The Banker's Niece 30: Winter

An icy blast hits Jane as she gets out of her car in the carpark behind Courtney Manor. She shivers and zips up her red knee-length down-filled coat. As she crosses the cobbled stable yard, white specks skim through the air in front of her. Grey clouds bloom on the horizon, so dense they look like paint put on with a trowel.
    The coat is new and having its first outing, like the pink velvet t-shirt she wore two days ago at the party on Saturday. (Oh dear. The party.) Because the coat was new, she was nervous about wearing it, but for once, she thinks, she might have judged the Devon weather correctly. This is winter at last and the coat is perfect.

    It’s the only thing that is right however.

    Over the last ten days she’s spent precisely one day at work, and that was five days ago. For the rest of the time she’s been semi-comatose in bed nursing her head and her guts. Or disgracing herself in front of her colleagues in one way or another.

    And now, as she opens the back door of Courtney Press and is greeted by the familiar gust of warm, slightly stale air, she has the sense that she’s in the wrong reality. Her feet are touching the ground but her mind is elsewhere. Something inside her has come untethered. She doesn’t want to be here at all.

   

‘I’ve a treat for one of you two this morning,’ says Henry.

    Sam makes a face, and in spite of herself Jane wants to giggle.
    Neither Sam nor Henry has made any mention of the party and she hopes that they at least didn't notice anything. She does still have to talk to Lauren however - who of course noticed everything - and that's something she's not looking forward to.    
    Sam is looking effortlessly cool as ever in a baggy emerald-green jumper with frayed cuffs. Behind her the billowing curves of Dartmoor are lost in whiteness. Is it cloud or snow? The hairs on Jane’s arms prickle. She thinks again of Mole and the Wild Wood*.

    ‘Colin Fletcher –’ continues Henry.

    Sam groans.

    ‘Colin Fletcher’, repeats Henry, ‘is coming down today to “talk money” and he wants to take one of you two “lovely ladies”, as he puts it, out to lunch.’

    ‘Jane,’ says Sam.

    ‘Sam,’ says Jane.

    ‘Jane, I think, given the success of Spiders,’ says Henry, tapping his pen. It's his only sign of annoyance this morning - so far. ‘We need to capitalise on that. See what other “non-fiction” ideas he has.’

    What is it about Colin that makes Henry talk in inverted commas? Perhaps he doesn’t like the man either. That makes three of them then.

    ‘No,’ says Jane.

    ‘No what?’ says Henry.

    ‘No, I won’t go to lunch with Colin Fletcher,’ says Jane.

On the scale of things that happen to women, or even on the scale of things that have happened to her, it doesn’t come anywhere near the top, so it surprised her at the time how upset she was  and how long it took her to recover, and it surprises her now that she’s still affected.

    She and Colin had been to The Bell in Dulverton, ostensibly to ‘throw a few ideas around’ (Henry’s words) about future projects. In reality, Colin spent the whole lunch complaining to Jane about his love life.

    On the way back, a mile or so from Courtney Manor, he pulled into a track leading to some woodland. Then, while Jane was still trying to work out what was going on, he grabbed her chest with one hand and stuck his tongue down her throat.

    Gagging on the stench of beer and sweat, she somehow managed to unclip her seatbelt, open the passenger door and fall out of the car. She scrabbled away as fast as she could, got to her feet and ran, thanking God that she was a trousers and boots sort of woman, not a high heels and tight skirt one.

    Colin accelerated after her in his car, threw her bag out of the window and shouted, ‘Bitch. I thought you’d be grateful.’

    Back at the office Lauren helped her clean herself up and tried to persuade her to go to the police.

    ‘And tell them what?’ asked Jane. ‘Nothing much actually happened.’

    ‘They might have a file on him,’ said Lauren. ‘His behaviour might escalate.’

    Jane suspected she was right, but she couldn’t do it. She blamed herself for letting Colin drone on at lunchtime and giving him false expectations. She couldn’t face having her own morals put under scrutiny. She couldn’t face talking about the incident and having to remember it again and again in detail. She wasn’t even sure there had been an incident. Wasn’t it just part and parcel of women’s life?

    So, except for Lauren, she didn’t tell anyone.

‘Whyever not?’ says Henry.

    ‘He smells,’ says Jane.

    Sam sniggers.

    Henry’s head snaps up and he looks at Jane for the first time that morning. She doesn’t meet his eye.

