Tainted tree, p.14
Tainted Tree, page 14
‘But why didn’t he get in touch with the Russells? My parents? I could have come over. I could have met him.’
‘The solicitor wrote to them for him, but the letters came back marked “Not known”. You’re forgetting—these papers he got—they was more than twenty years old.’
‘But if he knew Adrienne was dead, why didn’t he change the will? And why did he leave it saying “whether or not she is my blood relation” or whatever it said? What was the point of all that?’
‘I don’t know what he did about the will, Miss Addie. But maybe he didn’t have the heart to change it. Sometimes, I think he only survived those few years, living in the past and day-dreaming; reading the letters from Adrienne, imagining how she might have been, what his little granddaughter might be like—and talking to us about the old times with Lillian, out in the Middle East and India.’
‘Mr Grainger—would you mind if I call you Bill?’
‘I’d be pleased if you would, Miss Addie.’
‘Bill, what you’ve told me today is so important to me. I’m adopted, and I have no blood relations at all. Do you really think I could be James’s granddaughter?’
‘Well, in looks, I can’t say you’re much like him. Your eyes are a different colour, and your hair, Miss Addie. And as for the rest, well when I’ve known you a bit longer, I’ll be able to make a judgement.’
‘I hope I measure up,’ said Addie, standing up, and taking her cup to the sink. ‘Bill, I hope you can find those letters pretty quickly. I really want to be sure you’ve got it right.’
Bill Grainger pushed back his chair and padded to the kitchen door. ‘I’d like to finish the roses, if you don’t mind, Miss Addie.’ Balancing on one foot, he started struggling into his boots. ‘If I don’t spray them today, we’ll have them covered with greenfly, before you can say “knife”. I’ll go home for my dinner, and I’ll bring them back with me later. If that’s all right with you.’
‘That will be fine, Bill,’ said Addie, resigned to wait a little longer for the truth.
And when she sat down later at James Buckley’s desk, with the sunbeams from the window making patterns on the deep mahogany, she was quite calm. There were, in fact, just three letters from Dorothy, one of them minus its envelope, and a locked diary with no key. Addie, automatically put the letters in date order, noticing that neither of the two remaining envelopes had been postmarked, and turned to the first.
14th July 1944
My dearest, she read.
I have written this letter over and over again in my mind. And now on paper. Will it get to you? Are you alive or dead? I have no way of knowing, and no-one to blame but myself. In my last letter, I dismissed you. After all we had meant to each other, I sent you away to war without a loving word. But there was so much love in my heart.
You must have guessed why I did it. When I wrote and told you of the birth of my daughter, Adrienne, you must have wondered if she could be your child. Now I want to tell you what I couldn’t bring myself to say before. Yes. Adrienne is your daughter. You knew, from what I had told you, how humiliated I was by my own illegitimacy. And you must believe me when I say that I only wanted to protect her from that stigma.
Our baby is now over a year old. She is lively and intelligent with beautiful blue eyes—your eyes. At first, I told Rodney that most babies are blue-eyed at birth, though he thought it strange, since both he and I are brown-eyed.
I had to lie about the date she was expected, and I begged Dr Charlton to back me up. He—dear, good man—knowing something of my previous troubles, he agreed. There were occasions—you will remember…that allowed Rodney to believe he was her father. In his mind, those assaults became moments of passion, and he was very proud of himself and of Adrienne. For a while he became almost genial. I thought I could live with him.
Suddenly the situation changed, and this is why I am writing now. He became suspicious. Then, he became once more the tyrant I had come to know in the first years of my marriage—alternately bullying and tormenting me and ludicrously begging my forgiveness, when his appetite was sated. During one of these nightmares, he beat the truth out of me.
You can imagine how I feel. If you can send me any word that we can eventually be together, I will leave him. I have no money, no means. I am desperate. For Adrienne’s sake and for the sake of the love we shared, please, my darling, send me some word, or means of escape.
Your loving Dorothy
Addie folded up the letter, and looked straight ahead. I should be feeling triumphant, she thought, knowing the truth at last, but all I can feel is anger and pain. She re-read Dorothy’s plea for help.
‘Desperate,’ she repeated aloud, ‘and how much more desperate, when he didn’t reply. What must she have felt then?’
She took a deep breath and started the second letter.
Dated January 1946, the restrained excitement in the words was obvious.
Oh my darling,
I hardly dared to hope that I would hear from you. When I heard the news of the end of the war, first in Europe then in Japan, I can’t tell you how many times I prayed that you were safe. But your Christmas present to Adrienne gives no indication that you received my last letter, or that you know the truth—that she is your daughter.
She is over two now, my little one, and she loved the toy you sent. We have so few things in the shops for children. Life is still as austere as it was during the worst part of the war.
I can’t remember what I said in that letter. All I can say is that my life is not happy, and when I think of the brief period of happiness I shared with you, living with Rodney seems even more of a prison.
