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CHAPTER ONE
‘ARE you ready yet, Mum? Honestly, I feel as nervous as though I were the one having to make the speech.’
‘I’m not making a speech, merely handing over the cheque to Dr Hanson,’ Lacey Robinson responded to her daughter’s excited chatter.
In point of fact she was guilty of evasion. She was nervous. Helping to raise the money for the research into the rare and devastating disease—which, while carried in the female genes only, manifested itself in physical symptoms in the male sex, like haemophilia and other similar disorders—had been one thing. Standing up in public to hand over to the hospital the cheque for the money they had raised was another.
She had already told herself very firmly that such self-consciousness was ridiculous in a woman of thirty-eight with a nineteen-year-old daughter, but that hadn’t stopped the butterflies at present crowding her stomach.
‘I’m so proud of you, Ma,’ Jessica told her, crossing the kitchen to come and put her arms round her and give her a hug. Of the two of them Jessica was easily the taller, topping her mother’s slender five-foot-two frame by a good four inches, but their colouring was the same. Both of them had the same silky fine dark hair and the same wide-spaced grey eyes, the same unexpectedly full lips, although in Lacey’s case there was a vulnerability about her features which was missing from those of her more ebullient daughter.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Lacey protested now. ‘It’s the people who donated the money in response to our appeal who deserve recognition and praise.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Jessica agreed. ‘But you were the one who organised everything, who first started the appeal.’
‘Only after I’d heard about little Michael Sullivan at work. It was so heartbreaking. I still don’t know how on earth Declan and Cath have managed to come to terms with the tragedy of it. To have lost two children before little Michael, from the same inherited disorder…’
‘Can Michael ever be cured?’ Jessica asked her quietly.
‘No, not cured, but with the money we’ve raised further research can take place into ways of alleviating the effect of the deterioration of the central motor system, and of course, now that they’ve managed to isolate the gene which causes the disease, a…Well, with the new techniques they have for discovering the sex of an embryo at a very early stage in a pregnancy, the parents can opt to have only girls who, while they carry the disease, are not affected by it.’
‘You mean that now the Sullivans could choose to have only daughters?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I don’t care what you say, I’m still proud of you,’ Jessica told her warmly, adding, ‘I’m glad they decided to have the presentation now, while I’m at home.’
Jessica was in her first year at Oxford, taking a degree course which would one day equip her with excellent qualifications. If Jessica was proud of her, then how much more was she proud of her daughter? Lacey reflected lovingly.
Life had not been easy for Jessica, an only child, a fatherless child…A child without the financial advantages of many of her peers, she could so easily have grown up rebellious and resentful, unhappy and alone, but, almost right from the moment she was born, she had been a sunny-natured, happy child.
It was typical of Lacey that she herself took no credit for her daughter and, as she wryly told friends, she could certainly take no credit for her scholastic abilities, nor her excellence at sports. Those were qualities—gifts—Jessica had received from her father.
‘Come back, Ma. Where are you?’ Jessica teased her now, waving her hand in front of Lacey’s face and grinning at her.
‘You know what I think, don’t you?’ Jessica commented thoughtfully ten minutes later when they were both in Lacey’s small car, driving towards the civic hall where the presentation was to take place. ‘I think that our Dr Hanson rather fancies you, Ma.’
Lacey flushed. She couldn’t help it. That was the curse of her pale Celtic skin colouring.
Jessica saw this betraying reaction and laughed before asking semi-seriously, ‘Why have you never remarried, Ma? I mean, I know you loved him, but after he’d left you, when it was all over and you were divorced…didn’t you ever…haven’t there…?’
‘Been other men?’ Lacey invited wryly.
It was her policy and always had been to be as open and as honest with her daughter as she could, and, although this wasn’t a topic they had ever discussed before, she sensed that, now that Jessica was living away from home, she was beginning to look far more questioningly at her mother’s past, at her life, comparing it perhaps to the lives of other women of the same age.
‘Well at first I was too…too upset…too…’
‘Devastated,’ Jessica supplied for her. ‘I know he was my father, but how he could have done that to you…?’
‘It wasn’t really his fault, Jess. He fell out of love with me. It happens.’
