not my family in any way, he thought. She could be a throwback as Anne had once suggested but he thought it was unlikely. Ronald was his but he would not mind if he wasn’t. The boy still lacked spirit and showed no sign of improvement the last time he set eyes upon him. ‘Useless, huh ...’ he would mutter when he thought about his son, which was not often.
Felicity married a lumberjack but that marriage didn’t last long. Very few worthwhile things lasted long in her chaotic life. She had considered her husband to be handsome and virile at first but soon decided that he was a silly and uncouth man who always dressed in checked shirts and thick twill trousers. All he thinks about is drinking with his mates and chopping wood. I will never be rich if I stay with him, she thought.
She was tired of the outdoor type and ghastly cold weather in the north of Canada. ‘All bears, wolves, snow, frostbite and ugly thick clothes,’ she remembered shouting at him. ‘I’m off!’ At least the marriage had given her a chance to get away from the lecherous Bob and she was thankful for that. Bob was fun at first but too demanding and rough for her taste.
She obtained a divorce as quickly as she could, claiming untruthfully that he had slept with several bimbos in the lumber camp, and moved to Vancouver where she found a job as a cook in a restaurant. She once again took her maiden name of Brown which she preferred to her married name, Griffiths. Felicity became an efficient cook, she loved the work; it was, like the typing at school, one of the few things that interested her. It was fun for a while and not too mentally demanding. She moved from one job to another, never staying more than a few years, and lived with several doubtful men until she moved in with an Italian immigrant Roberto who was six years older than she was. Roberto was a steady and reliable man who had a calming influence on the nervous and anxious Felicity. He had a poorly paid job in a department store but did earn a steady income and that was better than nothing. They rented a small flat and had little money to spare but Felicity was as happy as she could be without the cash she longed to have. She dreamt about buying jewels and smart clothes but her wardrobe remained sparse.
He’s a lovely Latin type, she would tell herself in an attempt to convince herself that she should stay with him and that things could be worse. He’s a good lover but it’s a pity he hasn’t got a better job.
She wrote to Ronald when she felt like it, which was not often, and she would, if she was lucky, receive a reply from him in the form of one or two paragraphs on cheap white paper, which she considered were as dull as ditchwater.
‘He was always a boring quiet child. What a miserable tyke of a brother to have,’ she would grumble to herself. He did not send her any photographs of his daughter as a baby which she would have liked and had asked him for several times, after all she was her niece, or of his wife whom she had been curious about, but just one small snap when his daughter was about eighteen years old sitting on a bench with her mother under a strange exotic tree in his garden. His wife and daughter appeared to be as uninteresting as he was. ‘Ugly bossy-looking bitches, like a couple of hippos!’ she exclaimed as her temper flared and she tore it up. ‘He’s welcome to them. No wonder he has not sent any photographs before.’ She did wonder, however, if he had any money and if it would be worthwhile sending him a hard-luck letter. She understood he had a successful dental practice and should be ripe for a penny or two, but doubted if he would oblige. He had always been mean and careful with money.
‘OK, here. We are doing well, real Aussies now ...’ was repeated with monotonous regularity on postcards depicting kangaroos, koala bears or some obscure surfing beach. Even his Christmas cards had an Australian theme and bored her stiff. If they had been accompanied by a few dollars they would have been much more interesting.
When Felicity reached her early sixties Roberto died suddenly from a heart attack. She had few friends, those she had made found her too difficult for any length of time, and her thoughts returned to dear Auntie Janet. She decided to write to her. She had made sure that she kept in contact with her at Christmas and it was now time for that long-delayed visit. She was getting too old to start another more lucrative career and had lost interest in men. Also money was tight.
She sat down at a rickety old cheap pine desk, rough and fit for not much more than firewood, that she had bought with Roberto in a sale a few years before, and found an old and slightly crumpled piece of cream paper tucked away in one of the drawers.
‘Dear Aunt Janet,’ she began. ‘I suppose I still call her that,’ she muttered to herself. I wonder what the old hag is like now. She was not very welcoming last time I saw her, she thought. Hmmm, she must be about eighty-six or -seven now. ‘I find myself alone,’ she continued to write, ‘my dear partner Roberto having died recently and I would love to return to England and visit some of my old friends.’ She could not for the life of her think of the names of any old acquaintances, except Pattie Moore, who had proved useful as a spy over the years. ‘I have booked a flight next month and wonder if you would let me stay with you for a while? I would really love to talk about old times and catch up with all your news dear Auntie. I should be arriving in London on the 18th October and could be with you on the 19th. I am so looking forward to seeing you once again. Your loving niece Felicity.’