Without really thinking, she began to draw her father, as near as she could remember: the heavily handsome face, the full moustache and slick brown hair that made him look rakish, the muscular frame that under her pencil became even more muscular, the face growing ugly and brutish. At his feet she drew the outline of a crouching woman. The pencil strokes became steadily fiercer, making marks like blood dripping from his fists, spreading about his feet and the female figure, until the drawing was almost obliterating the original picture.
Of course her father – selfish, belligerent, callous though he was – had never been guilty of the sort of mayhem her pencil described; but the way he’d walked out when Mum had been so ill – that, and having his unnatural way with herself, was enough. For both these things she’d never forgive him.
She’d spoiled such sketches this way before and it always felt as if someone else was making her, though why was incomprehensible, except that it helped get some of this pent-up anger and hatred out of herself and left her with an odd sense of fulfilment, even triumph.
Laying aside the obliterated sketch, she got ready for bed. Stripping off skirt, blouse, straight-fronted corset and the rest of her undergarments, she washed herself from head to toe in the cold water poured from the cracked ewer into the basin on the washstand, each application of the flannel taking her breath away despite the warmth of the summer evening.
She washed methodically, each separate part scrubbed remorselessly with a harsh, faded flannel to be savagely rubbed dry with a rough towel. In a way it seemed to help erase every vestige of the memory the sketch of her father had conjured up in her mind – how her very soul would cringe from his approach even as she kept her face expressionless in case he got angry; that awful clutching at her heart as he told her what a pretty girl she was before leading her by the hand up the stairs, and what she’d recently gone through to get rid of the horrible result of his use of her. God! One of these days she would find him. She would watch him beg for his life. If it came to it, she would have no complaint about swinging for him.
Having dried, cleaned her teeth and donned her nightgown, she unpinned and brushed out her long hair, counting fifty strokes that would help keep the dark auburn tresses shiny, finally creeping into bed to think of pleasanter things: Ronnie Sharp, her art sessions with Michael Deel, the fact that no more had been heard from her employers about being let go. She felt a lot better.
In his study Bertram Lowe frowned at the drawing he held up before him – hardly a drawing, more a mass of heavy pencil marks, so thick that the picture beneath was almost unidentifiable.
Having given Ellie permission to use his study for this purpose, she often left her work here. This one had been among several other delicate pencil sketches and watercolours she’d done, pretty country scenes copied from a book he’d lent her. It came as a shock to find something like this.
Looking at the others she had done, he had felt pleased, the cost of a tutor being, he felt, well spent. She was improving with each visit. Her speech, too, had improved but could still be better. Not easy to get someone out of the bad habits of a lifetime.
Then, almost at the bottom of the little stack, he’d come across this. He could hardly make it out for the vicious indentation of the pencil over every part of what she’d drawn. There was deliberation behind the marks, not just a crossing out of something not up to standard.
He felt a sense of bewilderment as he held it up for a better look. If it hadn’t been to her satisfaction, why hadn’t she merely torn it up and thrown it away? Why this? and why save it? Quite possibly it had been left in this pile by mistake?
Bertram’s medical brain began to question: had she often done this sort of thing? Even this one seemed to indicate a troubled mind – a confused mind, perhaps. It was possible. The traumatic experiences she’d suffered: the death of her mother, the sexual abuse of her father, and for his own part, the abortion – who could say what such things did to the brain?
She seemed settled here, well adjusted enough, but what really went on in her head? Were these the outward sign of a traumatized mind?
Leaning closer, he could just about make out, beneath the apparent vandalism of her own work, what appeared to be the shape of a man with another figure lying at his feet, but little more than that. What had prompted her to obliterate the sketch so viciously?
He should have shrugged off the matter as showing mere childish annoyance about a sketch that hadn’t turned out right, but something was telling him it went deeper than that. Oddly, it worried him every inch as much as if this had been his dear Millicent, even though he kept telling himself that it was none of his business.
He wasn’t happy at the way he was beginning to feel about her. Ellie was not his daughter. If he grew too fond of her, she would break his heart in the end. The life of a cherished offspring was, essentially, forever bound up with their family, no matter how far in the world they roamed. Ellie’s life was her own. She was beholden to no one; one day she would leave to get on with her own life and he would never see her
