Highly Unsuitable Girl

by Carolyn McCrae

  She gathered all the paraphernalia that was required for a day out with a five year old, all the time thinking that this was the last thing in the world she wanted to do. She knew that for the two hours it would take them to reach the coast Margaret would not stop fidgeting or crying. She would be car sick and the combination of the noise and the smell would make the trip almost unbearable. She dreaded what the day would bring but knew there was no point in arguing with Geoffrey, if he wanted to take his daughter for a sail that was what he would do. Geoffrey was used to doing as he wished. It never occurred to him that others were worthy of consideration, not even his wife.

  The journey felt as long as Kathleen had expected it would. Margaret acted up all the way, wriggling and chattering incessantly, excited that she was to be going out in her beloved Daddy’s yacht Guillemot for the first time. Kathleen had tried to persuade him not to say anything until they had reached the yacht club, she knew how difficult an excited Margaret would be to control on the journey but she hadn’t been at all surprised when he had ignored her and told Margaret as they loaded the car.

  By the time Geoffrey turned the Jaguar into the Yacht Club car park he was barely able to control his impatience. The journey had taken far longer than he had planned as he had had to pull into lay-bys three times to allow his daughter to be sick. He would be lucky to catch the tide.

  “Why couldn’t you calm her down?” He asked impatiently, as they unloaded the car. “She’s been behaving like a baby.”

  “You didn’t help making her so excited.” Kathleen replied, defensively.

  “I hope you bring up Geoffrey Junior to be better behaved. The girl is uncontrollable.”

  Margaret stood holding her father’s hand staring with undisguised idolatry up at his face. Kathleen hoped she had not realised what her father was saying about her.

  “Have a lovely time Margaret. Be a good girl, do everything your Daddy tells you to do.” Margaret, tugging impatiently at her father’s hand, didn’t answer.

  Kathleen was about to tell her husband to remember his promise to keep close to the shore but he was already turning away from her so she didn’t bother. She watched them walk away, Geoffrey striding out quickly with Margaret almost running to keep up.

  She found a seat on the clubhouse balcony and took out her knitting, exchanging brief pleasantries with the other wives occupying themselves as their men enjoyed their freedom on the water. She looked up occasionally from her knitting trying to catch a glimpse of Guillemot amongst the irregular flotilla of yachts tacking backwards and forwards.

  Geoffrey hadn’t stayed close to shore, but then she hadn’t really expected he would. He only did as he promised when that was what he had always intended.

  Whenever she thought of her father Margaret remembered that short time, no more than an hour, that they had spent together on Guillemot. She had only moved when her Daddy told her to and she obeyed immediately every one of his instructions. She had never known her adored Daddy to have so much time for her. He always left for his office before she was allowed downstairs in the mornings and he always worked so late that he had never spent more than a few minutes with her before she had to go upstairs to bed. For the remaining eighty years of her life she could close her eyes and picture her father’s strong arms, tanned even though it was so early in the year, the dark waves of his hair, the way it had blown across his eyes, and his long brown fingers as he held on to the tiller and pulled on ropes. Then she would see the brown of his eyes, terrified, as they sank below the water.

  She was in the water too, she didn’t know how, but her Daddy was with her. She had floated, her head back, looking at the seagulls flying in the sky. Then he wasn’t with her. She heard him calling her name but she couldn’t see him. She heard him telling her to keep her head above the water. Still she couldn’t see him. She heard him tell her not to worry, they would be fine, help would be on its way. Then the water turned her and she saw him and for a lifetime she wished she hadn’t. He kept disappearing then she could see him no more. Brown straight wet hair, brown eyes, brown arms, brown fingers. Gone. She resolutely kept her head back as he had told her to, not knowing what else she should do.

  Kathleen was sitting on the Yacht Club veranda trying to control the ball of wool in the breeze as she worried about the journey home. She became aware of shouting, but she didn’t think it unusual, there would always have been noise as the estuary was crowded on the first sunny, breezy, bank holiday of the year.

  She looked up from her knitting to see the railings were crowded with people and realised there was a problem. ‘Is the child safe?’ she heard someone cry. One woman was pointing out to the estuary, another had her hands over her face as if she didn’t want to see horror unfold. ‘What is it?’ Kathleen had asked one of the women who, she realised, had tears running down her cheeks. The response ‘Oh my God’, accompanied by a look of horror, didn’t seem to serve as an adequate answer. She realised that the women who were not crowded on the balcony railings were looking at her.

  Ten minutes later she was seated in the Commodore’s office trying to take in what the kindly man was telling her. The few words she heard seemed disjointed, completely out of context and made no sense. ‘Capsize’ ‘no life jacket’ ‘water still very cold at this time of year’ ‘tried to swim to shore’ ‘drowned’ ‘sad’.

  Geoffrey was a strong swimmer she tried to tell him. He couldn’t have drowned. He could swim for miles. But then she had remembered the fall he had had while out riding the previous week. He had hurt his shoulder. At the time he had laughed at her worry, saying it was nothing. But ‘nothing’ had killed him.

