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.