All the Daughters Read online

  ALL THE DAUGHTERS

  ALL THE

  DAUGHTERS

  PENNY FREEDMAN

  Copyright © 2012 Penny Freedman

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

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  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 978 1780886 572

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Typeset in Aldine by Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For Zoë Emmeline

  and Genevieve Joy,

  who are and are not

  the daughters of this book,

  and for Robert

  with all my love

  Contents

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  A Note

  FOREWORD

  I lived very happily for thirty years in the city which was the inspiration for Marlbury and I have many good friends there. I would not want anyone to think that Gina’s jaundiced view of the city is mine. The characters who appear in these pages bear no relation to any of that city’s inhabitants, and the places of learning and entertainment have only the most superficial resemblance to prototypes there.

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house

  And all the brothers too, and yet I know not.

  Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 4

  1

  TUESDAY 21st SEPTEMBER

  ‘And what’s her history?’

  ‘So what’s your policy on farting in class, Eve?’ Ellie asks.

  Eve gives a hoot of laughter. ‘Well, I try not to do it as far as possible,’ she says. ‘It helps if you don’t eat gipsy tart for lunch.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Ellie protests, waving her wine glass with dangerous vigour. ‘They drove me mad this afternoon. You just get them settled and working on something and then one of the boys farts – or the others say he has – and they all start flapping their arms and holding their noses and making a big production. Next thing, they want to open the windows to clear the air and then they start dropping things out – not their own things, other people’s – all sorts – pencil cases, books – there was even a shoe this afternoon – and then the owners want to go down and collect them, and the whole lesson collapses. And all the teachers in the rooms below know you’ve lost control when all these things start hurtling past their windows.’

  She ends with a comic wail, but I can see she’s perilously close to tears. Poor Ellie: my twenty-two-year-old daughter, fresh out of university and in her first term of teaching at The William Roper Academy, Marlbury. Now Marlbury isn’t your crumbling post-industrial city. On the surface, it’s a prosperous and charming town – quite a tourist attraction, in fact, with its fine abbey and gardens and little half-timbered houses – but it has its areas of social deprivation and William Roper is creamed several times over by three grammar schools and a bunch of private schools. Middle class parents have numerous ways of avoiding William Roper and avoid it they do. I taught there myself for fifteen years, give or take a few terms of maternity leave. It wasn’t an academy then but I doubt the change has been anything more than cosmetic: a lick of paint, a smart uniform and a shiny logo. That unpleasant American expression comes to mind; Ellie is discovering that, even with lipstick on, The William Roper School is a pig.

  ‘There are extra problems to teaching drama,’ I say to Ellie. ‘It’s a bit easier if you’ve got them pinned down in desks.’

  ‘That’s why I asked Eve. They all mill about in the art room, don’t they? How do you keep them focussed?’

  ‘Well, I don’t have the farting problem, for a start,’ Eve says. ‘My room stinks so much of paint and turps nothing else gets a look-in. But the real secret is being relaxed. If they know you’re rattled, then they know they’ve got you. You start by pretending – you should be good at that, you being an actress and all – and then you find you’re doing it for real. Of course, it’s hard jumping in the deep end like you’re doing…’

  Eve’s voice, with its soft Irish consonants, is like warm honey and her sitting room is an improbable feast of colours and textures. There are rugs, covers, cushions, curtains, all made by her over the years, in a palette of blues, greens and yellows; there are ebullient arrangements of dried flowers and grasses; there are vigorous sketches of her four gorgeous daughters and her growing brood of grandchildren. As she talks on, though, soothing Ellie, and I sit back on my sofa and sip my wine, I find I can superimpose on all this the sights, sounds and smells of William Roper as I met it when I was only a year older than Ellie is now. Sights and sounds are easy: gum-smeared windows, graffiti-gouged desks, leprous paint and the clattering, shattering soundtrack of a thousand teenage voices ricocheting between hard surfaces. What surprises me is the way the smell comes up to meet me, compounded of many simples, that unmistakeable blend of spearmint gum, cheese and onion crisps, cheap floor cleaner and teenage sweat.

  I did my time there at the coal face and then, as I was coming up to forty, I got out. Eve stayed, but then Eve is a better woman than I am. Eve is the woman I would like to be if I could somehow be wiser, calmer, sweeter and kinder. If I were quite unlike myself, in fact. But still I aspire. Misguided, neurotic, sour and judgemental as I am, I still believe that I could be that warm, consoling earth-mother if only – if only what? If only the world were a different place, I suppose. Anyway, I didn’t stick it out at William Roper; I escaped to teach English for academic purposes to foreign students at Marlbury University College, where the ambience is superior, the students are, for the most part, well-motivated and the classroom smell is different: garlic mainly, with sheepy overtones of damp wool between October and March, when students from warmer climes – Greeks in particular – don’t like to take their coats off.

  Enough of this. I snap back into the conversation. ‘I’ve remembered,’ I say, ‘what I used to do about the farting issue.’