‘And you were never tempted to tell him about me. I mean…’
‘Yes…yes, I was tempted,’ Lacey admitted honestly. ‘But he’d already made it clear to me that he didn’t love me any longer; that he wanted our marriage to end. I didn’t know until after he’d left that I was expecting you; perhaps I should have.’
‘No…no, Ma. You did the right thing…the only thing,’ Jessica assured her quickly, putting her hand over her mother’s and giving her a warm smile. ‘Don’t you ever think you didn’t. I know people whose parents stuck it out supposedly for their sakes. It must be awful to be brought up in that kind of atmosphere, never really knowing if both your parents are going to be there when you get
home from school, feeling they’re only together because of you. No, I might only have had you but I’ve never, never doubted that you loved me and wanted me.’
For a moment the two women exchanged looks of shared love and respect and then Jessica reminded her mother slyly, ‘But you still haven’t answered my original question.’
‘No. Well, as I said at first, it was the last thing on my mind, and then as you grew older…Well, to be honest with you, Jess, there just never seemed to be the time, or at least it’s probably more honest to say that there never was a man for whom I wanted to make the time.’
‘Perhaps you were afraid…afraid of allowing anyone to get too close to you in case they hurt you the way he…the way my father hurt you,’ Jessica suggested shrewdly.
‘Perhaps,’ Lacey agreed.
‘Well, it can’t have been because you didn’t have the opportunity,’ Jessica added forthrightly.
She laughed when Lacey flushed again.
‘Oh, Ma…sometimes you make me feel as though you’re the little girl. Look at you! I’ve seen the way men give you a second look, the way they watch you. And it’s not just because you look sexy.’
When Lacey started to object, she overruled her and went on firmly.
‘No, I don’t care how much you try to deny it, you are; but it’s not just that…it’s something else. Something to do with the fact that you’re so small and…and vulnerable-looking.’
‘Well I may be short on inches, but that does not make me vulnerable,’Lacey told her quickly.
It was a sensitive issue, this obvious vulnerability she knew she possessed and yet seemed unable to do anything about. Others had commented on it, women friends…men. She knew that it was, like Jessica herself, something that had come with her marriage, or rather with the ending of it. But the last thing she wanted to do this evening was to think about the past.
Even now there were still times when she dreamed about it…about him…and in those dreams still remembered. When she woke up her response to the remembered hand against her skin was so acute, so sharp that the realisation that it was just a dream seemed impossible to accept. And there were other dreams…dreams when she cried out her shock, her disbelief, her anguish, and woke up with her face wet with tears.
Oddly enough those dreams had intensified since Jessica had gone to university. It was almost as though her subconscious self had tried to restrain them while Jessica was there, knowing how much she would hate her daughter to be upset…to know how very intensely she still remembered events which were over months before her daughter’s birth.
At first she had put it down to the fact that she was missing Jess…the fact that she was, for the first time in twenty years, really alone; and yet her life was busy and fulfilled. She had a good job…good friends…and, since she had got herself involved in the fund-raising for little Michael, she scarcely seemed to have had a moment to call her own.
Tonight was the culmination of many months of hard work, bringing Michael’s plight to the attention of the country via the media, raising money through all manner of events for research into ways of alleviating the distressing physical and mental deterioration suffered by children like Michael, children who rarely survived to adulthood—although there were varying degrees of severity and admittedly there had been very rare instances in which male children born to female carriers of the gene seemed to have escaped unscathed but these instances were far too rare to form the basis for any kind of detailed research.
Their small country town was lucky in having a very good local hospital, and now, with the money they had raised, further research could be done. It couldn’t bring back the two sons the Sullivans had already lost, of course, Lacey acknowledged sadly as she parked her car outside the civic hall.
They were halfway across the car park when Jessica, who had been walking a couple of yards behind her, suddenly caught up with her, taking hold of her arm and giving her a small shake as she told her with a soft laugh, ‘There—see—it’s happened again: A man just getting out of the smoothest-looking car you’ve ever seen was really giving you the eye.’
‘Jessica!’ Lacey protested. ‘Honestly. I—’
