Chapter 2: Adam’s Rib

Accountants Differ

By the time I was officially appointed Chief Executive of Black Sheep UK I had been in effective charge for two years. Great Aunt Harriet was the actual boss, but she asked me to help her out. I was still at university, and it wasn’t until I graduated that my wife and I set off for Switzerland to solve the mystery of Great Uncle Henry’s missing fortune. He had died aged ninety and I was only twenty when I took command of five nursing homes in Scotland.

I’m Kenneth and I belong to a large family that keep a careful watch on each other because of Henry’s supposed wealth. His Will was a disappointment since he died broke, and the family became more united in their adversity. My second cousin Kirsty and I married in Switzerland once we had tracked down our Great Uncle’s hidden wealth with the help of his ghost. We decided not to share the good news with our kinsfolk!

Although they are designated nursing homes, the properties only accommodate wealthy pensioners whose health is looked after by medically trained staff. A cordon bleu chef and five-star hotel service contribute in no small measure to the well-being of our clients. Kirsty and I live in a luxury flat in the attic of the Glasgow home, the flagship of the group. She is completing a PhD in psychology.

Henry left everything running smoothly and profitably and, young as I was, I could see that no changes were required. At the same time, I recognise that our clients are aging so change will be thrust upon me. The most striking thing about the Glasgow home is the harmony amongst staff and guests. Henry, over the years, had made some strange appointments that all seemed to work. The head nurse, Karen, had paid her way through nursing school by selling her body.

The homes themselves had started life as brothels that Henry had set up at the end of the World War. They were exclusive houses in the best locations and established his fortune before the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies undercut his prices. His faithful clients were reaching the time in life when resurrection was becoming as important as an erection in their conversations. Henry was quick to adjust to the changes.

Some of his best girls in the old days had been nurses supplementing their always meagre salaries and he continued to offer employment to such girls at rates a good bit higher than the NHS. In return for the extra cash, they were expected to be tolerant of the odd incident when a bubble of sap suddenly rose in the withered stumps of the clients.

What struck me forcibly was that Henry wasn’t simply a good judge of character. His individual choices were well made but it was the way staff and guests gelled into a warm unit that was astonishing. There was respect and real friendship throughout the homes. There were squabbles, of course, but they resolved themselves without the basic fabric being altered.

It is a phenomenon not confined to the Glasgow home. I spent two weeks in each of the other homes and, except in one instance, the atmosphere was every bit as good as back at headquarters. We’re not talking about angels here. The patients are aging, often in pain or reacting to a change in medication. The staff members are sometimes stretched too far and react by snapping at the clients or each other. There seems to be a dynamic in the buildings that absorbs the blips and restores harmony.

I got to know all the staff and guests, but I was still struggling to understand how Uncle Henry put his teams together. In most cases I came to appreciate why he had made an individual choice of the person holding the post. The one exception is Jenny, the receptionist in the Glasgow home. After my round of visits to the other homes, she was on duty when I returned to Glasgow. She did not acknowledge my presence and ignored my greeting.

So far as I can judge, she is always ill-mannered and grumpy, although I have seen her chatting quite amicably with staff members. Perhaps she doesn’t like bosses or men, but I had done nothing to antagonise her. She is tall and strongly built with pretty hair nicely styled. I find it hard to judge her looks because she is scowling anytime I see her but her features are good enough. The off-putting thing for me is her eyebrows that form a thick dark bar across the upper part of her face; I feel uneasy when she looks at me and I wonder what sin I’ve committed that only she can see.

Kirsty claims she has hardly noticed the woman and Karen told me I was havering when I mentioned Jenny’s eyebrows. Henry appointed her so he must have seen or sensed something that I was missing. Maybe I was havering, but I had to put off a closer look at Jenny to deal with a problem that had been handed to me when I stopped in Dundee.

