He laughed gently at her crestfallen face. ‘Don’t look like that. I’m not deserting you. You’ve got a very busy few months ahead of you at school, haven’t you? It’ll go very quickly, and I’ll be back in this country in time to hear your exam results. Then we can celebrate.’
She pulled a face. ‘If there’s anything to celebrate.’
‘I’m sure there will be. And we’ll need to talk about your future by then, won’t we? Whatever happens.’
‘I know all that. It’s just — just… ’
‘Just what?’
‘Just that you’re — the only family I’ve got now and I’ll — miss you.’
She felt foolish the moment she’d said it and to her dismay found her eyes filling with helpless tears. She fumbled miserably in her bag for a handkerchief, fighting off the embarrassing display of emotion. Now she’d ruined the whole evening. How could she be so stupid?
Gerald hurriedly asked for the bill and, when he had paid, took her arm firmly and escorted her out of the restaurant. When they were seated in the car she looked at him apprehensively.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What for?’
‘For being such an idiot — for embarrassing you.’
He smiled wryly. ‘Don’t give it another thought. I’ve been in much more embarrassing situations and lived to tell the tale,’ he told her. ‘Actually it’s rather flattering. Most of the women in my life are glad to see the back of me.’
She wondered a little at this remark. So he saw her as a woman? Most of the women, he said. How many were there in his life? As far as she knew he had never been married, but a man as good-looking, as famous and talented as Gerald, was bound to have had dozens of glamorous girlfriends.
‘Tell you what,’ he was saying, ‘when I come back we’ll have a grand reunion celebration — anything you like. You can choose. And look — any time you want to visit the flat, just go along. I’ll tell the caretaker to let you in. You can play the piano or just be by yourself if you feel the need. I know it’s a bit of a squash at Mrs Johnson’s. How does that appeal?’
She sniffed, nodding into the darkness. He was placating her. He didn’t think of her as a woman after all. He still saw her as a child. But she wasn’t a child any more. She was seventeen now. She hadn’t felt like a child for ages; not since Dad died.
But in spite of everything Gerald had been right about the time flying. Once the holidays were over and she was back at school there was so much to do. She hadn’t forgotten Matthew’s words about paying his mother back for her sacrifices. Perhaps it was too late to pay Dad back, but he had wanted her to do well so she would do it for him anyway. Now Cathy too disappeared to her room with her books each evening. Johnny complained that she and Matthew were like lodgers.
‘Ships that pass in the night,’ she said, half joking, half serious. ‘I’m sure all that bookwork can’t be good for you. You’ll ruin your eyesight, the pair of you.’ But secretly she was proud of her hard-working son, and of Cathy too, for the industry she knew came hard to the girl. In spite of what she had said, it seemed that she meant to pass those exams and stay on at school after all. There had been a time soon after Daniel Oldham’s death when Johnny had worried that the child didn’t care any more. But it seemed her fears were unfounded.
With Cathy’s new desire to succeed came other changes. In her friends for instance. Carla made no secret of the fact that she disapproved.
‘I don’t know what’s got into you,’ she complained. ‘You’re no fun any more. This is the fourth week you’ve refused to go dancing or to the pictures on Saturday. You have to have some time off. Don’t you want to meet any boys?’
‘I’ve got a lot of time to catch up,’ Cathy said. ‘I’ve let things slide.’
Carla sniffed disdainfully. ‘You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘Ever since you’ve been living with the Johnsons you’ve turned into a swot. Don’t tell me it’s that awful Matthew? You don’t fancy him, do you — spots and all?’
Cathy denied the accusation hotly. ‘Of course I don’t! Why does everything have to be because of some boy? If you must know, I want to repay Dad for all he did for me, that’s all.’
‘What for? He won’t know, will he?’ Carla said insensitively.
‘Well, I’m doing it anyway. Gerald expects me to do well. I don’t want to let him down.’
