‘Indelicate,’ Harold agreed.
‘He should have given me a bit of time to discover the differences between me and Gareth –’ She ground to a halt, realising that she was all but confessing to her newly discovered father-in-law that her marriage had been a mistake. She cleared her throat. ‘I became incredibly stubborn. The more he raged against Gareth, the more I flouted him. It seemed right to follow my heart rather than do as I was told.’
Harold’s lips twitched as he poured more coffee. ‘Yes, it’s a pity that my son’s not of sufficiently good family.’
Diane let her head fall back as she laughed. It felt almost unfamiliar; she hadn’t seemed to have done much laughing since Bryony got on the plane to Brasilia. ‘Isn’t it ironic? I wish I could tell my father about you.’
‘I wish you could, too,’ sighed Harold. ‘It would be comfortable to be able to change the past.’
The grandfather clock in the hall bonged, six resonant chimes. Diane waited for the last to fade before suggesting, diffidently, ‘Would you mind telling me where you’ve been for most of Gareth’s life? I have a lot of blanks to fill.’
Harold’s face sank into deeper folds. He put down his empty cup and steepled his fingers. His voice was bleak. ‘I’m afraid it was all too common a story in those days. I was young and I got a girl in trouble. I’m not proud of it. Father owned a big shop with several departments and our family, we thought ourselves grand. We had cars and we even went abroad on holiday.’
Abroad. Diane remembered going abroad, feisty France and dreaming Italy, the excitement of visiting a country with a different climate, foods, smells, sounds, language, culture and people. Since her marriage she hadn’t managed even a cheap break in Spain because Gareth liked a sturdy British holiday in July at a seaside holiday camp with his brothers and their families, so that if the weather wasn’t great there was always good company. The three brothers never seemed to tire of each other.
Diane hadn’t ever suggested linking up with her own brother. Just imagine Freddy’s face if she’d suggested a fortnight in a static caravan site with a clubhouse and a crowded outdoor swimming pool! Freddy took his holidays in La Manga in a big villa with a spacious private pool surrounded by high walls.
He had the money – as Gareth never ceased to remind her.
Harold cleared his throat and applied his neat handkerchief to his watering eye. ‘Wendy worked in Father’s department store. Tight skirts were all the thing and she was so tall and willowy the fashion could’ve been designed for her.’
‘You’rekidding,’ Diane breathed. Even over a quarter of a century ago, when Diane had first known her, Wendy hadn’t been within four stone of ‘willowy’. Tall, granted, but with a body that was a series of pears and tyres, topped by a set of turned-down, worn-down features.
Harold tipped his head against the back of the chair. ‘Stupidly, I got Wendy pregnant. I thought a great deal of her but still I took advantage, didn’t take proper responsibility. Perhaps I thought that kind of dreary obligation was for other people. I was the boss’s son! I had an Alvis and a flat of my own, very nice. Going about with a girl like Wendy was not uncommon for a young man used to a bit of class privilege. Oh, yes, it survived the sixties, you know!’
‘Certainly do,’ Diane murmured, thinking of her father.
‘My friends referred to her as my bit of fluff and were perfectly pleasant to her, as long as I didn’t take her to the wrong places. I wasn’t expected … didn’t have to ...’ Angrily, he shook his head. ‘I didn’t have to treat her as I would a daughter of a family friend – with respect. And I didn’t introduce her at home.’
Diane grappled silently with the image of gruff, forceful Wendy being Harold’sbit of fluff.
‘Anyway. When she told me she was having my baby I’m afraid I failed to offer to marry her. I arranged to buy a little place for her instead, where I could visit her and the child. Gareth.’ He laughed bitterly, a suggestion of colour coming to his face. ‘I didn’t even attempt to explainwhy. I simply thought of my parents’ shame if I were to “marry beneath me”.’
‘I suppose that’s how things were, then.’
