Father Unknown Page 40

  Ellen liked fun too, but for her this was dressing up and going out to a club, shopping in the Chelsea boutiques, or going for a meal in one of the new American hamburger places. She wasn’t averse to drink, but drugs frightened her. She liked men too, but it was the gentler, more thoughtful ones she was attracted to, not the outrageous show-offs who strutted down the King’s Road in velvet jackets and knee-high boots, as though they were rock stars.

  It was Ellen who adopted the hippie style and philosophy, not Josie. She loved Bob Dylan, Steppenwolf, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors. She would sit on the floor in her long, flowing dresses, flowers pinned into her hair, and talk about poetry, books and alternative religions. She cared, she wanted to put the world to rights, and in her own small way, through her work at the school and in her day-to-day contact with people, she put her beliefs into practice.

  Later on in the second file, Daisy became immersed in the roller-coaster life Josie led – trips to Paris and Rome, staying in the best hotels, invitations to rich men’s yachts in the South of France. She had beautiful clothes, a hairdresser and makeup artist on hand, but she never got to see the Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum, or had fun like everyone who read about her in the papers supposed.

  In one poignant passage she described how Mark took her to the beach at St-Tropez. He took pictures of her sunbathing, posing in a minuscule bikini and doing handstands in the sand. But when he’d finished and she asked if she could swim, he refused to let her and took her back to the hotel room.

  Daisy read too in horror of how Mark forced Josie to have kinky sex with a man introduced as the Duke, while he watched. There were many more accounts of three-somes in the same vein. It wasn’t clear whether these were before or after the one with the Duke, as Josie had said her affair with Mark ended after that point. But it appeared to be afterwards, as if he’d blackmailed her into further trysts in return for more work.

  Josie had already made it quite clear that she had never enjoyed sex, but now Daisy could see it truly disgusted her. She went along with Mark’s fetishes because she was afraid not to. At one point she said she thought she might just as well become a hooker, then at least she’d get paid for it.

  Ellen’s joyful love life clearly both mystified her and made her jealous, for she had written one section at this point as if it were comments made by Josie while visiting her sister.

  You’re at it all the time like a bloody rabbit. I can’t see what you get out of it. All your men are such earnest drips too. I’m surprised they’ve got it in them.

  With Ellen’s voice she’d written her view on the subject:

  Josie was so screwed up, she couldn’t see that if she was only to find a gentle, loving man, one that respected her, she might have found why I enjoyed sex. But she seemed, and perhaps this was conditioning by Mark or Violet, to be unable to look beyond a man’s bank balance and status. I have certainly never found that a fat wallet alone makes a satisfactory lover.

  The mystery of exactly why Josie’s modelling career came to such an abrupt end was also explained.

  It seemed Mark had been having an affair with Penelope Cartwright, a married woman who for some years ran the biggest model agency in London, even before he’d met Josie. When Penelope finally felt ready to leave her husband for Mark, Josie had to be dispensed with.

  Mark’s ruthlessness had been apparent throughout the story, but he was clearly vicious too, for if he wasn’t going to make any further money from Josie, he didn’t intend to let anyone else either. He used his considerable influence to make sure no other photographer or agency would book her for work. He even sold salacious stories about her to the newspapers, so she lost all credibility.

  The little money she had soon ran out. When she couldn’t pay her rent, she moved to cheaper and cheaper places. Only Ellen was there for her.

  Daisy found herself weeping as she read passages which showed so clearly that Ellen was the one person who truly cared, who never rejected her however badly she behaved. She wondered how after so much care and love Josie could even think of killing Ellen.

  Perhaps as Josie had written this she was filled with remorse, and even believed herself to have been mad at the time she did it, for she recounted things most people wouldn’t want to admit to. She stole money from Ellen several times, often landed herself on her in the middle of the night, and stayed for days, then left without saying goodbye. She contracted a venereal disease; Ellen took her for treatment. The police raided a flat in Knightsbridge and found Josie to be the only woman in the company of five men. She made some blue films and posed naked for several magazines, and still Ellen stuck by her.

  Yet interspersed with running back to Ellen, Josie also frequently returned to Cornwall.

  She had this terrible need to be accepted and approved of by our parents. Maybe if she’d just gone home quietly, she might have won them over, but she wouldn’t do that. She always had to wear something sensational, she’d even pawn something to buy it if she had no money. Once she was there she behaved like a visiting film star, demanding special food from Violet, staying in bed half the day. Then she’d go off to Falmouth to show off to her old schoolfriends, and she always made sure the local press knew she was there. But then that was part of the lure of her home town, because there at least she was still a celebrity.

  Daisy puzzled over that last section. It seemed to her that Josie felt as strongly about the farm as Ellen did, but for very different reasons. While Ellen loved the land, the animals and nature, for Josie the farm stood for security and perhaps the status which she’d failed to find anywhere else.

  Nothing changed there, not the view, the lack of comfort, or her parents’ disapproval. But living in a world where everything else changed faster than she could change her clothes, Josie found this comforting.