    ‘He’s got a goatee,’ she continues, gaining momentum. ‘His teeth are yellow, he’s got stains on his trousers –’

    ‘Typical author then,’ says Sam.

    ‘Jane,’ barks Henry. ‘I always thought you were a professional. You can’t let personal feelings –’

    ‘And he assaulted me last time we went out together,’ she says.

    ‘Assaulted you?’ says Henry.

    Something unfamiliar rumbles in her chest.

    ‘Yes me,’ she retorts.

    ‘Whyever didn’t you say something at the time?’ says Henry.

    The rumble in her chest is making her breathe more heavily. She has to speak in short bursts.

    ‘Because I thought you wouldn’t believe me. Because I thought you’d take his part. Because I didn’t want to antagonise him. Because I knew he made a lot of money for the company. Because I was embarrassed. Because I’d only just started working here. Because I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

    She can hear her voice becoming shriller. If she had the time, she’d copy Maggie Thatcher and practise lowering her voice to make it sound male and authoritative. But she doesn’t and this will have to do for the moment.

    ‘Well if that’s the only problem, you take your car this time,’ says Henry.

    ‘Henry!’ shouts Sam. ‘You can’t say that.’

    ‘No, it’s not the only problem,’ says Jane, standing up. The rumble inside her has turned into a roar. She doesn’t care what her voice sounds like any more. ‘I’ve had enough of being an editor. I’m fed up with massaging authors’ egos. I’m fed up with writing other people’s books for them and them getting all the credit. I’m fed up with other people’s books. I’m fed up with being grown-up and sensible and well behaved. I’m fed up with everything. I’m off. Goodbye.’

    She gives the door of Henry’s office a good slam behind her. At least she can do that properly.

She slews down Henry’s drive, which is already powdered white. At the end she pauses. Left takes her south and home. Right takes her north, towards Exmoor and the unknown. She turns right. Moly would be proud of her*.

    She zooms over crossroads, not bothering to look at the signs. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She doesn’t want to know. She just wants to get away.

    Each road is steeper and narrower than the last. She drives in a daze, whisking past farms and hamlets, trundling over tiny stone bridges, creeping through forests as dark as night. The landscape is nothing like the Devon she knows. She feels as if she's gone back in time, to an era when humans had barely started to put their mark on nature. 
    Sleet turns to snow. The wipers pile the snow into drifts that collect at the bottom of the windscreen. Clio's engine races as she loses her grip on the roads.
    They rattle over a cattle grid and suddenly there are no features at all. Just naked hills all the way to the horizon. A white ocean. For a moment she can't breathe.

    They swoop through the white ocean as snow falls so thickly she can hardly see ahead. Clio slides from side to side, up and down. Wind catches the car and tries to turn it over.
    Jane's stomach hollows. Where is she? What has she done? Should she stop or should she go on?

    The road dips abruptly. Jane knows this only because first she feels weightless and then she’s thrown against the steering wheel. She tries to brake but Clio presses on, scrambling over a series of bumps, and Jane has the impression they’re not on a road at all.

    A wall of whiteness at least as tall as the car rears up in front of them and Clio heads for it as if it were a waterhole and she a wildebeest dying of thirst.

     They plunge into the whiteness and judder to a halt. The engine cuts out. There's total silence. A blue light fills the car.

    Jane turns the ignition off and then on. Clio gives a polite hiccup. Jane jiggles around in her seat trying to shake the car in case something has come loose, waits a few moments for Clio to catch her breath, then tries again. There's not even a hiccup this time.

    She pulls the door lever and leans against the door. With a crystalline scrunch, it moves quarter of a centimetre. She tries the passenger door and that doesn’t move at all. She presses the button that opens the boot and it clicks instead of burping as it usually does. She turns round to give the tailgate a push. It doesn't budge.
    She can't start the car and she can't get out.

    She takes her phone out of her bag. There's no signal.

    She thinks of people stuck in avalanches. Don’t they have to stick their ski poles out in order to get some air? 
    She can't open a window without the ignition but she could try and open her door again or even smash some glass, but then she might be inundated with snow and/or freeze to death.

    Which would be worse, she wonders. Dying of suffocation or dying of cold?
    And does she really care?
    She slumps forward, rests her head on the steering wheel and closes her eyes.

    

* From The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

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The Banker's Niece 29: New Year's Day

New Year’s Day 1980

Rick burst into the flat, bringing with him a gust of frigid air. The back of  Jane's neck tightened as it did before one of her ‘heads’.