Our home in that fair city had been performing badly. Not only did we have vacant beds instead of the waiting lists of the other homes, but there was also a sudden rush to the door by staff that had been there for years. The home was due for refurbishment and five million had been set aside for that purpose, but I wondered whether we would be wasting money. I was deputising for Aunt Harriet at the time so I had no authority, but I nosed around and uncovered what looked to me like a plot.

The medical director appeared to be damaging staff relations, getting rid of experienced people and bringing in new folk who were attracting lots of complaints from the clients and others – the chef resigned in a rage and returned to France before I could find out why. A group of city business men that wanted to buy the home had suborned the medical director with the intention of bringing the price down.

We could have refurbished the home and fought off the bid, but I argued that the home was not worth fighting for. Aunt Harriet agreed and sent young Cedric off to negotiate the best possible deal. Cedric is our accountant, but he is not very good at mathematics. He is a brilliant psychologist and is emeritus professor since he retired from the chair he graced at St Andrews University. We did well out of the sale of the home so everyone was happy.

One reason I had wanted to sell was because the existing home was now in the wrong part of the city. It’s easy enough to make the building secure but the surrounding area tended to discourage visits by relatives – especially in their own cars. Perhaps I would have fought the takeover if I had been more experienced, but I judged it to be the wrong time and place for a battle. Henry had left several other properties, and my long-term plan was to open them as homes if possible. One estate near St Andrews looked particularly promising. All the properties were profitably rented but the lease on this property expired in less than three months.

On a visit to the east coast, I agreed to lunch with two lawyers who represented guests in the Dundee home. Things were not going well, according to them and they wanted me to open a new home somewhere close to the river Tay. I temporised with the two men, promising nothing but leaving the door open. After lunch I went to view the mansion in Fife. It looked even at first glance to need a lot spent on it, but I had the price of the Dundee home and the five million we hadn’t used refurbishing it. Before I drove up to Aberdeen to visit our home there, I contacted a surveyor and ordered a comprehensive survey.

A preliminary report was waiting for me when I got back to Glasgow, and it was sufficiently promising for me to decide to explore further. I wanted Cedric to assess the likely return from a home close to St Andrews. He had been a student when he lost his virginity to Aunt Harriet in about 1950 and he had been her slave ever since. He is outstandingly clever – virtually unbeatable at chess – but he gets muddled when he talks about any aspect of accounting.

Despite being unable to follow the simplest discussion, he goes off and returns with a clear answer. The books are always immaculately completed, and projections are always properly costed with contingencies considered. Now there may be other explanations but I had concluded that Cedric was a front for a qualified accountant who was doing the actual work. Until now I had done nothing to check whether I was right or wrong. So long as the accounting was completed correctly and on time Cedric could use a monkey for all I cared. We didn’t keep two sets of books – what I saw the Inland Revenue saw.

Working on a possible new home changed that. Until I had decided on what to do, I didn’t want anyone outside the company to get wind of my plans. But I couldn’t decide what to do until the accountant, whoever he or she was, had conducted the feasibility assessment. Henry had done all that sort of thing himself, but I didn’t yet have the knowledge or experience. I could think of no one on the staff that was a candidate for the job of secret accountant. In fact, I was having difficulty figuring out why a good accountant would let Cedric get the credit.

My worst-case scenario was that someone outside the company was doing the books while they waited to get wind of our future plans. Not that I suspected Cedric of any wrongdoing, but he is, for a gifted psychologist, dangerously naïve. At twenty-one, I was going to have to play the heavy father with an emeritus professor of seventy! I’ll bet they don’t teach you how to do that in business school!

“I’ve wanted to tell you from the start, but she wouldn’t let me,” Cedric readily confessed when I broached the subject. “She thinks you hate her like all the men, so she made me promise to keep quiet.”

“Why should I hate someone I don’t even know?”

“Oh, but you do know her, it’s Jenny.”

I let my face speak for me.

“She’s had a tough time in her short life, you know. Henry knew all about her when he took her on.”

