Free Acquired Tastes by Simone Mondesir Page A

could still remember the utter misery she felt on arriving at St Aloysius that first day. She had wanted to cling to her father and beg him to take her home, but her father did not like displays of emotion. According to him they were a sign of character weakness.
    Her father, Bill, had an uncertain temper at the best of times and Alicia, and her mother Eileen, had long since learned to avoid provoking it, but the days leading up to Alicia's departure for boarding school had been very tense as, at the same time, the regiment was preparing to leave for a tour of duty in Singapore. Foreign postings were unsettling for his men and their families, and her father made it clear that he had no intention of dealing with indiscipline at home as well as on the base, so, at least when he was around, Alicia and her mother had fought to keep their feelings under control.
    But every so often, Alicia would enter a room and find her mother looking lost among the chaos of packing cases, her shoulders shaking and tears streaming silently down her face. Alicia tried to comfort her, telling her that she really wanted to go to boarding school and that she would write every day, but there was something about her mother's mute sorrow that seemed beyond comfort.
    Alicia's father had found them clinging to each other on one such occasion, and ordered them not to make an exhibition of themselves. When Alicia's mother had continued to weep, he lost his temper. If it hadn't been for that damned priest with whom her mother spent so much time, he raged, Alicia would not be going away to a convent.
    Alicia was shocked by his words, even though she knew her mother's devout Catholicism was a constant source of irritation to her father. His religion was the army which allowed no time for something he considered to be women's superstitious nonsense. But the angrier he grew, the more Eileen turned to her religion for comfort. It was the only thing that gave her the strength to survive the rigours of married life she told Alicia, and survive them she must, for marriage was the cross women had to bear.
    Her parents had not always been unhappy. Alicia could remember a time when her mother sang around the house and her father had been as quick to laugh as he had been to lose his temper. Then, just before Alicia's fifth birthday, her mother went into hospital for a while. When she came home, she moved into a separate bedroom and never moved back. Her mother and father had become strangers in the same house after that. Alicia had never known quite what happened. She had come to suspect her mother may have had a hysterectomy; however her mother refused to talk about what she called 'those things', even to this day.
    Alicia had been a solitary child. She was shy and found it difficult to make friends, a situation made worse by her father discouraging her from playing with the children of those ranked either below or above him. So on that first day at boarding school, when Vanessa introduced herself and then bade Alicia to follow her, Alicia felt like an orphan who had been adopted. She would have followed Vanessa to the ends of the earth.
    If anything, Alicia's admiration and hero-worship of Vanessa had grown with the passing years. Vanessa was everything she secretly longed to be, but never dared, and though it was silly and rather adolescent, Alicia had always felt that just by being Vanessa's friend, a little of Vanessa's glamour rubbed off on her.
    Perhaps her admiration was the reason why, even though they were both mature women, when she was with Vanessa she still felt like an awkward eleven-year-old schoolgirl, mused Alicia, sucking the end of her pen. After all, she was a respected scholar and had even gained a quiet reputation as a feminist spokesperson among some of the women undergraduates because of her championing of little-known nineteenth-century women novelists. However, it was not a reputation with which she was altogether happy. Alicia disliked what she