It had been great to see the girls today. Katie hadn’t changed much. Sophie was different though. She’d had more education than Katie and me of course, staying on for A levels and then college. She, of all of us, seemed to me the most adjusted and fulfilled. She’d had a very privileged childhood – well-off business parents who clearly overindulged her. Still, it didn’t seem to have spoilt her too much and clearly she’d worked hard to justify what they must have spent on her. I’d always envied all the time she had to herself, up in that luxurious little den of hers with her TV, her expensive toys and her seemingly endless collection of videos and CDs.
My parents adopted me when I was three weeks old and it felt to me as though they’d never left me alone for a minute from that day on. There she would be – Mum – standing at the school gates every afternoon, making sure I didn’t get run over or kidnapped or, even worse, led astray by some of the kids from the council estate. Needless to say, she really disapproved of poor Katie.
Even when I went to secondary school she was still there, doggedly waiting every afternoon until I begged her to stop. I tried to explain to her that it was embarrassing, that I was already suffering from mild bullying because I was shy and introverted and if she continued to baby me I knew I was in for much worse, but she still managed to make me feel guilty, accusing me of being ashamed of her, of not loving or appreciating her any more.
Katie understood. That was the nice thing about Katie. She could always see my side of things. She didn’t talk much about her own home life. I knew her mum had died when she was quite young and I wasn’t sure what happened to her dad except that he wasn’t around any more. There were a lot of children in her family, some of them had been left behind in Ireland with a grandmother. Katie lived with her elder brother and his wife. She never complained, though there were times when I’d noticed bruises on her arms and I wondered if all was well at home. But she always spoke fondly of her brother, Liam, so I never plucked up the nerve to ask. There was certainly no over-protective mum waiting to escort her safely home. I’d disappointed them of course, as I’d always known I would some day. No one could possibly live up to the standards and expectations they’d set for me.
I poured myself a glass of juice from the fridge and then went upstairs to shower and change. The house was beautiful. I was always telling myself I should be grateful for such a fantastic home. Our bedroom overlooked the garden and as I opened the window the scent of roses and lavender drifted up to meet me. Fitted wardrobes occupied one wall, their mirrored doors throwing back a reflection of the room – cream carpet, turquoise silk brocade curtains at the windows with the same material flouncing the dressing table and the hangings of the four-poster bed. A room most women would die for.
In the en-suite I showered and was just changing into jeans and a tee shirt when I heard Harry calling up the stairs.
‘Mum! Come and see what I won at the fête.’
I walked out on to the landing to see him standing at the foot of the curving staircase, his dark hair tousled and his brown eyes eager as they looked up at me. He’d been to the village fête with two of his friends and it was clear that they’d had an enjoyable afternoon.
‘Mum, can Paul and David stay to tea?’
‘Of course.’ I ran downstairs and hugged him, feeling him stiffen slightly in my arms. Charles had instilled into him that at eight he was far too old for hugs from his mother, too old for bedtime stories and certainly far too old for teddy, who had been put out with the stuff for the ‘bring and buy’ sale at the fête.
I let him go and looked around. ‘So – what did you win – were is it?’
The cheeky grin that I loved so much lit up his face and he picked up a plastic supermarket carrier bag from the floor. Opening it he held it out for me to look inside.
‘Tadaah!’
I could hardly believe my eyes. ‘It’s a teddy – your teddy.’
‘I know. They’d put him on the tombola stall. I bought a ticket and I won him. Dad’s got to let me keep him now, hasn’t he?’
I wasn’t so sure. ‘Well – maybe we’d better keep him out of sight for the time being,’ I suggested. ‘Just in case. Where are Paul and David?’
‘Waiting outside. I said I’d ask you first.’
‘Well you’d better go and get them,’ I laughed. ‘Is fish fingers and chips OK?’
‘Great!’ he called over his shoulder on his way out.