  Daisy saw that the farm was almost like a character in itself, and its power had run through the whole story. Josie had learned at an early age that her mother had married her father for it. Even before that her father and his brother fought over it. All through her growing-up years she had observed people were impressed by it. Her mother had urged her to help her persuade her father to sell it. She even wanted rid of Ellen to make it easier. Ellen loved it and would have liked nothing better than to stay and work on it.

  Daisy thought Josie must have eventually begun to wish it were hers, just because everyone else seemed to value it. Maybe she began to fantasize about how it would be if it became hers? Did she find out it was willed to Ellen when Albert died?

  Sadly Josie gave no hint of any of that. But she did show that anger and resentment were building up in her, and got Ellen to relate it.

  Mum told Josie she was stupid for not finding a rich old sugar daddy to keep her. She said if she’d had her looks she wouldn’t be stuck on a miserable farm in the middle of nowhere. She took all Josie’s clothes away on one occasion when she’d come home drunk from Falmouth. She beat her with a cane, and locked her in the shed all night as a punishment.

  But Josie was hurt even worse by Dad. He didn’t hit her, but he acted like she wasn’t there. One night she pleaded with him to talk to her, and he said, ‘I’ve only got one daughter now, I disowned you when you told lies about me.’ She tried to explain how it was Mark who said all those things, not her, but he wouldn’t listen. He just turned his back on her and said that in his eyes she was already dead.

  There was a litany of such incidents, and Daisy found she couldn’t read them all, for the harshness of Josie’s parents astounded her. Yet the perverse thing was that on every visit, Violet kept urging her to find a rich man, and get him to keep her.

  Daisy could see why Josie had lost all sense of right and wrong. The press had feted her when she was under Mark’s protection, then vilified her when he cast her aside. She had her father on one hand refusing to even acknowledge she was still alive, and her mother urging her into being an old man’s plaything.

  Drugs, drink, sex, and men. They were the things which
drove Josie. She needed the first two to cope with the second two. She went with anyone who was prepared to keep her drugged or drunk. I knew she’d reached the absolute bottom when she turned up early one morning after being robbed and raped by two men. That time I refused her any further help. I let her have a bath, cooked her a meal and then I said she had to go. I hoped if I were tough with her she’d pull herself together. She went home to Cornwall, and it seemed it had worked. She got a job, even talked about buying a house.

  Daisy turned the page eagerly, realizing she was now close to the part where Josie set the fire. But to her acute disappointment, the work ended there. A blank page followed it.

  She sat for a while, thinking about what she’d read. She wanted to cry, yet she wasn’t sure who for. She felt she now knew the whole family intimately, and each one of them was tragic in some way.

  To close the file up, she had to manipulate the pages back on to the arched binder as many of them had come out, and as she got to the end, to her surprise she found another page sandwiched between some blank ones.

  It was different to the rest, typed on what looked like an old manual machine. The page was dated 1 November 1978.

  Daisy fell on it gleefully, knowing Josie must have written it right after the fire. She hoped it would shed some light on how she felt about what she’d done.

  It wasn’t a confession. She’d written it as Ellen, and it had a very melodramatic ring to it, as if she was experimenting with the part.

  I am totally alone now. My entire family is gone, and I’m sitting here in my flat looking back at all the sadness, bitterness, hatred and envy, and trying to find some explanation within myself why my family members were all so damaged.

  I cannot. They each had perhaps a little more than a fair share of disappointment and heartache, but many others have worse and carry their burdens lightly.

  My beautiful, troubled sister is dead, and I grieve for her.

  Yet I can’t say I’m entirely sorry, for at least now her suffering is over. They say the phoenix rises out of a fire, and I shall strive to do likewise. In time I plan to move to London, and lead the kind of life Josie could have had if she’d just been wiser.

  *

  Daisy sat there for quite some time, reading and rereading it. Was Josie mad then, deluding herself that she was Ellen? Or was it just part of the act, like putting on her sister’s clothes, driving her car and living in her flat? She wondered too if Josie had really wanted to write a confession about what she’d done, but was afraid to commit it to paper.

  As she picked up the page to put it back in the file, she saw there was handwriting on the back of it.

  It was dated the end of April, and Daisy realized it was the day she went into the shop and spoke to her for the first time.

  I don’t know what to think or do. A girl came into the shop today and announced herself as my daughter.

  For the first time since I became Ellen, the shock made me forget how she’d react. It came to me later, once I’d had time to think about it. Ellen would have cried, hugged the girl, closed the shop, told the whole world who this pretty, vibrant young woman was. She would have been filled with joy.

  But all I felt was fear, even if I did manage to hide it.

  I’ve been happy as Ellen. By taking on her character and values I found not only success in the business world but the peace I longed for, the kind of harmonious way of living I always envied her for.

  But this girl threatens all that. If I let her into my life I will need to be on my guard constantly. Yet if I tell her I don’t want her, what then?

