The thought that he might possibly misconstrue their few moments of idle conversation outside the school gates never even crossed Hazel’s mind, never mind the thought that, because of her unmarried state, because Katie was illegitimate, he might jump to the assumption that, having already had one lover, she might welcome another.
But when he turned up at the house and asked her out, her father was so disapproving and so upset that even though she had no intention of accepting the invitation she felt compelled to ask her father why he objected so strongly.
At first his response was evasive.
She had to be careful, he told her uncomfortably. It wouldn’t do to have people gossiping.
‘Gossiping about what?’ she asked him, genuinely not understanding.
For the first time that she could remember, he lost his temper with her.
Did she not remember that she had an illegitimate child? he demanded tersely. Did she not remember that the disgrace of that had driven them away from London? But that kind of disgrace could never be totally evaded. People talked, people knew… If men started calling here at the house for her…
And then Hazel understood, and quietly but firmly she closed the door in her heart which might have led to an adult relationship with a man. The kind of relationship which might ultimately have brought her true sexual and emotional fulfilment as a woman, the kind of relationship she had sometimes yearningly daydreamed of, the kind of relationship she had envied other women sharing with their men, but which she now understood could never be for her.
In her father’s eyes she would always be branded by Katie’s birth. Who knew how many other men might feel the same way, might feel that she was sexually available and easy, because of that?
Because that was what her father had been trying to say to her, even though he had been too embarrassed to put it quite so plainly. As the mother of an illegitimate child, she had a reputation. Men approaching her would only be doing so because of that reputation, because they wanted sex from her. And even if that was not true, she could not risk hurting and upsetting her father again by inviting what he would see as speculation and gossip about her morals.
She reminded herself that she was very fortunate, very lucky in that her father was prepared so generously to house and support her. That without that support her precious Katie would never have had the lifestyle she now did. A lovely home, the security that was provided by her grandfather’s money, the lovely surroundings in which she was growing up. Without her father to provide these things for them, their lives would have been so very different. Hazel wasn’t sixteen any more. She knew quite well how difficult life was for other single mothers, how very fortunate she was. The least she could do was to repay her father by respecting his wishes. And, after all, were they so difficult to live by? All right, so there was no man in her life, no lover, no husband…but she had her precious Katie. She had her father, she had her lovely home, and she was slowly making new friends.
And if sexually she was still as unawakened as she had been when Katie was conceived, well, was she really so very bothered? She could barely remember what it had felt like when Jimmy made love to her. What she could remember was that she had not been particularly enthralled by the experience; that she had not had a physical desire to repeat it. What she had enjoyed, though, was the closeness it had brought between her and Jimmy, the tenderness with which he had kissed her afterwards. But these were very dim memories now, the memories of a child, not a woman…and if the price she must pay for Katie’s security and her father’s peace of mind was her own celibacy, well, so be it.
Over the years she had kept in contact with Jimmy’s family, who had all accepted Katie as his daughter. She and Katie had spent several holidays with Jimmy’s mother, who was now divorced from Jimmy’s father, and as the rest of the family grew up, married and produced children, Hazel made sure that Katie knew her aunts and uncles and her cousins.
She didn’t want Katie to suffer as she had done through being too isolated and over-protected. She didn’t want Katie to repeat her mistakes, to yearn, without knowing she did so, for contact with her peers to such an extent, to yearn for love so much that she mistook a healthy male teenager’s natural desire to express his sexuality for that love and responded to it with the same disastrous results as she, Hazel, had done.
But Katie wasn’t her, as Katie herself had gently pointed out to her when she had first started going out on dates. Guiltily Hazel had acknowledged that she was glad in many ways that her own father had died before Katie had reached this stage in her life, because she would not have wanted him to inflict on Katie the mental and emotional taboos he had inflicted on her. It would not be right for her own sins to be visited upon her precious daughter. All she could do was to pray that Katie was strong enough, mature enough, happy enough not to need to make an intense emotional commitment to a member of the opposite sex until she was old enough to handle any potential sexual consequences.
So far she had been lucky, she acknowledged, restlessly smoothing another cushion. So far none of Katie’s relationships with the opposite sex had been remotely serious. But she herself had an almost morbid fear of Katie repeating her mistakes.
She didn’t want Katie’s freedom, Katie’s joy, Katie’s life curtailed in the way in which her own had been curtailed. For Katie, she wanted everything she had not had herself.
For Katie, she wanted the very best that there was: a good education; the strength and self-confidence that came from knowing she could support herself.
A sad smile crossed her face. Art had been her own best subject at school. She had once hoped to go on to college to study it further, but Katie’s arrival had put paid to that. Nevertheless, she had found a way of using that talent, even if she had discovered it rather late in life.
After her father’s death, and because she had felt so guilty, so uncomfortable in the now empty house during the day, she had started taking adult education classes.
Her art teacher had been so impressed with her skill that she had recommended her to an agency she knew who specialised in supplying illustrators for writers.
For the last two years, Hazel had worked exclusively for one particular writer, supplying all the illustrations for her very popular younger children’s books.
Had she discovered this talent when she was younger, who knew what might have happened. Given the freedom of financial independence, she might have felt able to go out more, to meet people, to perhaps even meet a man… But then what would have happened to her father? After his stroke he had never fully recovered. He had needed her then as she had needed him after Katie’s birth and she had always been grateful that fate had given her the opportunity to show him her love and her gratitude.
Now financially and physically she was free, but she was thirty-six years old: far too old to be thinking of romance, of love. And besides these days when she looked around, when she looked properly at the men around her, she saw with distaste that many of them, while smiling and flirting with women who were not their partners, were hurting those partners and seemed not to care that they were doing so. That many of them were weak and vain; that others were like dependent children, greedily taking everything their women had to offer and giving precious little back; and she had come to the conclusion that, for every happy couple she knew, she knew three who were not, and that perhaps after all fate had not truly been punishing her in denying her the right to her sexual and emotional fulfilment as a woman.
The very firm distance she had initially learned to keep between herself and the male sex, to please her father, had become a defence mechanism behind which she retreated for safety, causing Katie to tell her sternly that she was behaving more like a woman of seventy than one of half that age.
‘You’re really attractive, Mum,’ Ka
tie had told her fondly. ‘Far too attractive to be living on your own.’
‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might want to live alone?’ Hazel had retaliated. ‘Lots of women do. Take Jessy Finlay, for instance.’
Jessy was a forty-year-old redhead, who owned a small cottage on the outskirts of the village, and who worked as a freelance reporter for a local TV station. She was outrageously extrovert, and very popular with all the local men, if somewhat less popular with their wives.
‘Jessy might live alone, but she does not sleep alone,’ Katie had informed her mother brutally, softening a little to add quietly, ‘It’s not natural, Ma. I know there isn’t any man in your life. I know you don’t have a discreet lover tucked away somewhere. Has there ever been anyone apart from Dad?’