As I peeled potatoes I thought about Charles, away at a conference. He was away an awful lot of weekends for one reason or another. The business, Grayson Electronics, was doing very well and it was the price one had to pay for success, or so he was always telling me.
Ever since we moved into Crayshore Manor he’d been urging me to engage a housekeeper or at least someone to cook and do the housework but so far I had held out against it. He refused point blank to allow me to go back to work for him, which is what I would have preferred. What else would I do with my time? With Charles working long hours and very often weekends and Harry off to boarding school soon life was going to be pretty empty and aimless.
There had been endless arguments about Harry going away to school. In my opinion he was too young.
‘Why can’t he go at eleven as he would if he stayed at home?’
Charles had laughed. ‘That’s Irish!’
‘You know what I mean,’ I argued. ‘He’d move on to secondary school at eleven, so why can’t he wait till then to go to your precious old school?’
His face set in the determined lines I’d come to know all too well. ‘He’s an only child and he’s getting hopelessly spoiled.’
‘No he’s not!’
‘Admit it, Fran, you baby him. Do you want him to grow up into an effeminate ninny?’
‘Plenty of boys go to the local grammar school without growing up into ninnies.’
He threw down the newspaper he’d been reading. ‘Maybe not, but they don’t have you as a mother, do they?’
His words hurt. When Harry was born there had been complications and I was told that it was doubtful that I’d be able to conceive again so Harry was especially precious because of that. They must have known at the hospital that Harry wasn’t my first child, but no one mentioned the fact, something for which I was infinitely grateful. When Mum came to see me and her new grandson she asked me if anyone had enquired about my previous pregnancy. I was surprised. After it was over it had never been mentioned again – till now. I told her nothing had been said and she was clearly relieved. Obviously she wouldn’t have wanted Charles to know about my guilty secret and she wasn’t alone in that.
I was sixteen and in my GCSE year when it happened. Pete and I had known each other since primary school. It was only when we reached puberty that we started seeing one another as boyfriend and girlfriend. I adored him. He was such fun. His parents, unlike mine, both worked and were very free and easy with their kids. Lisa and Frank, his brother and sister were older than him and both at work so their house was often empty during the day. Sometimes after school I’d go to his house and we’d play videos or listen to music but then things grew more serious between us and one day we got carried away and things went too far. It was just the once, but as they say – once is all it takes.
I took it for granted that Pete would stand by me but when I told him I thought I might be pregnant, I was completely shattered when he refused to take it seriously.
‘You can’t be. It was only the once and everyone says it can’t happen the first time – unless….’ He looked at me in a way that turned my heart to ice.
‘Pete! You can’t think….’
He shrugged defensively. ‘Well, how do I know? If you did it with me how do I know there haven’t been others?’
I was speechless with hurt as I watched him walk away. After that he ignored me, refusing to speak to me, even when I followed him home and begged him. It was the most miserable time of my life. I didn’t know which way to turn. As the weeks went by I cou
ldn’t face telling my parents so I took the line of least resistance, trying to convince myself that if I ignored it maybe it would simply go away.
No one knew. Pete obviously hadn’t told anyone and I didn’t even confide in my best friends. I carried on at school and took my exams. To my relief nothing showed and by the time term ended and I was six months pregnant I was as slim as ever, but after that it gradually began to be noticeable. I made excuses not to go out, wore loose tops and stayed in my room a lot until eventually Mum’s suspicions were aroused and she came upstairs and asked me outright if I had anything to tell her. It was then that I blurted out the truth, relieved in a way to get it out in the open.
My relief was short lived. Dad had to know of course and their reaction was even more awful than I’d anticipated. They sat in judgement on me, appalled that I could have behaved so immorally – let them down so badly after their careful upbringing, and they were furious when I refused to tell them who the father was. I wasn’t protecting Pete. I was afraid he might repeat his earlier accusations and that my parents might believe him. It was made all too clear to me that I was an ungrateful child and an enormous disgrace and disappointment. It was also made clear to me that there would be no question of keeping the baby. As soon as it was born it would go straight for adoption. At sixteen and still living under my adoptive parents’ roof I had no choice but to agree.
