Читать книгу Forbidden Loving - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 5

HAZEL glanced nervously at the clock. Only another half-hour or so and they should be here. A pretty, dark-haired woman of thirty-six, she tried to hide her irritation as best she could when well-meaning people described her as ‘petite’ and exclaimed that she looked far too young to be her claimed age of thirty-six, never mind the mother of an almost-nineteen-year-old daughter into the bargain.

But that was exactly what she was, and it was as the mother of that very pretty, intelligent and popular nineteen-year-old that she was fretting anxiously about the arrangements she had made for Katie’s first proper visit home since she had left for university at the end of the summer.

It had been all very well to gulp, hold her breath and exclaim as calmly as she could that there would be no problem when Katie had rung up three days ago and announced breezily that when she came home for the weekend she would not be alone, but would be bringing a friend with her. After all, she had had nineteen years in which to get used to the fact that Katie was an inveterate people collector, but what she hadn’t expected was for Katie to continue excitedly, ‘I know you’re going to like Silas, Ma. He’s a very special person and I can’t wait for the two of you to meet.’

Her heart had plummeted immediately Katie had finished speaking, and, although she had successfully managed to hide it from her daughter, she had been overwhelmed by a sharp sense of fear.

And yet Katie had had boyfriends before, of course; several of them in fact; gangly, sometimes spotty young men, who blushed and stammered, or adopted an unwittingly touching and amusing male machismo which sat very uncomfortably on their as yet still boyish shoulders. But this time it was different. This time … This time she felt all the apprehension and alarm of a mother who felt that her child was threatened in some way.

She had sensed just from the way Katie spoke his name that this Silas was important to her. Too important … She gave a tiny shiver, frowning unseeingly around her small sitting-room.

She could never really understand those women who claimed that their teenage daughters were their best friends. She felt far too great a sense of responsibility and awareness of life’s cruelties and un-kindnesses ever to relax her maternal vigilance enough to make that claim.

She hoped she wasn’t a possessive mother. All through Katie’s growing years she had worked hard at making sure that Katie never became distanced from her peers or from other adults, or suffered the kind of aloneness and isolation which she had suffered as a child.

The trouble was that Katie had been so vague about this Silas Jardine, and she had not liked to question her too deeply. All she knew about him was that Katie had met him at the university and that she was sure that he and her mother were going to get on like a house on fire. It sounded very ominous to Hazel. She had been all too maternally aware that, behind her insouciance and bright chatter, Katie was hiding something.

Biting her bottom lip, Hazel checked round the sitting-room again.

A warm fire burned in the grate, and logs were heaped up in the basket beside the fire, logs which had been supplied by Tom Rawlins from the farm, about whom Katie was always teasing her by describing him as her adoring swain.

It was true that she and Tom occasionally went out for a meal or to see a show. He was a widower with two grown-up children; she was … Well, she was the mother of an almost grown-up daughter and it was only natural that they should have things in common. But that was as far as any relationship between them went.

Fortunately Tom was far too gentlemanly to make the kind of sexual demands she so dreaded and detested receiving.

It had shocked her three years ago, when Katie had coolly announced that it was high time that her mother stopped behaving as though she ought to be punished and despised simply because she had given birth to an illegitimate child, and started feeling proud of herself instead for all that she had done for that child.

‘Ma, every time a man looks at you, you shrink visibly. You’re a very attractive woman. Everyone says so, and I for one certainly wouldn’t object if you decided to provide me with a stepfather, providing of course that I liked him.’

‘Well, for your information, I have no intentions of doing any such thing,’ Hazel had retaliated sharply.

‘Why not? You should think about it,’ Katie had told her smartly, adding critically, ‘Just look at you. As long as I can remember it’s just been you, and me, and of course Gramps. I know it must have been awful for you, losing Dad like that in such an awful accident and then finding out about me. But I don’t see why just because of that you’ve got to spend the rest of your life hiding away from men. You can’t get pregnant just by smiling at them, you know,’ she had added with typical teenage scorn. ‘You can’t want to spend the rest of your life alone. With Gramps gone …’

‘It’s all right,’ Hazel had told her shakily but drily. ‘If you’re worried about having a geriatric parent 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 hear from Jimmy that evening, nor all of the next day, and it wasn’t until 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 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,’ Katie 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?’

Much as she longed to tell her that that was none of her business, Hazel had found herself admitting that there had not. What Katie did not seem to realise and what she had no intention of telling her was that she herself was the result of her own single and unmemorable sexual experiment. And, uncomfortable though it made her feel to contemplate it, Katie at eighteen probably had a good deal more sexual experience than she had at nearly twice that age.