    Quickly she turned the gas off and moved the pan of mince to the back of the cooker where flailing arms would be less likely to knock it (whether accidentally or deliberately). She pushed the tea-towel with its concealed knife to the back of the worktop where it would be less conspicuous, just in case Rick suddenly decided he needed a tea-towel. (Unlikely, but you never knew.)

    ‘It’s buggered,’ he said, throwing what looked like the Mini’s cassette player on to the table.

    ‘Oh dear,’ said Jane staying by the cooker at least twelve feet away from Rick and keeping her voice as neutral as possible. She had to stop herself becoming angry too. She had to be invisible. ‘What happened?’

    ‘I buggered it,’ he said. ‘All by myself.’

    ‘Oh dear,’ said Jane again.

    This was bad. Rick never lost his temper when dealing with the inanimate, not even recently. Repairs were his trade. He took pride in them. He cared for machines as if they were alive. He mourned them when they died. He could work for hours with the tiniest of components, picking them up between his nails when his fingers were too clumsy. He pored over circuit diagrams as if they were paintings by Old Masters.

    He advanced towards the fridge and Jane tried to stop herself taking a step backwards. Not that there was much point stepping backwards, unless she could pass through walls.

    He wrenched open the fridge and hauled out a bottle of lager, then rummaged in a drawer for the opener.

    Leaving cap and opener on the worktop, he threw himself on to the sofa and switched on the television.

    He used to offer to pour her something when getting a drink for himself. He used to clear up after himself. He used to ask if she minded the television being on.

    Murder, war and lying politicians filled the air. Jane wanted to block her ears. She hated the News. As if it wasn’t difficult enough keeping one’s own life together. But she’d long since given up objecting.

    ‘I could do you some mince mixture,’ she said brightly. ‘Are you hungry?’

    Rick grunted.

    Jane ladled some food into two bowls and took them over to the coffee table with two spoons. The meal needed carbohydrate, but she didn’t think she was capable at that moment of sorting any out.

    Rick ignored the bowl and kept his eyes on the television. Jane sat at the far end of the sofa and tried not to look at him.

    She picked up one of the bowls and lifted a spoonful of mixture. Then she stopped with the spoon halfway to her mouth. She knew that if she tried to swallow anything she would choke.

    Of the last eleven days, they’d spent nine alone together and not one moment had worked out right. Something had to change. The thought of a whole new year the same was unendurable.

    ‘You don’t love me any more,’ she said.

    It wasn’t what she intended to say - she didn’t know what she intended to say – but it was what came out.

    She’d said something similar before many times but it had always been a sort of game, a prelude to protestations from Rick and to making up, or – more likely these days - to one of those arguments when whatever either of them said only made matters worse and they went down and down until they could have killed each other but by some miracle didn’t.

    This time, it wasn’t provocative. It was a question phrased as a statement so as to give Rick the chance to answer or not as he chose and, if he did answer it, to do so truthfully. She could hear it in her voice.

    Rick switched the television off and turned to look at her and it was like seeing the face of some god of the underworld with deep dark eyes full of ancient pain.

    ‘There’s someone else isn’t there,’ she said.

    As soon as she spoke, she knew she was stating a fact.

    And now that she’d said those words everything over the last year made sense.

    Rick’s unexplained absences. His half-truths. The feeling she had every time he looked at her that she was being compared, that there was another woman standing next to her. Band conversations she’d overheard. Dougie’s strange looks. Rick’s niceness every time she came back from weekends with her parents, when Rick didn’t do ‘nice’. The current disaster that was their relationship.

    She’d never admitted it to herself before. She’d always told herself that Rick wasn’t like that. That such things didn’t happen to her.

    But now they had.

    He nodded.

    ‘Is it . . . is it . . . Chris?’ she said, trying to remember the name of the postgraduate who’d transformed Rick’s working life.

    He nodded again.

    ‘And have you . . . ?

    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

    In an instant, she saw everything. Her collapse under the onslaught of her parents’ letters. Her backing out of marriage. Her persuading Rick that they could live together instead – that it wasn’t so different really.

    Of course it was different. It was different in every way. For them.

    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve failed you. I’ll go.’

She made her way to the bedroom, holding on to the walls, telling herself she had to pack, repeating the instruction to herself like a mantra.

    In the bedroom, the cupboard door stuck, as it always did. Even with everything that had been happening, Rick always arrived to help her.

    Only this time, he wasn’t there.