‘Mum! Watch out, the chip pan is smoking!’
I spun round at Harry’s alarmed warning and pulled the pan off the heat, smiling reassuringly at him. ‘It’s OK. I was miles away. Tea will be about ten minutes so the three of you just have time to wash your hands.’
Dad drove me down to Dorset soon after my shame was revealed. I was to stay with his sister, Aunt Mavis, until the baby was born. Mavis wasn’t my real aunt of course and it was clear from the start that she resented having me to stay. I helped as much as I could with the housework and shopping. She wasn’t exactly unkind but from time to time she spoke of how she had warned her brother and sister-in-law at the time not to take the risk of adopting. She would make snide remarks about ‘bad blood’, saying that adopted children were always ‘a gamble’ and an ‘unknown quantity’, reminding me of my obligations and how ungrateful I was to reward them in this way. Once she looked me up and down and shook her head. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ she muttered. ‘A dowdy little thing like you.’
When I went into labour she drove me to the hospital and left me there. She picked me up when I was discharged and a week later I was on my way home, my baby girl no more than a fleeting memory of blonde hair as soft as thistledown, heart-breaking blue eyes looking trustingly up into mine. I thought that the painful ache in my empty arms would surely kill me.
At home I wasn’t encouraged to wallow in my wretchedness. ‘It’s over now, we’ll forget it,’ I was told. But I couldn’t forget. At night I’d cry myself to sleep in secret, stifling my sobs in the pillow as I agonized about my baby. In my heart I’d called her Carolyn. Where was she now? Would she be loved as I would have loved her? How could I bear the thought of her growing up in the belief that I’d abandoned her? But in the daytime there was no time for regrets or dreams of what might have been. I’d had a lucky escape, I was told. I should be grateful for a roof over my head and good Christian parents. Now it was time to grow up, to train for a job and start to earn my own living.
I enrolled at the local college for a secretarial course. It was a new environment. My friends had gone – Sophie to sixth form college and Katie to some dead end job. I was too ashamed to seek them out. The other girls on my course seemed so young to me, so light-hearted and fancy free. They seemed little more than children and compared to them I felt a hundred years old. Occasionally one of them would invite me to join the crowd for an evening out, to a club or disco but I could imagine the scene if I dared to suggest it at home. I’d already learned that I was never to be trusted again.
The three boys ate their tea in the kitchen, chattering to each other about the fête, about football and swimming and all the other things little boys are interested in. Soon Harry would have to say goodbye to his friends and try to make new ones, just as I had all those years ago, but he wasn’t shy like me. He had a friendly, gregarious nature and he had no shameful secret to cut him off from the rest. He surely wouldn’t find it a problem. Oh, I hoped so much that he wouldn’t find it a problem.
I qualified well at the end of my course and worked for a year in an insurance firm. When I saw the job with Grayson Electronics advertised, I applied. It was an up-and-coming firm and although the job advertised was only temporary, the money was good and I thought that even as a temporary job it would look good on my CV. I was anxious to be earning enough money to be able to leave home and get a little place of my own. I didn’t think I had the remotest chance of getting the job and no one could have been more surprised than me when I got it.
The outgoing PA, who was leaving to have a baby, invited me to have coffee with her during which she filled me in on ‘The Boss’.
‘Charles is a lovely man,’ she told me, leaning confidentially across the table in the little café round the corner from the office. ‘He’s a good boss, very kind and considerate, but he’s in the middle of a rather acrimonious divorce at the moment so you have to make allowances for his mood swings.’
She told me she had loved the job and looked forward to returning to it when her baby was a year old. As it happened she never came back.
