Rosa's Child (5 page)

The Reverend's strategy was to serve him very well, because for more than a decade Grace did not utter a word about her predicament to anyone. Throughout these years it remained a secret.

Towards the end of her teens, however, Grace began to feel differently about what had happened to her, and much of the anger repressed since childhood began to surface. And yet Grace was unable to summon the courage to confront her father about the pain he was causing her. For the Reverend continued to exercise a powerful, almost hypnotic control over her every move. For all that she was a young woman now, rather than a child, she was still struggling in vain to break free.

Her feeling of revulsion reached a peak when one day when the Reverend Mann spoke to Eunice in a tone that Grace felt to be full of bitter accusation.

'Eunice,' he bellowed, unable to control the fury welling inside him. 'You have got cancer.'

Crying to herself, Eunice limped up the stairs. 'I haven't,' was all she could say.

As the Reverend raged - all the while seeming to Grace more and more like an animal - Irene busied herself in the kitchen. It was an all too familiar scene. Having delivered his blow, he would withdraw, stricken with remorse, awash with guilt and grief at the brutal savagery of his tongue. The furious moods that would descend on the minister seemed to come from nowhere - and the result was always the same: a black cloud would hover over the whole household, although Irene would carry on as if nothing had happened.

Appalled by her father's unfeeling treatment of her ailing sister, Grace could stand no more. Without a word she walked into his study, picked up the telephone and began to dial 999 - to talk to the police. Now the truth concerning her father's sexual abuse would be revealed. But as she did so the minister walked into the room. Lost in his own troubled thoughts, he did not see Grace, who silently replaced the receiver and crept out of the room, feeling at the same time relieved and thwarted.

Afterwards Grace dwelt for a long time on what had happened. She realized as she made for the phone that should she report her father's behaviour and a criminal prosecution ensue, she would be responsible for triggering two important consequences. First, there would be an enormous scandal within the ranks of the Baptist Church. Now, as she thought about it afterwards, this outcome scarcely troubled her.

By contrast, the second prospect did. With the Reverend Mann almost certain to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, there would be no one to provide for Eunice. And that was one extra burden Grace was not prepared to add to her already heavy load. It was out of loyalty to her sister, she realized, rather than concern for her father, that she had replaced the receiver.

For the Reverend Mann it had been a narrow escape: once again he had been saved from public exposure.

FOUR

Obsessed

T
hroughout the twins' late childhood and teens Eunice continued to be very ill. Much of the time she was in great pain, and Irene would administer the most powerful medication available, in an attempt to relieve her suffering. Eunice often called out in the middle of the night: 'Mummy, Mummy, I don't know where I am.' Instantly she received the reassurance she sought. But by the time Irene had returned to her bed, Eunice was anxiously shouting for her again, completely disorientated, her mother's words of comfort having already faded from her mind. The days too were seldom without trauma, mainly because for several years Eunice suffered almost continuously from seizures which would cause her to drop to the floor, clutching her head and writhing in pain.

Nor, in this instance, had medical science been able to work its wonders. In fact, Eunice had hardly regained consciousness from her second operation when her parents were summoned to the consultant surgeon's room - a route they had come to know well. There they learned that the operation had not been carried out to his complete satisfaction - indeed he was not sure if it ever could be - but he felt it was his duty to try one more time.

Each time Eunice went into the operating theatre, her faithful Aunt Flora, who had kitted out the twins with clothes on their arrival in Wales, swung into action once more. Aware that Eunice felt very self-conscious shorn of her hair, Flora set about producing a series of little bonnets, including a yellow and pink pixie hat, of the same material and colouring as her clothes, so as to form a matching outfit. Flora's sewing skills were put to good and frequent use, for altogether Eunice was to have her hair removed seven times. And all to no avail.

'I'il never forget the day,' Irene would recall, 'after ten days in the Royal Infirmary, when the doctors produced the word "incurable". We drove off, with tears rolling down our faces, all the way home. Incurable - at just ten years of age.'

Having tried and failed, the surgeons admitted there was nothing more they could do. The patient could now return home; she would not have to face surgery again. Worst of all, the upshot of this string of interventions was that Eunice was extensively paralysed - not just in her legs, but also down her entire right side, so that she had only one good limb out of four. As a result, she would be wheelchair-bound for the rest of her life. The Manns, drawing strength from their Christian convictions, chose to take a positive view. At least now their daughter was no longer in pain. And although her body had all but ceased to operate, her mind remained intact - not least her cheerful disposition. For Eunice soon demonstrated that she did not intend to waste time bemoaning her fate. Quite the contrary: she attended a special Girl Guides group at a local hospital and even went to camps. In the process she grew to be dearly loved by those who came into contact with her. And she returned that love, as she did to her foster parents. Full of gratitude, she would often fling her good arm about her mother's neck and hug her tightly.

