on your hands cramping your style, I assure you that you need not be.’
That had made Katie laugh and the subject had been dropped, but Katie had resurrected it with uncomfortable frequency as the time drew nearer for her to leave home and go to university.
‘You’re so young, Ma,’ she had expostulated more than once. ‘Men fancy you. I’ve seen the way they look at you, but you … Well, you behave like—like a shrinking virgin.’
When Hazel had flushed and protested, Katie had grimaced and added, ‘Look at yourself now and you’ll see what I mean. Anyone would think you were totally sexually inexperienced, like … like a nun or something.’
‘Katie,’ she had protested crossly, for once silencing her ebullient offspring, but later, alone in her bedroom, staring out of the window at the pretty Cheshire countryside which gave her so much inspiration for her work as an illustrator of children’s books, she had been forced to concede that Katie had a point. She did tend to shrink away from unknown men. She was shy and rather withdrawn, unlike Katie, who, thank goodness, seemed to have much, much more self-confidence.
And as for her sexual experience … Remembering this last conversation with her daughter now, Hazel sighed to herself, automatically plumping up one of the pretty needlepoint cushions she had worked the previous winter, and settling it back on the old-fashioned brocade-covered chair, which had been her father’s.
Even now after five years it still seemed odd to her to look at the chair and see it empty.
The stroke which had semi-paralysed her father four years after they had moved north from London had meant that in the last years of his life he had needed her in almost constant attendance. It had seemed a small enough way of repaying everything he had done for her and Katie.
Left alone with a four-day-old daughter at the age of forty-two, he couldn’t have found it easy to bring her up alone. His wife, her mother, had died following complications with the birth. As he had once explained uncomfortably to her, neither he nor her mother had ever expected to have a child. They had married late in life, and her arrival had come as something of a shock.
Nevertheless he had loved her and done his best for her. His practice as a solicitor had demanded a great deal of his time, but he had been scrupulous about spending weekends with her, and a conscientious if somewhat over-protective housekeeper had been hired to take charge of the old Victorian house where she had grown up, and of her.
She had had a very protected and sheltered growing-up; a very lonely and isolated one in many ways, attending a very small girls’ school from which she was picked up every day by Mrs Meadows, so that she was not given much opportunity to mingle with the other girls and make the friendships which might have drawn her out of her shell.
And then when she was sixteen she had met Jimmy.
He went to a nearby boys’ school. He almost ran her down on his bicycle, and their friendship developed from there.
Jimmy was as ebullient and outward-going as she was shy and introverted, which was no doubt where Katie got her lovely laughing personality from.
Hazel adored and worshipped him, blindly following his lead in everything he suggested.
He wasn’t a cruel or unkind boy; far from it, but he had a resilience which she lacked, and he was far, far too young to have the wisdom to look into the future and see the risks they were taking.
Looking back now, it seemed difficult for her to understand how at sixteen she could ever have believed she had fallen in love. With hindsight, she suspected that in Jimmy she had believed she had found the answer to her loneliness and that he was in many ways the friend, the brother, almost in fact the mother, she had never had.
Jimmy knew everything and everyone … Jimmy opened her eyes to so many things about life. Jimmy encouraged her to take advantage of her father’s preoccupation with his work, to meet him illicitly in the evening … to spend long hours with him in the bedroom of the home he shared with his parents and brothers and sister.
The Garners were a large and very casual family. Ann Garner was an actress, Tony Garner a director; they were seldom at home, their five children left to the casual and careless discipline of a transient population of au pairs and relatives.
Ann Garner smiled at her in a preoccupied and busy fashion whenever she saw her in the house, but Hazel doubted if she even knew her name in those days and she was certainly not the kind of mother to make strenuous and exhaustive enquiries into her children’s friendships. She was there, and she was accepted, and that was all there was to it.
But there was no point in trying to shift the blame, the responsibility on to Ann Garner’s shoulders.
Hazel might have been naïve, she might have been stupid, but she did know what she was doing, did know the risks she was taking.
The first time Jimmy touched her, kissed her, she had been shocked—had withdrawn from him. She wasn’t used to any kind of physical intimacy from others. Her father simply wasn’t that kind of man, and Mrs Meadows had never encouraged what she termed ‘soppiness’.
So she withdrew from him and Jimmy let her, watching her with curious, amused eyes. He was only twelve months older than her, but, in his knowledge of life, twenty years older.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like it when I kiss you?’ he asked her cheerfully.
She shook her head, flushing.
‘That’s because you don’t know how to do it properly,’ he told her with male assurance. ‘You’ll soon get to like it.’
And she soon did. She also liked the sensation of being physically close to him, of being held in his arms; of having someone special of her own in a way that her father and Mrs Meadows could never truly be hers.
The truth was that Jimmy filled a need in her life, healed a wound … gave her a special sense of identity and importance that made it impossible for her to think of refusing him anything. Even when that anything was the one thing she knew she ought to refuse.
But he was so tender, so coaxing. And even if, afterwards, she was forced to admit to herself that the experience had been more uncomfortable and embarrassing than anything else, at least she had the joy of knowing that she had pleased him. She knew that because he had told her so, kissing her with almost clumsy tenderness as he helped her to dress afterwards, and then taking her home on the new motorbike which he had bought himself with his birthday money.
His parents had been away for his birthday, his mother touring in the first run of a new play, his father directing a TV movie in Greece, but they had both sent him cards, and there had been a generous cheque to go into his bank account.
That cheque had bought the motorbike of which he was so proud. A huge, powerful thing which privately Hazel didn’t like, but which she was far too loyal to criticise. Jimmy loved the bike; she loved him; therefore the bike was wonderful.
As he dropped her off outside her house that Saturday afternoon, he teased her by dropping a quick kiss on her lips before she could turn her head to look anxiously towards the house, terrified that her father might have seen them.
Jimmy was vastly amused by this fear of hers that her father might see them together.
‘What if he does?’ he asked her, genuinely curious. ‘Does it matter? Has he forbidden you to go out with me?’
She was forced to shake her head. Boys and whether she might or might not go out with them was simply a subject that could not be raised with her father. The thought of her even beginning to do so made her quail, and yet her father was not overly strict, and was certainly not unkind. Just the opposite; he was gentle, if somewhat remote. So why did she feel it was so impossible to tell him about Jimmy? She had no real idea—she just knew that it was, just knew with instinctive feminine wisdom that, to her father, she was still very much a little girl and that that was how he wished her to stay.
Even though he had promised to telephone her, she didn’t