‘Ah. Now we’re getting to the truth.’ Carla smiled triumphantly. ‘Gorgeous Gerald the famous pianist. It’s him you fancy, isn’t it? I might have known. It’s been nothing but Gerald this and Gerald that ever since last autumn.’ She tossed her blonde curls disdainfully. ‘You’ve turned into the most awful little name-dropping show-off since he came on the scene, and now you’re a swot too — just like Rosalind Blair.’
‘I’m not!’
Carla ignored her protest. ‘It isn’t as though you have to do it either. I mean, everyone knows that a girl as plain as Rosalind has to work hard. Can you imagine any man asking her to marry him?’
They were in the cloakroom and Rosalind was close enough to overhear. Cathy blushed and whispered: ‘Shut up, she’ll hear you.’
Carla glanced round haughtily. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve said anything she doesn’t already know,’ she said, unabashed, and looked challengingly at Cathy. ‘Right then, are you coming dancing with me on Saturday or do I ask someone else?’
‘I think you’d better ask someone else,’ Cathy said firmly.
‘All right, I will. If you want to turn into a cabbage you’d better get on with it and the best of British luck!’
Cathy watched as Carla shook her head and walked away. She was beginning to see her friend for what she was: shallow and selfish. All the same, she missed their weekly outings and Sunday tea at the Maybridges’ gloriously chaotic house. Working for her exams was hard going but she was determined to do the best she could so that Gerald would be proud of her. Whenever her spirits flagged she got out the postcards he had sent her from each of the places where he’d played: New York; Los Angeles; Boston. She imagined the hectic, glamorous life he must be having; the concerts and the parties; the beautiful women he must be meeting every day, all of them falling over each other to get close to him. And she wondered at the thought that he could actually find the time to write to her. He must be just a little bit fond of her. Then she would imagine the scene where she would tell him of her success, and picture the look on his face. It was all the incentive she needed.
She put on her coat and heaved the heavy satchel on to her back. She’d have to hurry or she’d miss the half-past four bus. She reached the door at the same time as Rosalind and when she saw the other girl blush and look away Cathy decided to try to apologise for Carla’s cruel and thoughtless remarks.
‘Look, Rosalind, I’m sorry about those things that Carla said. She can be very catty at times. Take no notice of her. She was cross with me because I wouldn’t go dancing with her on Saturday.’
Rosalind’s colour deepened. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, tugging at the strap of her satchel. ‘There’s no need for you to feel sorry for me. I’m used to being called plain.’
‘She thinks I’m a bore because I’m working hard for my exams,’ Cathy went on. ‘She was getting at me really. She knows how embarrassed I get when she makes loud remarks about people.’
‘She was accusing you of being like me. How awful for you!’
Cathy looked at the other girl’s hurt expression. ‘Oh, no. I take it as a compliment. If I can do as well as you always do in exams, I’ll be very pleased.’
‘I work hard because I have a plan. Besides, there’s nothing much else to do.’ Rosalind looked up with a smile and suddenly Cathy saw to her surprise that she wasn’t plain at all. The brown eyes behind the spectacles were large and lustrous and she had small, regular features and nice teeth. If she had her straight dark hair cut differently … Someone had once said that Rosalind’s mother had been an actress before she married, though Carla had scoffed at tha
t rumour.
‘No actress would let her daughter walk around dressed like that,’ she said. And Cathy was reluctantly inclined to agree. Rosalind came to school in a sad assortment of shapeless skirts and blouses that Carla insisted were rejects from a jumble sale.
The two girls had fallen into step but suddenly Rosalind stopped.
‘Don’t feel you have to walk with me, Cathy,’ she said. ‘I told you, I’m used to catty remarks — and to being on my own. You don’t need to apologise for Carla either. I know you’re not like her.’
‘I don’t feel I’ve got to walk with you, I want to. After all, we catch the same bus so why shouldn’t we walk together?’
Cathy glanced at the other girl, hoping she hadn’t sounded patronising. ‘That’s if you don’t mind?’ she added.
