by Penny Jordan
‘Well, I can only manage a couple of days, but Silas will be here until Christmas if that’s OK with you.’
‘Until Christmas!’ Hazel gaped at her and discovered that she had to lean against the units for support. ‘But Katie, that’s impossible. I mean—’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Katie argued stubbornly. ‘Why shouldn’t he stay here? When he told me that he was setting his new book here in Cheshire and that he wanted to do some research in the area, I knew immediately that this would be an ideal base for him. He wasn’t so sure at first. It took me a while to persuade him that you wouldn’t mind.’
Hazel stared at her, unable to utter anything other than a rather numb, ‘Really?’
Giving her a sharp look, Katie acknowledged, ‘OK, so maybe I should have asked you first, but I know if I’d told you that one of your favourite writers was giving a brief series of lectures to us, and that I’d invited him up here because I knew he was looking for somewhere local to stay while he researched his next book, I knew you’d throw forty fits and raise all manner of objections, but you can’t let me down now, Ma, and he won’t be any trouble. I doubt if you’ll even know he’s here,’ she added with supreme disregard for the expression on her mother’s face.
‘I mean, he could have Gramps’s old bedroom. That has its own bathroom, and he could work in Gramps’s study. He’ll probably be out most of the time anyway. He said he wanted to visit Gawsworth, and just think how thrilling it will be when his book comes out, to know that it was actually written here.
‘You’ll have to pin up a huge notice outside saying, “Charles Kershaw wrote here”.’
‘Charles Kershaw?’ Hazel stared at her. ‘But his name’s Silas Jardine.’
‘Yes, that’s his real name, but he writes under the name of Charles Kershaw. Kershaw was his mother’s maiden name apparently, and Charles is his middle name. He told me that when he first started to write he was still lecturing full-time and that that was why he chose to write under a different name.’
Hazel raised her hand to her forehead in an unconscious gesture of confusion.
Silas was Charles Kershaw, one of her favourite authors, and Katie had invited him to stay here while he researched his latest book. Katie, her daughter, and Charles Kershaw were lovers…
She thought of the subtle and skilled sensuality of the romantic passages in his novels and was shaken by a surge of betraying envy for her daughter, coupled with a shocking conviction that that skill, that subtlety was completely wasted on someone as young as her ebullient, boisterous daughter.
Immediately she clamped down on such destructive thoughts. Thoughts she had no right to allow into her mind. Behind her she could hear Katie saying in bewilderment, ‘What’s wrong with you? I thought you’d be thrilled…’
Hearing the love and the anxiety in her voice, Hazel forced herself to put aside her own feelings to exclaim wryly, ‘Just as you thought I’d be thrilled when you brought all those snails in from the garden and set them free on the kitchen floor.’
‘Well, you complained because they were eating your delphiniums and you’d said you didn’t want to kill them. Although I do seem to remember you threatening to kill me instead.’
Suddenly they were both giggling, the release from her earlier tension bringing emotional tears to Hazel’s eyes.
‘Oh, Katie,’ she protested helplessly, sniffing them away. ‘I can’t—’
I can’t have your lover staying here, she had been about to say, but just as she spoke Silas himself walked into the kitchen, looking keenly at her and then just as keenly at Katie.
Conscious of her flushed face and tear-wet eyes, Hazel turned back to the oven, quickly opening the door and ladling the batter into the now almost over-hot fat.
While it spat its aggression at her, she heard Katie exclaiming brightly and falsely to Silas, ‘I’ve just been revealing your true identity to Ma, Silas, and although she’s too overcome with awe to tell you so herself, she’s thrilled to bits that you’re going to be staying here. She can’t wait to boast to all her friends about you, can you, Ma?’
‘Katie,’ Hazel protested, flushing angrily as she closed the oven door and rounded on her daughter. Perhaps her father had been right after all when he had accused her of being far too lenient and indulgent towards her daughter. Her indignation flashed brilliantly in her eyes as she turned towards Katie, but once again she was forestalled as Silas himself intervened pleasantly.
‘I really am grateful to you, Hazel. I must admit when Katie first suggested I base myself here with you while I worked on my new book I was a little dubious. Of course, it was marvellously kind of you to offer to put me up, but writers aren’t the easiest of people to live with, especially when they’re working, and I was afraid that Katie might have unwittingly painted an over-glamourised version of what having me staying here would be like. But I must say that having met you I realise how uncomplimentary those fears were. It’s obvious to me that you are an eminently sensible lady, despite the rather contentious comments to the contrary made by your daughter.’
