Father Unknown

by Lesley Pearse

  She went over to the window and pulled the heavy curtains back. It was too dark to see the grass and trees of Primrose Hill clearly, but beyond that was a panoramic view of the twinkling lights from the city. ‘I sit out there on the balcony for hours in the summer,’ she said. ‘I have my plants around me to remind me of home, and the world at my feet.’

  Put like that, Daisy could understand Ellen’s feelings perfectly. She also thought Ellen must be very astute to have bought a flat in such a good part of London. From the way property prices had risen since she bought it, and would continue to rise, she’d certainly have kept her inheritance intact.

  Ellen closed the curtains and told Daisy to make herself comfortable, then she opened the bottle of champagne which she had sitting in an ice bucket, and poured two glasses.

  ‘To us, and our future,’ Ellen said, clinking her glass against Daisy’s. ‘I’m sorry I was so shell-shocked when we first met. After you’d gone I had a cry because I realized I hadn’t really welcomed you.’

  ‘It was my fault for dropping the bomb.’ Daisy giggled. ‘My dad is always going on about me charging in like a rhino and he’s right, it does put people off.’

  ‘Well, you can see how pleased I am that you’ve come back into my life now,’ Ellen said, patting Daisy’s knee. ‘And I’ve done a few rhino charges in my life too. Now, tell me from the beginning about why and how you came to find me.’

  ‘Mum always told me I was adopted, but it didn’t really mean anything very much to me, not until after she died and I saw this.’ Daisy opened her handbag and brought out the picture of Ellen and Josie as little girls. ‘You sent it to Mum when I was about six, I think.’

  Ellen took the picture and suddenly tears were welling up in her eyes. ‘I’d forgotten I sent it,’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘We thought we were real stars the day that was taken. We were so excited because it was very rare for anyone to come to the farm, least of all a photographer.’

  As they continued to drink the champagne, Daisy told her how she found Dr Fordham in Bristol, and then went on down to see Mavis Peters.

  ‘It was she who told me all about you, your family, why you had me adopted, and about the fire,’ she said. ‘I was so shocked by that, Ellen, it must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘I didn’t want to live myself for a while either. I expect you were also told by Mavis that I’ve never been back?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘I just couldn’t,’ Ellen said, her voice shaking. ‘The thought of seeing the farm gone, of imagining their panic as the flames engulfed them, was too much to bear. I couldn’t even speak to Mavis on the telephone. I know I should have, but I couldn’t do it, just the sound of her voice would have been too much for me.’

  ‘She’s been so worried about you,’ Daisy said gently. ‘She loves you.’

  ‘I know, but that kind of made it worse.’ Ellen turned on the settee to face Daisy. ‘When there’s only one person in the world who really knows how it is for you, sometimes that is the hardest person to face.’

  Daisy knew just what she meant. Often when she had been in trouble she couldn’t face her mother, even though she knew she would always stand by her and understand.

  ‘I know,’ she said softly, and took Ellen’s hand and squeezed it.

  ‘Starting out all over again, putting everything, my job and friends behind me seemed the only way I could cope,’ Ellen went on. ‘I didn’t care that people would be hurt, not then, I was hurting too much myself to think about them. I changed everything, the way I dressed, the way I used to think. People use that expression now, “reinvented myself”, well that’s exactly what I did. Then much later, when I’d come to terms with everything, I was so different to the old Ellen, I just didn’t think I’d be able to fit back into those old friendships any more.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Daisy agreed. The story was slipping into place now, making perfect sense. She had nothing but admiration for this woman who had clearly suffered so much.

  ‘I started drinking just after the fire,’ Ellen said. ‘Oh God, it was awful when I think back. I felt so low I used to slip out and buy a bottle as soon as I woke up, it was the only thing that seemed to help. Of course I didn’t want anyone to see me like that, so I didn’t answer the door. That flat became like a prison, hour after hour of lying in bed hurting. I didn’t even buy newspapers any more, because I knew there’d be so much stuff about Josie in them. I didn’t answer the phone because I guessed journalists would try and get me to talk about her.’

