Daughter of Riches

by Janet Tanner

  ‘I have to find your father! Don’t you care about him? How could you take this attitude, Sophia? It’s not the way I brought you up! Now if Paul was here things would be different. Paul would make sure his father was all right …’

  ‘Yes, Mama, I know, but he’s not here.’ Sophia had learned it was best not to argue. She also realised nothing she did would ever really satisfy Lola. But there it was. She was glad that at least she could do something for her mother. If only she had had the opportunity to do the same for her father!

  The new house they were buying was very close to where Susan Feraud lived and when she had a spare minute she was able to see her for a chat. Sometimes Susan called at the house and she and Sophia had become firm friends. Since Molly was only a few months older than Robin there was always plenty for them to talk about.

  ‘You are lucky, having a little girl,’ Sophia confided to Susan, looking at Molly who was round and pretty and always pink-and-white clean in her smocked dresses and little gathered sun-bonnet. ‘Not that I’d swop Robin of course – or either of them for that matter – but I should love a little girl! They are so little trouble compared with boys, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Susan said sagely. ‘I’m sure there will be all sorts of problems later on that we haven’t even thought – of yet – like boyfriends for instance. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that. I remember accusing my mother of having forgotten what it was like to be young – now I’m beginning to think the trouble was she remembered only too well!’

  Sophia laughed. ‘Perhaps Molly will fall in love with Robin. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if they got married?’

  ‘Mm. Though of course she may prefer Louis. He’s that bit older than she is and he really is a very handsome little boy.’

  ‘Yes he is, isn’t he?’ Sophia said, pleased. She did not add that he was also too often a very naughty one, or that bringing him up was beginning to be a bone of contention between her and Bernard that threatened to disrupt their family life. To say that, even to as close a friend as Susan, was getting too close for comfort to things Sophia preferred not to think about, but which she was unable to ignore all the same.

  ‘Why are you always so hard on him?’ she had yelled at Bernard one evening when he had spanked Louis and put him to bed for systematically ripping holes in every one of Robin’s soft toys and pulling the stuffing out. ‘He’s only a child, for goodness’ sake!’

  ‘He has to learn he can’t go around being deliberately destructive.’

  ‘He’s not. Really he’s not. I expect he’s just jealous. Children often do odd things when a new baby comes along.’

  ‘He’s had plenty of time to adjust. Robin is nearly a year old! And anyway, there’s no reason for him to feel jealous. You make more than enough fuss of Louis.’

  ‘Are you saying I favour him?’

  ‘Actually yes, I think you do.’

  ‘Well somebody has to! You certainly don’t! In fact you make it perfectly obvious he comes second with you. Though I suppose that’s inevitable when he isn’t your own son.’

  ‘That’s not true, Sophia!’ Bernard said angrily.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Sophia knew she was being unfair. She had not the slightest grounds for thinking Bernard favoured Robin – he was, after all, still a baby and certainly not old enough to be spanked, yet she could not rid herself of the feeling that it was so. She couldn’t see how Bernard could possibly not feel more loving towards his own flesh and blood and sooner or later it was bound to show up. It was one of the reasons, she knew, why she would have liked Robin to have been a girl – it had very little to do with dressing a baby in ribbons and lace, and a great deal to do with the fact that Bernard’s feelings would have been quite different towards children of a different sex anyway – they would not have been in direct competition. But Robin was a boy and he was Bernard’s son whilst Louis was not.

  Somehow she had to make up for that, she thought, act as a buffer between them. It wasn’t Louis’s fault that he was the child of a German; he hadn’t asked to be born.

  As soon as she could she slipped up to the boys’ bedroom. Robin was sleeping soundly but Louis was sniffling into his pillow. She knelt down beside his bed pulling him into her arms.

  ‘Don’t cry any more, Louis. Mummy knows you didn’t mean to hurt Robin’s toys. Mummy loves you.’