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The Banker's Niece 28: Puddleglum

Summer 1978

‘I blame myself,’ cried Jane, massaging her forehead.

    ‘Why?’ said three voices at once.

    Jane was sitting at the kitchen table in Wendy's cottage with Rick, Wendy and Van. The back door was open and the sounds of an August evening floated in – chatter from the pub garden, lawnmowers, a dog barking in the distance.

    Van had arrived earlier with two bottles of cheap white wine and somehow the four of them had ended up drinking it together and chatting and Jane had brought down the letters from her parents and Wendy and Van had read them.

    Jane took a deep breath. ‘Well, when I first wrote and told my parents about Rick, I said, “he’s asked me to marry him and I told him he was unsuitable”.’

    ‘Why on earth did you say that?’ asked Van.

    Van was long and droopy and Jane kept wanting to call him Puddleglum*.

    ‘Because it was what happened,’ she said.

    ‘Sort of,’ said Rick.

    ‘It was a lament,’ she continued. ‘What I meant was, “Of course we have to marry, but I wish you weren’t so unsuitable – by my family’s standards”.’

    ‘You foresaw trouble,’ said Van/Puddleglum.

    ‘Oh yes,’ said Jane.

    ‘But why did you tell your parents that?’ asked Wendy.

    Jane sighed. ‘I wanted to warn them and I thought I’d make the problem into a bit of a joke.’

    ‘How so?’ asked Van.

    ‘I put an exclamation mark at the end of the sentence in my letter.’

    The other three laughed and Jane ran her fingers through her hair. ‘And I suppose also I was unsure myself and I wanted their reassurance.’

    ‘Fatal mistake,’ said Van. ‘You admitted weakness.’

    ‘I see that now,’ she said.

    ‘You got everybody off on the wrong foot, Rick included,’ said Wendy severely.

    She had long hair hennaed orange. It glowed like fire in the evening light.

    ‘Yeah,’ said Jane, wanting to cry.

    ‘No she didn’t,’ said Rick. ‘I would have hated them anyway.’

    Wendy gave a snort of laughter.

    ‘And your father would still have been a pompous prick and your mother a snob,’ said Van.

    Just like Puddleglum. Underneath that lugubrious exterior, a heart of gold.

    ‘But what do we do now?’ wailed Jane.

    ‘Do?’ exclaimed Puddleglum. ‘You carry on of course.’

‘D’you think your father’s read your mother’s letters?’ asked Rick later in the evening as they lay on their mattress sweating in the heat.

    The boxroom had one tiny casement window which they’d pushed open as far as it would go but there was no through-draught as they had to keep the door shut for privacy. Their clothes were piled on the landing outside but they dressed in the morning dancing around on the mattress. It was like living on a small boat.

    ‘I shouldn’t think so. I can’t see him approving of them,’ said Jane. ‘Why d’you ask?’

    ‘I just thought that, if he had, he might understand a bit better why I haven’t made more of an effort to get to know them.’

    ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said.

    ‘No, I s’pose not,’ he said. ‘The whole basis of the visit was wrong.’

    ‘Anyway,’ said Jane, ‘his letters are just as horrible as hers but in a different way.’

    ‘Yeah,’ he yawned. ‘Shall we go somewhere nice tomorrow, seeing as we’ve both got the day off?’ he said.

    ‘That would be lovely,’ she said, nestling against him.

    If she pretended to be OK, maybe she’d be OK.

  

‘Two more billets-doux have arrived,’ said Rick next morning, dropping the envelopes on to the sheet and climbing over Jane with two mugs of tea. ‘Shall we burn them?’

    ‘What if they say they’re coming to the wedding?’ said Jane.

    ‘Good point,’ said Rick. ‘We might want to write back and tell them they’re not welcome.’

    Jane gave a half-hearted laugh.

    ‘Who’s going to read them first?’ asked Rick.

    ‘One each?’ said Jane.

    ‘OK,’ said Rick

    She grabbed the blue one. Her mother’s letters hurt most at the time but they were easier to ignore than her father’s.

My dear Jane

I shan’t come to the wedding. It does not mean that I shan’t be thinking of you – just that I would not be able to bear to be there. There is no point being a skeleton at the feast.

    What worries me most about your marriage is the general lowering of all your standards. I don’t mean material things – they don’t matter so much when you are young. It’s the mental attitude, the way of thinking and talking and behaving. Rick has such a naïve, prejudiced, cliché-ridden approach to life, so uneducated in every sense. I can’t believe that this will satisfy you for long. At the least, when he is your husband, perhaps you can teach him some manners. They may not seem very important, but they do make for a more pleasant existence. And the way you behave is how other people see you.