  Ellie and Eve turn to look at me. I sense that their conversation has moved on in my absence.

  ‘I told them that in polite society it wasn’t done to comment on other people’s bodily functions and I made anyone who mentioned farting come in at lunch time and write rhyming couplets on the subject of polite behaviour.’

  Ellie objects, ‘But we’re not supposed to punish kids by giving them ex
tra work to do. We’re supposed to engage them in the work, not make it a chore.’

  ‘Well, I never made them write rhyming couplets at any other time. I hate rhyming couplets – they make everything sound trite and trivial, like Pope.’

  ‘The Pope?’ Ellie asks, startled. ‘He doesn’t speak in rhyming couplets, does he?’

  Eve shouts with laughter and I splutter on my wine as I say, ‘Not the Pope, Pope – Alexander – 18th century poet, so-called. What an ignoramus you are, Ellie. I told your father he was wasting his money on your expensive education.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ says Eve. ‘That will be a bit of a handicap in coping with the William Roper kids – you having been to Lady Margaret College for Girls, all posh and civilised and well-behaved.’

  ‘Not as well-behaved as all that.’

  We turn to look at Colin Fletcher. I’d almost forgotten he was here. He’s withdrawn himself a bit from our female circle and is mulling over a crossword, I think.

  ‘Lady M has a bit of a drugs problem at the moment, I hear.’

  ‘There always were drugs around,’ says Ellie. ‘We got them from the boys at The Abbey.’

  ‘This isn’t just the odd bit of cannabis or ecstasy,’ Colin says. ‘It’s serious stuff.’

  ‘Wow,’ says Ellie. ‘That’ll be getting Mrs Mayfield in a flap. I wonder if they’re coming from The Abbey too.’

  Colin smiles. ‘As we’re the school doctors for Marlbury Abbey, I couldn’t possibly comment. Professional confidentiality.’

  Colin is a GP – our GP, in fact – and if he were an actor you’d be bound to cast him as the old-fashioned family doctor. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with a lot of springy grey hair and a rather military moustache. Like my ex-husband, Andrew, he is an alumnus of The Abbey School, Marlbury’s finest and most ancient public school, but he has surprisingly left-wing views and I bumped into him on several demos during the Thatcher years. I saw him on the march against the Iraq war in 2003 too – though you didn’t have to be left-wing to join that – just in possession of a couple of brain cells. He is gentle, humorous and charming, and if I’m never quite comfortable with him, it’s simply because he’s been familiar with the most intimate bits of me and that feels rather odd.

  ‘Talking of drugs,’ I say, ‘did you know I’d given up smoking?’

  ‘How long since your last cigarette?’ Colin demands with professional scepticism.

  ‘Six weeks.’

  Eve gives me a round of applause and I bow graciously.

  ‘I’d like to say it was your influence, Colin,’ I tell him, ‘but actually it was because of Freda.’

  Freda is the fifth member of our party this evening. She hasn’t joined in the conversation yet, although Ellie and I are proud of her extensive vocabulary. She is Ellie’s three-year-old daughter, born at the end of her first year at university and the reason, I’m afraid, that Ellie is facing the rigours of William Roper at the moment. It’s a sensible career decision for a single mother but it’s not what Ellie envisaged, I’m sure, when she went off to study drama at university, and I’m sorry she has to be sensible. I am also furious with Freda’s father, who has never been named and has never, as far as I know, contributed anything to her life. Since Ellie has a huge student loan to pay off – day nurseries don’t come cheap – she and Freda are living in my house. I’ve always claimed that I was looking forward to an empty nest once Ellie’s sister, Annie, took herself off and left me in peace, but the nesting habit is hard to break, I find, and I think I may have been ruined for living alone.

  Aware that we’ve all turned to look at her, Freda gives us a wide, gummy smile. She is exploring a basket of toys (property of Eve’s grandchildren) and with a performer’s instinct, she demonstrates her ability to create a tower of beakers in descending order of size. We watch and admire, but Ellie is preoccupied.

  ‘Eve,’ she says, ‘do you teach Marina Carson?’

  ‘Do I teach her! She practically lives in the art room. If she’s not painting, she’s tidying my cupboards. They’ve never been so immaculate. I’m her refuge from the world, I think.’

  ‘Is she any good?’

  ‘Oh yes, she’s quite talented.’

  ‘Marina Carson?’ I say, ‘That’s not a William Roper name. She sounds like the heroine of a romantic novel.’

  ‘She’s a puzzle,’ Ellie says. ‘She’s in my tutor group.’

  ‘9X?’ asks Eve.

  ‘What does “X” stand for?’ I chip in.

  ‘Extra,’ Ellie and Eve tell me simultaneously.

  ‘And is that Extra Bright or Extra Dim?’

  ‘Extra maths and English. They don’t do a language or physics and chemistry.’

  ‘So Extra Dim. What we called remedial in my day.’