  And Louis opened his eyes and looked at her. It wasn’t easy to be sure in the half light but for a moment Sophia felt quite certain she could see something of Dieter in that look and her heart contracted with love. She leaned over and kissed the soft cheek and smoothed back the lick of blond hair. Then she sat beside the bed holding Louis’s hand until he fell asleep.

  When she went back downstairs Bernard said nothing, but she was sure he knew where she had been and what she had been doing all the same. And the barrier was there between them, unjustified resentment on the one side, a determination to run his house in the way he saw fit on the other.

  For an hour Sophia banged pots in the kitchen, cleaning shelves, cupboards and even the stove, though it did not need doing. At last Bernard appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Come on now, this is silly when you are tired.’

  ‘Why? I’m just cleaning up the pots that have got dust on them.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with the pots and you know it. It’s because I spanked Louis. He’s got to be disciplined, Sophia. I’d do the same if it were Robin. And whatever you may think I do look on Louis as my own. Now come and make up, eh?’

  She poured away the water, made a great show of rinsing out her cloths, but he was still there in the doorway waiting when she had finished and she went to him, a feeling of guilt beginning to replace the resentment. Bernard was good and kind, perhaps he would do the same if Robin was the offender. But it was easy for him, he saw everything in black and white, not the million shades of grey that coloured her own reactions.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘ I know you were only doing what you thought was right. It’s just that I’m a bit, well – touchy where Louis is concerned.’

  ‘Let’s forget it,’ Bernard said. He came up behind her, putting his arms around her and she relaxed against him, feeling the tension easing out of her body as he held her.

  But somewhere in the back of her mind a small voice that refused to be silenced was whispering that this same confrontation was going to be acted out many more times before the boys were grown. It was inevitable the way things were. And it would take all her efforts to ensure that it did nothing to damage the precious relationship she and Bernard now shared.

  Chapter twenty-four

  Vivienne was utterly and completely fed up. She was fed up with the miserable English weather, fed up with having very little money to spend on herself and most of all fed up with the theatre.

  Why, she asked herself, had she ever imagined that a career as a repertory actress would be glamorous? It wasn’t. It was sheer bloody hard work, monotonous, tedious and tiring.

  Perhaps, she thought gloomily, it wouldn’t be so bad if she were the leading lady. At least the leading lady got to wear pretty clothes on stage – even if she was expected to provide them herself – and she was in the centre of the curtain call lineup, blowing kisses to the audiences who were, in the main, noisily appreciative of the repertory company’s efforts. But she was not the leading lady. A good deal of the time she was not on stage at all. She was blessed with the insulting title of Assistant Stage Manager and the reason for her existence was to be a general dogsbody. She made tea and coffee, she swept the stage, she called the cast, and occasionally she got to play bit parts, maids mostly, with nothing to say but ‘Yes M’m’ and nothing to do but carry on the trays of glasses or cups that she herself had laid up in the wings.

  If she had been seventeen years old, as the other ASM was, Viv thought it might have been bearable as a start to a career. But she was twenty-seven, long past the age of being prepared to put up w
ith such indignities. How Loretta had stood it she could not imagine, yet she had always spoken of her days on the stage in such glowing terms. And certainly Blake seemed to remember her fondly. But then he addressed everyone, even the very butch stage hands, as ‘darling’ – when he wasn’t yelling at them and telling them that never, ever, would they work in the theatre again!

  Blake had a wife, a busty little character actress with a cleaned-up Cockney accent who brought a bow-bedecked Yorkshire terrier to the theatre each day, but it did not take Viv long to realise he also had something going with Belinda Grey, the leading lady. Intimate little looks passed between them and sometimes in the gloomy passage between dressing rooms and stage Viv saw him patting Belinda’s bottom or fondling her rather underdeveloped breasts. Was that how she had got to play leads? Viv wondered. After all, she was hardly Peggy Ashcroft! Well, two could play at that game!