    I’m writing to you now, but I shall hide my feelings in the future and all will be sweetness and light! You need not be afraid to come to see us. It would be very sad if we lost touch – families are important. As you get older you will realise this.

    I’m not sending you conventional phrases of good wishes. They would stick in my throat.

    Love Mummy

She was almost immune by now. Almost, but not quite.

    ‘Hmm,’ said Rick, perusing her father’s letter. ‘Tricky.’

    They swapped sheets of paper.

    Jane hardly recognised her father’s handwriting. Instead of sloping forwards as it usually did it sloped backwards. It was much bigger than usual. It was written in heavy pen.

My dear daughter

You have told me your decision and I am, of course, very sad. It is so far from the happy family occasion it should be but the abruptness of your actions have obviously made that inevitable.

    What is a major worry is the thought that you may be turning your back or opting out of many of the standards to which we did our best to bring you up. I don’t think we are old-fashioned. That is an accusation that the younger generation always make to the older when they want to do something without approval.

    If friendships wither it is not always the friend’s fault. It is even odds that it is caused by oneself. It is not clever nor tolerant not to respect and consider other people’s point of view. It is even odds that they are more right than you.

    Nor is it hypocrisy to observe the usual courtesies and respect the social graces and behaviour of the company you are in at any time. It is kindness and thoughtfulness. Many of the most courteous and well-mannered people are some of the poorest and their company some of the most delightful.

    Bigotry is the belief that you are always right. Honesty is to say what you think even if you accept that you may be wrong.

    Selfishness and intolerance are the bane of the world. Kindness and good manners the blessings.

    Sorry to be a pompous bore.

    With love Daddy

‘Cliché-ridden,’ exclaimed Rick, putting down her mother’s letter.

    ‘I don’t understand,’ said Jane, staring at her father’s letter. ‘Is he talking about us?’

    Her head whirled. She felt sick. Her father sounded broken. She’d never heard him speak like that before. Every word was a knife to her breast.

    How did she manage to be such a disappointment to her parents? She’d always tried so hard to please them. What had she done wrong?

    Every letter from them tore her apart. Each time it was harder to put herself back together. This time she didn’t know if she could manage it.

    She didn’t know what the truth was any more. She didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know who was right, her or her parents.

    She didn’t even know if she still loved Rick. If she really loved him, why did she keep freezing? Why did she keep seeing him through her parents’ eyes?

    What was love anyway but a bottomless black hole?

    She had to end this pain now. She couldn’t bear it any longer.

    ‘I can’t go on,’ she said.

* A character in The Silver Chair by C S Lewis

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The Banker's Niece 27: The little house in the woods

Summer 1978

Jane hopped off the bus and wandered up the dirt track which led to Wendy’s cottage where she and Rick had been staying since the end of June. 

    As she left behind the Five Bells, the pub at the intersection of the track and the main road where she and Rick had spent many a happy evening, the throat-catching stench of deep-fat frying changed to the fragrance of the multitude of wildflowers that spilled out of the hedgerow like the froth on Rick’s lager. The buzz of bees replaced the roar of the traffic.
    The cottage may have been cramped, with her and Rick sleeping in a box-room the size of their mattress, and the atmosphere may have been strained given that Rick and Wendy had shared a one-night stand shortly after the sudden departure of Rick’s long-time girlfriend nearly a year ago now, but in Jane’s opinion its location on the edge of the city could not be faulted. It was a little piece of forgotten countryside. A little piece of paradise.

    Soon Wendy’s tiny thatched cottage appeared round a corner, peeping out of the trees like something from a fairy tale, and in spite of her aching legs Jane sped up.

The other advantage of Wendy’s cottage thought Jane as she settled on a blanket under an ancient apple tree, was its vast back garden now so overgrown that it was like a hayfield. She felt like a child again, hiding in the undergrowth.

    Thank goodness Wendy was out somewhere and she had the place to herself. She had tried to make friends with her, really she had, but so far without success.

    Take last week, for instance. Because Wendy was a student at the Art College and her clothes always looked right – unlike Jane’s which always looked wrong – Jane thought she might be interested to see the Laura Ashley wedding dress, so she’d put it on and gone downstairs to the kitchen to ask Wendy’s opinion. Wendy was boiling a tinned meat-pie for one in a saucepan, and she didn’t even look up.

