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‘OK, OK, but it seems so wrong that you should be on your own like this, Mum. You’re only thirty-eight. You should marry again…I hate the thought of you spending the rest of your life on your own. One of our tutors was saying the other day that there are women now, career women, who are marrying for the first time in their late thirties and having children…that the mature older woman with young children will soon be more the norm…that people won’t feel so isolated when they get older because they will still have children at home…and—’
‘Ah, I see where this is all leading: you’re worried that I’m going to become a burden to you in my old age. Well, I’ve got news for you, my darling daughter: I don’t need a husband to produce children.’
‘No, but you do need a man,’ Jessica told her bluntly. ‘And it isn’t that. You know that. It’s just that I’m beginning to realise how much you missed out on, and if you want the truth I feel guilty, Ma. If it hadn’t been for me, you could—’
‘Stop right there,’ Lacey told her firmly. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I’d probably have given up and…and done something very, very silly indeed,’ she said quietly and truthfully, watching the shock register in her daughter’s eyes. ‘You were my lifeline, Jess. You were my reason for going on living. Without you—’
‘You really loved him that much?’ Jessica shivered. ‘Oh, God, Ma, I’m never, ever going to let myself be vulnerable to a man like that.’
Lacey felt her heart sink. She had been afraid of this. Afraid that in her honesty she might have warped Jessica’s own attitude to love.
‘Loving someone always makes you vulnerable, Jess, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad.’ She pushed Jessica’s long hair off her face and smiled at her. ‘You will fall in love, you know,’ she told her softly. ‘And, when you do, you’ll wonder how you can ever have believed you wouldn’t, I promise you.’
She prayed that she was right, and that Jessica wouldn’t cut herself off from the happiness that loving someone would bring her just because of her experience.
After all, it was quite true. Lacey could have gone on to form another relationship, to have married a second time. The fact that she had chosen not to was…Well, as she had already told Jessica, there had simply never been a man who had made her feel that she wanted to.
Or was it that she had never allowed there to be a man who might have made her feel that way?
Uncomfortably she pushed away the thought. What was the matter with her? She had far more important things on her mind right now than dwelling on the past; on something she should have overcome years ago. It was twenty years since her marriage had broken up, for heaven’s sake. Twenty years. A lifetime, and yet sometimes…sometimes she would see a man in the distance, and something about the way he moved, the turn of his head…would set her heart racing, her stomach cramping, and it would all come sweeping over her again. The elation, the desolation, the joy…the grief…the pain, the anguish…the disbelief and the anger.
She hadn’t realised she had stopped walking until Jessica caught hold of her arm and said teasingly, ‘It’s no use, Ma. Too late to back out now. They’re all waiting for you in there.’ She eyed Lacey’s elegant navy dress with its white collar critically and added, ‘I still think the walking shorts and that snazzy little jacket with the gold stripes would have looked terrific on you…’
Recalling the eye-catching outfit Jessica was describing, Lacey grinned at her and retorted, ‘For someone your age with endless legs maybe; for me—never!’
The civic hall was packed, the sea of faces confronting her as people turned their heads to register her entrance, panicking her for a moment, even though she had thought she was prepared.
She had never liked crowds, preferring solitude, anonymity—a legacy from her childhood at the children’s home where s
he had grown up after the death of her parents—and she suspected that without Jessica standing behind her and blocking her exit she might almost have been tempted to turn, run and disappear.
Thank goodness for Jess. How humiliating it would have been if she were to give way to that silly juvenile impulse…and now Ian Hanson was coming towards her, smiling at her…
As Jessica had so sapiently remarked, had Lacey indicated that she would welcome it he would probably have been keen to take their relationship to a more personal level.
As it was she liked him, just as she liked her boss, Tony Aimes, but for neither of them did she feel the emotional, or sexual, desire that might have encouraged her to respond to their overtures. Both of them were divorced, both of them had children, both of them were kind, attractive men, but, much as she liked them as people, as men they left her completely cold, completely untouched…unaroused.
Because she deliberately chose to stay that way? Because she was afraid? Angry with her train of thought, she tried to remind herself why she was here. Tonight was most certainly not the night for that kind of immature and self-centred soul-searching.
Tonight was Michael’s night; Michael’s and the night of all those who had given so generously to their cause.
She had been very apprehensive at first when she had been nominated by the other members of their fund-raising committee to be the one to publicly hand over the cheque to the hospital, but rather than cause a fuss she had unwillingly agreed to do so.
Tony Aimes had suggested that after the presentation they might go out together somewhere for a celebratory meal, but she had gently refused, just as she had refused a similar invitation from Ian Hanson, explaining truthfully that, since she saw so little of Jessica now that her daughter was at Oxford, she intended to spend the evening with her.
The trouble was that, while she liked both men as friends, and while the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt anyone’s feelings, she knew enough of the anguish of loving someone and then finding out that the love they professed to feel in return was only a cruel sham to ever wish to inflict that kind of pain on anyone else, so she had no wish to have a more intimate relationship with either of them.
She had known Tony Aimes for many years. She had originally moved to this part of the world following the break-up of her marriage.
Housing here had been relatively cheap then, and as Lacey had been a divorcee with a baby on the way—and very little money—that had been an important consideration.
When Jessica’s father had announced that he didn’t love her any more and that he wanted a divorce, he had told her that she could keep the marital home, that all he wanted was his freedom; but her pride would not allow her to do that, and so after the divorce had become final she had sold the house and scrupulously forwarded to his solicitor half the proceeds of its sale.
She had never received any acknowledgement of his receipt of the money but then she had not expected to do so. From the day he had walked into their kitchen and announced that he no longer loved her he had also walked out of her life, and her only contact with him had been via their solicitors.
People started to clap as she walked towards the small stage. She could feel the hot burn of embarrassed colour sweeping her skin. At thirty-eight she ought to be long past the stage of blushing like a schoolgirl, she told herself ruefully; long, long past it.
It seemed she was the last to arrive—the others were already up on the stage, little Michael squirming excitedly in his chair as she went to join them.