'Just forget it, my love,' Irene would reply, struggling to control her own emotions. 'We're glad to be able to do it for you. We just wish we could give you a new arm or a new leg.'

And then she would add a few extra words, because she knew they always comforted her daughter and brought a smile to her face. 'Never mind, my love: there'll be no wheelchairs or wonky arms or legs in heaven.'

As devoted as Irene was to Eunice, so was she derelict in her duty towards Grace. Although she developed an uncanny knack of absenting herself on the occasions when her husband seemed likely to seek sexual favours from Grace, her intuition was far from fail-proof. On several occasions she walked in on father and daughter at a most inappropriate moment, with the result that all three parties were covered in confusion and embarrassment. Almost every time, as Grace quietly slipped away, a fierce argument would erupt between the Reverend and his wife, their angry words reverberating around the household.

Afterwards Grace would receive not a word of sympathy or support from her mother. On the contrary, like her father before her, she soon found herself at the mercy of Irene Mann's sharp tongue. Underlying these attacks was Irene's painful realization that her foster daughter had become a rival for her husband's affections, and a formidable one at that. In her mother's eyes, therefore, there was little that Grace could do, try as she might, to win even her most meagre approval.

Irene Mann might have failed in terms of mothering Grace, but she also had a raw deal as a wife. Not only had her husband forsaken her bed; she also had the humiliation of knowing precisely where and with whom he was likely to be at night. In fact, during the school holidays the Reverend had a habit of abandoning the marital bed altogether in favour of a spare room a little way along the corridor of their flat, so as to be opposite Grace's bedroom.

It was hardly surprising that Grace found it difficult to forge anything like a normal relationship with her foster mother. Likewise, while Irene displayed genuine love and tenderness towards Eunice, she could rarely find it in herself to show affection to her other daughter. In any case her husband would not have permitted it, for his practice of excluding all rivals for Grace's affection had not altered with the passage of time. Grace was not to be shared - not even with her mother. 'Sometimes you would think that those two were lovers,' said Mavis Wainman, a visitor to the family home - an observation which must have hurt Grace's mother, innocent though it was.

The destructive undercurrents flowing through the Mann household eventually began to take their toll on Irene. Tending to Eunice day and night was extremely draining in itself. But in addition to that duty the Reverend's wife was obliged to be available to counsel female students at the Bible College, many of whom wished to consult her about their own personal problems. It was a role which she carried out with much skill and aplomb. But with no one to counsel her in her own difficulties, and unwilling to reveal the dark secrets of her own marriage, Irene began to show more and more signs of stress, experiencing bouts of hyperventilation and falling to the floor in hysterical paralysis. It was not long before she herself was confined to bed, diagnosed as suffering from nervous exhaustion.

Mother and daughter, estranged from one another as they were, had one thing in common: neither had anyone at all with whom they could share their sense of isolation - least of all each other.

At the same time, despite Grace's concern for Eunice, all was not sweetness and light between the twins. For many years there had been considerable tension, for although she rarely said as much, Grace resented the fact that her sister had become both disfigured and incapacitated. Previously they had talked, walked and run together, whereas after the tumour was diagnosed these activities had ceased abruptly. As young children they had played happily together, with Eunice invariably the leader of the two, often protecting her more fragile sister in minor skirmishes at school. But those days had long since gone. The sad truth was that from the moment she had set eyes on her sister neatly propped up on pillows in her hospital bed after her first craniotomy, Grace had felt that her twin had already passed from her.

Eunice's illness had prompted Grace to make a painful reappraisal of their relationship. The situation had not been at all easy to accept, and when Grace was back at home from boarding school she would occasionally take out her frustration on her sister. There were frequent arguments, often concerning the family piano, a dark upright model to which she was very attached. Grace loved to play it, but Eunice could not bear what to her ears was a string of ugly, discordant sounds.

With Grace out of the way at school, Eunice naturally came increasingly under the influence of her mother, on whom she had become entirely dependent. As a result, during the school holidays it would not be long before Eunice was herself pointing her finger at her twin sister. 'That's a very unchristian thing to do,' she would often remark. And then, just to remind Grace of the many binding rules of the Mann household, she would warn her twin: 'Mummy and Daddy wouldn't like that.' For Grace, it seemed that her best and oldest friend had ceased to exist. Once again she had been abandoned.

