Father Unknown Page 29

  Over a meal of steak and kidney pie, followed by a lovely chocolate mousse, Mavis told Daisy everything she knew about the Pengellys, in much greater detail than Tim had. She was good at telling stories, giving so much detail, and having seen where Beacon Farm once stood, Daisy could now visualize all the characters and the settings.

  ‘What do you think happened to Clare?’ she asked. She supposed if this grandmother of hers had lived she would have been older still than Mavis. ‘In your opinion was it suicide or an accident?’

  ‘It had to be suicide,’ Mavis said. ‘If she’d gone up there for a walk with the baby in her arms she would have been doubly careful to keep away from the edge of the cliff. I think it must have been post-natal depression. Of course in those days they didn’t know about that sort of thing, they passed it off as “trouble with her nerves”! Clare was by all accounts an artistic, highly strung young woman.’

  Mavis paused, looking reflective.

  ‘I suppose she married Albert in the heat of passion, he must have seemed wildly romantic to such a gently brought-up girl. He was a good-looking chap when he was young too, by all accounts. But two babies in such a short time, in primitive conditions which she wasn’t used to, must have become too much for her.’

  Daisy pondered on this for a moment. ‘No wonder I’ve never been exactly normal,’ she said, and half smiled. ‘Sullen, difficult men, mad women, trapeze artists, what a family history!’

  ‘Your mother was one of the best people I’ve ever met,’ Mavis said sharply. ‘She was highly intelligent, sweet-natured and hard-working. Her only fault was that she always tried to make things right for other people. Never herself.’

  ‘But she changed when she got that money, didn’t she?’ Daisy retorted, forgetting she wasn’t supposed to say anything unkind. ‘She didn’t want the farm, or her old friends.’

  Mavis looked accusingly at Tim. ‘You shouldn’t have put it like that,’ she said indignantly. ‘You know I don’t believe it was the money that stopped her keeping in touch. I honestly think she must have had some kind of mental breakdown, most sensitive people would after something so terrible happening to them.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, you knew her better than anyone after all,’ Daisy said hastily, ashamed of herself for hurting such a kind and loyal woman. ‘Maybe she will come back to you too one day. I hope so. But tell me about Josie now.’

  She took the photograph of the two girls together out of her bag and showed it to Mavis. ‘Ellen sent this to my mother when I was about six or seven,’ she said. ‘I only want to understand the significance of it. Why didn’t she send a recent picture? I know it must have meant something special to her, I feel it really strongly. That’s why I want to know about Josie too.’

  ‘Ellen loved Josie, they were best friends as well as sisters,’ Mavis said eventually. ‘That picture was taken not long before Ellen found out that Violet wasn’t her real mother.’

  Daisy listened carefully as Mavis repeated Ellen’s story about the revelations in the school playground, how nasty Violet was to her about it, and her feelings afterwards that nothing would ever be the same again.

  ‘In my opinion that picture signified real happiness to Ellen, everything that came after was tainted with sorrow. Most of us have dozens of pictures of happy times, but that was her only one. So she wanted you to have it.’

  ‘I see,’ Daisy said, feeling tears prickling in her eyes. ‘But please tell me about Josie. I’m sure she must have been very important to Ellen, and if I ever get to meet her it will help if I know about her already.’

  ‘I suppose the first important detail about Josie is that she ran away and caused so much misery for all her family,’ Mavis said. ‘She went just after her fifteenth birthday in July, two months after your birth, when Ellen was in a very low state. All of us here in the village got to hear about it immediately because Albert called the police from the pub when Josie didn’t come home after a weekend in Falmouth. He rang Ellen in Bristol too, checking to see if she’d gone there.’

  ‘How long was it before they knew where she was?’

  ‘Apparently she sent a postcard just a few days later saying she was in London. She sent others too later on, saying she had a room and a job, but she didn’t send an address. I’m sure you can imagine what that did to the rest of the family.’

  ‘My parents would have been distraught.’ Daisy shook her head sadly.