I recovered the power of speech and took Cedric up to my flat where we would be undisturbed while he told me why I should learn to trust Jenny. Learning to like her was not on my agenda at this point.

Spare the Rod

Jenny was six when her mother died giving birth to her little brother. Her older brother James was ten and he was the only one in the family who felt much more than inconvenience at his mother’s passing. Jenny missed the cuddles, but her Aunt Cath stayed on after the funeral and she filled that gap. Her father, the Reverend George Kelty had never been much of a presence in the household so his retreat into the solitude of his study went largely unnoticed.

Jenny’s relationship with her father remained unaffected by her mother’s death. She saw him on Sundays bellowing out a sermon from the pulpit until it was time for her to troop off with the other children to Sunday School while he shouted his main attack on sin and debauchery at the adults. At home she only heard his voice at the beginning and end of meals when he said grace and pronounced the blessing. James was called into the study on Saturday mornings to give an account of his progress in school. For the rest of the time, silence was observed throughout the manse.

When Aunt Cath first came to stay, she was funny and she would ask Jenny questions then answer them herself. She became quieter and quieter as time went on and she hardly ever smiled except at George Junior, the baby that had killed mummy. Then there came a day when Jenny and James stood in the hall clutching each other while their father delivered a mighty sermon to Aunt Cath in his study.

What really surprised the two children was that Aunt Cath was talking back. No one spoke when the Reverend was preaching. Not even the two church deacons who were really old, talked back to the minister! They couldn’t hear what Aunt Cath was saying and Jenny didn’t know what her father was shouting about. James just turned eleven and going up to the Academy in August made rather more of it.

“He wants Aunt Cath to marry him,” he whispered to his sister. Jenny felt her heart lift and she smiled happily.

“She won’t have him. I wish I could hear what Aunt Cath’s saying. He says she’s a fornicator.”

“What’s a forn-equator – what you said?”

“You’re too young to understand. Shut up and let me listen.”

When Aunt Cath stormed out the study, she almost knocked them over. She knelt and enfolded them in her arms and even James was happy to accept her embrace for once.

“Oh, my darlings, how I’m going to miss you. I wish I could bundle little George up and take him away with me.”

Five minutes later the door closed behind her for the last time. James and Jenny laid the table and put out a loaf and some cheese for tea. They were sitting quietly when their father appeared and sat at the head of the table as normal. He said the grace and then ate stolidly and silently until he had finished when he pronounced the blessing before he returned to his study. Little George was fed from a jar of baby food before being wiped down and his nappy changed. Even James was scared to attempt to bath the baby.

The following morning Jenny and James did their best to feed George and themselves. Jenny took her little brother out in his pram while James tried to tidy the house. He was white-faced when his sister returned: his father had caught him with the vacuum cleaner and had shouted at him for doing woman’s work.

“Where’s your good for nothing sister? Housekeeping is her job.”

Later in the afternoon a large, middle-aged lady arrived and introduced herself as their new housekeeper. She spent the first few days tutting about every aspect of the housekeeping. According to her Aunt Cath was a slut whose filthy habits had endangered the lives of the family. While she stayed with them, the house smelled of strong disinfectant. The food seemed to be disinfected too since everything she cooked tasted the same.

She was the first of many housekeepers inflicted on the children. They came in all shapes, sizes, and ages but none of them lasted very long. Some stormed out of the house, others crept out while James and Jenny were at school, but they all left sooner or later

By the time Jenny was ten George was a bright but nervous child who could only be comforted by his big sister. None of the housekeepers ever stayed long enough to form an emotional bond with the children. Just as George was getting to trust the latest lady she would pack and be on her way. James seldom came home before bedtime. After school he would go home with his best friend Alec where he would be fed by his pal’s mum Angela.

She was the one who noticed that Jenny was running out of clothes. The housekeepers bought things for George, but no one noticed that Jenny’s underclothes were in tatters and nothing fitted her properly. Alec’s mum always asked James about his sister, and she eventually braved the Minister to tell him that he had to buy clothes for his daughter. He gave her a handful of notes and told her that if she was so concerned she could take the child shopping.

