Princess

by Alison Fraser

  ‘Since this conversation, I have made no further progress. Cases like Serena’s, where the patient is intelligent and highly intuitive, tend to be problematic, for she pre-guesses where my questions are leading and chooses whether she wished to go there or lead me round in polite circles. Despite this impasse, I recommend that treatment continues and she does not try out her newly-found “wings” yet.’

  Adam discerned from the tone of the report that the psychiatrist was deeply involved with his case, not withstanding Serena’s lack of co-operation. Recalling his own abortive attempt to help her, Adam sympathised with the man’s evident frustration. And he too did not believe in miracles outside the context of the Old and New Testaments, although from earlier letters his mother obviously did. He turned to her accompanying note.

  ‘Dear Adam,

  ‘I have enclosed Simon Clark’s report for you to read and give me your impartial advice, but I wish you to bear in mind my own impressions.

  ‘I know that in ways I’m a naive old woman, but Serena is now, to my eyes, every inch the beautiful bright girl she promised to be as a child. I wish you could see her, Adam. It’s hard to believe she was ill at all. Sometimes she herself is so rational about it all, she reminds me of you and your calm practical approach to life.

  ‘She spends much of her time painting and seems to have inherited her father’s talent, although frankly some of her work is incomprehensible to me. However, she needs formal training, and with that in mind, we submitted a portfolio of sketches to the Art College in Leeds, and on the strength of her promise, they were willing to give her a place in September without the usual academic requirements.

  ‘I realise it was foolish of me to act without first consulting Simon, and he is, as you will gather from his report, opposed to the idea of subjecting her to any stress, but it’s hard to stand against Serena’s quiet certainty that she can cope.

  ‘So where do I go from here? I told Serena I would write to you, and since then she hasn’t mentioned the subject. It’s as though she’s making herself resigned to not going, and it’s this very mature acceptance itself that gives me faith in her.

  ‘As for Simon, he undoubtedly deserves the fine reputation he has gained for such a young man and is very devoted to Serena’s interest, coming frequently to visit her, but I do not feel his attitude is strictly analytical. I believe Serena is aware of this and is deliberately distancing herself, so I’m not unduly worried about this aspect.

  ‘Please write soon, Nancy

  ‘P.S. It’s Serena’s birthday next week. Perhaps you could send her a card. She has no other family but us.’

  Adam screwed up the letter into a tight ball and added a rider to his mother’s philosophy of life—’Write no evil’. But he had accurately read between the lines, as she had meant him to, and his first impulse was to anger, sharp and harshly critical.

  Didn’t the dedicated doctor, supposedly versed in human reactions, know that it was the patient who became infatuated with him—not the reverse? Adam realised in himself a primitive violence that wanted to beat senseless an anonymous figure an ocean away, and while it lasted, one unfinished threat drummed through his head— ‘if he’d touched her’.

  It remained after the fierce, blinding anger subsided, but served to deflect the disgust back at himself as it recalled one crazy minute out of time when he had wanted to do just that... to touch Serena, to more than look at her frail beauty. The memory was clearer than any collected since, more real to him than yesterday. And it never failed to leave a bitter taste in his mouth which no amount of whisky could wash away.

  Now his mother expected his impartial judgement when a confusion of guilt and inexplicable anger tied his stomach into knots every time he thought of her little fledgling. Involuntarily his eyes strayed to the painting of Serena’s mother. It didn’t match the print of his memory, the expression too calm and trusting, but there was enough of the girl there to disturb.

  Julia’s mouth went into an even tighter line when she entered the study and found Adam staring at the portrait she instinctively disliked. She slammed the door and fired at his back, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  Adam swivelled slowly round and the smell of some perfume, exotic and sensuous, filled his nostrils. He relaxed back in the desk chair and for the first time in months was conscious of her as a woman with more than a passing claim to beauty. But despite his appreciation of her bold features and generous curves under clinging blue silk, he knew with the utmost certainty that he would never again want her in his bed. He continued sipping his Bourbon in silence, but something in his look must have prompted the tirade that followed.

