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‘Then get up and make yourself some,’ a male voice suggested from the kitchen door. ‘You’ve spoiled this brat, you know,’ Silas told Hazel, as he walked into the kitchen. ‘You sit down,’ he instructed her, removing the bread knife from her hand before she could object.
Numbly Hazel did as she was told. What on earth was going on? Silas was treating Katie as though she were a child and not his lover. She knew it was true that she had tended to spoil Katie a little, but her father had tended to be very demanding, especially when he had had his stroke. He had been the old-fashioned kind who took it for granted that a woman should virtually wait hand and foot on a man, and somehow or other Hazel had got into the habit of doing the same thing for Katie, although she had made sure that her daughter did absorb the rudiments of domesticity and taking care of herself.
‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ Katie said now. ‘Silas is right. You do spoil me. Oh, great—home-made bread,’ she enthused as she saw the loaf Silas was slicing. ‘Marvellous. One thing I do miss about home is your cooking. Ma is a wonderful cook, Silas. In fact she’s wonderful, full stop,’ Katie added, giving her a warm hug and dropping a kiss on the top of her head. ‘By the way, Ma, may I borrow your car? I mean, you won’t need it, will you? Not if you’re going out with Silas, and I could really do with it, if I’m going to see Susie.’
Grimacing at her, Hazel nodded.
‘But just see you treat her with the respect she deserves, and no using all my petrol and leaving me with an empty tank, and—’
‘Put the seat back when you get out,’ Katie chanted in unison with her, adding with a grin, ‘Is it my fault I’ve got long legs? OK, OK… I hear what you’re saying.’
‘You hear it, but will you pay any attention to it?’ Hazel asked her wryly.
‘The answer to that question, if she’s typical of her age-group, is no,’ Silas supplied as he brought over a plate of delicious golden brown toast. ‘I have four teenage nephews,’ he added surprisingly. ‘One of my sisters has twin boys of eighteen and the other has one of fifteen and another of nineteen. I suppose there must have been a time when we were all equally selfish, but somehow as one gets older one fails to remember it; hence maturity’s lamented impatience and exasperation with youth.’
‘Just listen to Grandpa there,’ Katie teased, adding curiously, ‘I didn’t know you had nephews. Have you any other family?’ she asked him, spreading butter generously on her toast and then licking it off her fingers, for all the world like the little girl she sometimes still was.
‘Not really. My parents are dead. I’ve got the usual assortment of second and third cousins and an aunt or so, but that’s all.’
‘It’s odd that you’ve never been married,’ Katie told him, ignoring Hazel’s faint gasp of reproach. Tact, it seemed, wasn’t essential to modern relationships.
It was funny that when she had first realised how much older than Katie Silas was it had been her daughter she had been desperately anxious to protect. Then she would have welcomed this albeit unwitting blow to his ego, but now conversely it was Silas’s feelings she felt the most need to defend and she had to bite down hard on her bottom lip, still sore and swollen from the previous day’s mangling, to prevent herself from objecting to Katie’s tactlessness.
‘Is it? I suppose I’ve just never met the right person, at the right time. When I was young I didn’t want to settle down; there were too many things I wanted to do with my life first, before I committed myself to a wife and a family, and then later… And then later… Well, I suppose it’s true that the older you get the fussier you get, and the more reluctant to settle for anything but the very best.’
A simple statement of fact, or a subtle warning to Katie herself that she must not think in terms of permanency, of commitment, of marriage?
She hated herself for the relief that she felt, and tried to tell herself that it was purely on Katie’s account and had no other significance at all.
* * *
IT WAS mid-morning before they were all eventually ready to leave. Hazel sighed a little as she saw Katie coming downstairs dressed in a multi-hued jumper, a pair of old jeans which clung lovingly to her long slim legs, leg-warmers which clashed vividly with her jumper and a
pair of old trainers, and yet somehow still managing to look stunningly pretty.
At Katie’s age she had not had one tenth of the self-confidence of her daughter. What did she mean, at Katie’s age? she derided herself inwardly—she didn’t have one tenth of Katie’s confidence now. Wryly she compared Katie’s outfit to her own sensible, sombre-hued clothes.
She looked dull and boring, a plain sparrow standing next to a tropically plumaged bird of far more exotic hue.
Was Silas comparing them as well, mentally berating Katie for deserting him and leaving him to accompany her mother? She writhed inwardly at the thought, half inclined to announce that after all she could not go with him, but good manners, the manners instilled in her by her father and Mrs Meadows, prevented her from doing so.
And if Silas was annoyed by Katie’s defection, he was certainly not allowing it to show.
* * *
ALL THE WEATHER signs were that they were going to have an early winter. Certainly, after a dry warm summer, the sudden spate of frosts and cold winds had come as an unwelcome shock at first, but Hazel had always loved autumn. There was something especially invigorating about its cold crisp mornings, its pale blue skies, the pastel colours of its pale sunshine against a landscape washed clean of the warm vibrant colours of summer. Soon the distant hills would be covered in their first falls of snow; soon the last of the leaves would be gone from the trees, leaving them skeletal and bare.
‘Brr…it’s cold,’ Katie complained, shivering as they stepped outside. ‘Roll on summer.’
‘Summer!’ Silas commented, watching as Katie folded herself into Hazel’s small car. ‘Why is it the young have no appreciation of the truly wonderful things in life? Personally I prefer this time of year, when the landscape is stripped back to its bare bones. It gives it an austerity, a pride almost that you never see in summer.’
His words so closely mirrored her own thoughts that Hazel smiled warmly at him, unaware of how much her sudden pleasure changed her whole face, dispelling the tension and control she was always so careful to maintain and instead revealing a much younger, more vulnerable woman, a woman who in so many ways seemed almost younger and more innocent than her own daughter.
Watching her, Silas wondered if she had deliberately chosen to efface herself, to camouflage herself and hide away behind the barriers she had erected against his sex, or if she had simply fallen into the unconscious habit of doing so.
When Katie had first told him about her home and her mother, in her artless, confiding way, he had been very dubious about accepting her invitation to come and see both of them for himself. Now…
He watched as Katie drove off and then turned to study Hazel. She was watching her car disappear with an expression on her face that was almost wistful.
