Muriel's Reign Read Free

that her face was to be her fortune.
    Nothing else was likely to provide her with one.
    She left school early and took odd jobs but none of them brought her fortune. Events led her from rented rooms to factory work, to other towns, to occasional adventures but nothing rose to the standard of the early promises made by her mother.
    Fred was the nearest she got. He was handsome and a sporadic big spender; rode a motorcycle and rented a furnished basement flat near Central London.
    He worked, he told her, for J. Arthur Rank and rewarded her with descriptions of the cinema trade as they ate in restaurants. Phyllis settled for it. Her higher expectations had dwindled and she took a morning job cleaning for a family who were good to her and was grudgingly contented.
    One afternoon Fred was knocked off his motorbikeas he drove the wrong way down a one-way street. He died in the ambulance as it made its way to the nearest hospital. Phyllis was saddened for she had liked Fred well enough and was anxious about her future.
    J. Arthur Rank’s were, obviously, excellent employers but unlikely to know much about pensions for common-law wives.
    The day after Fred’s death she looked up the firm in the telephone book. Fred had never allowed her to ring him at work.
    ‘Always up a ladder fixing a bit of lighting. In and out, I am, like a fiddler’s elbow.’
    A lady at the office number listed for Rank Productions said, ‘No.’ No Mr Reardly had ever worked there as far as she knew. She would check, of course, but felt there must be some mistake. ‘Another firm, dear, called Rank, I daresay. There are plenty of them. The fur trade perhaps?’
    Phyllis was never able to track down Fred’s past. Never, entirely, did she find out how he had passed his days or where he had found inspiration for the stories he cooked up for her about the film industry as they ate out.
    For a short while she continued with the cleaning job but soon the flat was reclaimed by an angry landlord who tried to make Phyllis pay back rent as Fred’s few possessions were confiscated and his employment as burglar hinted at.
    A live-in job was her only hope and it was with that only hope that she read the lines in a domestic journal: ‘Carer needed for elderly gentleman. Nursing experience not essential.’
    The advertisement took her to Lincolnshire where Jerome Atkins lived and where his mind had started to judder.
    Arthur Stiller, solicitor, had interviewed her and deemed her suitable. He liked a pretty face and Phyllis’s was prettier than any of the other applicants.
    He said, ‘Bear with me,’ as he left her on a chair in his office – ‘I must have a little think.’ He had already decided to offer her the post.
    She stretched her eyes when she was shown the vast house and stretched them further when she was shown to an attic room, roses papered on walls and ceiling, and told it was where she was to make her home. Old furniture too – and oil paintings. It was not hers – but surely a fortune lurked.
    Other members of the household were hostile and the outdoor staff disdainful but it suited her in several ways.
    Her first meeting with Jerome Atkins, her new employer, was encouraging. His wife was alive but only just and lived in seclusion in a cut-off wing of the place with her own team of helpers.
    He looked younger than his eighty-four years, hada good head of white hair, winged eyebrows and tight, hard, unwrinkled skin.
    Mrs Atkins died soon after Phyllis’s arrival. Her husband was little affected by the event but enjoyed Phyllis decking him out for the funeral service, conducted by Dawson in the village church. She brushed his collar, polished his shoes and tucked a handkerchief into the pocket of his dark suit.
    Nothing she did inched her nearer to extracting promises from him although, as he grew daily pottier, he enjoyed telling her of his astonishing wealth. ‘Me. Me. Very rich, you know. Oh yes. Very rich indeed. You – like