  “He’s drowned?” She asked as if she didn’t quite understand what the word meant. ‘Dead?’

  The commodore nodded then had seemed to cheer up as he spoke about Margaret. “Your daughter is safe though. She was wearing a life jacket. The ambulance men are checking her over but she seems none the worse for her adventure.” Belatedly he caught the look of horror on Kathleen’s face.

  Kathleen replied with icy calm. “Adventure? You think this is an adventure? My husband is dead, my daughter’s father is dead, and you call it an adventure? Where is she? I must go to her. She will need me.”

  Kathleen struggled to stand up. She knew she must find Margaret. Margaret would be frightened, she would need her mother. But as Kathleen tried to stand her legs collapsed and she fell to the floor.

  “The baby.” She screamed, not caring that she was losing all remnants of respectability and control. “Help me! The bloody baby’s coming. Now!”

  Geoffrey’s son had come into the world within an hour of his father’s leaving of it. It was her husband’s tragedy he never knew he had a son, and it was his son’s tragedy that he was never allowed to forget it.

  Kathleen was freed by her husband’s death in a way she could never have anticipated. For the first time in her life she was able to do exactly as she pleased. She never went so far as to acknowledge that she was happy Geoffrey had drowned, it just wasn’t the disaster it might have been had their relationship been different.

  Geoffrey’s will had been read after the funeral by the family solicitor who seemed embarrassed as he detailed the scale of the wealth involved. Geoffrey had been convinced his child would be a son and had re-written his will only a few weeks before on that basis leaving his widow and her daughter very well provided for but ensuring, when the son reached his majority, everything would be his. It would be up to the boy what provision should be made for his mother and his sister. All the financial arrangements that Kathleen had never cared to know about were placed in the hands of a board of trustees of which she would not be a member. She had access to a great deal of money but it was not hers. In twenty–one years everything would be his and she could have nothing.

  Determined to make the most of those years she hired a live-in nanny and a housekeeper and she used the freedom they gave her to spend weekends shopping in London and countless after
noons drinking tea and gossiping with her friends, the wives of the men who controlled her son’s fortune. She played the dignified widow to perfection implying to all that her grief was something she would only allow to overcome her in the privacy of her own home.

  To these friends and acquaintances Kathleen always talked of her son as her ‘little man’ and ‘the man of the house’ but Geoff knew from a very young age that he could be nothing of the sort. His father’s memory ruled the family. Every disagreement between mother and son ended in Kathleen’s tears and recriminations that his father would be so disappointed in him. His birthday, 10th April, was dedicated to the memory of his father so throughout his childhood the day was spent listening to his mother and sister talk of the man he had never known. His birthday parties were always held, cards and presents given and received, on the 11th as Kathleen, with increasing resentment, counted down the years to his twenty-first when she would no longer be in control.

  “I really don’t think Liverpool is a good idea Geoffrey.”

  “Tough, Mum, I’m going.”

  It was one of the very few times in his life that he stood up to his mother and won.

  She never forgave him.

  Chapter 3: Realities

  Merseyside, August 1970

  Anya had to get a holiday job. She had enjoyed her first term at university but she knew she would have enjoyed it more if she could leave home and live in a hall of residence but that was out of the question when she had no money but her grant. The book shop turned her down because of her accent, the post office would only be up to Christmas so she ended up folding sheets in the local laundry. If she worked every holiday and saved every penny she would be able to afford hall in her final year. Then, at last, she could make friends.

  She was just as lonely as she had ever been. She didn’t have the confidence, or the cash, to join any of the noisy groups which, at the end of each day, headed for the union bar or the buses back to halls as she turned in the opposite direction to the ferry and home. She was enjoying her course but every evening, as she walked round the ferry’s deck as it crossed the Mersey, she knew she was missing out. Exceeding her tutor’s expectations was no compensation for having no social life.

  There were advantages to the job in the laundry; it was close to home and the money was good, it had to be because it was hard work. At six o’clock every evening her feet ached from standing all day, her head ached from the clanking machinery and her back ached from the incessant bending and straightening the job required but at the end of each week, when she picked up her small brown pay packet, she knew it would all be worth it.

  Every morning at 8 o’clock she would take her place at the conveyor belt that fed flat ironed bed sheets one every 30 seconds. Moments later the motors cranked into action and for the next two hours she folded crisply starched sheets, 120 times an hour. The radio played pop music all day every day but it was almost impossible to hear with the noise of the machinery.

  At the end of the first week in January she went in to the office to pick up her wages and say goodbye with some regret. ‘You’ll be back at Easter?’ Mr Lupton, the owner, asked nonchalantly. She could have kissed him. ‘Oh yes please! I’ve really enjoyed it.’ ‘Not many people say that.’ He had replied with a smile.