Hazel gaped at him, blinking in disbelief as she listened to what he was saying.
‘Great,’ Katie beamed happily. ‘I’m glad that that’s all settled, although you’ll have to move bedrooms, Silas. I was saying to Ma that you’d be much better off using Gramps’s old room. It’s got its own bathroom for one thing and a huge bed,’ Katie informed Silas breezily, turning away before she saw the painful flood of colour that burned her mother’s face.
Silas saw it though, and through the tremor that convulsed her, and the tears of shame and self-dislike that stung her eyes, she could feel his steady regard.
Dear God, don’t let him guess what she was thinking. Katie was too young, too blind, too selfish as the young were selfish, to suspect what she was going through, to guess at the bitter, envious thoughts distorting her mind, to even think in the most fleeting fashion that she, her mother, might feel the most acute despair at the thought of Katie and Silas sharing the old-fashioned double-bed which had been so well designed to accommodate the bodies of two eager lovers.
But her despair was not, as she had first believed, generated by mere concern for her daughter’s emotional safety. No; it was generated by a far less palatable and acceptable emotion. It was generated by jealousy.
There, she had admitted it! Made herself confront it. When she pictured Katie and Silas together in bed, she was jealous of her daughter. She was envious of the fact that Silas desired her, that Silas wanted her. What was the matter with her? Did she really want to trade places with Katie? Did she really imagine for a single second that Silas would find her in any way attractive or desirable? One only had to compare her with Katie to realise the impossibility of that.
Katie was young, nineteen. She was thirty-six, her body not a girl’s any longer, but a woman’s.
She had given birth, produced a child. This child, who now stood in front of her, a fully formed and very beautiful young woman, poised on the threshold of her most sexually powerful years, while she…while for her those years were over. Her figure was still trim enough, enviably so according to most of her friends, but it was not a girl’s body. Her skin did not have the clear bloom of youth that belonged to Katie’s…her face did not have the soft youthful plumpness that still clung to Katie’s bones. No man in his right mind comparing them could possibly prefer her physically to Katie, especially not a man who had already made it obvious that he preferred the allure of young flesh.
Not even to herself was she prepared to admit that she wished Katie had kept Silas’s real identity to herself. She had often wondered about the man who had written the books she had enjoyed so much; now that she was confronted with the reality, she was disappointed. Physically, he might be the most exciting man she had ever seen, but mentally, emotionally…for all the confusion of her unwanted desire for him, she could not help feeling let down by the knowledge that the strength, the maturity, the compassion she had felt s
o powerfully in his books were all simply an illusion and that he was weak and vain, empty of all the strengths she had envisaged him possessing.
Perhaps it was just as well, she thought tiredly. At least that knowledge should help her to live through the next few months.
‘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.
And yet there was nothing remotely worshipful in the grin Katie had given him as she too registered his curtness.
‘You’ll have to watch him, Ma,’ she warned Hazel teasingly. ‘He’s got a terrible temper, frightens us all to death in class.’
Hazel frowned herself. She didn’t like the idea of Katie being involved in a relationship with a man who was potentially violent, although Katie herself seemed to have no such reservations.
If she was honest with herself, she did not like the idea of Katie being involved with him at all.
* * *
WHILE KATIE chattered her way enthusiastically all through supper, describing her new life as a student, Hazel remained almost silent.
She had so looked forward to this, her daughter’s first visit home, never imagining she would not come alone.
She put down her knife and fork, her meal virtually untouched, causing Katie to chide her warningly, ‘Ma, you don’t eat enough. Men like women with a bit of flesh on their bones, don’t they, Silas?’
Eyeing her daughter’s racehorse-lithe slenderness, Hazel found herself envying her her sleek height and her long elegant bones.
She felt like a dwarf in comparison.
‘No sensible man likes to see a woman starving herself into the kind of hungry, bone-thin brittleness that makes her look as though she’s permanently hungry. Tastes do vary, of course, but I must admit there is something very appealing to the male ego about the kind of petite fragility your mother embodies… Call it chauvinistic, or old-fashioned—which I suppose in all honesty it is—but such women do in general tend to bring out all the old protective male instincts in full force.’
‘But in your books your heroines are almost always positive Valkyries,’ Hazel protested without thinking, and then flushed wildly as she realised that she had made the mistake of looking directly into his eyes, and that he was looking back into hers, with the kind of searching scrutiny that made her long to be able to close them and hide herself away from him.