From then on Angela made a point of talking to Jenny at least once a week. She taught the little girl how to cook and it was Angela who bought her a training bra and explained what was happening when she had her first period. It was becoming harder to find housekeepers and it often took days for a replacement to arrive. Jenny would look after little George during these gaps, and she would cook and wash his clothes and hers. James would come home early from Alec’s, but he had to be careful: if his father caught him helping out about the house he would lose his temper.

It is hard enough being a teenage boy without your father sneering at you for being unmanly when he catches you laying the table. When he had just turned sixteen James broke down in tears to Alec’s mum over something that had happened during the previous night. Angela came storming round and bearded the Reverend Kelty in his study. For the first time in their experience, their father was shouted down and emerged white-faced and shaking to dismiss the current housekeeper on the spot.

It was only years later that Jenny found out the cause of the problem. James had wakened during the night to find the housekeeper, stark naked, climbing into his bed under the sheets. Whatever the Reverend Kelty said to Angela it put a stop to her visits to Jenny.

As usual Jenny, now twelve, took on the role of temporary housekeeper looking after a lively six-year-old, cooking and washing clothes for herself and her little brother. Her father’s clothes were sent to the laundry since he always had to look smart as a man of God and Angela was caring for James’ clothes. Now she was at secondary school she was getting more homework, and it was all getting too much for her to cope with. Several times she forced herself as far as the study door to ask when the new housekeeper was expected but she lost her nerve at the last minute.

She wasn’t left in doubt for very long. George had started at the school Jenny had recently left and the staff was happy enough for the little boy to sit in a classroom until his sister came to collect him. Despite Angela’s help, Jenny was not able to match the other girls. School uniform helped but she possessed no make-up, never listened to pop music, or talked about boys. She seldom smiled and was in constant trouble for failing to pay attention in class. Once Angela stopped coming round, she had no female company and she often went days talking to no one but baby George.

She was tired and fed-up before she collected George, and he was particularly naughty on the walk back to the manse. They came through the back door, and she had just given her little brother a drink and a handful of biscuits when her father roared into the kitchen.

“This house is like a pig sty. Get it cleaned up at once!”

Jenny looked at him blankly. She was doing her best without any help and her father expected more. Before she could think of a reply, he slapped her so hard across the face that she fell against the table, sliding down onto the floor where she lay too dazed even to cry. Her father slammed out of the room before the tears began to flow. George sat on his stool watching quietly while she pulled herself together. She rolled over and got to her knees and this was too good an opportunity for her little brother who climbed on her back and smacked her bottom shouting ‘giddy-up.’

Next day at school her registration teacher asked how she had come by the bruise that was now covering her left cheek.

“My father slapped me, miss.”

Before the words had been spoken, the teacher rounded on her.

“You wicked girl! How dare you say such a thing about the Reverend Mr Kelty. He has had a hard row to hoe since your poor dear mother passed away. What would she think if she heard you say such an awful thing about your dear father? I would have expected his daughter to help in every way to look after that big house and care for George.”

By break time the word was all round the school that Jenny Kelty was a wicked liar. There may have been one or two in the staff room who felt that there was no smoke without fire but even they believed that the girl must have provoked the attack. Sullen, moody, and inattentive they knew her to be from their own experience and therefore capable of any infamous action. None of the teachers would talk to Jenny and her classmates left her alone out of a kind of awe. You didn’t gob-up your mates and you certainly didn’t tell lies about your parents.

Whichever way you looked at it, Jenny was to blame. The head teacher was so upset that she could not bring herself to talk to the girl, but she made a point of calling ‘that sweet man’ the saintly George Kelty to let him know what his daughter was saying about him.

“Of course, none of us believe a word of it. I’ve made some excuses for Jenny in the past because of the tragic loss of your dear wife but there really must be a limit. I would advise you to have a stern word with the little madam when you get her home.”