For years Grace had been leading a double life, as is the fate of many a child sent away to boarding school. But for Grace, the contrast was unusually extreme. At Clarendon she enjoyed close and enduring friendships, laughter and fun. Awaiting her at home were an abusing and controlling father, an invalid sister and a remote mother. However, when she was fifteen and a half she was forced back into this nightmare full time, for the Manns had decided that she should leave school. Based at home, she would attend the local technical college and sit the O-levels in English and French that she had failed at Clarendon.

Grace's return home ushered in a period of despondency. Not only did she find her studies dreary; what seemed to her even worse, she felt a victim of her parents' shortage of money. At a time when, like any teenager, she wanted to dress up and enjoy herself, the Reverend made it abundantly clear that she would have to make do with her school uniform, comprising a shapeless dress, a V-necked sweater, striped socks and distinctly unflattering shoes. Again and again she was reminded that she was lucky to have as much as she did, given the strain that Eunice's condition placed on the family purse. In time Grace acknowledged the dilemma, and realized that there was no point in complaining.

Throughout this period she struggled to maintain the optimism she had known at Clarendon. But whereas at school she had been buoyed up by constant companionship, now she retreated into daydreams to lift her spirits. Sitting alone in church, she would imagine a life in which she was free of the sexual obligations imposed on her by a domineering father, free of his rages, free of the petty restrictions in which he sought to ensnare her.

For the Reverend Mann was as determined as ever to have his daughter all to himself. In recent years he had braced himself for the day when he would have to allow Grace out into the world. How, he had often wondered, would he be able to isolate and control her when her school-days were over? Although it entailed a degree of exposure to the wider world, the technical college was a necessary step if Grace was to make something of herself. At least, he could comfort himself, the clothes she wore to class were hardly calculated to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

However, as soon as Grace's year at the college was over, the Reverend's possessiveness raised its head once more. After some thought he decided that the answer lay in the Girl Crusaders Union. Here was a Christian organization from which the male of the species was wholly barred; where only women, of varying ages, were to be found working diligently side by side. The Reverend used his influence to ensure that his daughter was appointed a junior office clerk, with a number of minor duties to perform. It was an ideal solution, he felt. But what about when the working day ended?

Ironically, it was indeed after office hours that Grace, now eighteen, fell in love for the first time. She had been aware for some time that young men had begun to notice her, but she had always turned her head away, remembering the lessons her father had drummed into her for so many years. Inside, though, she was quietly rebelling, planning her escape when the right person came along. He might not have been able to point to the most exciting of careers, but David Bond, a bank clerk from Thornton Heath, south London, and an active member of the Reverend Mann's own congregation, was such a young man, stirring feelings in Grace that she had never felt before.

Grace knew that any attempt to develop a friendship with David would meet with her father's strenuous opposition. Nevertheless, desperately keen to have the freedoms enjoyed by other girls of her age, she calculated that if she granted her father more sexual favours he might relax his veto. Eventually she was allowed to go on a date with David, but the plan backfired, for after giving his consent the Reverend became even more obsessed with his daughter and redoubled his efforts to thwart the relationship.

'He's just not the sort of person I want you to be involved with, Grace,' he said, plainly in no mood to argue. 'You can do far better than that,' he added, secretly hoping that he would not have to vet an alternative.

But her father's insistence was to no avail, because for the first time in her life Grace began to dare to defy his orders, by arranging a number of clandestine meetings with her new and ardent admirer. Tracking her every move, the Reverend did not take long to find out, and made no effort to conceal his wrath. Yet, sensing his daughter's determination, he indicated his willingness to adopt a different attitude. She could go out with her young man, but on certain conditions. So restrictive were these that the Reverend felt confident that the relationship would soon wither on the vine. Most importantly, Grace had to be home by 9.30 p.m., with the result that the young couple were scarcely able to enjoy an evening together.

In truth, the minister was as fascinated by this blossoming romance as he was horrified by it. He soon found himself unable to resist asking exactly how far the liaison had progressed. 'Has he kissed you yet?' he asked over dinner one evening, doing his best to make it sound like a casual enquiry. For if there had been any kissing, what other tokens of affection might the couple have exchanged? And what potentially damaging information might his daughter have confided to the young man? It was desperately important to find out. On this occasion the Reverend found out nothing incriminating at all - not even if Grace had received an innocent peck on the cheek - for Irene at once upbraided him for asking, thereby sparing her daughter the embarrassment of having to answer and frustrating her husband still further.

Bent on discomforting Grace's suitor in any way he could, one day the Reverend, on seeing the couple walking arm in arm in the street, went as far as to shout out: 'Young man, your arm!'