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‘How are you?’ Dry-mouthed, Harriet hovered, scarcely able to credit that finally she might be about to learn something about her paternal genes. ‘I’m really sorry if Boyce upset you—’
‘Do you think I don’t know that you put him up to it?’ her mother shot back at her accusingly.
‘We have talked about this, my dear,’ Gustav interposed, in the very mildest of tones. ‘As it is natural for Harriet to be curious, so it is appropriate for you to satisfy that curiosity. After that has taken place, I am certain that Harriet will agree with me that the subject need never be referred to again.’
Harriet had been wishing the older man would practise tact and leave her alone with her parent. After that speech, however, she wondered if it was only thanks to his involvement that Eva had at last been persuaded to speak.
‘Do you have to stand over me?’ Eva enquired petulantly of her daughter.
‘Sorry…’ Harriet dropped down hurriedly on to the edge of the nearest armchair.
‘Before I tell you anything at all, I want you to promise me that nothing I say will go further than this room,’ Eva decreed.
Harriet’s brow pleated. ‘But why on earth—?’
‘I believe that your mother’s request for discretion is reasonable,’ Gustav commented.
Harriet was so tense that she would have agreed to virtually anything, but she could not help thinking that that particular demand was unfair and perverse. Surely whatever information she received should be hers to do with as she liked?
‘If you won’t give me your word, I will refuse to tell you anything,’ Eva declared.
Harriet breathed in deep and swore that she would treat any information that she was given with the utmost discretion. She was surprised when her mother became less tense, and wondered what the heck she was about to be
told that could require such a mantle of confidentiality…
Gustav positioned himself carefully behind the sofa and leant over it to rest a supportive hand on his wife’s narrow shoulder. Eva unfurled a minute lace handkerchief in one hand and whispered, ‘Please remember how young I was when I fell pregnant with you.’
‘Only seventeen years old,’ Gustav chimed in, unnecessarily.
Faster than the speed of light, Harriet’s usually stable nerves had rushed up the scale to overwrought. She repressed a strong urge to point out that she was well aware of that fact, and had never demonstrated the smallest desire to be judgemental about the circumstances of her birth.
‘I should first tell you that the man who got me into trouble…’ Eva utilised that outdated phrase with a little moue of distaste ‘…is no longer alive.’
Harriet swallowed hard on a surge of piercing disappointment. It had never really occurred to her before that her birth father might be dead. Yet her conception had taken place nearly thirty years ago, she reminded herself.
‘He was a great deal older than I was…more than twice my age,’ Eva explained flatly. ‘But a very handsome and sophisticated man. He knew exactly how to make an impression on the naive young woman I was in those days.’
The silence spread and spread.
‘What happened?’ Harriet pressed.
‘I worked part-time in the village shop. Sometimes he came in to buy cigarettes, and we would laugh and chat. One day when it was raining he stopped to offer me a lift when I was walking home. I was flattered by his interest,’ her mother divulged in a constricted voice, ‘and when he asked me to meet him of course it had to be a secret, because my father was very strict. I should have known better—’
As Eva broke off her recitation with the hint of a stifled sob, Gustav swiftly abandoned his stance behind the sofa. Sitting down beside Harriet’s slender mother, he grasped her hand in a gesture of encouragement. ‘He was the type of man who preyed on young girls. How were you to recognise that?’
‘I’m so glad that you understand.’ Eva rested enormous blue eyes on her husband and spoke as though they were alone together. ‘I’d heard whispers about how he’d treated his wife, but I paid no heed. Although the church didn’t recognise his divorce from her, I did think of him as a single man.’
‘Naturally you would.’ Harriet was feeling rather superlative to the proceedings. She could not comprehend why her mother’s husband was taking the leading role in a matter which she felt was really nothing to do with him.
Eva held on fast to Gustav’s hand and looked across at her daughter, her eyes unexpectedly hard in her beautiful face. ‘There’s nothing new or exciting in my story, I’m afraid. Your father said he loved me. He said he wanted to marry me and I believed him. I was hopelessly infatuated with him. When I realised I was pregnant, I went straight to him. I was so innocent I believed that he would be pleased. Do you know what he said?’
Encountering her mother’s cold, challenging gaze, Harriet felt most uncomfortable and shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’
‘He said that the baby I carried was nothing to do with him and suggested that I must have been intimate with other men.’
‘Now perhaps you can understand why your mother wanted to forget what happened to her almost thirty years ago.’ Gustav exuded the grave disapproval of a man with far from liberal views. ‘It may be a cliché, but Eva was seduced with lies and deserted.’
‘Horrible…’ Harriet wondered if she was being super-sensitive in feeling that her unknown father’s sins had somehow become hers.
