Rosa's Child (6 page)

What else could he do to thwart their amour? the Reverend wondered. Perhaps to impose one petty restriction after another was the answer, he decided.

'No, Grace, you certainly can't wear a string of pearls,' he summarily announced after inspecting his daughter's first romantic gift. 'I'll send them back.'

'No, Grace, he certainly cannot pay for you to subscribe to the tennis club. That is my job. I'll send the application back.'

The minister was convinced that a succession of such discouragements would eventually wear down the hapless bank clerk. However, soon after she had returned the artificial-pearl necklace and the tennis-club membership form, Grace learned that she was to enjoy a reprieve. For the Reverend, a highly respected figure in the world of Baptist nonconformism, had been invited to give a lecture-tour of the United States. Greatly flattered by the honour, he accepted - to his daughter's delight.

The organizers of the Reverend Mann's itinerary had prepared a punishing schedule involving nine flights and fifteen preaching engagements, all to be completed within twenty working days. In New York, then Buffalo, Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the minister was deeply impressed by the vastness of the congregations before him. It was a far cry from preaching in the suburbs of Cardiff. In addition, their appreciation of his ministry was more warm and effusive than anything he had ever experienced in Britain. Likewise he encountered a far more open response in person-to-person contact with those who flocked to hear him.

The Reverend had cultivated a style of preaching which went down particularly well in the United States. Delivered in his deep and creamy Welsh tones, it was characterized by his customary force and conviction. Hand waving and pounding of the lectern helped to drive home to his audience his powerful message of compassion. Before long he was espousing a crucial tenet of American evangelism: that effective preaching is inextricably linked with effective finance. In this respect, thanks to the generosity of his various congregations, his tour was proving to be more fruitful than anything he had ever experienced in his church career. Indeed on one occasion, preaching at Wheaton, Illinois, on a Sunday morning, and then later at the evening service - both times with well over a thousand people present - he was handed a cheque for a sum so large that at first he was minded to refuse it altogether.

'But this is too much, surely,' he protested, only to be told that such sizeable offerings were standard practice in Wheaton, a city long recognized as a centre of religious activity and sometimes referred to as the 'Protestant Vatican of the Midwest'.

Did those three tumultuous weeks mean that Grace's relationship with David was able to proceed uninterrupted for a while at least? Not at all. For although the Reverend was thousands of miles away, he had no intention of giving up. He never gave up. It was just as just as well for him, therefore, that he still had one trump card up his sleeve.

He might have been on a whirlwind tour of America, struggling with a hectic schedule, but the Reverend still found time to write a series of letters to Grace. In these he reverted to his original tactic, repeatedly renewing his plea to his daughter to end her relationship with David. Steadfastly she refused. The letters were put aside and ignored. Finally, it seemed, Grace was breaking free.

One day soon after her father's return from his preaching tour, Grace arrived home from the Girl Crusaders Union to find her mother looking extremely pale and shaken. Had something happened to Eunice, she wondered. It had seemed likely for some time now.

'Daddy is very ill,' Irene explained, her tone indicating the gravity of the situation. Here was the Reverend's final card. And as it turned out, he had played it rather shrewdly. Daddy's illness was, in fact, self-inflicted. The Reverend had attempted suicide - still an indictable offence in the 1950s -by taking an overdose of drugs. Having failed, he was admitted to a clinic in Sussex, where he was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous breakdown. He had returned from America exhausted.

When Grace walked into her father's room at the clinic on a hot summer's day, wearing a favourite turquoise dress, she saw a man who looked vacant and unexpressive, utterly stripped of his usual charisma and air of authority. Somehow he managed to summon up the energy to utter a few words. Manipulative to the end, he grasped Grace's hand and whispered a plea she had heard many times before.

'You won't leave me, will you?'

'Of course not, Daddy,' she replied without hesitation.

Here, at last, were the words the Reverend had been waiting to hear. They proved to be far more healing than the electroconvulsive therapy that the clinic was beginning to administer to the preacher. Not so ill that he could not decipher a coded message, he knew that Grace was telling him, in her own way, that she was prepared to end the relationship that had caused him so much pain. For her part, Grace had decided that this was the least she could do, for was it not pitiful to see her father suffering so?