If I don’t hear from you, I will, of course, carry on living with him. I have no choice. He knows that she is not his child and he makes me pay for it. He humiliates me in every way he knows how, both physically and mentally. But he has made me a promise. That no-one will know, including Adrienne herself, that she is illegitimate.
When I made up my mind to stay with him, I did it for her sake, I promise you. My darling, forgive me, but I couldn’t be sure you would survive. He could give us security, and Adrienne would not be subjected to the shame that I experienced.
But now you are safe, I long to be with you. Please say you want me too.
My hopes and dreams for the future go with this letter.
Your ever-loving Dorothy
Addie sat, sombre, picturing the situation. James, still caring for Dorothy after all this time, sending presents to his godchild, wondering as he did so, if she was really his daughter. Longing for some confirmation of Dorothy’s love, but receiving only formal thank you notes, first from Dorothy then from Adrienne herself. And all the while, Rodney was opening the notes and extracting anything personal from them, before sending them off. Whilst Dorothy waited for the intimate reply that never came. How many more of these letters could there be? Perhaps no more. Dorothy had her pride. She surely would not have begged a third time for James to rescue her. She would have accepted the presents unaccompanied by any intimate note, as a sign that James was himself not prepared to be involved in the scandal of a divorce case; that he perhaps did not want to jeopardise his career in the army. How painful it must have been for Dorothy to receive the gifts on Adrienne’s behalf, with no accompanying message for her alone.
Addie sighed deeply and picked up the third letter.
28th February 1965
My dearest James,
I have to tell you that our daughter, Adrienne, is dead. You have never indicated that you wanted to accept Adrienne as your daughter, but I feel you would want to know, just the same, that she died in America, having prematurely given birth to an illegitimate child, your granddaughter. I have enclosed the address of the kind people who are at present looking after her.
In the circumstances in which I live, there is no possibility of my taking on this child, who may or may not survive. I cannot bring the child to this household, and I have no will or strength to do anything else. I have only recently heard terrible rumours about my husband. He has frequently demonstrated his sadistic nature to me, but if I had known earlier of the way he has treated some young boys of the school, I could not have stayed with him. As it is, I have no will to carry on. The prospect of life with him, and without the joy which Adrienne brought me is unbearable. There is nothing to live for. Perhaps in some other place, I will find my daughter again.
I want you to know, I don’t condemn you. The war changes people, and you were always very kind to Adrienne. She often talked of you and your wife Lillian, and I was glad that you, at least, found happiness. Rodney kept his promise and treated Adrienne as a daughter. She went to good schools, enjoyed life, and was vivacious and spirited. She was a permanent reminder of you, as if I needed one. Nothing could take away my memories; they were my means of escape.
Dorothy Heron
Addie felt the tears run freely down her cheeks. What a waste of a life. Dorothy could have been so happy with James. She sat silently at the desk, her hands over her eyes, sharing with her dead grandfather all the emotions of bitterness and regret that he must have felt when the truth was eventually revealed to him.
Finally, when the sun had faded from the sky, and the room was beginning to darken, she wiped her eyes, and went to the telephone.
‘Sarah. James Buckley was my grandfather.’
Part 2
Chapter 15: New Friends
4th July 1991
‘You should have come over last night, Addie,’ Sarah said. ‘Why be on your own and miserable? Don’t you think so, Mum?’
Helen turned from the worktop, where she had been arranging a plate of biscuits. ‘I can understand that Addie might have wanted to be alone for a bit,’ she said.
She put the plate on the kitchen table and sat down.
Addie took a biscuit, and munched as she talked. ‘I know we knew all about Dorothy, but seeing it confirmed in her own hand—I guess I felt really sad—for both of them—Dorothy and James. I couldn’t feel cheerful. I needed to mourn for them.’
‘And how do you feel now, Addie?’ Helen asked, picking up her mug of coffee. ‘After all, nothing has changed. It’s only a matter of how you yourself adjust to it.’
‘I’m always going to feel sad for them. But I went through all the “if onlys” last night. If Rodney’s little helpers—and I guess there must have been more than one between 1943 and 1966—if they’d been brave enough to post the letters without him seeing them; if Dorothy had gone away with James in the first place; if she hadn’t married Rodney. The list is endless, and what I come back to is this. If things had been different, Dorothy and James might not ever have met, and my mother—Adrienne—might not have existed. Or her life might have been completely different, and I might not have been born.’
She stopped talking and sipped her coffee, looking out of the window, as she did so. It was another hot, cloudless day, just like the previous one. This time yesterday, she had only just met Bill Grainger. She had not yet learned the truth about her grandparents.
Sarah interrupted her reverie. ‘So no regrets, then.’
‘Well of course I have regrets for Dorothy and James, but I don’t regret my own life.’
‘Have you learned anything else from Dorothy’s diary?’ Sarah asked.