Her father had resigned from the Board of Governors when they decided to appoint a woman as head, but he prided himself on being a big enough man to accept good advice even from a dubious source.

When Jenny got home, he took her into his study, put her over his knee and thrashed her. He pushed her skirt above her waist and pulled down her white school knickers to ensure that the punishment was sufficiently severe.

“God hates liars,” he called at every stroke, completely overlooking the fact that Jenny had told nothing but the truth when she admitted to her teacher that her father had slapped her hard enough to cause the disfiguring bruise.

From then on, Jenny said as little as possible while she worked herself to exhaustion to keep house and not fall too far behind in her schoolwork. The teachers treated her like a pariah, and she was always the first to be picked on when there was trouble. Most of the other pupils gave her a wide berth but one or two of the naughtier girls cultivated her friendship until they discovered that she had no interest in causing uproar in or out of the classroom.

At home she was punished frequently and, it seemed to her, regularly. If he could find no immediate excuse to thrash her, he would fall back on Eve’s destruction of Adam’s happiness in Eden. Her father always managed to find fault with her on Mondays and on Thursday when he came home from the mother and babies’ class that he held after bible study. The pattern quickly became established: her father ordered her to the study where she had to remove her knickers and tuck her skirt into the waistband leaving her bottom fully exposed. Her father sat in a straight chair, and she stood between his legs leaning forward over his left knee.

He always accompanied his slaps with a pithy reminder of the fault that had occasioned his anger or God’s. The punishment continued until he was too tired to continue. After the first few thrashings, Jenny learned to dissociate her mind from what was being inflicted on her body. That was when she began to notice that a lump developed in her father’s leg during the punishment.

She didn’t dare to ask the cause, but he explained to her one time when a sudden attack of cramp forced him to leap up, that it was his prayer book that he kept in his trouser pocket. She also noticed that his excitement grew at first but just before the beating finished, he would calm down and, taking deep breaths, his slaps would turn into gentle rubbing of the red and swollen area of Jenny’s buttocks. At the peak of his ecstasy, he would often pull her closer until his prayer book was jabbing hard into her thigh.

She didn’t remember ever seeing the prayer book he kept in his trousers. It felt more like a cylinder than a rectangular shape. It also seemed to get very hot against her bare flesh. It was only when one of the bad girls fell out with her mates and became friendly that Jenny got a clue to the nature of the prayer book although she couldn’t convince herself that her new friend was correct.

“Let’s face it, Jen, your dad’s just a filthy old man. My stepdad keeps tryin’ it on with me, but he has nae chance.”

The straw that finally broke the camel’s back was supplied by this same girl. Jenny at fourteen had never worn make-up and she was persuaded by the girl to try lipstick. It was applied in the girls’ toilets after school and Jenny liked it so much that she kept it on when she went to pick up George from his school. He didn’t seem to notice until she stopped just out of sight of the manse to scrape the lipstick off. As soon as they were in the back door, George raced through the house and opened the study door.

“Dad, dad, our Jenny’s been wearing lipstick. She has dad, I’m not fibbing.”

Jenny didn’t even wait to be called into the study, but she was surprised when George made no move to leave.

“You said I could stay and watch Jenny gettin’ it, dad. You said she’s truly wicked and it was time I learned the evil ways of women. Can I stay, dad? I promise I won’t say a word.”

Jenny had thought that her humiliation could get no worse, but she was hardly even surprised when her father smilingly agreed to let his younger son witness her punishment. He even invited George to pull down her knickers after her skirt was hitched up. The prayer book seemed to be bigger this afternoon and she noticed that George had a little one of his own that he was clasping through his school trousers.

After a beating, Jenny usually pulled herself upright, pulled down her skirt and left the room with her eyes on the carpet but something changed that day. The feelings of shame left her and settled on her father just as if she had passed him a plate at the dinner table. The girl at school was right after all: The Reverend George Kelty really is a filthy old man, a pervert, a paedo. Jenny stood up straight when the assault was over.

