It took three weeks for Miss. Thorne to arrange a meeting between Grace and her father but Grace was patient. She was enjoying school and concentrated on her work. In Biology they gave chloroform to fruit flies so they remained still long enough for the pupils to count the vestigial wings. Grace was fascinated. The girl sitting next to her was heavy-handed with the chloroform but returned the dead flies to the jar, hoping no one would notice.
Grace knew the social worker’s promise hadn’t been forgotten because at home Maureen and Frank discussed her father. They were very impressed that Edmund Fulwell’s family lived at Holme Park. Apparently it had come as news to them too. Perhaps the social worker had remembered Dave’s awkwardness, his feeling that Grace was in some way different, and thought she’d be better accepted if her wealthy connections weren’t known.
“We’ll have to take you there one day,” Maureen said. “They do guided tours and there’s a lovely tearoom.”
Grace and her father met at last, not in the tearoom at Holme Park, but in the front room of 15 Laurel Close. Maureen and Frank had taken the bad boys out, the ones which were left. Gary was back in the Young Offender institution. Maureen had cried when the police came to take him away.
Antonia Thorne waited in the house with Grace. Edmund Fulwell was late. Miss. Thorne didn’t mention that to Grace, but she could tell because the social worker looked at her watch every now and then, with resignation as if it was just what she expected. Grace, waiting, didn’t feel anger or fear. She was numb. She thought this must be what it felt like to be dead, then wondered if this was how her mother felt before she killed herself. Perhaps she’d been waiting for Edmund to leave his lover and come back to her with just this sort of numbness. Perhaps she’d decided she might as well be dead.
The doorbell rang. Miss. Thorne gave a start and frowned. Grace thought she was annoyed because Edmund after all hadn’t fulfilled her expectations. She would have preferred it if he hadn’t turned up.
“I want to go,” Grace said.
She opened the door and he was standing on the doorstep, pulling a strange face so his eyebrows did definitely meet over his nose. His hands were in his overcoat pockets. It was late afternoon in October, almost dark, with a gusty wind which blew litter and dead leaves into the doorway. He stooped so his face was almost level with hers.
“So,” he said, ‘ must be my lovely daughter.” And he continued very quickly so she understood again that the previous meeting was a secret between them.
Antonia Thorne shouted in a jolly, primary school teacher’s voice, “Come along, Grace. Don’t keep your father standing in the cold.”
And he came in, just as if she were the teacher and he was doing as he was told. Shrugging out of his overcoat he seemed to take up all the room in the corridor though he couldn’t be much bigger than Frank.
The social worker left them together in the front room, though she said pointedly that she would be in the kitchen making tea if Grace needed her. She didn’t close the door behind her.
“Anyone would think she didn’t trust me,” he said. He laughed, then when Grace didn’t join in he muttered, “I suppose you can’t blame her.”
He seemed less comfortable than when he was waiting for her outside school, more uptight. Grace, who had seen Gary’s mam in various states of inebriation, thought he was probably sober today. Last time he’d had a few drinks.
“You said you’d be in touch,” she whispered.
“Yeah, look, I’m really sorry. Things haven’t been easy lately. I expect she… ” he nodded towards the open door,”… explained. I needed time to sort myself out.”
She heard the self-pity in his voice and for a moment she was cross.
What about me? she wanted to shout. Didn’t you think of me? Then she realized it was no good. If she wanted to keep in touch with her father she wouldn’t be able to make demands on him. Edmund Fulwell would need looking after.
Chapter Twenty-Four.
For nearly four years Grace took responsibility for her father, though this went largely unrecognized. It was an unprecedented period of stability for them both.
One day, soon after Edmund arrived back on the scene her Biology teacher called her back after class. “Have you ever thought of joining the Wildlife Trust? There’s a junior section. I think you’d enjoy it.”
The junior section consisted of Grace and two spotty adolescent lads who refused to speak to her, but she was taken under the wing of three elderly spinster sisters. The Halifax sisters lived in a house which had remained largely unchanged since their parents’ day. It was a suburb of the town which had once been very grand, housing ship owners and traders, though many of the houses had now been converted into flats. It had a library, filled with natural history books field guides, sets of encyclopaedias and monographs.
She spent hours in the library. Although Grace had never complained of the noise in Laurel Close, very soon after meeting her the sisters invited her to use the room for homework. They said it was good for them to have someone young in the house again. Later Grace suspected this had been suggested by her Biology teacher; at the time it seemed miraculous.
When she was working the sisters left her to her own devices, except the youngest, Cynthia, who had per med hair and large squelchy bosoms.
She interrupted occasionally to bring Grace cups of tea and home-baked ginger biscuits.
During the summer the Wildlife Trust organized field trips. A coach took them up the coast to look at sea birds or inland to walk in the hills. Then, for the first time, Grace plodded along pebbly river banks looking for otter spraints. Later in the season they saw bats flying into the stone barn to roost.
It was the badger watch which made the biggest impression. She sat with the Halifax sisters in a wood at dusk and waited for the badgers to emerge from a sett, their noses snuffling the air. Leading the trip was a postgraduate student who talked about her research. She knew each individual badger, how the group was organized.
When I grow up, Grace thought, that’s what I’m going to do.
Occasionally she invited her father to accompany her on the Wildlife Trust excursions but he always refused.
“Na!” he said. “I’ve never been much into wildlife. Except for eating it.”
Grace was already a vegetarian but she didn’t rise to the bait. She suspected that food was more important to his life than she was. At least it provided him with an income. He’d started work in the little restaurant where he took her on their first meeting. He’d been at school with Rod, the owner. He was an inspirational and meticulous cook and the restaurant appeared in good food guides. Because of this Rod put up with his occasional bouts of drinking, his truculence. He also allowed Edmund to live in squalor in the flat above.
Grace continued living with Maureen and Frank in Laurel Close but she spent little time there. Before school every day she took Charlie for a walk in the park. She could already identify all the common birds there. When school was over she walked to the sisters’ house, stopping on the way to have coffee with her dad if he was there. Sometimes he was out with a woman, though seldom, she thought, with the same one more than once. In the summer she walked to the town centre from the sisters’ house and caught the bus home. In the winter, when it was dark, Cynthia gave her a lift home in the sisters’ ancient Rover, or Frank would pick her up. Maureen and Frank didn’t seem to resent the time she spent away from home. Her Biology teacher told them that she was Oxbridge material and they said they wanted to help. Grace never seemed to have friends of her own age, but she didn’t really want them.
Suddenly, in the summer before her fifth form, she noticed a change in her father. She had listened to him talking about his women before, given sympathy when it was needed but in those cases it was a matter of hurt pride, not unrequited love. This time, it seemed, it was serious.