Gemma Makes Her Mark, page 3
That particular day’s burglary case against Gemma’s client, Christopher Jones, an emaciated ex-drug addict, hadn’t attracted the same media frenzy that the Stones had. Even the regular reporter for the Chichester Observer hadn’t bothered to show up. Apart from the duty solicitors only an equally skeletal-looking girl had turned up; although a few years younger than Christopher she was presumably his partner. Gemma had prepared her report and, she liked to think, delivered it with some style. It was clear to her prison was not the best place for Christopher to end up, and she had made a strong case for a Community Sentence. However, his appointed solicitor that day, Mr Lane, was not one of her favourites and had obviously been more interested in getting away from the court as soon as he could. He had offered little in the way of mitigation even though Christopher had owned up, pleaded guilty and saved everyone a lot of bother as well as expense. When the leading magistrate started to deliver a sentence of imprisonment for one year Gemma resolved to try to avoid working with Lane again, but the added ‘suspended for two years’ at least provided some satisfaction for her involvement.
She gathered her files together, had a quick word with Christopher, reminding him that any future misdemeanours would automatically revoke the suspension and lead to prison, and went out into the car park and afternoon sun. It was nice enough to put the roof down on her MG midget and boded well for the barbecue Mark said he was going to prepare later. She pulled out of Chichester town centre and on to the old Roman Road and then the A285 to Petworth. There was no need for her to get back to the office in Littlehampton today. She was grateful that her current boss, Gregory, didn’t mind her doing her paperwork at home; although she reckoned he must be getting on for sixty, it helped that he obviously fancied Gemma. She didn’t mind that, though; at least he wasn’t obviously pervy about it. She wondered what it was with men of a certain age, or to be fair any age. The drive itself was a pleasant and picturesque one, right through the best of the South Downs, but that afternoon in court had convinced her even more strongly that it was time for a change; she didn’t intend or need to continue to do what she’d just gone through for that much longer.
In essence, Gemma was pretty much bored with the probation job, and perhaps as a consequence of that, or perhaps anyway, with her life in general. Toward the end of her final year at university, not having much idea of what to do next, she had sort of drifted into it. There had been an advert on one of the university notice boards for a recruitment fair of some kind and Gemma had gone along for no particular reason; she’d picked up various bits of information and leaflets from the different stands, including an application form to work as a probation officer. She had been told by the probation representative that there were good opportunities for graduates and that you could specify what areas you wanted to work in. One of the more interesting courses on her degree had been on crime and society and had involved considering how best to deal with repeat offenders. Perhaps because of that passing interest, Gemma had decided to give it a go and fill the form in, specifying anywhere in the south of England. It had been something of surprise when she was invited to Littlehampton for an interview only a few weeks after graduating with her upper second degree in Sociology. It wasn’t that she particularly needed to work, she was well provided for from her father’s will but she couldn’t face going to live with her mother in the old family home in Farnham. While that might have been comfortable enough, watching her mother‘s embarrassingly desperate attempts to stay young – and, even more excruciatingly, available – was not on her agenda. Gemma had never got on particularly well with her mother anyway but after the way she had treated her father before he died it had become more than that. Over the last few years Gemma had become convinced that her mother was to blame for her father’s death and also for his general and obvious unhappiness. Since going away to university soon after her father’s death, her feelings of indifference had developed into something closer to hatred and she had recently felt a strong and growing desire for revenge of some kind.
As it was, the interview itself had gone pretty well. It had really been more of a conversation with the senior probation manager, David, and the administrator-cum-secretary, Lizzie, at the Littlehampton office. Gemma had always got on well with older people, particularly men, and it had been apparent from the start they were pretty desperate for new staff in the West Sussex region. David was clearly quite taken with her – in a nice, avuncular, if slightly drooling, way. He was an earnest, old school-style probation officer who was probably in his early sixties and approaching retirement; it came over that he clearly felt more than a little disillusioned by recent changes to the probation system. Gemma had the sense to play on this and stress the importance of rehabilitation, and of working on a personal rather than managerial level with offenders. She noted his nod of approval when she mentioned the importance of offenders facing up to the consequences of their behaviour and taking responsibility, but that this could only work in a supportive environment. Lizzie was common sense personified; even though she was a ‘Miss’ and no doubt had always been so, she looked as if she would be the ideal partner, if not wife, for David. It struck Gemma that they probably ran the office like a well organised home, and that gave her a good feeling about the place and job.
