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‘Just think how well it will go down at the WI,’ Katie teased her. ‘They’ll be asking you to give a talk on what it’s like living with a famous author.’
‘Hardly,’ Hazel told her repressively. ‘We’ve far more important and interesting subjects than that to discuss.’ She gave her daughter an austere look. ‘By rights I ought to march you upstairs and make you explain to your…to Silas just what you’ve done.’
‘Oh, come on, Ma. You wouldn’t do that, would you? He’d be furious with me…’
Furious with her? Hazel gave her a worried look. What kind of lover was it who was furious with his partner? Awful images of violence and oppression flitted through her mind.
‘He doesn’t…he isn’t…he isn’t unkind to you in any way, Katie, is he?’ she asked cautiously.
Her daughter was, after all, in her own eyes at least an adult, and it wouldn’t do to pry too much into her relationship with Silas. And besides, she was too much of a coward to want to be furnished with too many intimate details of what went on between them.
‘Unkind?’ Katie seemed to consider the question, and then responded thoughtfully, ‘No, not really, unless you include giving me the most grotty marks for my last essay.’
Either Katie had totally misunderstood her, or her fears were completely unreal. Fervently hoping that it was the latter, Hazel got up to clear the table and load the dishwasher.
‘I’ll do that, Ma,’ Katie offered.
It was just gone eight o’clock when Silas came back downstairs, and when Katie suggested that the three of them walk down to the village to have a drink in the pub, Hazel quickly made the excuse of having some work to do, feeling that she ought to at least make the attempt to allow the two of them some time alone together. Katie might be quite happy to include her mother in their company, but Hazel doubted that Silas could share her feelings. Although he certainly wasn’t betraying any antipathy to her company in his expression, but then he was very good at concealing what he was feeling. Too good, perhaps, Hazel worried as she determinedly refused Katie’s cajoling to accompany them.
Modern lovers seemed to lack the kind of intensity she had always imagined must go with being deeply in love, unless of course as established lovers Katie and Silas no longer felt any urgency to be alone together.
Katie still hadn’t said a word about the fact that she had given them seperate rooms, had seemed to accept it quite matter-of-factly. She felt the beginnings of a headache pressing against her temples and lifted her hand to rub the tension away.
‘Aren’t you feeling well?’
The quiet question surprised her. She turned round to find Silas watching her.
‘Just a bit of a headache.’
‘You should come with us. The fresh air would do you good.’
‘I… I’m rather tired. I think I’ll have an early night instead.’
Katie had run upstairs to get her coat, and for some reason she felt the sudden burn of tears stinging her eyes. It was all the tension and shock, that was all. That and the fact that she wasn’t used to people expressing concern for her, to being made to feel feminine and vulnerable by the concern in a man’s voice. She was probably imagining it anyway.
Why on earth should Silas be concerned about her? Yes, she was imagining it, she decided distastefully as she turned away from him. She was turning into one of those silly middle-aged women, so afraid of growing older that she had to fantasise that every male she met was in some way attracted to her. The thought revolted her.
She had been in bed for just over an hour when she heard them
return.
As they came upstairs together, they halted on the landing a few feet away from her door.
She tensed indignantly beneath the bedclothes when she heard Silas suggesting quietly to Katie, ‘Perhaps you ought to go in and check on your mother, she—’
To her relief, Katie responded immediately, ‘Oh, good heavens, no.’ But she realised that Katie had obviously misunderstood the reason for his question and had assumed it was concern for her which had prompted it because she went on to advise him, ‘Ma hates anyone fussing, especially when she isn’t feeling well. Besides, she’ll probably be asleep by now. Night, Silas.’
There was a brief silence during which Hazel tried not to imagine them locked in a passionate embrace, but if it had been passionate it had also been extremely short, because she had barely closed her eyes to block out the unwanted vision of their entwined bodies, Silas’s arms wrapped firmly round Katie’s slender, youthful body, his mouth—that very male mouth with its sharply cut upper lip, and so much fuller, softer lower one, caressing Katie’s—when she heard the sound of Silas’s door opening and Katie’s footsteps disappearing down the landing.
Now she could sleep, she told herself, but of course she did not do so. No—she spent virtually the whole of the night snatching at unrelaxing moments of sleep in between waking up to listen for the betraying sound of creaking floorboards and doors.
What was she doing to herself? she wondered bitterly with tears in her eyes. Of course she wanted to protect Katie, to prevent her from being hurt, but the images dancing feverishly in her brain, the thoughts whirling turbulently through her head, had nothing to do with those emotions.
It seemed inconceivable that she, who had never wanted or imagined herself wanting a lover should so suddenly and so embarrassingly find herself in this confusing and unwanted state of frantic awareness of and yearning for, of all the men, the one who was her daughter’s lover.
It was degrading, humiliating…
CHAPTER THREE