Rosalind hesitated for a moment, then smiled again, blushing, this time with pleasure. ‘No. I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind at all.’
Chapter Two
Rosalind had a longer journey home than Cathy. It took her half an hour to get to the street in Burnt Oak where she and her mother occupied a flat. After she got off the bus there was a lengthy walk and by the time she arrived at Courtney Avenue the strap of her satchel was biting into her shoulder and her back ached. As usual she let herself into the rundown Edwardian house with her own key and trudged up the uncarpeted stairs to the first-floor flat.
Rosalind didn’t mind coming home to an empty flat each afternoon. She was used to it. It meant she would have an hour’s peace and quiet to get on with her homework before her mother got home from work. That hour was essential. Once she had her O levels behind her she was determined to go on and take her A’s. Her whole future depended on how well she could do.
In the cramped little kitchen with its window overlooking the dusty back garden she put the kettle on for coffee and took down the biscuit tin, then went through into the living room and began to unload her books on to the table. She had set her sights on passing at least two subjects with good grades. She’d been told that she wasn’t university material but already knew what she wanted to do so it wasn’t a problem. She was determined to go to a business college, the best one she could find, and take a diploma course in hotel management. The careers mistress at St Margaret’s had tried to talk her out of it, feeling that the quiet, somewhat withdrawn girl had none of the right attributes for hotel work. But it was all Rosalind had wanted to do ever since she could remember and she refused to be discouraged from her goal.
As she waited for the kettle to boil she thought about her brief and unexpected talk with Cathy Oldham. Ever since her first year at St Margaret’s she’d admired the tall, striking girl with her auburn hair and green eyes. It was strange — people often talked of green eyes when they really meant grey, or blue-green, but Cathy’s were a true, clear green, like emeralds. When you looked into them it was hard to look away; they were quite mesmerising. Yet Cathy wasn’t at all the type one associated with green eyes. Rosalind had always felt that, and today it had been confirmed. Cathy was thoughtful and kind, just as Rosalind had always known she would be. She felt a sense of satisfaction in having her instinct proved right. She’d never really understood why Cathy and Carla Maybridge were such friends. They were so different.
Rosalind took a biscuit from the tin and munched thoughtfully. She wished in some ways that she could be more like Carla, who seemed to attract people like a magnet. But she was only too aware of the power she had and used it in all the wrong ways. She was self-centred and thoughtless, often to the point of cruelty to those less fortunate than herself; though goodness only knew she had no need to be. Everything seemed to fall effortlessly into her lap. She was pretty and popular with both girls and teachers alike, and although she only ever managed to scrape by academically she was always at the centre of things. Cathy on the other hand seemed quite unaware of her own attractiveness. She was a more serious, introspective kind of girl. Rosalind had heard about her father dying. She knew Cathy had no mother and that she’d had to leave the home where she’d grown up. Watching her at school she’d recognised the suffering in the other girl’s face and manner and, herself the only child of divorced parents, had longed to reach out to her; to sympathise. But she hadn’t known how, or where to begin. In the end, afraid of receiving a snub, or some scathing remark from Carla, she hadn’t even tried. Today as they’d walked to the bus stop together she had searched her mind for some words to express her understanding and regret, but to her frustration, they’d refused to come.
Rosalind had been almost eight when her parents had divorced. Until then her life had been divided between Aunt Flora who kept a boarding house in Cleethorpes and the hotels and ‘digs’ up and down the country where her parents, Una and Ben Blair, stayed as they toured with their singing act. Flora Mawson wasn’t a real aunt. She was Una’s late mother’s oldest friend and the nearest she had to a blood relative now that her parents were dead.
Rosalind had been born while her parents were touring with ENSA during the war. Una, furious to discover that she was pregnant and forced to take time off, had deposited her new baby with Aunt Flora in Cleethorpes as soon as she could, and rejoined Ben who was touring at the time with a production of The Desert Song. She was soon to discover that during her absence he had become more than friendly with a dancer in the same company. It was the beginning of a long string of infidelities and eventually the end of the marriage.