  ‘Albert and Violet were too. Most of us in the village half expected more tragedy to follow – Josie was, after all, Violet’s whole life. Yet Ellen told me when she came down that it seemed to be pulling Violet and Albert closer together. She took some comfort in that.’

  ‘So Ellen came back down here then, did she?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Only for a week, and that was one of the bravest things she ever did. After all she’d been through already, the last thing she needed was Violet blaming her for Josie running off, but she felt she had to try to comfort her parents. But that was how she was, Daisy, always thinking of others before herself.’

  Mavis paused and dabbed at damp eyes.

  ‘I really don’t know how she managed to get through that visit without them guessing something awful had happened to her too. She used to come up here and sob her heart out to me. About both you and Josie. She said she could understand perfectly why Josie wasn’t letting their parents know where she was, but she was desperately hurt that Josie hadn’t even telephoned her in Bristol before she left to tell her what she was going to do, and to ask if she’d had her baby and what it was.’

  Daisy thought of her own relationship with Lucy. ‘Sisters can be cruel and thoughtless,’ she said.

  ‘I know, but they had been everything to one another all their childhood,’ Mavis said. ‘Ellen had confided in Josie when she first found out she was pregnant, Josie was the only person other than me that knew why Ellen really went to Bristol. So you can imagine how hurt she was that Josie couldn’t trust her with her own secret, and didn’t seem to have remembered that Ellen would need some support too.’

  ‘So when did they all find out where Josie was living?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘They didn’t for absolutely ages, well over a year as I remember. But around Christmas of the year you were born, they ran a story in one of the tabloids about a young runaway girl photographed on Paddington station. It was Josie.’

  Mavis got up and went over to a bureau, and took a cardboard folder out of a drawer. ‘You’d better read it all yourself,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll understand how we all felt.’

  Daisy opened the file and gasped as she saw the headline ‘Runaway’ and the heart-breaking picture beneath of a girl who looked little more than twelve, her hair tied up in bunches, tears rolling down her cheeks, and clutching her suitcase fearfully.

  ‘It was just a scam,’ Tim said, as she was reading about Mark Kinsale, the photographer who took the picture. ‘According to what Ellen told Gran much later on, that guy Kinsale had plans right then to do a sort of Cinderella feature with her.’

  ‘But Albert and Violet just saw this, and thought it was all for real?’ Daisy asked incredulously. ‘God almighty, that must have been terrible for them.’

  Mavis nodded. ‘It was, absolutely shattering. The whole village saw it, everyone was so frightened for Josie. You’ll see the article is all about young girls disappearing into vice rings and such things. Violet was nearly out of her mind. To make matters worse they ran a whole series of grisly stuff about runaways, and every week that picture of Josie was repeated. It was four weeks before they announced they’d found her. Go on turning the pages, you’ll come to it.’

  Daisy winced when she came to the page headlined ‘Found’.

  In this picture Josie was looking a great deal more adult and knowing, wearing a man’s shirt over skimpy underwear. The journalist said she had been given a tip-off that Josie was working in a so-called ‘photographers’ club’ where men paid by the hour to take pictures o
f young models. She stated that invariably the men had no film in the cameras and the girls were being conned into ‘glamour poses’ which often verged on the pornographic.

  Then Mark Kinsale was alerted and he visited the ‘club’ and took this picture of Josie. The article ended with a gushing piece about her innocence and beauty and how Kinsale felt she had the ability to be a real fashion model if she was given the opportunity.

  ‘I can see how contrived it is,’ Daisy said, looking up at Tim and Mavis. ‘But I don’t suppose Albert and Violet could. Was it true that she was really about to be sucked into vice, or was that just hype?’

  ‘I think the newspaper knew she was working in that place all along, even before they put the first picture in the paper. And a fat lot they cared if she was in danger,’ Mavis said angrily. ‘Albert and Violet went up to London to see them, they begged the editor of the paper to tell them where Josie was living, but they were sent away and told to keep out of it. That was criminal. If they’d done that to one of my children I think I would have killed them.’

  ‘If you can distance yourself from the misery that newspaper caused for the Pengellys,’ Tim said, ‘it was rather a clever scam to launch Josie. In the four weeks they ran it, they caught the attention of every parent in England by showing all the dangers runaways can fall into and making every single one of them desperately want her to be found safe and well.