  ‘But you pulled yourself together,’ Daisy said. ‘That shows how strong you really were.’

  ‘I wasn’t strong when I left there,’ Ellen said, then gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘I packed up the few things I really cared about, and left at night so no one would see me go. I left everything else inside, sent a note to the landlord, and left no forwarding address.’

  ‘Why did you choose to come to London?’ Daisy asked.

  Ellen shrugged. ‘Because it was big enough to swallow me up. Besides, it was the only other place I knew. I’d had some good times here with Josie.’

  ‘Weren’t you terribly lonely at first?’

  ‘Not really. I wanted anonymity, and I got that. For the first time ever in my life, I found I could be myself, not that person other people thought I was.’

  Daisy must have looked puzzled for Ellen smiled. ‘Well, I’m sure you’ve been told by Mavis about what a good girl I was? Just because I was reliable, honest, hardworking and good with kids, I ended up with a bloody halo. You can get very tired of that, just as I got tired of wearing hippie clothes and never putting on makeup. There was always a bit of me who wanted to be a rebel, that’s why I dressed like that in the first place I suppose. That and feeling the need to be as opposite to Josie as possible.’

  ‘You obviously did know something about clothes all along for your shop to be so successful,’ Daisy said.

  Ellen smiled. ‘You can learn anything if you try hard enough, and I must have picked up a few pointers from Josie over the years. But I’ve been fortunate.’

  Daisy thought that the cream suit she was wearing tonight, timelessly elegant and beautifully cut, was evidence of her good taste. She looked comfortable yet glamorous at the same time. Daisy hoped that she could look like that at her age.

  ‘Did you envy Josie?’ Daisy asked a little later when the conversation was gradually moving away from the Pengelly family on to Ellen’s shop and London in general.

  ‘Only occasionally,’ Ellen said. ‘For all the seemingly good things about her fame, she had it so tough most of the time. I expect you were shown press cuttings about how she got started?’

  Daisy nodded.

  ‘Well, what the press said was all rubbish, she was set up between the newspaper and the photographer Mark Kinsale. He was an evil bastard, but she didn’t realize that until long after he had her completely in his clutches. He took her virginity and her heart, and her money too.’

  Ellen got up and opened a drawer in a bureau. She pulled out a large, thick leather-bound book and sat beside Daisy to show her it. It was all of Josie, pictures and press cuttings, many that Daisy hadn’t seen before.

  As Daisy turned the pages the single thing which struck her most was the care and love with which they had been collected. A large picture of Josie in evening dress would be surrounded by other smaller complementary ones, then on another page there would be ones of her in swimwear or casual clothes. Appropriate quotes from her had been cut out and used as a way of bringing her character into the album. One that made Daisy smile was above one of her topless: ‘I was blessed with a good figure, so I see no sense in hiding it.’

  ‘It still makes me sad how she was portrayed,’ Ellen said with a little break in her voice. ‘She was “The Face of the Sixties”, so very beautiful, so much part of the era. Everyone who was anyone then dabbled in drugs, lots of the models posed in the nude too, but they didn’t hou
nd them for it the way they did Josie. Look at this cutting, for example!’

  She turned the pages quickly towards the end of the album and stopped at a picture of her sister wearing a witch’s pointed hat and a diaphanous black net dress – she appeared to be naked beneath it. The heading on the cutting was ‘I’m a witch, I can put a spell on you.’ Daisy read on to find the journalist reporting that Jojo professed to be a witch and was studying the work of the famous satanist Aleister Crowley, including satanic rites and orgies.

  ‘It was just a joke.’ Ellen grimaced. ‘She was photographed at a fancy-dress party, for goodness’ sake. Lots of people talked about Crowley at that time, it made a welcome change from those who were banging on about becoming Buddhists and stuff. Any fool would have known she was just teasing, but they put that in the paper as if she was serious. She was wearing a body-stocking under that dress too. But they implied she was wafting about in the semi-nude.’

