she was back at school on Monday that she heard the gossip running round the playground.
Jimmy was dead … Killed in an accident when he had lost control of the new motorbike of which he was so proud. His sister wasn’t at school.
A note had been sent to the headmistress hurriedly explaining the facts. Jimmy’s parents had been sent for … Everyone who ought to know what had happened had been informed—apart from her.
Somehow or other she made it through the day, going home to be violently sick in her bathroom, unable to take in what had happened … unable to accept that she would never see Jimmy again.
She didn’t go to the funeral—didn’t feel able to intrude on the family in their grief, even though she visited the cemetery the following day herself to lay a small floral tribute there and to say a special prayer for him.
It wasn’t until almost four months after Jimmy’s death that she realised she was pregnant and even then it had taken someone else, one of the teachers at school, to gently question her and elicit the truth.
To their credit, both families took the news of her pregnancy very well, and when she announced that she wanted to keep her baby, Jimmy’s baby, there were no attempts at forcing her to do otherwise.
Even so, despite his kindness and concern, she was sensitively aware that she had shocked her father, and guiltily she felt that she had somehow let him down; that her behaviour had not been what he had expected in his daughter.
Her guilt was intensified when, within a month of Katie’s birth, he announced that he was selling his practice and retiring and that the three of them would be moving away from London.
Despite the fact that he never once reproached her, even despite the fact that he had already told her that she was still his daughter and that her place and her child’s would still be under his roof, she knew intuitively that it was because he felt embarrassed and let down in having an illegitimate grandchild that he felt compelled to make these changes in their lives.
But she was still barely seventeen, and a very young seventeen at that, far too young to even think of leaving home and living by herself even if she had the means to do so.
There could be no question of her continuing at school, of course, and once Katie was born she had no real desire to do so. Her little daughter became the focus of her whole world.
When Mrs Meadows, outraged to learn that she was pregnant, had handed in her notice, she had taken over the running of the house, surprised to discover how much she had learned from the older woman, who had not been above insisting that she helped her out with the chores. The housekeeper, before she had left, had told Hazel in no uncertain terms how fortunate she was in having so kind and generous a father.
Phrases such as ‘if you had been my child’, and ‘your father, poor man, I don’t know how he can bear the disgrace’, had been freely bandied about and after Mrs Meadows had gone Hazel had sworn passionately to herself that from now on she would do everything she could to make amends to her father for all the pain she was causing him.
Quite why her father chose to move to Cheshire, he never actually explained, but Hazel was beyond caring where they went.
As it happened, she liked the quiet Cheshire village with its pretty fields and distant views of Alderley Edge and the Welsh hills, but when her father suggested rather awkwardly that she might prefer to pretend to people that she and Jimmy had actually been married, she uncomfortably shook her head.
Not even to please her father could she live that sort of a lie. She knew now that there would always be those who would condemn and vilify her for Katie’s birth, just as there would always be those who would reach out to her with understanding and compassion, generously accepting that Katie’s conception had been a pitiful accident rather than the result of a depraved lifestyle.
But it wasn’t until Katie was just five years old that she fully realised just how sensitive her father was about her unmarried state.
Since it was something he never referred to, she had hoped that he, like herself, had come to accept that, while Katie’s conception was not the best thing that could have happened to a sixteen-year-old, Katie herself was a beloved bonus who more than made up for her mother’s disgrace in conceiving her. But one afternoon, when she was collecting Katie from school, she fell into conversation with another parent who was also collecting his child.
Robert Bolton was an outwardly pleasant man, a few years older than she was herself, whom she understood to be divorced from his wife, and who had custody of two young sons.
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