    Luckily she’d recently acquired a boyfriend, Ivan, or Van as he liked to be known, so maybe the atmosphere would improve. They certainly seemed to be getting on well. Jane and Rick sometimes heard them at night through the walls of the cottage.

    She gulped from the pint glass of water and bit a chunk out of the cheese sandwich she’d brought out with her. A cloud of flies arrived to join her and she swatted them away. She stuck her legs out so that they could catch some sun.

    In some ways, this had been one of the best summers she’d ever had. After her finals, there was the wonderful thought that she didn’t ever need to attend an educational establishment again or sit through any more exams. Because she worked shifts at her waitressing job, she had time to be outside in the day. Sometimes she and Rick could even take days off from work and go to the sea together. And then of course, there was their wedding to look forward to, only two weeks away.

    Occasionally, now she had time to think, she remembered London and everything that had happened there but it all seemed a long way away, both in time and space, and she quickly forgot again. It didn’t do to dwell on it because it came between her and Rick. It made her freeze up and sometimes that could last for several days. Thankfully Rick was pretty patient.

    Another boon was Rick’s lovely parents, especially Peggy. Whenever Jane was at their house, she felt happy. She could be herself, whatever that was. Something inside her glowed, as it had when they went to see the vicar.

    As for her parents, it was over four months since she and Rick had visited them and they’d written such horrible letters, and they’d not said anything else whatsoever on the subject of her and Rick marrying, so maybe they were having a change of heart. In any case, now that she’d given them the good news about her finals (as well as the news about the wedding, of course), they had to be pleased. (They hadn't replied to that letter yet.)

    She hadn’t told them of her move however. That was another good thing about the summer.

    She polished off the sandwich and started attacking some plums. With her other hand she sorted through the post she’d found on the doormat when she arrived back.

    Two envelopes leapt out, a square blue one and a long brown one, both forwarded from her old house.

    For a second she couldn’t breathe. A bit of plum stuck in her throat. 

    Then she told herself not to be so silly. They were probably congratulating her on her results.

    But her hands were shaking as she ripped open the envelopes.

    First the blue one.

My dear Jane

Thank you for your letter. It was very depressing to hear that you are going to marry Rick in August but so be it. I think you are putting us all in rather an invidious position. Why this unseemly haste? Either you should have got married quietly without telling anyone beforehand or you should give everyone due warning. Don’t forget that we are all very fond of you and it is a big day. Have you considered all the rest of the family? I think this hole and corner business is most unsavoury. Unless you are pregnant, why do you have to rush it so?

    Apart from anything else it is a little unfair to Daddy who has already made all his travelling arrangements for the business trip which you should have known about.

    You are our oldest and first born and of course we want to be at your wedding, whoever you marry. We may not like Rick, but you have rather taken it for granted that we wouldn't - you said so before we even met him - and we’ve never had a chance to get to know him better and change our minds.

    Anyway this is my immediate reaction and I won’t write any more at the moment. If you feel like it, ring up and reverse the charges.
    Love

    Mummy
PS Ollie was thinking of coming to stay with you. I hope you're not going to let him down as well.

Then the brown one.

My dear Jane

As you have never said anything before I did not realise that you and Rick were thinking of marriage in August. If you had only asked for a talk we could easily have found time.  As it was I thought there was nothing precipitate, and am upset that Mummy should have been faced with this by herself and without warning last weekend when I was away.

    There is of course nothing we can do if you decide to go against our wishes except to convey our real sorrow at such estrangement. But if you are looking for our approval then I feel bound to say that, at this stage, I am unable to give you away. We hardly know Rick although we are aware that you come from different backgrounds. I do find him very difficult to talk to and while that is partly my fault he does not seem to be forthcoming in general conversation. Of course he is nervous but we cannot make a real judgement if he will not talk. About his home and family, interests, sport, holidays he’s had, school, training – in fact anything. He doesn’t necessarily have to talk to me but some initiative is essential if we are to get to know him.
    I don’t want to repeat all I’ve said in my previous letter but I do think that you yourself will not know your own mind if you stay at Exeter where obviously you will see Rick all the time and think of little else. If you get a job well away from Exeter, you and he would be welcome to see each other at weekends and hopefully here at home as often as you like. If you do this, and if your mind remains unchanged and we know more about Rick, we shall feel properly placed to be fair and reasonable. You must know our only concern is your long-term happiness. I also trust that Rick will appreciate all this, that he will be fair to you and not wish for hasty and irreversible action.

