Five

Sandra/Cassandra

I don’t want to appear big-headed but I always knew I was destined for something special. People around here are nice enough but they’re ordinary, humdrum. Their lives are not the kind I see myself living. Most of all I didn’t want the life my parents had. They knew that’s how I felt and to be fair they understood, which was why they were making the sacrifice.

‘We won’t see her for dust will we, Derek?’ my mother said to my father as I was getting ready to leave. ‘She’ll be far too busy with all her new friends to have time for her old parents.’

‘Oh yes, hobnobbing with all those debs and whatnots,’ my father said, and I sighed and rolled my eyes although secretly I agreed with them.

I’d had a brother once but he died, and my father had ambition once, hoping for a promotion and a move to the country but the promotion happened to someone else, and someone else after that, so my mother never got her big garden. So for a long time now I had been the only thing my parents really cared about. It was exhausting, quite frankly. They ruled me with their innocence, controlled me with their goodness and gagged me with their adoration. I couldn’t wait to get away.

I waved goodbye to them as they stood on the doorstep of the pebbledash box that was my home. They both had their hankies out. Tears rolled down my father’s cheeks. ‘Tears of pride,’ he kept saying. ‘Don’t worry, Princess, they’re tears of pride.’

I hadn’t been able to sleep properly for a week and each morning I had ticked off another day in my diary as if I were a child waiting for Christmas, instead of what I was, a teenager about to go off to boarding school. But seeing them, my parents, standing there so small and, well, humble, I suddenly wasn’t so sure I wanted to go after all. I felt like running over to them and putting my arms round them and telling them I loved them. Then I got annoyed. They didn’t need to be that pathetic. All that was needed was a flat cap for my father and wrinkled stockings for my mother and they could have walked straight out of Last of the Summer Wine. Us not having a car used to really upset me but now I thanked God. If we’d had one they would have insisted on taking me all the way to LAGs. Honestly, I would have died! As it was, Mr Bennings, the minicab driver, was dropping me, for free, at the train station and then the school minibus would pick me up the other end. Apparently there were several girls on that same train from Manchester.

I turned round and looked behind me as we drove off. My parents were still waving. I realised how stooped they both were. Jesus, they were sixty, not a hundred. My father’s roses, though, those garish Peace and Queen Elizabeth roses, stood ramrod straight, glad to get rid of me no doubt. They had long memories, flowers, and I suppose they’d never forgotten the weed-killer incident.

I had tried to make my parents see how naff our garden was. ‘Like some municipal park with everything in perfect straight lines. Jessica’s garden is all wild and overgrown. It’s gorgeous.’

‘Well, Jessica’s parents are very bohemian, aren’t they?’

I would have killed to have bohemian parents but instead I had a mother who crocheted antimacassars and a father who used a tape measure when he planted his narcissi.

Three hours after leaving home, I stepped out on to the hallowed gravel of the Lakeland Academy for Girls and right in front of a reception committee. Three girls, one dark, one fair and one auburn, all of them tall and willowy and managing somehow to make the lumpen blue/grey uniform look chic, spoke at once. ‘You must be Sandra.’

I never felt Sandra suited me as a name. Of course my parents were pleased with their choice. To show me what a great pick it was they pointed to Sandra Castle, Lady Mayoress of our town about a hundred years ago and to such luminaries as Sandra Dee (some old actress who anyway had actually been christened Alexandra, which wasn’t so bad). I had never met people so pleased about so little as my parents were. Most of all they were pleased with me. They worshipped me from my thick ankles to the ends of my frizzy hair, or golden curls, as mother liked to describe it. My mother and Aunt Gina said I had style and character and that was worth much more than just a pretty face. And I had believed them, sort of, until I saw the princesses.

Then I heard myself say, ‘I’m christened Sandra but everyone calls me Cassandra.’ OK, so that wasn’t actually true. But this was the start of my new life. Why shouldn’t I be allowed a new name too, a name that suited me?

‘Oh right?’ The fair princess smiled politely. She was the tallest. She had sparkling blue eyes and honey skin. ‘That’s unusual, though, your nickname being longer than your real name. I’m Portia, by the way.’

‘But if you prefer Cassandra,’ the dark one said. She smiled too, a sort of all-purpose smile that might have been directed at me, or the minibus or a bird in a tree. ‘I’m Rose.’

I took in the cascade of dark curls, the wide blue eyes and the peaches and cream complexion that looked as if it’d die of shock if it encountered a pimple. I wondered what it felt like going about the world being that beautiful.

‘Why don’t you like Sandra?’ the auburn princess asked. She put her hand out, a long-fingered, rather large hand, and shook mine in a firm grip. ‘I’m Eliza.’

Portia, Rose and Eliza; yeah, that figured.

The auburn princess seemed really to want to know the answer to her inane question because she asked again, ‘Why don’t you like Sandra?’

I shrugged. ‘I’m used to Cassandra, that’s all. I was only named Sandra to suck up to a rich godmother.’ I smiled inwardly, pleased with my ingenuity.

‘Miss Philips asked us to look after you, show you around and all that,’ Portia said.

‘I have a rich godfather,’ Eliza said. ‘But I won’t get a bean from him because his avaricious daughter will inherit the lot.’ At that all three of them laughed as if she had said something hilarious.

‘Sorry, in-joke,’ Rose said. ‘It’s my father, you see. My father is Eliza’s godfather. And possibly soon to be stepfather.’ She giggled.

I smiled back at them. In comparison with these girls Jessica and her family seemed positively conventional.

‘So all she’ll inherit is a stuffed fox,’ Rose said. She turned to Eliza, ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘Absolutely,’ Eliza said. ‘But I like the fox so that’s OK.’ Then they fell into each other’s arms and laughed some more.

I was shocked, actually. In my world you didn’t start counting your inheritance while a person was still alive. At least if you did, you kept it to yourself.

‘So,’ Portia turned to me. ‘Which one is yours?’ She nodded towards the line of tuck boxes deposited at the back of the minibus. Stupid question. Mine was obviously the one without a single sticker. The brand-spanking-embarrassingly-new one. The one thing that would have been good to get second-hand my parents had insisted on getting new. ‘Don’t know what nasty dirty things someone might have kept in there,’ my mother had said, wrinkling her nose at the very idea. I had tried to tell her how common it was to be bothered by dirt and germs. Jessica’s place was a complete pigsty by my mother’s standards but I wouldn’t have been ashamed to take any of the girls from LAGs there. I bet the floors at the princesses’ houses were a right health hazard.

Eliza helped me carry the embarrassing tuck box. As we walked along to the boarding house I asked her, ‘So where’s your real dad?’

‘Dead.’

‘And Rose’s mum?’

‘Gone. She lives on some Greek island somewhere. So Rose and I thought it would be really excellent if my mother and her father got married because then Rose and I would be sisters. We’re making progress, aren’t we?’ She threw the last sentence over her shoulder.

‘Certainly looks like it,’ Rose said.

‘So how rich is he, then?’ I asked Rose, who had caught up. Next to me Eliza stiffened and her smile turned polite.

Rose said, ‘I don’t really think one asks people that kind of thing.’

I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. It was so unfair. They had talked about inheritance as if money and people dying were just some joke. They had opened the door but when I tried to step inside they had slammed it in my face.

At bedtime, Eliza came into my cubicle to see how I was doing. I decided I liked her after all. For a start she wasn’t completely perfect-looking because of those large hands and feet and because of the slight bump on the bridge of her nose and the freckles. I thought we might become best friends.