  ‘Then, when they showed where she was, they squeezed people’s hearts a bit more. They twisted quotes from Albert so he sounded like a vicious bully, her mother a monster, and the farm a hell-hole. It was all preparing the way for when Josie would be launched as Jojo, the model, the little-girl-lost with the tragic childhood.’

  Daisy began to turn over the cuttings. She could see exactly what Tim meant. The farmhouse photographed in mid-winter did look stark and primitive. Violet was caught looking fat and frowzy in Wellington boots and a dirty apron as she fed chickens. As for Albert, he looked like an ageing gypsy with long, straggly hair, brandishing a stick at the photographer. She thought if such a story were to be run today, she’d be crying over it too.

  ‘It’s hard to believe such a beautiful girl had such awful-looking parents,’ she said, looking at Mavis and Tim. ‘To be truthful, I wouldn’t want to show that one of my grandfather to anyone.’

  Mavis gave a little snort of disapproval, but Tim grinned. ‘Shame we haven’t got one of your father up on his trapeze,’ he said.

  Yet as Daisy looked at more pictures of Josie, she couldn’t help but feel a little grudging admiration for Kinsale. Setting aside his somewhat sinister motives, he had clearly worked hard on Josie, gradually building her up from the waif on the station to a real glamour-puss. Maybe it wasn’t ethical, but then the film industry and the pop music world were both full of talentless people who had been hyped into stardom. She wouldn’t mind someone doing it to her.

  One article amused her particularly. Josie had been taken to Carnaby Street to buy new clothes, and she was photographed in several different outfits, including a mini-fox-fur coat and long tight boots.

  It was all very Sixties, with quotes from Josie like, ‘Wow, this is out-a-sight,’ ‘I feel fab,’ and ‘It just blows my mind to think a few months ago I was milking cows.’

  ‘I stopped collecting cuttings then,’ Mavis said as Daisy came to the end of them. ‘I couldn’t bear to look at her, knowing what she’d done to her parents. Of course, her home life wasn’t idyllic, but neither was it hell. We all saw how it affected Albert, he became even more of a recluse, drinking at home which he never did before. As for Violet, time and again she sat here in this very room, sobbing her heart out. I couldn’t take to the woman, but I know how much she loved her daughter.’

  ‘Was Josie in on it?’ Daisy asked. ‘I mean, if she was only fifteen, was she mature enough to know what the newspaper was doing to her parents?’

  ‘Ellen always said she didn’t, but she could be very gullible where Josie was concerned. Whether she did or she didn’t, that still doesn’t excuse her hiding away in London and not telling her parents where she was. Or for the way she treated them later on.’

  ‘Did she come back here eventually?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Not for a very long while. We saw her face in every magazine and newspaper. Adverts for shampoo, bridal gowns, swimwear, everything. She looked lovely. But none of us down here could really feel proud that she was a local girl, we all felt so bad about Albert and Violet.’

  ‘But obviously she must have made it up with them, or she wouldn’t have died in the fire. When was that?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘I don’t know if you could say they ever really made it up,’ Mavis said thoughtfully. ‘She’d come down here and swan around showing off from time to time. But she usually managed to upset them again because she was so scornful of the farm and country life.’

  ‘And she got into drugs too?’ Daisy said. ‘When did that start?’

  ‘Almost as soon as she started modelling,’ Tim said. ‘Well, it was that era when everyone was at it, wasn’t it? Judging by the amount of pictures of her, that guy Kinsale must have worked her very hard too. But she didn’t really come unstuck until after she’d split with Kinsale. That was when she seemed to fall apart.’

  ‘Was he her lover?’ Daisy had seen a picture of him in one of the cuttings and she thought he looked a mean sort, one of those ageing Sixties rock star look-a-likes with a pony-tail and a frilly shirt.

  ‘I think he was right from the beginning,’ Mavis said. ‘He was old enough to be her father too! But that’s not for me to judge. Violet met him once, she went up to see Josie when she had flu. She stayed for a few days in her flat in Chelsea, then he came round and threw her out.’