‘But I was arrogant. I didn’t think of Wendy’s feelings at all. And she, of course, was too smart to fool.’ He managed a small, painful smile. ‘She came along to see the cottage. I explained how I’d be responsible for her finances and she wouldn’t have to worry. “I’ll keep you,” I said. The next day, she didn’t turn up for work, nor the next, nor the next. When the personnel lady tried to trace her she found no forwarding address. I never saw Wendy again. Gareth has been very blunt –’ he coughed, ‘about the hard life she lived, subsequently.’
For the first time in her life, Diane felt a flutter of sympathy for the abrasive, pugnacious woman who had been her mother-in-law; too late now, because Wendy’s cider-drinking, cigarette-smoking, lard-eating lifestyle had brought an end to her several years ago. She sighed. ‘Whatever pride made her turn her back on your cottage had certainly withered by the time I met her. Did you try and trace her?’
Sadly, he shook his head. ‘I was angry. In those days, a man could pretty much wash his hands of a woman like Wendy. And that’s what I did. I let my child be brought up a bastard.’
Diane objected, ‘But even if Wendy had accepted your offer to keep her, if you wouldn’t marry her then Gareth would still have been a bastard and still have to fight everybody at school who told him he was. Having a father who paid his mother’s rent wouldn’t legitimise him. Hemindednot having a father. It ate at him. Not knowing his father caused a gigantic chip on his shoulder, but I don’t know whether having a father who tidied him out of sight would have been any better. And then his stepfather cleared off, leaving Wendy with two more kids to bring up alone. He couldn’t even finish his apprenticeship because he had to bring in every penny he could for the family coffers.’
Harold’s eyes shifted her way and she caught a glimpse of Gareth in the hardness of his stare. ‘Quite.’
It was several moments before he spoke again. ‘Eventually, I married Eleanor, Valerie’s mother. I loved her in a quiet way and she was the right sort: nice family, decent education, properly brought up. But she never had half the strength of character of Wendy. And, I’m afraid, proved not to be an affectionate mother. Valerie always had to beg for her attention. I’m not sure I’ve done particularly well by either of my children.’ He turned to gaze out at the garden. ‘But I never forgot that I’d fathered another baby, although it might have looked as if I had. Then I began to suffer with angina and the doctor did a bit of straight talking about what might happen … well, I realised that I didn’t want to die without ever having met my son.’
Having let the rush hour grind by whilst she enjoyed a delicious meal and a cosy chat with Harold, the journey home was easy.
But, unlocking her kitchen door, Diane was struck by the difference between the silence of anobody’s home just now but they’ll be along laterempty house and ayou live here aloneempty house. It was like the difference between a daughter who was out hanging with her friends and a daughter who was half the world away.
She wondered when Gareth would return to their modest brick-built semi. Or if he would. Stripping off her laced shirt and zippy jeans in the bedroom she glanced at the double bed, as neat as a cushion of moss with its green quilt, and tried to imagine sharing it again with Gareth, lying beside the warm, snuffling, fidgeting body that never seemed to find tranquillity, even in sleep.
The next room was her sewing room, crammed and cramped. The overlocking sewing machine stood at one end; garments hung from the picture rail and wrapped about the tailor’s dummy she’d bought eighth hand, its plush covering long ago worn shiny and the original maroon turned to rusty streaks. Shelves were buried by pots of beads and sequins, fabric, interfacing, thread, zips, and clothes that were destined to be unpicked for their fabric or other treasures – sometime. An octagonal Victorian sewing box that her grandmother had passed to her when Grandma’s fingers had become too swollen to hold a needle, its mahogany as dark as treacle, stood on the floor beside a stack of glossy mags. Also passed on.
Automatically, Diane began to make her way through the comfortable clutter, but the ringing of the phone made her shift suddenly into reverse and run downstairs to answer with a breathless, ‘Yes?’
‘If Tamzin keeps her appointment, let her order what she wants.’ James’s deep voice buzzed in Diane’s ear. ‘Tell her you’ve arranged it with me.’
