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