‘Oh, it wasn’t Dorothy’s. It was Adrienne’s,’ replied Addie. ‘I guess it won’t add anything much to the letters she sent to James, but I won’t know till I get a key for it.’
‘Why don’t you break it open?’
‘It was probably very precious to Adrienne and I don’t want to feel I’ve desecrated it. Even Rodney didn’t do that. But perhaps he didn’t care about a teenage girl’s diary. What strange standards he had, though, didn’t he? You’d have thought he’d have thrown everything away. It was like he was paying homage to their memories in keeping those letters and the diary.’
Sarah finished her second biscuit and, with the side of her hand, carefully brushed the crumbs into a neat pile.
‘Addie, you said he kept back the letter in which Dorothy talks about suicide. That amounts to murder, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t think so, Sarah. Saying she’d lost the will to live didn’t necessarily make it obvious that she would kill herself there and then. But in any case, it doesn’t tie in with his character. I guess he would have stopped her taking an overdose if he could, but he may not have seen the letter until it was too late. You remember, Sarah, what Dr Glossop said.’
‘What—about him being in tears at the funeral?’
‘Yes. I guess he needed her—even loved her in a funny kind of way.’
‘From what you said about him weeping and begging forgiveness,’ Helen said, standing up and collecting up the mugs, ‘it sounds as if he was racked with guilt for what he did. He may have been a very sick man.’
‘Huh,’ grunted Sarah.
‘Well, sick or not, I can never forgive Rodney, but I am just so thankful that I’m not related to him. I feel as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. In fact I almost called home, this morning, to tell Mom, but then I realised it was too early. I’ll try her before lunch, so I won’t stay much later, if you don’t mind dropping me off, Sarah.’
‘I can go that way round to the agency.’ Sarah said, standing up. ‘They told me to call in sometime today. They may have a job for me next week.’
‘That’s great. Sounds as if I should find out about my driver’s licence, if I’m losing my chauffeur.’
‘You could ring the AA and find out.’
Addie was puzzled. ‘Alcoholics Anonymous?’
‘Automobile Association. I’ve got the number in the car.’
Addie too got up from the kitchen table, and said goodbye to Helen, before following Sarah to the front door.
Outside the house, Sarah bent to retie the shoelaces on her trainers. Straightening up, she said, ‘You are staying longer then? After what you said about putting the house on the market…’
‘That was when I was Rodney’s granddaughter. Now I’m James’s granddaughter. I’m in my grandfather’s house. I feel so proud I want to shout it from the rooftops.’
‘Okay, okay, I get the general idea. Anyway, now that you know you come from such good stock, you’re going to be brave and have a go at driving.’
She unlocked her car on the passenger side, and Addie slid in.
‘I’m sure with all the driving we’ve been doing together, I’ll remember which side of the road to drive on,’ Addie said optimistically, as Sarah settled herself in the driving seat.
‘Are you going to buy yourself a little car? If so, can I come and drool with envy?’ Sarah said, pulling away.
‘I have a car back home—and I have to watch the finances. I thought I’d hire something while I’m here.’
‘There’s a place that Jonathan sometimes uses. Rydale’s. Do you want me to drop you there?’
‘Well if you could come by when you’ve finished at the agency. I could call them this morning, and arrange it for this afternoon.’
‘If you have time, Addie. It’s nearly midday now.’
‘I have to ring Mom first. If I don’t catch her at breakfast time, she’ll be off somewhere.’
‘Right. I’ll ring you later, to see if there are any snags.’
Addie walked into the house that now felt even more a part of her life—something shared with James, her real grandfather. She felt enormously satisfied, and yet, despite this, vaguely unsettled. It was as if the successful outcome of her quest, which had occupied so much of her mind in the past few weeks, had left a vacuum which needed to be filled with something else. Somewhere at the edge of her mind, intrusive thoughts were making themselves felt. She was used to Lloyd being there, as he had been for months—a wound, at first unbearably painful, now gradually healing; she was used to the sudden surge of physical longing for him which continued to occur, but which she managed to control. Now though, this same feeling was creeping into her mind and her body and, of all people, Jonathan Amery was the cause.
But Jonathan had made it abundantly clear that their relationship should be polite and professional. Somehow, she would have to expunge him from her thoughts. If she were back home, she would throw herself into something completely different—maybe even a new man. Here, where did she go? What did she do?
The phone started ringing, breaking into her thoughts.
‘Addie Russell,’ she answered.
‘Hello, Addie. This is Julian Gilpin.’
‘Who?’
‘Julian—Daphne Heron’s son.’
‘Oh, Julian. Of course. I’m sorry. How are you?’
‘Yes, fine. It was so nice to meet you the other day.’
‘It was very kind of you and your mother to talk to us,’ Addie said.
‘I did get the impression you were looking for confirmation that Rodney Heron was your grandfather.’
‘Well, actually…’