  Daisy raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Well, Violet said it was him who threw her out. I always suspected it was really Josie,’ Mavis said seriously. ‘That was around the time she got really famous. She was off to New York one minute, the South of France the next. Always on Kinsale’s arm. After they split up he was still her photographer, which I suppose meant he was making huge amounts of money from her, but they weren’t as they say these days, an “Item” any more. Soon afterwards she was going out with rock stars and actors, mentioned in the gossip columns nearly every day.’

  ‘How much did Ellen have to do with her during that time?’ Daisy asked. She found it hard to imagine a famous model wanting to spend much time with a quiet girl like Ellen who worked with handicapped kids, not even if she was her sister.

  ‘Ellen’s flat in Bristol was her bolt-hole,’ Mavis said. ‘She would turn up there when she needed her. But it wasn’t until she really began to slide down the slippery slope that it became a regular thing. I think Ellen gave her money, she tried very hard to straighten her out. But nothing worked. Ellen told me Josie would cry to her, say she was going to change, and she’d leave to go back to London resolute, but in a few weeks she was back on drugs, worse than she was before.’

  ‘So what happened to her in the years after her career was over and before she died?’ Daisy asked.

  Mavis suddenly got up and went into the kitchen. It was clear to Daisy this was something she didn’t want to discuss.

  ‘Porn,’ Tim whispered. ‘Gran can’t cope with that. So don’t ask her anything about it. After Josie died, that’s when I started digging into everything about her. I got hold of a video with her in, it was pretty seedy. But don’t tell Gran that either!’

  Daisy grinned. ‘Well, how come she ended up back down here then?’ she asked.

  ‘The end of the road, I guess.’ Tim shrugged. ‘According to what Gran’s told me, she would turn up about once every six months, always with a tale for her mother that she was about to go into films, television or something.’

  ‘Poor Violet used to confide in me,’ Mavis said as she came back into the room with three cups of hot chocolate on a tray. ‘Heaven knows I didn’t want to hear it, but I had to anyway. Josie would weave all these stories,
than shoot off again, usually borrowing money which she never repaid. But it was different the last time she came. Even I could see she really seemed to have quietened down. She was here for over a month and Violet said she had left her flat in London, and she was going to buy a place down here. It seemed definite, she’d made a formal offer for a small cottage in Truro, got herself a job, we both thought she’d turned over a new leaf.’

  ‘But then she died in the fire,’ Daisy mused. ‘Strange how things work out for some people, isn’t it? Did she have any money left to pay for this cottage she was going to buy?’

  Tim looked at Mavis sharply. ‘Well, did she, Gran?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think she did,’ Mavis admitted. ‘My husband spoke to someone in the know who said she hadn’t left a will, but that hardly mattered as her bank account was overdrawn.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Daisy murmured, and the other two looked at her. ‘Makes you wonder if she started the fire and intended to get out just in time.’

  There was an uneasy silence while both Tim and Mavis stared at her.

  ‘I’ve often thought that,’ Tim finally admitted, fingering his collar nervously as if he was afraid Mavis would snap at him.

  ‘I did too,’ said Mavis in a small voice. ‘I’ve often wondered if that was the real reason Ellen wouldn’t come back here. Maybe she thought so too.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘You will come back and see me again?’ Mavis asked as Daisy put Fred’s lead on in readiness to leave the following morning.

  The note of sadness in the old lady’s voice surprised Daisy, and she suddenly realized Mavis half expected her to disappear just as Ellen had.

  ‘I can’t promise to come down here for a while. I’ve got to get myself a job,’ Daisy said. ‘But I’ll keep in touch and tell you any news. Of course, if the solicitor in Falmouth comes up with anything positive, I’ll be on the phone immediately.’

  Tim had said his goodbyes and gone out an hour earlier, out of diplomacy, Daisy suspected – he must have thought the two women had things to say to each other in private. There was indeed a great deal Daisy wanted to say to Mavis, she very much wanted to express the depth of her gratitude. But as yet she couldn’t find the words.