  I know I really don’t have a choice, I have to do what Ellen would have done, and I have to trust that she will guide me, as I feel she has so often done before when I’ve been troubled. But is it possible for her to guide me through the correct emotions of being a mother?

  If only I’d let her tell me about her baby. I don’t know how long her labour was, if she had stitches, what the baby weighed, if she was fat, thin, bald or red-haired from the start.

  I never asked. I turned away from her every time she tried to speak of it. Why did I? I always loved her, we shared so much.

  Tonight I’m very ashamed, for suddenly I can see that being compelled to give away her baby was right at the centre of what she was.

  It was her one sorrow, the quiet part of her I could never understand, and that deep well of understanding she had came from it too.

  How ironic it is that I thought I knew everything about her, yet I had to be confronted with her child before I saw the part which was invisible to me before.

  I was always so self-centred. I never truly considered another person’s feelings, or why they reacted to certain situations in a certain manner. I certainly never held myself accountable for anything.

  Ellen was so different. She was born with an instinct for nurturing, she forgave people, bore her troubles without blaming anyone else. Yet at the same time she could always find good reasons for everyone else’s bad behaviour. She even managed to get Violet loving her in the end.

  Maybe that’s what set me against her finally. I was born to that woman, yet she only ever used me as a tool to get what she wanted. I can’t mourn her or Dad, they were hateful to me, and made me what I became. But I do mourn for Ellen, and when I was confronted with her daughter, the terrible loss came back to me.

  Everything Ellen did was right. She had a kind of purity that left no one untouched by it.

  I think I saw some of that in Daisy too. I hope I did. And for Ellen’s sake I can’t turn her away.

  This is going to be the ultimate test.

  Daisy let the sheet fall to the table and wept. For Ellen, whom she could now see, feel and hear, and for troubled Josie.

  There was still no way she could condone what Josie had done, but she now had a better understanding of why. It seemed to her the money Josie made from murder was secondary to getting a kind of revenge. She found a way to be reborn, and wicked as it was, it made a kind of sense.

  That night Daisy was unable to sleep, her mind still in the pages of the book. Strangely, she wished Lucy were here, so she could discuss it with her. It was after all a story about sisters, and they could both find a few parallels to their own relationship in it.

  She wondered too what Lorna would have thought about it. She was an Ellen type, a carer, a doer. Had she had a wayward sister she would have looked after her no matter what happened.

  She could imagine Lorna pointing out the pluses that had come from looking for her birth mother. She would have said Daisy had learned to look beyond herself, found understanding of others’ weaknesses, learned to value her own family, to forgive, and to recognize the true value of honesty. She wasn’t dizzy any more.

  On Sunday morning, as Daisy cleaned the house and prepared the lunch, ready for her father’s return from his holiday, Joel was still in the sitting-room, reading the book. He had come straight from the night shift at six that morning, let himself in, and started on it.

  It was torment watching him immersed in it. Daisy wanted to ask where he had got to, or what he thought of it so far. Yet she resisted the temptation, for it was important to get his rounded view of the whole story, not just parts of it.

  When she heard his step coming down the hall towards the kitchen, she wheeled round. ‘Have you finished it?’ she asked.

  He nodded gravely.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ she said impatiently.

  ‘As a policeman I’d say she had more than a few screws missing. But as a man, I feel like crying for her.’

  ‘Do you?’ Daisy gasped. She hadn’t expected that reaction.

  ‘Yes, very much so.’ He reached out for Daisy and hugged her tightly, leaning his face down into her neck. ‘If only there had been someone strong there for her when she first met that Mark Kinsale. What an evil bastard he was!’ he said with feeling.

  ‘But that doesn’t excuse her!’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Joel said,
straightening up and trying to smile. ‘But it’s a lesson to all of us about what can happen to kids when their parents fail them.’

  That had been the last thing Daisy had thought before she finally fell asleep after reading the book, and she’d remembered how her mother and father had never given up on her, no matter what she did. She was glad Joel had seen it that way too, and she hoped one day they would be good parents.

  ‘I know it’s a weird question. But did you get to like Josie?’ she asked. ‘I mean, despite everything.’

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ he nodded. ‘Troubled, mad, vengeful, whatever, there was something. But it was that note she wrote after you found her that got me. She was admitting then what she was. She could have saved herself by telling you to piss off, but she was trying so hard to do what she saw as the right thing, for Ellen.’

  ‘She made a pretty good job of it too,’ Daisy said wistfully. ‘She was so interested in me, so admiring and generous too. Of course now, with hindsight, I can see that it wasn’t really right between us. I always wondered why she didn’t talk about when she had me, didn’t shed a few tears, or even tell me about her work at the school. But I believed that she’d cut all that out of her mind after the fire.’

  ‘Lots of adopted kids can’t really bond with their birth mothers, even when they are both totally truthful,’ Joel said, and his eyes were sad. ‘That’s why I was never enthusiastic about you searching for her in the first place. I was afraid you were trying desperately to replace Lorna.’