  ‘I don’t know why I agreed to come to America with you,’ Julia cried plaintively with all the pathos of a tragic heroine, but when it failed to evoke a response she continued stridently, ‘Adam Carmichael—the Great Lover, the Great Writer. What a joke! Ever since you came back from that trip to Yorkshire, the only affair you’ve been capable of conducting is with that damn bottle. You’re nothing but a... an impotent drunk!’

  The moment Adam lifted his head and turned his gaze full on her, Julia stepped back, frightened she had gone too far, but his reply was mild and amused. ‘You missed out the key to my fatal attraction—a rich impotent drunk.’

  He could have said more—reminded her that he had never asked her to come to America. She had turned up uninvited on his flight, and he had no delusions as to why. Julia, having run through her divorce settlement, had needed a meal ticket, and, more than a little drunk when he had reached his stopover in New York, he had allowed her to earn it in a bedroom in the airport hotel.

  ‘You’re a bastard,’ Julia finally managed, for she had no real defence to the implied accusation, other than the fact she had once found the man as attractive as his money.

  ‘Granted,’ Adam smiled.

  Frustrated, Julia searched for a new line of attack and alighted on what even she normally recognised as a taboo subject since the day Adam had caught her reading the first psychiatric report with a lurid interest.

  ‘I see you’ve had a letter from your mother.’ Julia went to pick it up, but Adam was quicker. Too quick. ‘Ah, how is the dear little thing—the mad cousin?’

  ‘Leave it!’ Adam rapped out, rising to his feet and her bait.

  ‘Why so touchy?’ she challenged.

  ‘I shall not discuss this with you,’ he dismissed coldly, making for the door.

  ‘What’s she like, Adam? I’m curious.’ Julia, suffering from the insult of months of his total indifference, became quite reckless with a sense of her power to hurt. ‘Is she physically deformed as well? Is that why you’re too ashamed to talk about her?’ It stopped him dead in his tracks and she observed his hands clenching into tight angry fists. ‘Or is she simply a social embarrassment? You know—bedwetting and dribbling at the mouth...’

  ‘You ignorant bitch!’ It was a roar, the only warning of the fist sent flying as he turned.

  At the last second Adam caught the action up sufficiently to unfurl his fingers, but the back of his hand still had the force to knock her back against the desk. He could easily have broken her jaw if he had been a fraction slower.

  ‘Don’t come near me!’ Julia screamed in genuine terror as he took a pace forward to try to do something about the damage he had done. It wasn’t the first time Julia’s vicious tongue had resulted in her being hit by a lover, but never by the cool self-controlled Adam, and that blow had been no emotional play-acting. She began to edge nervously along the desk.

  ‘I’m not going to hit you again,’ he stated raggedly, backing slowly away from her, hands loose at his side. ‘Just don’t talk about her like that.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Julia promised, giving him one long frightened stare before rushing to the door with the parting shot of, ‘Perhaps you should be seeing a shrink too!’

  Adam’s laughter followed her out into the hallway, a loud crazy-sounding confirmation of her fears. He had read
her perfectly—wrongly assuming Serena Templeton to be a blood relation, Julia now had doubts about his own sanity. Yet she was close. There was a craziness in him, not through heredity but by infection. Through the touch of the girl. And realising the absurdity of that idea, he laughed all the harder.

  ‘It’s from the States,’ Nancy declared with pleasure after a brief examination of the labels adorning the flat wooden crate. ‘From Adam, for your birthday.’

  Her birthday had been and gone. Nancy had bought her a beautiful chestnut mare, a generous gift all the more precious because it was a testimony of Nancy’s faith in her recovery. Simon Clarke had given her an illustrated book on Renaissance painters, and it had embarrassed her. She didn’t want any more presents, at any rate not this one.

  ‘Aren’t you dying to see what’s inside, dear?’ Nancy enthused brightly.