Edward Mann had got his own way once again. But the stakes had been high: it had been essential for his very survival to see that young man off. And now, at last, his sabotage had worked. Within six weeks of Grace's visit he had discharged himself from the clinic. The medical staff expressed dismay at his departure, which they considered premature, for he had not completed the course of treatment prescribed for him. They had no way of knowing that he had already received his cure.

This dramatic turn of events convinced David of what he had long suspected: his pursuit of Grace was futile. Always strange towards him, the Reverend's behaviour had now made it impossible for David to have a normal relationship with his daughter. For her part, Grace, wrenched away from her first love, knew that the time had come to leave home. She had made up her mind to embark on a career in nursing, and enrolled on a three-year training course at the Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, Essex. The decision astounded her parents, who were not slow to point out that there had been little evidence of Grace's caring instincts in her dealings with Eunice. Surely, they argued, if she was genuinely interested in nursing, then who better to care for than her twin sister. In any case, Irene pleaded, she needed Grace to help her care for her sister. It was true that Eunice, still clinging doggedly to life, remained in desperate need of full-time care. Yet, anguished as she was by Eunice's plight, Grace felt that if she did not leave home and start to live her own life she would die too - in mind if not in body. It felt like a life for a life.

Clearly the Manns had failed to grasp Grace's real motivation, and she was not about to spell it out for them. What she wanted above all else was to get away from their suffocating grip, particularly that of her father. She had thought that a nursing career would provide a legitimate reason for going, but as far as she was concerned it could just as easily have been another kind of work altogether. In the event she stood her ground and stuck to her first choice.

The Manns may have capitulated, but throughout Grace's training, far from giving her encouragement, Irene would often play on her guilt about Eunice. How wonderful it would be, she said time and time again, if only Grace would give to her poor sister the care she lavished on her patients at the hospital.

Nor did Grace's escape from the Mann household effect the end of her father's obsession with her; indeed her absence seemed to exacerbate it. Although she gave up nearly every rest day to be with her parents, still the Reverend would ask when she was coming again, extracting a pledge from her to that effect. Grace could see that she was locked into a familiar pattern: as ever, it seemed to be her destiny to sacrifice herself to her father's emotional demands. And even worse than knowing how she would be spending every day off for the foreseeable future was being asked repeatedly to reassure her father that no, of course she would never leave him.

It was while in Birmingham, where she had gone to complete her midwifery training, that Grace became involved with Peter Bailey, a curate and, like David Pitts before him, also a member of her father's congregation. For the Reverend Mann, who by now had transferred his allegiance from the Baptist Church to the Church of England, a familiar threat loomed, except that with Grace now courting a clergyman the danger was even more pronounced. What if Bailey came to learn of the long years of abuse? Worse still, what if the Bishop were to hear of his misdemeanours? To begin with, the Reverend tried an approach that his daughter knew all too well.

'No, Grace, definitely not for you. You know that he's just been rejected by another girl and you would undoubtedly be on the rebound. I would hate to see you get hurt in that way.'

When that tack proved unsuccessful, and with Grace and Peter edging towards marriage - at least in the Reverend's imagination - Edward Mann embarked on another of his urgent, self-appointed missions of destruction. Fully recovered from his breakdown, he busied himself writing letters to Grace at the nurses' home and telephoning her incessantly. He then developed a habit of appearing on her doorstep without warning in order to plead with her in person. And on several occasions he suddenly emerged from the Birmingham traffic in his battered old Austin to spy on his daughter as she, on her bicycle, attempted to go about her business around the city.

For the Reverend it was imperative to bring his daughter's present relationship, like every one of them, to a speedy end. But in this case there was an even greater urgency than usual. As a man of the cloth, Peter Bailey could ruin the Reverend at a stroke if his dark secret were to come to light. The best form of defence seemed to be attack, the minister decided, and he wrote to the Bishop listing the reasons why his prospective son-in-law was quite unsuitable to become a vicar.

