Free Rosa's Child by Jeremy Josephs Page A

would provide a legitimate reason for going, but as far as she was concerned it could just as easily have been another kind of work altogether. In the event she stood her ground and stuck to her first choice.
    The Manns may have capitulated, but throughout Grace's training, far from giving her encouragement, Irene would often play on her guilt about Eunice. How wonderful it would be, she said time and time again, if only Grace would give to her poor sister the care she lavished on her patients at the hospital.
    Nor did Grace's escape from the Mann household effect the end of her father's obsession with her; indeed her absence seemed to exacerbate it. Although she gave up nearly every rest day to be with her parents, still the Reverend would ask when she was coming again, extracting a pledge from her to that effect. Grace could see that she was locked into a familiar pattern: as ever, it seemed to be her destiny to sacrifice herself to her father's emotional demands. And even worse than knowing how she would be spending every day off for the foreseeable future was being asked repeatedly to reassure her father that no, of course she would never leave him.
    It was while in Birmingham, where she had gone to complete her midwifery training, that Grace became involved with Peter Bailey, a curate and, like David Pitts before him, also a member of her father's congregation. For the Reverend Mann, who by now had transferred his allegiance from the Baptist Church to the Church of England, a familiar threat loomed, except that with Grace now courting a clergyman the danger was even more pronounced. What if Bailey came to learn of the long years of abuse? Worse still, what if the Bishop were to hear of his misdemeanours? To begin with, the Reverend tried an approach that his daughter knew all too well.
    'No, Grace, definitely not for you. You know that he's just been rejected by another girl and you would undoubtedly be on the rebound. I would hate to see you get hurt in that way.'
    When that tack proved unsuccessful, and with Grace and Peter edging towards marriage - at least in the Reverend's imagination - Edward Mann embarked on another of his urgent, self-appointed missions of destruction. Fully recovered from his breakdown, he busied himself writing letters to Grace at the nurses' home and telephoning her incessantly. He then developed a habit of appearing on her doorstep without warning in order to plead with her in person. And on several occasions he suddenly emerged from the Birmingham traffic in his battered old Austin to spy on his daughter as she, on her bicycle, attempted to go about her business around the city.
    For the Reverend it was imperative to bring his daughter's present relationship, like every one of them, to a speedy end. But in this case there was an even greater urgency than usual. As a man of the cloth, Peter Bailey could ruin the Reverend at a stroke if his dark secret were to come to light. The best form of defence seemed to be attack, the minister decided, and he wrote to the Bishop listing the reasons why his prospective son-in-law was quite unsuitable to become a vicar.
    Here was a man possessed. No longer was he hounding a vulnerable, teenage schoolgirl, but a young woman of twenty-five - and evidently with some success, because it now appeared that he had managed to recruit his wife to his cause. For now she it was who sought to lay down the law to Grace.
    'You do realize, don't you,' she told her daughter at the vicarage, 'that if you do go ahead and marry Peter, your father won't come to the wedding.' Grace stood stunned as Irene, somewhat superfluously, played her next card: the relationship was merely a friendship and any idea of marriage was really all in their heads. For instead of accepting the prospect of her father's absence from the ceremony, Grace immediately concluded that her romance with the young curate was doomed. The crude threat had worked. For Grace it was unthinkable that her father