  In many ways Nancy treated her as a little girl; it didn’t annoy, because it was motivated by affection. Serena forced herself to move towards it, to smile and look excited, while every inclination cried out against touching ihe box.

  ‘I wonder what it is?’ Serena stalled, as she tried to banish her silly fears connected with the sender. At first the subject of Adam Carmichael had been avoided by his mother, but it had not been natural. And now when his name slipped into conversations, Serena schooled her features and gave a convincing pretence of having no memory of the man.

  ‘It’s nailed down,’ she mumbled, as though that fact would prevent it ever being opened.

  Brocklehurst came with hammer and chisel, and after much grunting and muttering, levered up the top and as if he was still in the stables emptied all the straw on the living room carpet.

  ‘Eeh, it’s thee, Miss Serena,’ he finally announced, placing the painting with an unusual care against the back of the leather sofa so they could all admire it.

  ‘It’s my mother!’ Serena cried with pure wonder. How many years had it been since her father had explained that the painting had upset Andrea and therefore had been given away? For a moment there was only utter pleasure in the gift.

  ‘Fancy Adam finding it!’ Nancy exclaimed proudly. Her son had not only remembered but sent something so special. ‘There’s a card. “To my cousin, with best wishes.” Isn’t that nice?’

  With well-practised self-control Serena stopped herself from protesting aloud, ‘He’s not my cousin’. For though she had accepted Nancy as her aunt, had grown very fond of the woman who was so different from Andrea Simmonds, she could not eradicate a certain bad memory.

  Not wanting to hurt the older woman, she lamely replied, ‘It’s very kind of him,’ but the words held none of that first surge of joy.

  Later, in her new airy bedroom, she stared hard at her mother’s portrait and then into the mirror. The same features and colouring had been duplicated in herself, but the likeness was superficial. Painting it when her mother had already entered the last stages of consumption, the artist had captured all her inner beauty and peace.

  Had her mother ever feared that creeping death? Raged against the unfairness of it? Serena didn’t think so. Her father had taken her into the garden of the small villa in Italy and warned her that her lovely mother was very ill.

  ‘You must be wrong, Daddy,’ she had declared with the total certainty of an eight-year-old in whose experience ill people didn’t laugh and dying people were like the old woman with the gnarled hands and the bent back who had once lived next door.

  When she had been confronted with the truth of it, she had none of her mother’s calm strength to draw on. Indulged by the local villagers and cherished by her parents, she had cried hysterically against the hitherto unknown pain, until her father forced her to recount and hold on to all the happy memories of her mother. It had helped, and to a certain extent, later when her father had left her too, but there had developed darker shades of the spoilt little girl who had cried, ‘Daddy, I hate the whole world!’ No, she had too much anger in her to ever approach her mother’s serenity, and although she could be ‘good’ for those she liked, she also knew herself capable of the opposite.

  Along with the painting Adam had enclosed a short note giving his support for her going to college, thus overriding Simon’s advice. She should have been grateful—instead she retained the impression that he was a threat to her, based on one vivid recollection of the good-looking face in Nancy’s photograph bending over hers and wanting to hurt her in a way that even Andrea could never have matched. It was a fear she had never quite learned to rationalise, but she wanted very much to put Adam Carmichael into his true perspective.

  First she penned a short thank-you note to him, its style not much improved on those she had sent in her childhood to a great-aunt in Scotland who used to knit her monstrous woollen cardigans and which she had worn for precisely the thirty seconds it had taken for her mother to snap her picture and send to the old lady. A duty letter, and it read like it, but she would have been genuinely amazed by the anger it engendered in its recipient.

  Over the next few weeks, she read his books and used her sharp intelligence to gauge the writer from what he had written. She conceived a clear picture of a clever man with a liberal twist of wry humour which made her smile in spite of herself, and a cold, dispassionate view of his fellow man, from which she quite wrongly deduced that Adam Carmichael had more than a passing fondness for himself. Added to the speculative kitchen gossip that she had overheard concerning his private life, she had him pigeonholed as an egotistical womaniser. Not a pleasant image, but not a very frightening one either.