Here was a man possessed. No longer was he hounding a vulnerable, teenage schoolgirl, but a young woman of twenty-five - and evidently with some success, because it now appeared that he had managed to recruit his wife to his cause. For now she it was who sought to lay down the law to Grace.

'You do realize, don't you,' she told her daughter at the vicarage, 'that if you do go ahead and marry Peter, your father won't come to the wedding.' Grace stood stunned as Irene, somewhat superfluously, played her next card: the relationship was merely a friendship and any idea of marriage was really all in their heads. For instead of accepting the prospect of her father's absence from the ceremony, Grace immediately concluded that her romance with the young curate was doomed. The crude threat had worked. For Grace it was unthinkable that her father might not be beside her in church, proud to be giving her away. Peter was dropped. The Reverend had imposed his will on Grace once again. But when would she wake to the truth that he had not the slightest intention of relinquishing her to another man; that he would never do so - not if he could help it.

Indeed, the Reverend was harbouring a strange fantasy of possession which had played on his mind for some time. He had a habit of using car journeys to talk openly with Grace about any one of a variety of intimate subjects. Often the topic was the deep pain he felt at not having had a child of his own - 'the greatest tragedy of my life,' as he invariably described it. But he had something else on his mind one day as he was driving twenty-four-year-old Grace from his curate's house in the Croydon diocese to Farnborough Hospital in Kent, where she was being trained in midwifery.

'Grace,' the reverend said rather tentatively. 'You know, I would love it if we could be together.'

'Yes, Daddy,' replied Grace, desperate to be back in the safety of the nurses' home.

'You know. I mean married. Why don't we just drive off somewhere now?'

'But you know that's impossible, Daddy.'

That matter-of-fact response may or may not have dispelled the bizarre fantasy from the Reverend's mind altogether, but Grace received no such proposals of marriage again.

As Grace approached her thirties, trapped as she was, she was becoming desperately tired of colluding in her father's tricks. Aware that their geographical separation had made no difference at all to his ability to control her, she resolved that in future she would try a different tack. If only she could keep her relationships secret, she reasoned, then he would have nothing to be upset about. His ignorance would be her bliss. And so began a gradual process of alienation from her parents that would come to characterize their relationship for many years. Birthdays and anniversaries were remembered, and there would be a polite exchange of cards and presents at Christmas. Underneath this semblance of normality there was no longer any real contact.

So when in 1964 Grace, who was now working as a health visitor in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington, met Alan Stocken, an engineer, at a party in the city, she decided not to announce the news to her parents for the time being. In fact, Grace was to hold her tongue much longer than she expected, but for quite another reason. The courtship went on so long that she began to wonder whether Alan had any intention of ever proposing to her. When finally he did so, Grace gladly accepted and presented the couple's decision to the Manns as a
fait accompli.
For the first time in her life Grace had outwitted her father. The Reverend, realizing this, telephoned his daughter some six weeks before the wedding to make just one enquiry. It seemed as if he was already reconciled to her loss.

'You really are going to go through with this then, Grace? Then you really do want me to phone the Bishop?' he asked. Rather than a promise to engage the cleric's services, the question concealed a threat. The Reverend only had to tell the Bishop that as a non-practising Christian the young man was unsuitable as a husband for Grace to make it impossible for them to marry in that diocese.

Alarmed as she was by this possibility, Grace nevertheless replied in the affirmative. Indeed, so undaunted must she have sounded that at last the Reverend realized he was wasting his time contesting the match. In truth he was rather relieved that she had chosen someone well removed from Church circles, even though this was counter to everything that he had preached about the value of a shared religion. Even so, he decided to play one last desperate card. Aware of his daughter's medical history and of the surgeon's remarks after removing an ovarian cyst from her, he turned his attention to his prospective son-in-law. 'You do know,' he informed him, 'that Grace will never be able to have any children?' It was a malicious but futile manoeuvre, for Alan Stocken had already made up his mind: Grace was to be his wife.