Chapter Eleven Fairfax, 1979
Chapter Eleven
It was inevitable that James and Eloise would end up getting married. They enjoyed each other’s company and Eloise was more like a mother to little Amelia than a nanny. She wasn’t an easy baby and screamed through the night, racked with colic, her red angry face wet with tears.
James would never have coped on his own, but Eloise spent hours trying to soothe the fractious child.
He proposed to her on Amelia’s first birthday, mostly out of desperation to make sure she wouldn’t get fed up and leave him on his own with his bad-tempered daughter.
To his surprise and relief, Eloise agreed.
James had discovered he was the kind of man who needed a woman around. Up until he had met Marge he had no idea of how much better life could be with the right person at his side. He had come to value companionship and, it had to be said, being well looked after.
James also knew he wouldn’t be able to cope with Amelia without Eloise around to help. It was tough enough having a baby, but Amelia would soon be at school, and then there would be the horrors of boys buzzing around her. He didn’t have the energy to deal with all of that on his own.
He had such mixed emotions about his child. She made him feel guilty, resentful and baffled, but also inadequate and weak, and mixed in with all of that he felt an overwhelming sense of protectiveness. In order to function he needed Eloise. Thank God she had agreed to be his wife.
Eloise had actually grabbed his gruff marriage proposal with both hands.
She was lonely and missed having people to look after, and both James and Amelia needed a lot of care and attention.
She knew some people would make fun of her and James walking down the aisle at their age, but she didn’t care.
Eloise just liked to feel useful, and in her own way she loved James, and doted on Amelia. She dismissed the child’s bad temper and outbursts of anger as totally understandable, “After all she had been through as a baby.”
They sold their houses and moved to the outskirts of Seattle where Eloise had worked for a few years. She didn’t know many people there anymore but felt comfortable and settled. It might rain a lot but compared to Alaska it was positively balmy.
James left most of the childcare to Eloise and spent much of the time sitting on his favourite chair reading and listening to the radio. He’d managed to tune into Radio Scotland and found himself becoming overly emotional hearing the commentary of an Aberdeen v Dundee United game.
‘I’m a silly sentimental old fool,’ he thought to himself. ‘I had a shitty childhood and I couldn’t wait to get away, but right now I’d do anything to see the grey granite streets of Aberdeen even in the horizontal rain.’
As he grew older, he thought more about his homeland. He would knock back a couple of whiskies every night and grow maudlin and homesick. After being off the booze for so long, it seemed as though he were making up for lost time.
Eloise rolled her eyes when he listened to ‘Flower of Scotland’ and drunkenly and tunelessly roared the lyrics out with tears in his eyes, frightening Amelia and making her cry.
When James tried to soothe his daughter, she would wriggle in his arms and push him away, wrinkling her nose at the smell of booze on his breath.
He felt rejected by her, and sometimes even jealous of the close relationship between Eloise and Amelia.
Instead of making more of an effort with his child, he shut down and turned to the bottle for solace and company. As she grew up, Amelia had given up trying to get his attention. She knew it was hopeless and so she hardened her heart.
Eloise would tell him he was driving her away and that he needed to make more of an effort, but James was too set in his ways.
“Stop nagging me, woman. I’m doing my best but she’s a difficult child to love. There’s not a bit of her mother in her and she does nothing but defy me.”
Eloise was near to tears, “You vowed you would look after her and love her. You promised you would do the same for me and all you do is sit on your behind and drink whisky. No wonder she won’t talk to you.”
James would mutter something under his breath and pour himself another drink. Eloise would give up and leave him to it. She had come into this marriage with her eyes open, but she hadn’t thought he would turn into such a grumpy, bitter old man quite so soon.
The years on the fishing boats and in the oil fields had taken their toll on James.
He was wracked with arthritis and in constant pain.
He had also become increasingly forgetful.Eloise would come back from the shops and find him out in the street looking frightened and confused and calling her name.
“Where were you?” he would demand plaintively.
“You left me alone for so long and I couldn’t get into the house.
” She’d grab the front door key hanging from a stout strap she had fastened around his neck and tell him for the hundredth time that he could let himself in.
At first, she had felt deeply sorry for him, but that soon turned into guilty exasperation.
By the time Amelia was ten years old, it was clear her father was deteriorating badly. One terrible night, Eloise realised that his mind was going when he kept calling Amelia by another name: ‘Cara’. He was holding onto his daughter’s hands, weeping and begging for her forgiveness.
“James, what’s going on, you’re frightening her,” said Eloise, and she was all the more perturbed when James turned to her, his eyes suddenly lucid, and whispered he had to confess something. Eloise sent Amelia from the room.
“What on earth is the matter?” she whispered. And James finally told her he had another daughter. A daughter he had never met, and whose very existence was an accident, the result of a one-night stand.
Eloise hadn’t expected this. She couldn’t believe he had never told her about something so important. She clasped her hand over her mouth, her thoughts reeling. He had kept this daughter a complete secret. From her, from Marge, and now from Amelia. Her half-sister.
“I should have gone back to Orkney and tried to be her father,” James was weeping. “But it’s too late now.”
“It’s never too late, James. Why don’t you try and contact her?” said Eloise, her mind running to what might be possible. She was picturing a family reunion, a happy ever after with herself in the middle accepting praise as the one to have made it all happen.
James shook his head violently.
“No. No! This has to be kept secret. No good will come of it, too much time has passed. It’s better for Cara and for Amelia that they don’t know.”
He lapsed into a stubborn silence leaving Eloise in turmoil.
Surely Amelia had a right to discover she had another family, even if her father didn’t want her to find out.
Recently, Eloise found she was worrying constantly about Amelia and now she would have the added stress of feeling guilty about keeping this enormous secret. She had no idea what to do.
Amelia had grown into a strange, intense child.
The rest of her classmates at school found her odd and cold, but even the bullies were too scared of her to make her life a misery.
Everyone just gave her a wide berth. Perhaps stung by the isolation, she could be sneaky and snitched to the teachers on the kids who smoked cheap cigarettes under the bleachers by the football field.
She treated James with complete disinterest, but she showed a softer side with her step-mother when it suited her.
It was Eloise who told Amelia the story of how her mother had died giving birth to her, turning the very real tragedy of Marge’s death into a sort of turgid soap opera embellished with every retelling, complete with heavenly choirs of angels clasping Marge to their bosoms, and weeping medical staff proclaiming Amelia to be an angel.
Eloise was a decent woman, but she was the worst possible influence on a child like Amelia. She was forever telling the little girl she was far more beautiful and clever than everyone else.
With his drinking and his bad temper, James had proved to be such a disappointment to Eloise, she poured all of her affection into Amelia, who in her eyes could do no wrong. The more Amelia misbehaved, the more Eloise defended her.
When Amelia pushed the neighbours’ five-year-old son off his bike, his enraged father turned up at the door after work only to be met with a furious Eloise falsely claiming his child was a menace who had started it by chucking stones at her precious step-daughter.
Earlier that day, Eloise had readily accepted Amelia’s tearful explanation that it was all the little boy’s fault even though deep down she knew the truth.
She continued haranguing the poor man, “My Amelia would never do anything so terrible. She’s a good girl and she’s been brought up properly, unlike your son. ”
He walked away muttering that she had better stay away from his boy or there would be trouble.
Eloise then darted upstairs to comfort Amelia, insisting on giving her hugs and treats and painting poor Amelia as a precious victim of other people’s jealousy.
So Amelia grew up neglected by her father and smothered by Eloise.
All of which made for a very mixed-up girl.