  The day came for enrolment and Nancy drove her down to the station, with both of them playing down the event. It was early October and cold. Serena was wearing a blue duffle jacket over jeans and a fluffy white jersey. She had bought them and their like on a shopping expedition with Nancy, who had favoured only smart, tailored clothes but had accepted with good grace Serena’s taste, based on information she had culled from magazines.

  Serena breathed a sigh of relief to find that her casual clothes conformed with the norm, but it was the single comfort she derived from the milling students gathered outside the college gymnasium. Not only did she appear to be the only person who knew no one else, but the conversations that drifted in her direction about films and modern music could have been in a foreign language for all she understood. She was struck by an echo—of being five years old and surrounded by dark Italian children chattering too fast for her modest command of the language—but even then she hadn’t felt so bad, because she had hidden her shyness in her mother’s skirts.

  By the time the doors opened and the mass began to surge forward with some semblance of organised chaos, Serena was in full retreat, hugging the low perimeter wall. The yard emptied and she was left with the conviction that if she didn’t make it today, she would never get this far again. It took her to the glass entrance but no further; the foyer was now deserted, and she had made it worse for herself by hanging back. Shrinking into the corner of the arched doorway, Serena felt ashamed of her cowardice.

  ‘Are you going in or just contemplating the architecture?’ a breezy teenage voice interrupted her apparent abstraction with the building’s exterior. ‘Late twentieth century functional, I believe.’

  Serena’s stare moved from the glass to the newcomer, but she remained aloof and the youth shrugged when his attempt at humour didn’t raise an answering smile.

  ‘Damn and blast!’ The curse was directed at the stiff door that opened outwards and was proving difficult for the boy leaning heavily on a stick. ‘Could you?’

  And Serena, breaking out of her self-absorption, noticed for the first lime that her companion was handicapped, and her own fear became secondary as she went ahead and opened the series of doors. That was until they reached the hall where the other students were casually scattered around, waiting for their names to be called, and then it came back to her full force when heads turned at the opening of the door and they were subjected to more than a cursory
glance.

  ‘It’s OK. People always do that,’ the boy announced when he caught and misread Serena’s startled expression. ‘Watch this.’

  Serena did as she was told, while her companion glared fiercely at the nearest starer, whose face turned scarlet, and then muttered disgustedly, ‘Like you had two heads instead of a slightly bent leg!’

  The leg was more than slightly bent and covered by a heavy caliper, but Serena picked up from the tone a very clear message—’Pity me and I’ll make you sorry for daring to!’

  Remarkably the boy’s abrupt manner made her lose enough of her diffidence to ask, ‘I wonder if you could help me. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do.’

  The boy held his head at an angle, testing Serena, discerned only a painful shyness and grinned the first overture of a friendship that was to enable her to survive the difficult weeks ahead.

  They were an odd pair: Charlie, most extrovert and cheerful, sometimes cutting and abrasive, came from a Liverpool slum—the words he himself used—and stubbornly refused to paint anything he did not see as beautiful; while Serena, with her pretty manners and natural refinement, initially could only paint in her self-taught style, its almost savage intensity a complete mystery to her tutor and fellow students when contrasted with her quiet beauty. Yet they were friends.

  Serena travelled the eight-mile round trip daily. She could have shared a flat with some of the other girls, but although with Charlie’s help she was learning to bridge the gap created by her lost adolescent years, she did not feel part of her generation. It was a strange mixture of being too naive and ignorant to understand their morals and trends, too adult and restrained to join in with their youthful high spirits. By evening she was glad to be at home with Nancy’s less demanding company.

  In the main she was content with the way life was— painting, riding and restful weekends—and it was through no effort of her own that she caught the attention of a local gentleman farmer in the Rippondale valley.