Sara Craven - Strange Adventure

When some of the hurt had died down from this rejection of her attempt to carve out a career for herself, Lacey was able to smile a little at the thought of her glamorous French stepmother permitting her to meddle in any of the domestic details in London or at their country home. Michelle ruled a small but efficient staff with absolute sway and she would not welcome any interference from anyone.

Lacey had often begged to be allowed to help even in a menial capacity when guests were expected, but all her offers had been met with a fairly brusque refusal until her father had intervened before one minor dinner party and suggested that she should be allowed to do the flowers for the centrepiece. She had spent time and thought on her arrangement, floating a mass of full-blown roses around the bases of delicately tapering candles in a shallow but exquisitely shaped dish. Just before the guests had arrived she had peeped into the dining room to see the table in all its finished glory. Her flowers had disappeared and a bowl of long-stemmed hothouse beauties stood in their place. Lacey had looked and bitten her lip, and later, when her father congratulated her boisterously on her efforts, she had given a little noncommittal smile.

She had been twelve years old when her father married again and she had soon learned that to fight Michelle was to lose. But there had been battles in the early days. Lacey, used to being first in her father’s affections since her mother’s death, could not reconcile herself to the fact that this slender, dark stranger with her beautiful face and incredible chic had simply taken over. And when her initial hostility had given way to genuine admiration for all that glamour and she was prepared to become a worshipper at her stepmother’s shrine, she had discovered with bewilderment that her adoration was unwanted. That in fact her own small person was the one flaw in Michelle’s vast contentment at having married a man as wealthy and easygoing as James Vernon.

Which, of course, was why she was here at the convent where Michelle herself had been educated. Her friend Vanessa, both of whose parents had embarked on other marriages, had explained it succinctly.

‘It’s “being got out of the way”. If I’d been a baby or a three-year-old my stepmother could have dressed up for photographs with bows in my hair, it might have been O.K. At our age, we’re just a pain in the neck. Della said it made her feel old just to look at me.’

As it was, Lacey had grown accustomed to being ‘out of the way’. She had learned that it was not always convenient for her to go home for her vacations, but as the alternatives had included carefully selected parties for skiing, sailing and sightseeing, she could not feel too hard done by.

But now she had to face the fact that her schooldays were strictly numbered, and that her future was by no means clear cut. Her father was being over-optimistic, she thought, in envisaging any role-sharing between Michelle and herself, and yet what else was there, if she was not to be allowed to work for her living?

Lacey sighed and leaned her forehead against the cold glass for a moment. There was an alternative which she had come to consider with increasing seriousness as the weeks had passed. She could ask Reverend Mother to allow her to enter the novitiate of the order. It was not an ideal solution, and there were immediate snags. Lacey was not yet eighteen or indeed a Roman Catholic, but none of these obstacles seemed as insuperable as the prospect of being an unwanted third in her stepmother’s home. She knew too that the nuns considered a sense of vocation as essential for the religious life, but she also knew from books she had read in the convent library that in bygone times many girls had become nuns because they were unwanted by their families and had become excellent religious. Lacey supposed, rather dubiously, that this could happen to her in time.

She looked again at the high wall, which as Sister Thérèse had often commented, was not to keep the nuns from the world but the world from the nuns.

Lacey sometimes wondered what this ‘world’ was like that had to be kept at bay, but she had never shared with the other boarders any burning desire to come to terms with it as soon as possible. She knew that many of the other girls were already sexually experienced, although she was rarely invited to join the little groups that gathered secretly late at night to discuss boy-friends and sex, and she realised wryly that she would have had little to contribute if she had been.

Lacey had never had a boy-friend, unless she counted Alan Trevor, the son of neighbours of theirs in the country, whom she had known since her early childhood. Lacey rode with him sometimes in the holidays and found him attractive with a sense of humour, but he had never attempted even to kiss her, and Lacey was secretly relieved that he had not. But it did not prevent her from speculating on how she would cope if and when that momentous occasion ever came about.

The worldly-wise Vanessa had told her that it was rarely the kiss that counted—more what men expected to follow it, but Lacey had never been able to apply any of this information to herself. Her body was something that she bathed and clothed and which obeyed the demands she put upon it without effort. The realisation that there were demands that others might make of it was utterly alien to her. At the convent her studies and her music filled her life. At home, usually in the country, she enjoyed the open air, often in Alan’s relaxed company or that of his sister Fran.

Convent life, she supposed vaguely, would go on in much the same way, except that Alan would not be there, and if she was honest that would be no great deprivation although she was fond of him.

She wandered back to the piano and perching on the stool began to pick out a melody with one finger. What, she wondered, was it like to be in love? Her cheeks flushed as she recalled some of the more lurid discussions she had heard from the others, but what had that to do with love?

And this was where one province where even her usual mentor, Sister Thérèse, would not be able to help her, she thought, then started guiltily as Sister herself suddenly spoke from the doorway.

‘So you are here, Lacey. Reverend Mother has asked to see you, and I guessed where you might be.’

Lacey closed the piano and rose bewilderedly, shaking out her skirt.

‘Reverend Mother? But why? I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?’

Sister Thérèse gave a slight smile. ‘Now why should you all imagine that Reverend Mother only sends for you when you have been in some kind of mischief?’ she asked chidingly. Then, after a slight hesitation, ‘You have a visitor, Lacey.’

‘A visitor?’ Lacey stared at the older woman with sudden joyous disbelief. ‘It’s Father. It must be,’ she blurted out, and regardless of Sister Thérèse’s restraining ‘Lacey!’, she ran out of the room and along the spacious panelled corridor to the main staircase.

The door of Reverend Mother’s study was slightly ajar, but Lacey still knocked and waited for the word to enter in spite of her inner excitement. Then she slid through the door and dropped a slight curtsey to Reverend Mother, her eyes turning eagerly to see who else was in the room.

Her hands clasped involuntarily in front of her and she stood quite still with all the joy and laughter fading from her piquant little face as Michelle rose from a high-backed chair, a formal smile barely curving her exquisitely made up mouth.

Questions were beating and tearing at Lacey’s brain as she forced herself to reply to Michelle’s polite greeting and pecked obediently at one scented cheek. One that had to be answered forced its way into speech. ‘Father—he is all right?’