    With much love

    Daddy

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The Banker's Niece 26: The banker's niece

1974

Everything about London was grey, thought Jane as she walked to the underground station on a Monday morning - the people, the streets, the houses, the sky. She couldn’t remember when she last saw the sun, or a piece of greenery, or someone dressed in a bright colour. She’d hated that about London when she first arrived to work here, and she hated it now, two years later.

    No wonder she escaped most weekends and visited her parents in the country, even if she then had to endure her mother’s recital of everything that was wrong with Jane. Her hair was ‘unflattering’, ‘greasy, ‘straggly’. Her skin was ‘pasty’ or ‘spotty’. Her clothes were ‘ghastly’.

    This time she’d brought Jane’s father into it too. Apparently he ‘thought she was much too fat’. Jane was surprised he’d even noticed her but it made her sad that he was against her too. Even though he never said anything, she’d always imagined that he was on her side.

       

As usual, Kelvin and Alan were talking about sex when she arrived at the bank. The focus of their attention today was the Sex Maniac’s Diary that sat across the join between their two desks. Jane had never looked at it herself, not even in secret, but she thought it contained humorous cartoons of different sexual positions, and today’s was obviously a good one.

    She ignored the men – which was difficult as her desk butted on to the ends of theirs - and concentrated instead on putting her bag in the bottom drawer of her desk

    ‘Good weekend?’ asked Kelvin.

    ‘So-so,’ said Jane. ‘Went to see my parents. You?’

    Kelvin chortled and made a face at Alan, who gave one of his sardonic smiles in reply. Jane knew what that meant. Kelvin had been off with one of his girlfriends. As he’d explained to Jane, he and Sylvia had married young because their daughter was on the way and now they had to ‘make up for lost time’.

    ‘Sylvia as well?’ Jane had asked.

    ‘Oh yes,’ he’d replied.

    Alan was no better, although more reticent. It was Kelvin who’d told Jane that when Alan’s wife went away he made a point of sleeping with as many different women as possible. Jane wondered if Alan’s wife knew.

‘I might wander down to Companies House this morning and do some research,’ she announced at coffee time. (Thank goodness it wasn’t her job any more to make the coffee and take it round. It had been nerve-racking entering the dealing room and having thirty or so young men swivelling from their screens to look at her, not to mention the wolf-whistles and the ribald banter.) ‘Anything I can do for you two?’

    ‘Ooh yes,’ they said, scrabbling through mounds of papers.

    She’d commented once on the state of their desks and they’d roared with laughter.

    ‘We’re the creatives,’ said Kelvin. ‘We’re allowed –’

    ‘Supposed,’ interjected Alan.

    ‘- supposed to leave our desks untidy.’

    They did make a good double act, not least because of their appearance, Kelvin being short with long blond hair and Alan tall with short dark hair. Once she’d thought they were fun.

    Writing reports on businesses didn’t seem that creative to her but perhaps it was so in comparison to the rest of the jobs at the bank. And what did she know? She couldn’t even read a balance sheet. She disappeared to Companies House as often as possible simply so that she didn’t have to sit at her desk pretending to work. She might have been a Trainee Research Analyst, but no one was training her. Sometimes she even regretted not being a secretary any more. At least she was good (goodish) at that.

    She was almost certain that Kelvin had wangled her the job but, if so, why wasn’t he helping her more? Even if he’d done it in order to keep her near rather than to help her in her career, he was still going a strange way about it.

    ‘Cellars at lunchtime?’ called Kelvin as she left.

    ‘OK,’ she said.

    She didn’t know why he bothered to ask as they hardly ever didn’t go to the wine bar. Alan used to come too but he stopped a few months ago. He was obviously more sensitive than she gave him credit for.

   

It started one day when she was standing at the photocopier and Kelvin slid up behind her and put his arm round her waist.

    ‘When are you coming to Paris with me?’ he asked.

    ‘Who’s paying?’ she said, trying to give a jokey answer to what she thought was run-of-the-mill flirting. God knows, she had enough of it to deal with. It wasn’t a very good joke but it was the best she could do at short notice.

    ‘Me of course,’ said Kelvin.

    And then she knew he was serious.

    Kelvin soon guessed she’d never slept with anyone before. He called her ‘vierge’, which sounded a lot less embarrassing than the English equivalent. And he never pushed her, unlike most men. But perhaps he didn’t need to, what with all his other opportunities.

