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‘You see, Silas, I was right,’ Katie was continuing happily. ‘I knew the moment you told me that you wanted a base in Cheshire to do your research from that you’d love it here with Ma. She might not look it but she can be quite a dragon when she needs to be. She’ll make sure no one interrupts you.’
Hazel checked her unproductive thoughts and gave her daughter a considering look.
Katie looked so innocent and young, but she was still a woman. Woman enough, perhaps, to try to ensure that no one trespassed into her lover’s life when she couldn’t be with him by placing her own mother on guard over him. But then who was to guard the guard?
She already knew the answer to that one. She must do it herself; she must make sure that she kept so strict a control on herself that no one, and especially not Silas himself, ever guessed how treacherously aware of him she was.
At least she could be thankful for one thing. He was hardly likely to make a pass at her. Hardly indeed. She might be several years his junior, but she was almost double her own daughter’s age.
Stop it. Stop it, she warned herself angrily. What on earth was the matter with her? Normally the last thing she wanted, the last thing she thought about, the last thing that worried her was the knowledge that as an object of male desire she was perhaps past her prime. No, indeed! Since her father’s death she had found herself quietly glad that she no longer had to put such a guard on her sexuality, that she was now of an age when men no longer felt compelled to flirt with her.
It was all very well for Katie to complain that she behaved like a middle-aged woman when she was still amazingly young. Katie had never had to contend with the sort of male curiosity that sprang from their knowledge of her past, their awareness of Katie’s own illegitimacy and the unflattering conclusions they tended to draw from these facts, and she prayed that she never would.
While not for a moment would she have ever wished that her daughter’s life had never begun, she wanted far more for Katie than she had had in her own life. She loved her daughter, adored her, and hoped that Katie too would one day know the joy that came from having a child, but not until she was mature enough to carry the burdens that went with that joy. Not until she was in a position to share that joy and that burden with a man who loved her as she deserved to be loved.
‘Oh, by the way, Ma, I forgot to tell you. Gran came up to see me the other week.’
Hazel focused on her daughter.
‘Ann…How is she?’
‘Blooming,’ Katie told her with a grin. ‘And guess what? She’s got the most gorgeous boyfriend. Well, man friend I suppose he is really. He’s younger than her, at least ten years, but he obviously adores her, and she’s over the moon. You should have seen the pair of them holding hands and gazing into one another’s eyes… I felt quite de trop.
‘They’re spending Christmas and the New Year in Switzerland and she’s invited us both to go out there for the New Year. She said she’d be in touch with you and sent you her love.’ Her face changed suddenly as she added quietly, ‘You know, she told me that I look very like my father. She said that sometimes she almost forgets what he did look like and then she sees me and it brings him right back to her. Can you remember him, Ma, I mean physically?’
Physically. Hazel went poppy-red, and then realised abruptly that her daughter was not meaning could she remember Jimmy in any sexual sense but rather was enquiring if she could remember the way he looked.
‘Yes and no,’ she told her quickly, acutely conscious that for all his silence Silas was watching her very closely. Did he think it was amusing or merely rather pathetic that Katie had been conceived as the result of two naïve children experimenting with sex, rather like playing with a box of matches, with equally disastrous results?
If she knew Katie, he would not have been spared any details of her history. Katie was all sunny openness about her family history, which was her own fault, because she had been determined right from the start that any burdens of guilt that were to be carried for Katie’s birth would be carried by her. She had never pretended to Katie that hers and Jimmy’s had been the love story of the century. Katie had grown up knowing that her father was dead, and as soon as she was old enough to understand the truth Hazel had gently explained to her how she had been conceived.
She knew that Ann had been equally frank, and was grateful to Jimmy’s mother for the support she had given her in ensuring that Katie did not make the mistake of glamourising or idealising her father, but had grown up knowing him almost as a sibling rather than a parent.
The Jimmy she could remember was a teenager, a child almost; the idea of her loving him was totally ludicrous. She mourned the loss of his youth, yes, but if he had lived, if he had not had that fatal accident, she knew that they would now be two strangers with nothing more in common than the child they had brought into the world.
‘Do you think if he’d lived you’d have married him?’ Katie asked her curiously, unconsciously mirroring her own thoughts.
Instinctively gnawing her bottom lip as she always did in moments of tension, Hazel wished that Katie could be a little less forthright and a little more tactful. It wasn’t a subject she wanted to discuss in front of Silas, but then she supposed bleakly that Katie had no secrets from him, and imagined, because of that, that her mother would have none from him either. She had forgotten at times how wonderfully selfish and self-absorbed the young could sometimes be.
Because she had always striven to be honest with Katie, she said, as matter-of-factly as she could, all too conscious of an intense desire to look at Silas, to see how he was reacting to all this, battling with an equally intense reluctance to reveal anything of herself to him, ‘I don’t honestly know, Katie. I suspect that Dad would probably have put pressure on us to do so, but we were far too young to even think of marriage, and if we had married it would have been a disaster for us and for you. Jimmy was only seventeen.’
‘And you were only sixteen. You could have had me adopted.’
‘I didn’t want to,’ Hazel told her firmly. ‘And I was lucky that Dad was prepared to stand by me and support me. It was a terrible shock to him, I know.’
‘And to you?’ Katie suggested. ‘I mean, you couldn’t have intended to get pregnant…but then I suppose the Pill wasn’t as freely available in those days and anyway—’
‘Er—I’m sure Silas isn’t interested in all this, Katie,’ Hazel interrupted her, wondering why on earth her daughter had chosen to resurrect this of all subjects.
When Katie herself had been entering womanhood, she had spent many many long hours discussing with her every nuance of her brief relationship with Jimmy…baring her own soul with painful honesty, admitting to her daughter that she had been far too naïve to think beyond the immediacy of what she was doing, that she had not even particularly desired Jimmy or sex, but that she had simply gone along with what he suggested because it was what he wanted. She had loved him, yes, but with the same intense adolescent love she might have given to a best friend or a close relative. There had been nothing remotely sexual in that love; she had been far too immature to experience such emotions and needs.
‘Oh, Silas knows all about your lurid past,’ Katie told her carelessly, oblivious to her sharply indrawn breath, or the way her eyes darkened with pain. ‘He couldn’t believe it when I told him how young you are. I think he thought you must have been altering your birth certificate. Well, you see for yourself now, Silas, that I wasn’t lying.’
‘Yes, I can.’
The terseness in his voice made Hazel glance worriedly at him. Something had obviously upset or annoyed him. He was frowning quite intimidatingly, and she quailed inwardly for Katie’s sake, hoping he would not vent his irritation on
her vulnerable head. That was the problem with such an unequal relationship—Katie would never, ever be any true match for him and she was positive that he would make sure that the balance of power in their relationship was always weighted in his favour and that Katie always remained the adoring acolyte worshipping at his feet.