Although she had always been scrupulous about making sure that Katie was as well informed on sexual matters as she could be, Hazel had always felt lamentably aware of her own inability to convey to her daughter that, exciting though sexual experimentation might be in one’s teens, true fulfilment, true sexual pleasure was something one could only truly appreciate with maturity.

All she had felt able to say to Katie was that she must always do only what felt right for her; that it was her own feeling of self-worth, her feeling of self-respect that was important, far more important than giving in to peer pressure or the importunings of some callow boy.

But how could she discuss with her daughter adult sex, adult emotions, a woman’s emotions, a woman’s needs, when she herself had no knowledge of these things?

Since Katie had left school at the beginning of the summer, Hazel had gradually begun to feel that she was the child and her daughter the parent. Katie now seemed so grown-up, so mature, so much better able to handle herself than Hazel.

Hazel had watched in awe and pride as Katie parried the over-fulsome compliments of the older men among their acquaintance, who were suddenly claiming that she was becoming very grown-up, and very, very attractive. Firmly but pleasantly Katie had let them know that she considered their interest to be avuncular. Firmly she had made it clear that she was not interested in their heavy-handed flirtation. And she was just as adept at dealing with her own peers.

Hazel had seen her off for university with a heavy heart, acknowledging that the child had gone and a woman had taken her place. She was so proud of her daughter. Proud of all that she was and all that she would be, and she had prayed desperately that Katie would get safely through university and launch herself in her chosen career before she fell deeply in love.

Now it seemed as though in making those prayers she, her mother, had brought down on her the very fate she had wanted her to escape.

True, Katie had said nothing about being in love with this Silas. Silas … what sort of name was that? It was far too theatrical, far too … too male. But the very way she said his name, the very hesitation in her voice, the very fact that she, Hazel, her mother was so acutely aware of these things, made Hazel desperately anxious to make the acquaintance of this man who, it seemed, had become so important to her daughter. And equally it made her extremely reluctant to get to know him, as though in doing so she was acknowledging his importance in Katie’s life.

It wasn’t just maternal jealousy either; it wasn’t that she resented someone else becoming more important to Katie than she was herself … well, not entirely.

Guiltily she tugged at her own swollen bottom lip.

Upstairs two immaculate and comfortable bedrooms were waiting for their arrival.

Two bedrooms. Katie would sleep in her own bedroom, of course. Her friend, this Silas …

Gnawing on her swollen lip, Hazel stared unseeingly across the pretty sitting-room, for once not seeing the charm of its exposed timbers, its low ceilings, and its deep stone-framed windows.

The house was old, very old, and she had fallen in love with it the first time she had seen it. She suspected that if her father hadn’t been in such a hurry to move them out of London he would have waited until something more modern came on the market, but as it was he had bought this pretty half-timbered Cheshire farmhouse with its large gardens and its wonderful aspects over the surrounding countryside, and gradually over the years Hazel had put her stamp on it, had brought it to life with all her gentleness and artistic skill, so that people coming into it for the first time caught their breath in pleasure as they studied its colour-washed rooms with their faded chintzes and brocades, its air of homeliness and comfort, its gentle warming welcome to everyone who walked into it.

Perhaps she should have taken hold of her courage and asked Katie outright if she expected this Silas to share her room, her bed. But then Katie’s room still only had the small single bed she had all through her teens.

That was no excuse, she told herself severely. The house had five bedrooms and two bathrooms. The room she had made up for Katie’s friend was the smallest of these, right next door to her own room. It had a tiny dormer window, and a polished wooden floor. It also had a large double bed. All the rooms apart from Katie’s and her own did, and she could hardly have moved out of her own room, not without causing Katie to make some comment.

So what would she do if Katie gaily announced that she would move into the spare-room with their guest for the duration of his visit? What would she do if this Silas chose to insist that Katie show her mother just how committed she was to him by sleeping with him?

Hazel had heard enough horror stories from other parents, other mothers confronted with just this sort of situation to feel more than mere apprehension. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to admit that her daughter was an adult, a woman. Of course she knew, of course she accepted … but it was one thing to accept that Katie was old enough to have a sexual relationship with someone, and quite another to be forced to witness that relationship, to be forced to have all her fears and anxieties revived right under her nose. It was bad enough worrying about Katie when she couldn’t see what she was doing …

If only they would arrive. Or, even better, if only they would ring and say they’d changed their minds. She was dreading meeting him, dreading it …

But for Katie’s sake she would have to pretend that she was happy for her. She would have to pretend that she liked him.

Stop it, she warned herself. He’s probably a very nice boy. He’s probably just as much in love as Katie is. He’s probably just as vulnerable, and he’s also probably got a mother somewhere dreading meeting Katie as much as I’m dreading meeting him.