Radclyffe Collier
Personal Data
Full Name
Collier, as you might imagine, is not an uncommon surname in The Vale which is perhaps why his parents gave him his unusual first and middle names.
Mental characteristics
Gender Identity
Relationships
History
Kiki’s understanding of matters was that Radclyffe would be around only for the purpose of and only for as long as it took to get herself and her partner, Vienna, pregnant. Kiki and Vienna had both wanted children, had both wanted more than one and had both wanted to experience motherhood for themselves. It seemed like the ideal arrangement: Radclyffe was to relinquish his rights to guardianship over the children and in return they would not raise any objections to his right of reasonable access to the children as they grew up.
Radclyffe was the very model of a procreative partner, always respecting the primacy of Kiki and Vienna’s family life over his own desire to spend time with the children but was always on hand when his help was needed. He adored the children and they adored him, and not just because he indulged them, which he certainly did, though never to excess, but because he was genuinely a nice guy to be around.
Trouble was, Kiki did not see it that way; she had never really liked him. The first time they had met she found him no more than tolerable; from there it was all downhill. To this day she could not tell you why; perhaps he was just too nice, who knows? But, in her youthful naïveté, she had been prepared to put up with him on the basis that once she had become pregnant, he would be gone. But it took longer for her to get pregnant than it had Vienna, for which, in her own mind, Kiki blamed Radclyffe. Then, after the children were born, she was quickly disabused of the idea that Radclyffe would not involve himself in the children’s upbringing which she resented notwithstanding that without him they might really have struggled with their first experiences of motherhood.
Radclyffe, perhaps sensing that all was not right, kept his distance when he was not needed. It was not what he wanted, nor what Vienna and the children would have wanted either but, as Erin and Andrea grew older and began to appreciate and to demand more of Radclyffe’s attentions, he inevitably started seeing more of them. Thus it was that the old resentments began to reassert themselves. That is, until one day, when the children were going on eight seasons, salvation, from Kiki’s point of view, arrived in the form of Magdaléna the Wanderer. She doted on the children and they were enthralled by her. Magdaléna, it seemed, had quite replaced Radclyffe in their affections (she had not, of course, and would never have allowed such a thing to happen) and, to boot, having her as live-in childcare meant he far less frequently had reason to be about the place.
But a wanderer never stays put in one place for longer than she needs to and, all too soon for Kiki’s liking, Magdaléna had packed her bag and taken once more to the highways any byways of Calmarendi. To make matters worse, as a legacy, she had kindled a passion in the children for the high and lonely places of the world, a passion that Radclyffe was more than happy to indulge for it had long been a passion of his also. When Vienna, too, began to show more than a passing interest in their expeditions into the wild places (which, for Kiki, held no attraction whatsoever) it all became too much. Kiki, imagining, without any basis in fact, that Radclyffe was using the situation as a cover for an illicit affair with Vienna, upped and left the family home.
History
As only a procreative father, Radclyffe had not been expected (or, as you may have read elsewhere, not by everyone even wanted) to play the rôle of a devoted father but, whatever the expectations, he loved his two daughters Andrea and Erin very much. It was a love reciprocated by both girls though, to a casual observer, by Erin rather more than Andrea.
It was not, however, through any lack of affection on Andrea’s part, rather that she was the less gregarious of the two which, in turn, may well have been a learned predisposition arising from the calm in her mind she could only achieve by being away from people and the din her nascent telepathy generated from their emotions. Indeed, Radclyffe was just about the only person she felt comfortable enough to confide in about this matter and, although there was never anything to suggest that he was himself a telepath, he was, in some way, able feel her pain in a way that resonated with her.
After Magdaléna had been and gone, Andrea prevailed upon her father to take her out into and to teach her the ways of the countryside and the lonely places. At first their “expeditions” were little more than family picnics but, as Andrea and Erin grew older, stronger and more responsible, they became increasingly adventurous. After Kiki had departed the scene at Prague Street, father and daughter grew closer and, though the coquettish Erin might, emotionally, always have been his favourite, it was, of the two, Andrea who bonded with him more firmly and in a rather more grown-up fashion.
Nevertheless, as she entered her teens, as her knowledge and self-confidence grew, Andrea took to heading out into the hills far more frequently on her own; Radclyffe understood her need for solitude and, indeed, that probably made the time they did spend together that much more precious.
After the accident, Andrea mourned the loss of her father every bit as much as she did that of her mother, Vienna, and even Erin. It was her determination to keep his memory alive that compelled her to take over proprietorship of the Boundary Café, to keep it running just the same way that he had run it for such a very long time.
Comments