  The moment she had met him Viv had known Blake was interested in her but she had frozen off his advances – Blake might once have been attractive but now he had gone to seed, faintly ridiculous in the plum velvet smoking jacket, frilled shirts and cummerbund which strained over his pot belly. Now, however, she set to work on him, flashing a smile, teasing with her eyes, brushing her thigh against his with just enough pressure for him to feel the tantalising knub of her suspender.

  It was not long before she saw results; she could tell from the little beads of perspiration that broke out on Blake’s forehead when she looked at him in a certain way that he was falling into her trap. At first he would turn abruptly and walk away as if by ignoring her he could deny the lust that was burning him up, but she persisted, amused at how easy it was to first fluster and then manipulate the man who could terrorise whole companies of professionals with his histrionic bawlings, and eventually he made his move, just as she had known he would.

  They were sharing an after-the-show drink in the lounge bar of the Smugglers’ Hole, the pub which was just across the road from the theatre.

  ‘I’m thinking of trying you out in a bigger part, Viv, but you will need some extra coaching. How would you feel about that?’

  Viv smiled, tossing her hair. Did he really think she was too naive to see through that one? Men! They were such children! Viv ran her tongue around her heavily glossed lips.

  ‘Extra coaching? At the theatre, you mean?’

  ‘Possibly. But it might be embarrassing for you in front of other members of the company. Why not come to my digs? The Clairmont Hotel. Thursday afternoon, 2.30 sharp.’

  Viv smiled again. He really was so transparent! Everyone knew that Dee-Dee, his wife, went to the hairdressers’ on Thursday afternoons for a shampoo-and-set and to have her ‘roots done’ – quite a lengthy process.

  Promptly at 2.30 on the Thursday afternoon Viv went to the Clairmont Hotel. It was a small seedy looking place in one of the backstreets and hardly warranted the name of ‘hotel’, but Viv supposed it was one step better than the digs she and the other members of the company had to endure. At least Blake and Dee-Dee would not have to give twenty-four hours notice of wanting a bath as she had to, or get locked out by a landlady who refused to hand over a front door key ‘in case it falls into wrong hands’!

  Blake himself was on the pavement outside waiting for her and he hurried her through the dingy lobby and up the stairs. The smell of stale cooked cabbage and boiled fish went with them. The bedroom was small and cheerless – dark, old-fashioned furniture, a threadbare carpet and a bed covered with a quilt which might once have been described as ‘old rose’. But the dressing table was cluttered with Dee-Dee’s make-up jars and perfume bottles and a faded silk dressing gown which might have belonged to either of them hung behind the door.

  ‘Now the part I have in mind for you calls for a little more experience than I believe you have,’ Blake announced, slicking back what little hair he had left from a forehead beaded with perspiration. ‘I’ve taught you to turn, haven’t I? But I think perhaps we might practise that first. Now, imagine I am the audience. You come on from stage left – over there by the window – walk across and turn. That’s the way. Facing me at all times. Good. Now. Sitting. Remember never to cross your legs. If you do the people in the front row will be able to look right up your skirt. Hands. On stage actors often become very conscious of their hands and wonder what to do with them. Well what do we normally do?’

  I know what you do with yours! Viv thought. Aloud, she said: ‘I suppose we forget them.’

  ‘Good. And that’s the way it should be on stage. Let them move naturally – definitely no flapping. Then, most difficult of all, the stage kiss.’

  Viv was keeping one eye on the clock. She had no desire to be in the room when Dee-Dee returned from the hairdressers.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Blake, do we have to go through with this charade?’ she asked coolly. ‘If you want to make love to me why don’t you just get on and do it?’

  Blake stared at her, shocked. In all his years as an actor-manager not one of the girls he had seduced had spoken to him like that. Some had been shy and modest and he had had to lead them (though they were, he had to admit, in the minority); others were bold, flirtatious and downright sexy. But none had ever been quite so blunt.

  ‘Well?’ Viv said, smiling. ‘That is what this is all about, isn’t it? I want some decent roles, you want me. It seems a fairly straightforward arrangement.’