  In the Christmas vacation of 1969 she got to talking in her breaks with a good looking student who was working in the office. Martin was there again in the summer vacation of 1970 when she found out more about him, he was at Newcastle University, he lived a few miles out of town and came to work every day on his powerful Norton motor bike. They discussed politics, arguing over America’s involvement in Vietnam. She knew he liked her and she wondered what it would take to make him ask her out. Anya spent the long, monotonous days imagining a holiday romance with Martin. He was different from the other boys she had known, he had good manners and spoke with a slightly posh accent. From October, when she would be living in hall, she would meet lots of interesting, intelligent, good-looking, middle-class boys like Martin.

  When, at the end of a particularly hot day in early August Anya opened her front door she had known immediately that something was wrong. There was no sound. The television was always on when she got home but that evening the house was silent. Anya looked in the kitchen which seemed unnaturally tidy and called upstairs. ‘Mum? Are you here?’ When there was no reply she climbed the stairs. She knocked tentatively on her mother’s bedroom door and pushed it open. If her mum had a boyfriend she would never have dared, but there hadn’t been a man around for months.

  Anya saw her mother lying on her bed and knew immediately she was dead.

  She had never seen anyone dead and for a few long seconds she looked at her mother’s face thinking with a strange detachment how pretty she could have been, before turning away and closing the door quietly behind her. She could call 999 later, just for a few minutes more she wanted things to be normal. She walked back down the stairs and boiled the kettle and then sat on the settee staring at the grey screen of the silent television as the mug of tea cooled in her hands. She couldn’t call 999, she didn’t know how she could say ‘my mum’s dead.’ She had hated her mother and their life for so many reasons but it had had the advantage of familiarity and she needed a few minutes of that old life before everything would change.

  It was getting dark when she eventually walked out of the front door and down the street to The Anchor. She walked up to the bar and asked for a brandy. She drank it before realising she had no money with her. She tried to explain to the barman that she only lived up the street, she’d go and get her purse, she wouldn’t be a minute, but he didn’t believe her. She looked around in muted panic.

  “I’ll pay for that.” A voice she felt was familiar seemed to take control.

  “Are you sure doctor?” she heard the barman say.

  Dr Hill was standing next to her. “Anya. Anya Cave isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “You look like you’ve had a shock. What’s happened?”

  “It’s my mum.”

  With those three words it was out of her hands. She didn’t have to call 999, she didn’t have to explain anything to anyone.

  It was very late when Dr Hill finally left. He had called the police and the ambulance and dealt with them all as Anya sat in the front room answering the very basic questions ‘who’ and ‘when’. She would leave the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ for another day. Left alone in the empty house she didn’t want to go to sleep, she didn’t want to have to wake up the next morning only to realise that her life had changed, anyway, she told herself, there were things to do. She sat down at the desk in her bedroom and wrote a note to Mr Lupton explaining that she could not return to work. She wrote that she hated to let them down when they had all been so good to her for more than two years, but a sudden family bereavement meant she was needed at home.

  Dawn was breaking as she walked the familiar route and dropped the envelope through the office letter box. She walked away quickly as she knew the boiler men started work very early and she didn’t want anyone to see her. Reluctant to go back to the empty house she walked to the park and sat down shivering until she began to feel the warmth of the sun.

  Should she have realised her mum was so ill? There hadn’t been a boyfriend for quite a while but there hadn’t been anything other than that out of the ordinary, they had bickered about anything and everything just as they always did. Maybe her mum had lost some weight and not used as much makeup as usual, perhaps she hadn’t been down the market to buy new clothes for months, maybe she hadn’t been out of the house at all for a while. Should she have realised something was very wrong? Should she have been more aware of what was going on? If she had been just a little less focussed on her own life would she have seen something? She sat alone on the park bench watching children play and mothers push prams.

  It was nearly lunchtime when hunger made her pluck up the courage to go home. As she turned the corner into Tennyson
Street she saw Dr Hill and his sister at the front door. She invited them in and they all sat down, rather formally, in the uncannily quiet and tidy front room.

  “Did your mother have difficulty sleeping?” Miss Hill asked kindly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did she go to a doctor?”

  “She never came to see me, or anyone at the practice.” Dr Hill volunteered

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t know the answer to anything they asked her about her mother and she saw Miss Hill and her brother exchange glances that she couldn’t interpret.

  “We didn’t really talk much.” Anya said in self-defence, feeling they were critical of her lack of closeness with her mother.

  “She didn’t tell you she was ill?”

  “Ill? No. She didn’t say anything. Was she?”

  Neither answered her.

  “Was she depressed at all?”

  “No. Not really. Why?”

  “Well your mother swallowed a lot of tablets. That’s why she died.”

  “She committed suicide?”

  “There will have to be a proper post mortem but I would say everything points to that.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Didn’t she tell you she had cancer?”

  “No. She didn’t. Not a word.” They had had so many secrets from each other but why couldn’t her mother have trusted her with something so important?

  “But that’s not what killed her, though it would have done eventually and rather painfully.” Dr Hill had never believed in shielding people from necessary truths.