Gemma had made the right impression on both of them and sailed through the interview. Although sexism was still rife, the Sex Discrimination Act and the establishment of the Equal Opportunities Commission a few years earlier had made things a little easier; and it had helped that the probation service was one area where women were getting some kind of foot in the door and recognition, compared to many other areas of professional work, at least. So she had walked into the job with little planning, or even thought, really. It had been summer 1980 and Mark had been one of her first assignments. Initially she had gone along to the prison visits to observe and be mentored by David as part of her induction period, but David’s disillusionment had been getting to him and he announced he was taking early retirement only a couple of months after Gemma had started to work there. It had seemed sensible for Gemma to carry on with Mark and with preparing his parole report as one of her first proper clients. She had been a little disappointed that David left so soon after her appointment but it had helped that his replacement as her line manager, Gregory, was only a year or two younger than his predecessor and didn’t seem keen to change things around too much.
That was over a year ago, and although there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the job, she had had enough. Initially David had been good to work with: he cared for what he did and worked hard too. Apart from him though, the rest of her colleagues had proved something of a mixed bag. Mathew, who’d taken over the official rehabilitation of Mark when they had moved in together earlier in the year, she found particularly irritating. He had cultivated a ponytail to go with a straggly beard that never seemed to be without the remains of his breakfast or lunch, depending on the time of day, and he wore what she assumed from the reek was the same check shirt for days on end. It wasn’t so much his appearance or slightly stale odour that grated most with her, but his rather ridiculous and supercilious manner with his colleagues as well as his clients, along with his half-baked advocacy of anti-psychiatry, which he appeared to believe offered some kind of way forward for probation. Even though she knew why he did it, the way that Mark played up to Mathew’s unwarranted intellectual snobbishness also really irritated her. On top of that Mathew had tried it on with her when she’d given him the benefit of the doubt and met up with him one evening soon after starting her job.
Her new boss, Gregory, was bearable in small doses; and to be fair his heart was in the right place, he didn’t throw his weight around and, more crucially, he seemed to trust her to get on with things on her own. He’d been parachuted in after David’s retirement and was a typical example of the ex-army personnel who still made up a good proportion of the service; at least he was at the opposite end of the political and ideological spectrum from Mathew. Gregory had brought in as his deputy Howard, a colleague he had worked with in Portsmouth, also ex-army and, as with so many of them, apparently unable to get a job in the police so settling for this as the next best. Along with Lizzie and Jude, a new and seemingly empty-headed part-time worker whom Mathew was busy homing in on now that he’d accepted that Gemma was out of bounds, that was the team.
Surprisingly it was the clients themselves whom she did feel some degree of sympathy with, and generally speaking they clearly did need support to get on with their lives. There had been a few times when it had felt really good to get a result and to see some progress and it did actually feel like she was making a difference, but it didn’t make up for the rest of the job. Aside from her less than inspiring colleagues, the service itself was becoming increasingly bureaucratised and managerialist – the recent emphasis on targets and performance indicators seemed to suit Gregory’s style of management and it was a trend that Gemma could see was bound to continue. It was time for her to take control of her life and to do some of the things she had always intended to; and to get what she felt she deserved. And a part of that would involve getting some degree of restitution – it sounded better than revenge – for her father, or perhaps in truth more for her. Although she hadn’t thought about it in any great depth, something told her that she needed to start to work on sorting out Mark and getting some kind of benefit from being with him.
As she drove past the old parish church at Duncton, a couple of miles from their cottage, Gemma was amazed how quickly the half-hour drive home had flashed by as she pondered the next step of her life. On one level it was so far so good: the job had been a diversion, a stepping stone maybe, but that was all; and being with Mark had turned out pretty much as she had imagined. He hadn’t managed to get anything much going in his post-prison life and had proved reasonably easy to manipulate. That made it sound horribly cold and calculating, which wasn’t really the case. They had had some good times together and she did actually care for him; as she mulled over her tentative plans for the future there was a twinge of guilt, but she knew she could manage that.
Soon after they had got together properly, Gemma had taken Mark to meet her mother and as she had expected the two of them had hit it off immediately. Anne was easily flattered and Mark was an inveterate flirt. Thinking back, Gemma hadn’t done that with any detailed strategy in mind, although perhaps there had been some kind of nascent intuition that it might be useful, even beneficial in the future.
When she had first visited Mark at Ford Open Prison and started working on his parole application – initially with David taking the lead while she was learning the ropes, and then on her own – she had let him, indeed encouraged him, to find out about her own background and life. It was just a matter of letting the man think he was in control. Come to think about it, that was about the only skill she had ever picked up from her mother, and even if it wasn’t one to be particularly proud of, it had its uses. Alongside going through the usual issues and motions involved in sorting out the probation report for Mark, she had initially and at the time purposely painted him a picture of her supposedly idyllic and happy childhood, with devoted and loving parents who gave her everything she wanted. It was, in fact, a picture that was a far cry from the loneliness of a single child, emotionally ignored but materially spoilt by her mother, and an unseen party to the constant whingeing and arguing between her embittered mother and despairing father. Even now she wasn’t certain just what was behind her idea to mislead Mark or whether it had even been intentional; however, in attempting to highlight a comfortable and well-off family background, Gemma realised that she had perhaps overdone things and would have to let Mark know something of her real feelings about her mother in due course.