  ‘Why didn’t she set the record straight then?’ Daisy asked.

  Ellen frowned. ‘She was told the old adage “All publicity is good publicity”, and she got to believe it! But she wanted her real story known and she got a well-known journalist interested in writing her biography. I have her notes for it here, in which she told the whole truth about our family. And about how she had been seduced, conned and used by Kinsale, and how he fleeced her of the money she earned and forced her into drug-taking. The journalist never did anything with it, instead he betrayed her by writing an article about her being treated for drug abuse in a Harley Street clinic. Talk about twisting the truth! She’d only been in there for a gynaecological complaint.’

  ‘But surely the real story about her would have made better copy?’ Daisy said, a little puzzled. She didn’t know if Ellen’s version was the true picture; Mavis had said she was sometimes blind to her sister’s faults.

  ‘The newspapers weren’t going to expose exploitation, not when some of their own were involved.’ Ellen shrugged. ‘Besides, they’d hit on a winning formula, the more outrageous they made Josie seem, the more papers they sold. She couldn’t fight it, she didn’t know how.’

  Ellen paused for a moment looking at one astoundingly lovely picture of Josie in a ball-gown. ‘They said she was the most beautiful girl in England,’ she said with a break in her voice. ‘But Josie didn’t think so. They made her feel ugly inside with what they made her do.’

  Again Daisy was a little confused. ‘Are you saying it was them who introduced her to drink and drugs?’

  ‘Mark Kinsale was the one who did that,’ Ellen spat out. ‘That evil swine used every trick in the book, drugs, drink, sex and blackmail, to get what he wanted out of her. She thought he loved her, she was too young and naive to see what was going on. He made her have sex with a guy he said was a film producer once, he said if the guy liked her he’d include her in his next film. But the “producer” turned out to be just an actor in blue movies, and Mark got it all on film. Every time Josie tried to get work with another photographer, he’d threaten to send the film to her parents and the newspapers. She was trapped.’

  Ellen shut the album sharply and got up and put it back in the bureau. The dispirited way she moved touched Daisy deeply. ‘You must have felt equally powerless knowing this was going on, but being unable to stop it either?’

  Ellen sighed. ‘Yes, it tore me apart. But I’m working on her biography, and if I ever get it finished and published, perhaps then I’ll have put the record straight. I wish there was something that could be done to punish Mark Kinsale too. But only last year I read in the paper that he died in the States. Too many drugs, I expect. But enough of him and Josie. Tell me about yourself now.’

  ‘There’s not a great deal to tell.’ Daisy blushed a little. She went over her recent history quickly, explaining how her mother’s death had given her more focus, and how she got her diploma as a chef. She spoke too of her relationship with Joel, and her sadness that it had fallen apart. Then she went on to say she’d fallen in love with Cornwall and fancied finding work down there if only for the summer.

  ‘You don’t want to do that.’ Ellen looked horrified. ‘It might be pretty and quaint, but you can’t bury yourself down there at your age cooking for holidaymakers. You want to get yourself work in some up-and-coming place here in London, somewhere with a future.’

  ‘But you loved Cornwall. I heard you wanted to farm your father’s land,’ Daisy retorted, though she couldn’t imagine that being really true, not now she’d met Ellen.

  ‘A silly girlish dream,’ Ellen said firmly. ‘Three generations of Pengellys broke their backs on that land. All it was good for was what it is now, a hotel for people who want to look at the view and romanticize about the past. There’s nothing in Cornwall except the views and the tourists that go there to gape at them. No industry, no decent shops, no work and no decent housing for half the poor devils who were born there.’

  Daisy didn’t know what to say. If she mentioned a quality of life which was missing in London and other cities, or that she’d met more real people in a week down in Cornwall than she’d met in years up here, she had a feeling Ellen would shoot her down in flames.

  ‘Well, I love it,’ she retorted. ‘I think London is dirty, overcrowded and full of get-rich-quick fakers. The whole Thatcher ethos gives me the willies.’