When I began working for Grayson Electronics, Charles was in his late thirties. He was the archetypal romantic novel hero, handsome, tall and well built, his thick hair attractively streaked with silver. His dark eyes were shrewd, summing up people and situations quickly and on my first day as his PA, I couldn’t have been more nervous. When I made my third stupid mistake and was close to tears he smilingly put me at my ease.
‘It’s your first day, Frances. You’re not going to get everything right straight away,’ he said kindly. He explained that the reason he hadn’t engaged an experienced PA was that she would have had to unlearn her old boss’s ways and habits.
‘I need to train you to my ways,’ he told me. ‘Can’t do with someone who’s always telling me how they did things at her old firm and how much better it was. I don’t think you’ll find me too difficult to work with,’ he continued with a smile. ‘I’m told that I do sometimes have a tendency towards sarcasm. If that happens just tell me to calm down – or chill out, or whatever it is you youngsters say these days. Right?’ He smiled that thousand watt smile of his and won me over completely.
I learned quickly, loving the job and the environment. GE was a good firm to work for with excellent facilities. Charles had the mood swings I’d been warned about, but knowing the circumstances I made allowances. Usually he’d be quiet. Sometimes he’d snap. I soon discovered that when he was like that it was usually triggered by a new complication in his divorce and I learned to get on with my work quietly and wait for him to come round.
A lot of gossip and rumours went round the office. The general consensus seemed to be that his wife was a complete bitch, bent on bleeding him dry. Once she turned up at the office on a day when Charles was away. She was very glamorous in her designer outfit and attractive in a hard way. She quizzed me about my background and education in a way that I resented and I guessed that the real reason for her visit was to look me over. Her husband suddenly appointing a PA half his age had clearly aroused her suspicions. Proof that he was having an affair would presumably provide a useful lever to extract more money from the divorce settlement. But she took one disparaging look at my clothes and hair, my pale face, devoid of make-up and clearly decided that I was not in her husband’s league. It didn’t do a lot for my ego at the time.
Six weeks later Charles arrived at the office one morning with a crate of champagne which he took to the canteen with instructions that everyone was to have a glass with their lunch.
‘My decree came through at last,’
he confided to me as he closed the office door. ‘Couldn’t let it go without some kind of celebration.’
I smiled. ‘Congratulations.’ Immediately I felt my colour rise. ‘Oh! I mean – I really meant to say I’m sorry….’
He was laughing. ‘I know what you meant and congratulations is very much in order so don’t worry.’
I bit my lip. ‘Well, I shall certainly look forward to my glass of champagne.’
‘Oh, you’re not getting one,’ he said gravely. Seeing my crestfallen face he added with a smile. ‘You’re not getting anything in the canteen today because I’m taking you out to lunch, so your first job this morning will be to ring and book a table for two at Donnizetti’s.’ He looked at my startled face. ‘Oh, don’t you like Italian food?’
‘Yes, I love it, but….’
‘That’s all right then. Shall we say one-thirty?’
That was the first of many so-called ‘working lunches’. Over them Charles gradually learned more about me. He had a way of getting information out of you almost without your knowledge. He discovered that I was adopted and that I didn’t get along too well with my adoptive parents and their Victorian attitude to life; he learned that I longed for a place of my own, for which I was saving. The lunches somehow turned seamlessly into dinners and eventually the pretence that we were working was abandoned. Charles told me that he’d handed over the marital home to Celia, his ex-wife and now he was living in a flat at the top of a large fashionable riverside block.
‘It’s very impersonal,’ he said rather wistfully. ‘I chose it because it was furnished – couldn’t be bothered to go to all the trouble of buying furniture again. But it’s not a home, just a place to crash, basically.’ He gave me a wry smile. ‘It takes a woman to make a real home.’ His fingertips touched mine across the table. ‘I bet you anything that when you get that little pad you’re saving up for you’ll make it a home instantly, even if it’s just a bedsit.’ He suddenly looked at me, his head on one side. ‘Frances, do I pay you enough?’
True Colours Page 3