  ‘Ach, you’re so out of date, Gina,’ Eve reproves me.

  ‘So what’s the puzzle?’ I ask.

  ‘When I first met her,’ Ellie says, ‘I wondered if she’d got into the wrong class by mistake. You can see at a glance that the others have problems – there’s that “nobody at home” look – but she seems different. And she’s not bad at drama. Then I got her first piece of written work in and I was really shocked: it was like primary school work.’ She takes a swig of her wine and carries on. ‘I was intrigued so I went and looked up her record in the year nine tutors’ office, and it’s really weird. It looks like she was abroad somewhere for eighteen months and only came back here a year ago. The weird thing is, before she went away she had a good VRQ – and an above average reading age – but when she came to William Roper last year, her VRQ was only 84 and her reading age was way down too. How can she have gone backwards?’

  ‘Where was she at school before she left?’ I ask her.

  ‘St Ursula’s in Upper Shepton. I wonder why they didn’t send her back there. It’s just the place for nice, dim little girls.’

  I notice Colin Fletcher shift in his chair and Eve says, ‘Colin, I’m going to gossip about the Carsons and you won’t like it, especially with them being your patients. So, why don’t you go out and start cooking the stir-fry. It’s all cut up ready and you always complain I overcook it anyway.’

  Colin gets up. ‘OK,’ he says. Then he puts a hand on Eve’s shoulder. ‘Just try not to say anything libellous, darling, that’s all.’

  As he goes out, we all hunch forward over the coffee table. ‘So Eve,’ I say, ‘give us the dirt.’

  ‘Well, I’m surprised you don’t know – Marina’s mother is Glenys Summers.’

  ‘Glenys Summers? I haven’t heard of her for years. She used to be a name to conjure with, though.’

  Ellie is looking blank. ‘She was a child star,’ I tell her. ‘A few years younger than me. She specialised in appealing waifs. “Elfin” was the word they used to use about her. Then she grew up and didn’t quite make the transition. I do remember her playing ditsy Dora in a film musical of David Copperfield, though. She could sing. She made a few records, I think. She was a bit of a Hello! favourite for a while, wasn’t she, Eve? There was some sort of scandal – drugs and a breakdown?’

  ‘Drink mainly, I think, though there were probably some drugs as well – and wild nights and crap men and not turning up on set and all the rest of it.’

  ‘But she wasn’t living here in Marlbury then was she?’

  ‘Oh no. You’d be hard put to find a Hello! night here. Hector, her husband, brought her down here in the end to try and get her away from all that. Bought Charter Hall out at Lower Shepton, a few hens and a horse and hoped country life would do the trick. And there were the two children by then.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘Not at all – except that the paparazzi left them alone – too lazy to shift their arses far out of London. After a couple of years, Hector rented out the house, booked her into a very exclusive clinic in Switzerland and uprooted the whole family. That’s how our Marina went missing.’

  ‘For eighteen months?’ Ellie asks. ‘Her mother can’t
have been in a clinic all that time, surely?’

  ‘Well, I suppose she wasn’t in the clinic all the time, but I guess she was having treatment. Or maybe Hector was afraid to bring her back.’

  The penny drops. ‘Hector?’ I ask. ‘Hector Carson? The Trilogy of Corisande man?’

  ‘The very same. He’s a lot older than Glenys, of course. Married her when she was at her craziest. He was going to be her rock, and I must say he’s stuck it out. There were some pretty hairy times. Colin was at his wits’ end with her – always some panic or other. The Swiss clinic was his idea.’

  I turn to Ellie. ‘The Trilogy of Corisande was a vogue thing in the seventies. It’s Lord of the Rings meets Morte d’Arthur, with some fake Chaucerian language thrown in. I couldn’t stand it but a lot of people loved it. There was a year when I was in the sixth form, when everyone was going round calling each other “a goodly wight” and that sort of thing. Really annoying.’

  ‘You said they had two children, Eve,’ Ellie says. ‘So Marina has a brother or sister?’

  ‘Oh yes. She hasn’t told you about Edmund? She will, I guarantee. He’s four years older than her and I’ve not seen him but he’s apparently handsome, brilliant, talented and the apple of everyone’s eye.’

  ‘Where’s he at school?’

  ‘The Abbey, I believe.’

  ‘That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? One child at The Abbey and one at William Roper?’

  ‘I think he got some sort of scholarship. But there’s no money for school fees for Marina, I guess. Switzerland will have been expensive and Hector’s royalties must be drying up. They’ll be doing better now, though, if Glenys’s show keeps running.’

  ‘Oh, that’s where I’ve heard the name,’ Ellie says. ‘She’s in that musical – Amy – isn’t she?’

  ‘The thing about Amy Robsart?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Sort of Elizabethan murder mystery. She – Glenys Summers – plays Amy. It’s supposed to be really good.’

  ‘She’s a bit old, isn’t she? She must be forty at least, and Amy Robsart was only in her twenties, surely?’