  Ellen laughed. ‘I used to say that when Ted Heath was Prime Minister, but I was in my twenties then too and idealistic.’

  Daisy glanced at her watch and saw it was after ten, and she still hadn’t asked the burning question.

  ‘Were you pushed into giving me up?’ she asked. ‘Both my mother and Dr Fordham seemed to think you might have been.’

  Ellen gave her a blank look, as if she didn’t understand the question. ‘Pushed?’ she repeated.

  Daisy nodded. There was a long silence.

  ‘There wasn’t any choice then,’ Ellen said eventually. ‘Unmarried mothers weren’t accepted like they are now. Now, I’ll just go and make us some coffee.’

  Daisy was a little disappointed Ellen didn’t seem to want to give her version of the events at that time, but as she waited for her to come back with the coffee, she saw why. Ellen was a strong woman, that was clear from the way she had rebuilt her life after the fire. It obviously wasn’t in her character to put blame on to others for her own actions, or to agonize over things past.

  ‘You must have thought me very odd asking you not to say anything to your family about finding me,’ Ellen said as she came back into the room with a tray of coffee and sandwiches. For the first time that evening, she looked a little anxious and unsure of herself.

  ‘Not really, I was too overwhelmed by just finding you to think of anything else,’ Daisy replied.

  ‘That was how it was for me too,’ Ellen said as she put the tray down on the coffee table. ‘My first reaction was how on earth can I suddenly spring a daughter I’ve never mentioned before on my friends? Then I got to thinking about it later and I realized I was still suffering from the bigotry of the past, and that’s ridiculous because it’s over and gone now. So I’ll be proud to say you are my daughter. I want to show you off.’

  Daisy felt a warm glow run through her. ‘I very much want to tell my family about you,’ she said.

  ‘You go ahead, but you won’t want me to meet them, will you?’

  Daisy looked at her in surprise.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean I don’t want to meet them at all. Maybe a meal in a restaurant or something like that, something formal on neutral ground,’ Ellen said quickly. ‘You see, I don’t know that I could cope with all the many reminders of what I lost by giving you up, not if I came to your house. I’d really rather we had a relationship that was separate, and special, where we can make a future together without all the trappings of the past.’

  In the last two days Daisy had pondered on how it would work if Ellen came to Bedford Park. While she was dying to see Dad’s and the twins’ reaction to such a beautiful woman, she
could see it might be awkward and strange for them, and it could possibly set her apart from them again.

  ‘I think that’s the perfect solution,’ Daisy said eagerly. ‘I am so glad I did find you. You are better than my wildest dreams.’

  Ellen smiled. ‘Bless you, darling. That’s the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Joel sat in an armchair, staring at but not seeing the ironing board littered with the remains of the previous night’s takeaway. The whole flat was in much the same state. Since he’d fallen out with Daisy he had no interest in cleaning up, or doing anything else for that matter.

  It was four weeks ago that Daisy had put the phone down on him while she was in Cornwall. He could kick himself now for not calling round to Bedford Park over Easter when she got home to talk it out with her.

  He understood perfectly why she wanted to find her mother, and he wasn’t against it at all. But he had maintained right from the beginning that she should go through one of the agencies who specialized in finding birth mothers. That way there would be a mediator on hand to smooth out any potential problems.

  It was when Daisy had said she thought Ellen might have had a nervous breakdown following the fire at the farm that he became worried. In his opinion, the last thing Daisy needed in her life so soon after Lorna’s death was involvement with someone unstable. She had been so strong for Lorna and John, but she could easily start to bend if someone else began to lean on her. Maybe he should have been more diplomatic, he also supposed he didn’t need to refuse to use his work connections to help in the search. But her wild exuberance caught him short.

  The next time he phoned Daisy, he tried really hard to be diplomatic. But she seemed so irritable, everything he asked her appeared to annoy her further. He still couldn’t see what was wrong with saying ‘Don’t be silly.’ It wasn’t meant to be offensive. But he supposed she’d have flown off the handle whatever he’d said. So he’d left her alone, thinking that time would bring her round.