By the time Rosalind had reached school age she was spending term time with Aunt Flora in Cleethorpes and the holidays with her parents wherever they happened to be working. Aunt Flora had pointed out to Una somewhat tersely that the boarding house was her bread and butter. Heaven only knew, the summer season was short enough and fond as she was of Rosalind, she really couldn’t have the child taking up one of her rooms while her parents ‘gadded about’ all over the country. So as soon as school broke up for the long summer holidays Rosalind would pack her suitcase and join the mother and father who were little more than strangers to her.
Sometimes they would be booked for a resident summer show at the seaside, which was nice. Ben did his best to act the role of father, taking her on the beach and playing with her when he wasn’t rehearsing. Una, on the other hand, needed all her free time for having her hair done and making sure she looked good off-stage as well as on. Less enjoyable summers would be spent touring, which meant long dreary Sunday train journeys and a succession of dingy digs and lodging houses where Rosalind would be required to keep quiet and not play on the stairs. In the evenings while Una and Ben were at the theatre she would stay in her room with the radio or a book. Later, she would lie awake, rigid with misery and unnamed fears as the sound of quarrelling initiated by her mother’s emotional tantrums reached her through the thin partition walls.
It had been around that time that her ambition had been born. When she grew up she was going to stay in one place all the time. She would have the kind of life where she would feel safe; one which would certainly have nothing to do with the theatre. She hated the musty, cheerless backstage environment; the faces made bewilderingly unfamiliar with orange make-up; and the tense, highly-charged atmosphere that seemed to exclude everyone not associated with it. Stage people weren’t like anyone else, she decided. It was as though they were split into two: one person on the stage and another off it. They seemed to keep all the best bits of themselves jealously guarded and stored up for the audience, so that there was nothing left over for those, like herself, who stood on the fringe of it all. Standing in the wings or occasionally seated ‘out front’ she found it difficult to believe that the two glamorous people on the stage, smiling so adoringly into each other’s eyes as they sang their romantic love songs, were the angry, morose parents who came home every evening to quarrel and shout at each other until the other occupants of the house banged on the walls in fury.
But quite apart from her dislike of the theatre, Rosalind recognised that she had no aptitude or talent for the life.
She had not inherited her mother’s lustrous violet eyes and mane of raven hair. Her own hair was an indeterminate brown and poker straight, and from the age of four she had had to wear glasses. Neither had she Una’s vivacious, mercurial personality. The years of being pushed into the background and passed around had set their seal on her character. She was much too shy and lacking in confidence to make a performer even if she had wanted to be one.
By the time she was seven she had decided that when she grew up she would have a hotel of her own; one where people — especially children — were made welcome. It wouldn’t be like Aunt Flora’s boarding house with its porch full of rusting buckets and spades and wet mackintoshes. And it certainly wouldn’t be like the cabbage-smelling, brown-wallpapered digs and theatrical lodgings where she spent her summer holidays. During the long hours she spent alone she planned it all. Her hotel would be warm and comfortable with cosy fires and bright lights in all the rooms. There would be delicious food to eat, pretty curtains and warm, soft beds. The bathroom wouldn’t be cold and draughty and there wouldn’t be any of those horrid hissing gas heaters where the hot water was always running out. Best of all, there would be a garden where children could play and go where they pleased. It would feel like a home, she told herself. It would be a home.
Soon after her parents’ traumatic split-up Aunt Flora decided to retire. Her announcement spiked Una’s guns on the awful weekend when she and Rosalind had arrived in Cleethorpes to throw themselves on her mercy.
‘I’m going to sell Sea View and go down to Devon to live with my sister Gladys now that she’s widowed,’ she told a tearful Una as they sat facing each other across the kitchen table. ‘So it’s no use you expecting me to take the child on permanent like.’
The Lost Daughters: A moving saga of womanhood Page 4