    They had nice times together. They went to plays and concerts and exhibitions. They discussed books and films. He really cared about art, like she did, and like most of her family and other friends didn’t. For them it was entertainment, it was Culture. They consumed it because it was fashionable.

    The fact that he was nine years older than her gave him a certain glamour. He knew things she didn’t. He was worldly.

    And something happened to her when he touched her.

    But she couldn’t forget that he was married and that what she was doing was sinful. And sometimes she noticed cruel lines running from his nose down either side of his mouth.

At the Cellars she knocked her glass and spilt some wine over Kelvin's trousers.
    He leapt up, brushing the liquid off.
    'You stupid cow,' he shouted. 'Now I'll have to get these cleaned.'
    It was the first time she'd ever heard a man speak to a woman like that.

‘D’you know what we three have in common?’ said Kelvin mid-afternoon, looking up from his reference books.

    ‘Do we have anything in common?’ said Alan.

    ‘We’re all class rebels,’ announced Kelvin.

    That was a new idea.

    The two men seldom talked about their families. All she knew was that Kelvin came from near Newcastle and Alan from Leeds and that both had been to university. They hadn’t said which ones but Alan had let slip once that when he was a student he was a communist. She presumed he wasn’t one now. How could he be and still work at the bank?

    By contrast, Kelvin wanted to know everything about Jane’s background and was always offering to accompany her to the parties of rich friends and relatives. She didn’t often let him – there was something about his eagerness she didn’t like - but whenever he did he took great delight afterwards in unpicking the hosts’ taste or lack of.

    Were they rebels, or simply ambitious?

    Was she a rebel, or simply a misfit?

    She went back to her reading. She was trawling through the satirical magazine Private Eye for gossip related to their work. It was the only part of the job she could do.

    ‘Hey,’ she said, as a name jumped out. ‘That’s my uncle.’

    She showed Kelvin and Alan the article. Her uncle was making lots of money ‘asset-stripping’, which as far as she could gather meant buying up ailing companies and selling off the profitable bits. Private Eye was saying something rude about him.

    As one, Kelvin and Alan burst out singing.

    Bankers’ nieces seek perfection

    Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring.

She recognised the lines as coming from a song by Bob Dylan, one of Kelvin’s favourite musicians. She liked Dylan too, but not this in relation to her. The backgrounds of Kelvin and Alan didn’t matter to her so why should hers matter to them? She was Jane, not some ‘banker’s niece’. She was hurt. She’d thought they were friends and equals.

    Or perhaps she was suffering from a deficit of humour.

Nor did she ever feel safe, she realised, as she walked back from the Underground in the evening, remembering the man standing next to her on the train who’d pressed himself against her slightly too much, and thinking of the men who tailed her at night and all the flashers and gropers she’d had to contend with over the months. She now understood Mr Turner's poem.
    Every day she wanted to leave, but she didn’t know where to go, what to do instead. She felt as if she’d exhausted all possibilities. She’d failed at everything: her education, her career, her looks, her relationships.

    Sometimes she was tempted to run to the other side of the world, and join Fee in New Zealand.

     

Kelvin called it love and wrote her poetry. To her it was more like being lost in a mire with every step taking her deeper into danger.
    On his twenty-eighth birthday Kelvin took her to a new Thai restaurant, the first in London. They sat alone in the stark red and black interior.

    ‘You’ll never sleep with me, will you,’ he said.

    It sounded like a challenge – or an ultimatum – and she realised that she just wanted it all to be over.

    Back at her house – so empty now without Fee – they lay on her bed as they had so many times before, but this time she let herself go.

    She understood straight away that she knew nothing. She hadn’t expected it to hurt so much, and she couldn’t believe that someone would make so much effort just for her. She wondered where the pleasure came in.

    Afterwards he looked down at her with a smirk and said, ‘How does it feel to join the ranks of the great unwashed?’ 

    A black shutter slammed down on her life. She’d been conned. This was her latest and worst mistake. It was something she could never undo.

    He leapt off the bed and started dressing.

    ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

    ‘Home, of course,’ he said.

    When he was gone she sat in the bath watching her blood seep into the water.

    Back in her room she played over and over the Nina Simone record that Fee had left behind for her. ‘Ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas, ne me quitte pas.’ She was hurtling down a bottomless black hole and only the music stopped her disappearing for ever.

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