Every indication that she wasn’t completely valueless came too late, Dixon reflected, sitting in the hotel garden in the shade of a wattle tree listening to the currawongs and kookaburras. How different her life would have been if she had known then that she was good-looking and clever, not ugly and stupid as she had been told.
One day, at the age of sixteen back in England, she had been trusted to escort a twelve-year-old girl inmate to the dentist for an extraction. During that walk along the busy streets she noticed that both women and men were staring at her.
As a child she had been convinced she had a freakish facial irregularity. There were no mirrors allowed inside the orphanage, vanity being considered a worse sin than blasphemy, whatever that was, so she’d only ever seen her image distorted in rippled glass or convex shiny surfaces. When prospective parents came to choose a girl for adoption the matron, obviously to spare Dixon’s feelings, knowing she’d never be picked, hid her away until they’d left with some other more attractive child. Later, on her first excursions outside the orphanage, when she caught sight of her reflection in shop windows and once briefly in a mirror in a doctor’s surgery, she realised she looked quite normal and was left to wonder why Matron always hid her away.
“Everyone’s looking at you,” said her young companion.
“I can see that.” She couldn’t understand it. She dropped her head to hide her face in the folds of her scarf.
If it was her feet that they were looking at she could understand it, as Matron had surpassed herself on this occasion by choosing from the second-hand store an even uglier pair of shoes for Dixon than she usually did. Already she could feel the pain of blisters forming on her heels as the backs of the ill-fitting shoes flapped up and down, scraping her flesh with every step she took.
“I wish they’d stare at me,” the young girl continued. “But then I’m not beautiful like you.”
Dixon tried to detect sarcasm in that remark but found none. It was the first time she’d had that word applied to herself and she wondered if the girl could be trusted to know what she was talking about.
“Everyone wants to look like you. Even Matron. I heard her say it.”
There was little bleeding when the young girl’s tooth was removed as it had long been disengaging from its socket. The dentist told her to come back when she was due to marry and he would remove her remaining twelve teeth and fit her with a nice set of dentures so she’d be no bother or expense to her husband.
“How is it we haven’t seen you before?” he asked Dixon. “Let’s take a look while you’re here.” He examined the inside of her mouth. “Splendid,” he said. “You must have good heredity to survive the diet up at that place. Something worthwhile from your mother or father, though I presume you’ve little else to thank them for.” He tilted up her chin. “Even a face as beautiful as yours would be spoilt if you had gaps in your mouth. Mind you look after them.”
It had taken sixteen years to discover she was beautiful and twenty-six to find out she was clever, in her ignorance missing out on adoption, education and marriage during that time. To think she could have had a home with a mother and father to love her if Matron hadn’t prevented her from being adopted; she could have gone to school and become a teacher or a writer; she could have married Manus and been the envy of all the females in Ballybrian and had beautiful children of her own. She could have been saved from working at the Park where she was hated by Charlotte and humiliated by Lily East, who had cast her out into the world with not one person to call her own.
The women’s magazines that Dixon read advised people not to indulge in regrets as they were a waste of time and didn’t alter anything. Dixon didn’t agree. Her regrets were her constant and valued companions. They mightn’t change the past but they could flavour the future, spurring her on to revenge, the prospect of which comforted her. When the opportunity presented itself, she was making sure she would be ready by having a substantial amount of money in her bank accounts to give her the freedom and the power to wreak the havoc she so desired.