She remembered her father with great fondness; he had been her hero, really. She missed him terribly. He had always had time for her. When she was younger, on returning from his daily commute to work in the city, he would pull back into the driveway of their detached house in Lynch Road, on the south side of Farnham, and always come straight up to her room to check whether she was asleep and to read to her if she wasn’t. Even when she had been asleep she had woken the next morning and imagined she’d seen him at the door. He had worked long hours in the city and looking back Gemma realised that he must have been driven to distraction and despair by her mother; no doubt his work had been something of a welcome escape for him. She felt a surge of bitterness; and now she would never have him to turn to if things got tough, or to share the special moments of her life with. Although she had no particular interest in getting married, the thought of doing that without a father just wouldn’t seem right.
***
Anne, Gemma’s mother, was a wealthy woman in her own right. She had been left a near fortune from both her father, George, and then her Uncle Arthur, each of whom had held senior positions as well as substantial shares in the Cunard shipping line. Their father, and Anne’s grandfather, Cecil, had worked his way up in the famous White Star shipping line in the early years of the twentieth century and had become a director when it had merged with Cunard in the mid-1930s. He had started working at Oceanic House, just across from Trafalgar Square, as a junior clerk soon after Thomas Ismay – the chairman since the founding of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, more commonly known as the White Star Line – had died and been replaced by his son Joseph Bruce Ismay in the last year of the nineteenth century. Cecil came to the attention of J Bruce Ismay, as he liked to be known, along with the rest of the senior management, for the way in which he took charge of dealing with the public outcry following the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. Hundreds of relatives and friends of passengers as well as general onlookers had descended on Oceanic House in the days after the sinking and Cecil had helped to avoid a public relations disaster for the company by ensuring the speedy and sensitive release of appropriate information. Initial reports had been confused and there had been a suggestion that the Titanic was being towed into New York. It wasn’t until the day after that there was confirmation of the extent of the disaster. Cecil had spent most of the week virtually living in the White Star offices and offering what news and comfort he could to the waiting crowd.
As well as being the flagship for White Star, it was no doubt due to the Titanic being to a large extent Ismay’s project and dream that Cecil’s response to the disaster came to his attention. Indeed, the chairman had himself sailed on the ill-fated maiden voyage and been one of the just over seven hundred survivors after being picked up by the RMS Carpathia steamship. It was little surprise that Anne’s grandfather’s actions in helping deal with the fall-out led to his promotion to a managerial role soon after; and so to his decision to invest all he could in buying shares in the company. After becoming a director in due course, Cecil used his influence to find positions with the company for both his sons just prior to the Second World War and left them his shares when he eventually died in 1938. Although they both survived the war, Anne’s father and her uncle, a confirmed bachelor, died within a year of each other in the late 1950s. Anne was the sole heir, her own mother having died in 1949 of cervical cancer, still pretty much undiagnosable let alone untreatable at the time.
An only child brought up in a privileged environment, Anne was self-centred, selfish and arrogant. She had homed in on Jeffrey Powell, her future husband, in the mid-1950s at a party to celebrate the completion and delivery of the Saxonia Carmania, the first of four Cunard liners which had been commissioned by the company to sail on the Atlantic route to Canada. Almost seven years older than her, he worked in the accounts department at Cunard. He was handsome but considerably less well-off than her – an ideal combination, Anne had felt at the time. They had got married in late 1954 and chosen Farnham as the place to buy their first house. Anne had a hankering for suburban living, increasingly in vogue at the time, and Farnham looked to be an ideal location: within reasonably easy reach of the Cunard offices in London but far enough away from the capital to feel it. It was a substantial detached property built a few years previously and lived in by just the first owner and then for a couple of years only. Even though her father was not particularly convinced of Jeffrey’s suitability as a future son-in-law, he had provided a substantial deposit for the house as their wedding gift, leaving only a small mortgage to be based on Jeffrey’s fairly average salary. He had also made sure that his daughter got the very best and the wedding was a lavish affair. With both her father and uncle highly regarded in the company, the wedding was attended by most of Cunard’s senior staff. The ceremony was held at St Andrew’s, the imposing Parish Church of Farnham, dating back to the 12th century and according to parish records a milestone on the medieval Pilgrim’s Way between Winchester and Canterbury. It had been followed by a reception at the Frensham Pond Hotel, a magnificent building overlooking Frensham Great Pond and with parts of it dating back to the fifteenth century. Previously known as The White Horse its sense of history was enhanced by it having served as a smart and welcome billet for Canadian soldiers serving with the Allies in the Second World War.