  Blake suddenly laughed in delight as the initial shock subsided. It was positively erotic seeing her standing there, hands on hips, head thrown back, issuing her challenge. Blake loved power games. He loved to conquer but most of his conquests had been too easy. Not this one. She might be offering him her body on a plate but the power struggle was not really about bodies – unless they were doing something very different and exciting.

  ‘You think I’ll give you better roles after this, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘I know you will,’ Viv replied sweetly, going to him and undoing the buttons of his frilled shirt. ‘You won’t be able to refuse me anything.’

  That afternoon was the first of many Viv spent at the Clairmont Hotel. She always arrived promptly and left well before Dee-Dee returned and the only thing that worried her slightly was wondering if her mother had been here before her.

  Repercussions at the theatre were not long in coming. Belinda, realising she had been usurped in Blake’s affections, became impossibly bitchy, blaming Viv for every little thing that went wrong and bawling her out in front of everyone, and the rest of the company, who were fond of Dee-Dee and hated to see her made a fool of, ostracised Viv as they had ostracised Belinda before her. The improved roles Blake had promised her meant free cigarettes (supplied by du Maurier as props), her photograph in the glass fronted display case outside the theatre, and her Equity card. But Viv soon discovered they were not as much fun as she had imagined; learning lines and rehearsing a new play each week was incredibly hard work, especially since she still had to do all her old backstage jobs.

  One evening towards the end of August Joe the stage-door keeper came looking for Viv during the interval.

  ‘There’s a young man out front says he’s a friend of yours,’ he told Viv in his soft Dorset burr. ‘ Wants to see you after the show.’

  ‘Really? What’s his name?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. Said he wanted to surprise you. It could be just a take-in, I suppose, but I don’t think so. I’ve seen most of the tricks in my time and I think he’s genuine.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Viv asked.

  ‘Oh, a good looking chap. In uniform.’

  ‘What sort of uniform?’

  ‘RAF.’

  Paul! thought Viv. It must be Paul.

  ‘I think I know who it is,’ she said to Joe. ‘Tell him I’ll be out just as soon as I’ve taken off my make-up.’

  For the rest of the show Viv was in sparkling form, making the most of her role – Elvira in Blythe Spirit. It gave her an extra kick of excitement to know Paul was in the a
udience and afterwards as she wiped the greasepaint off her face with wads of cotton wool her hands trembled a little with excitement at the thought of seeing him again. She slipped into the cotton trousers and shirt she had worn to the theatre and calling a quick goodnight to anyone in earshot she hurried along the narrow dusty passageway to the stage door.

  The moment she emerged she saw him, standing under the wall, smoking. His back was towards her and she crept up behind him, reaching up to cover his eyes with her hands.

  ‘Hi Paul! Guess who!’

  ‘Viv!’ He turned, taking her hands in his. ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘How many men do I know in the RAF?’ she countered. ‘Oh, it’s so good to see you!’

  And that was no lie, she thought. The years since she had last seen him had matured Paul. Both his face and his frame had filled out and the extra weight suited him; in uniform – always an attraction Viv had to admit – he looked quite startlingly handsome and she found herself wondering why she had thought of him as nothing but a substitute for Nicky. Of course the truth was that in the old days he had been a boy and now he was a man – and a very personable man at that.

  ‘Did you enjoy the show?’ she asked.

  ‘The show was very good, though I have to admit I only came to see it because you were in it. I’m not a great theatregoer, as you know.’

  ‘I’m flattered! But how did you know I was in it? What are you doing here in this part of the world?’

  ‘I’m stationed nearby. I was in town with some friends and saw your photograph. So I decided to come in on my first free evening and see how you were doing.’

  ‘And was it worth it? Was I all right?’

  ‘Stop angling for compliments, Viv! But yes, you were terrific. Though I’m not sure I like the idea of you as a ghost. I have to say I prefer you in the flesh.’

  ‘Paul – you are wicked.’