She looked at her father’s suffused face and he dropped his eyes and then she looked at her baby brother standing clutching his trousers with his eyes competing with his mouth to see which could open furthest. When he saw her looking, tears began to run down his flushed cheeks.

Standing tall, Jenny strode out of the study with her skirt still tucked into her waist band. She ignored her knickers lying on the carpet and her scarlet bottom radiated warm shame onto the old and the young male creatures watching her exit.

Go Directly to Jail

Once she was out the study with the door safely closed Jenny stopped and fixed her skirt. At this point she should have gone to the kitchen to prepare dinner, but something had changed. Her school bag was lying on the table, and she should at least pick that up since she had an essay to do for rotten Mrs McElvie but she was in no mood for appeasement on any front.

She went slowly upstairs, stopping to remove the key from the inside of her father’s bedroom door. Years before James had discovered that one key fitted all the locks in the house. Jenny went into her own room and locked the door behind her. She remembered to leave the key in the lock as her big brother had told her. The key was a bit stiff, and she had a moment of fear that she would not be able to unlock the door. She thought that it would serve them right if she died in there and her decaying corpse made the whole house stink!

She threw herself down on the white counterpane of her bed and eased her skirt up to expose her smarting bottom to the cooling air. It must look like a glace cherry in the middle of an iced cake, she thought, on the verge of hysterics. Her fingers tightened on the sheet as she waited for the explosion that was bound to happen when her father discovered that she had not gone meekly back to work. Meekness seemed to be the only quality he looked for in women!

Today was Thursday and they always ate early since the Reverend held a bible study class on that evening from six until eight. Listening as hard as she could, Jenny heard nothing from downstairs until about quarter to six when the front door banged. Surely her father would not have left without roaring a sermon through her locked door.

She sat up on her bed and looked at the door as if it held an answer, so she noticed at once when the handle turned. The lock held so she let out her breath and waited for the tirade that would follow his failure to gain entry. Instead, there was a gentle tap on the door and young George’s plaintiff voice asking why she had locked her door.

“Can I come in, Jen?” he asked.

“Go away!” she whispered, and then, allowing her anger to take hold, she repeated it at the top of her voice.

“I didn’t know, Jen. Honest, I just thought you would get a bit of a telling off. I was really scared.”

She remembered that he was only eight years old and that he had never seen his father behaving like that, so she rose and walked over to the door to let him in. Then she remembered him standing with his face flushed holding his little prayer book and she was overwhelmed with a disgust that brought bile into her mouth.

She found herself torn between disgust and pity for the little boy, but she heard him go into his own room and turn on his television set. That brought her anger back. The Reverend didn’t approve of television and never watched it, but he had given in to George’s pleas that he was mocked by the other boys at school since he knew nothing about the actors they watched so avidly. Her father’s solution was to install a set in George’s room and forbid Jenny to watch it.

He can have his telly, but he can’t have me, she thought. That led her to thinking that if her little brother couldn’t have her then her father should not have her either. If he wanted someone to thrash, he should get Mrs McElvie. He could tuck up her skirt and take down her drawers; she would enjoy exposing her big fat bum to the Reverend Kelty who she admired so much.

How would she like it if her bare bottom was smacked – her arse! This was the first time Jenny had ever thought a bad word. When she started junior school, she used to put her hands over her ears if anyone swore. Even now she censored what the other pupils said, tuning out the naughty words. Now she revelled in her daring.

“Arse, arse, arse, big fat arse, lardy arse,” she said out loud hoping that God was listening.

Then she formed a picture in her head of Mrs McElvie stretched across her father’s knee, bare arsed with his hand descending on the exposed flesh. She thought it would be like the jellies the housekeepers had sometimes made, all quivering and shaking. When his hand struck, she imagined it sinking into the rolls of fat. She tried hard to imagine what it would sound like, but she fell asleep while she was still considering and discarding squelching noises.