‘I’ve put Cherry in your old room.’
Her mother’s quiet words cut through her introspective thoughts.
Her old room. Tiny and cosy, up under the eaves, with its uneven walls and sloping ceiling.
‘You’re quite close to her… in the guest room. It’s got its own bathroom now, and I thought you’d prefer that.’
A guest room with its own bathroom. Nostalgia touched her with melancholy fingers. Even here, after all, things changed. She had noticed that her parents had also had central heating installed. A new innovation, indeed. She remembered vividly the arguments when her mother had first tentatively broached the subject. Then her father had flatly refused to even consider it.
But times obviously changed. People changed.
LATER on that evening, as she took Cherry up to bed, sitting in the familiar bedroom with its rose-patterned wallpaper, Kate listened half-heartedly to her daughter’s excited chatter, while part of her couldn’t help remembering how she had thrown herself on this very bed and wept with grief and fear, unable to believe that she was actually pregnant… that Silas was actually married… that her father was refusing to allow her in the house.
‘And Grandpa was saying that it will soon be the Dales Show. I wish I had something I could show. Mum, are you all right?’
Kate gave her a faint smile. ‘Fine…’
‘Were you thinking about my father?’
Green eyes met green, and Kate wondered at the perception of this child of hers, who could be so gravely and heart-breakingly mature.
And there was no doubt at all about where she got that perception from. It was one of the first things she had noticed about Silas… That and his almost overpoweringly male good looks.
She realised she was drifting helplessly back into the past and that she had not answered Cherry’s question. Walking over to the window, she looked out at the familiar scenery of the dale. Below them, her father’s sheep were gathered in the lowland pastures. These would be the ones that would soon need shearing.
Keeping her back toward Cherry, she said quietly, ‘No. No, I wasn’t thinking about your father. I was just remembering when this was my room.’
It was the first time she had lied to Cherry, and the small deception hurt, but coming home had stirred up too many memories, had brought to the surface of her consciousness feelings and thoughts she couldn’t share with anyone.
Thoughts not just of Silas, but of David, her childhood, her parents and her own suddenly altered perceptions of past events; it was almost as though she had turned a corner and found herself confronted with an unfamiliar view of a territory so intimately well-known that the shock of the unexpected forced her to examine what she thought she had known.
‘Time for bed,’ she told Cherry, turning to smile at her. Whatever else she might think or feel, nothing could change her love for this child she and Silas had made together.
She kissed her, hugging her briefly.
‘Happy to be here, Cherry?’
‘Oh, yes… It’s even better than I hoped.’ She turned serious green eyes to her mother. ‘If I lived here, I don’t think I’d ever want to leave.’ And the sombre look she gave the view from the window made Kate’s heart tremble with apprehension.
The last thing she wanted was for Cherry to become too attached to this place. There was no way they could make their lives here on a permanent basis. Jobs in teaching in this part of the world were bound to be scarce, and where would they live, other than with her parents?
Seeing Cherry settled into bed, Kate went downstairs, automatically heading for the kitchen.
To her surprise only her father was there, engaged in the homely task of making a pot of tea. An unfamiliar sound caught her ears and she traced it to a dishwasher discreetly concealed by an oak panel that matched the rest of the kitchen.
‘Your mother’s not getting any younger,’ her father said gruffly, noticing her astonishment. ‘Time was when I hoped that David would change his mind and come back, but it looks like your mother and I will be the last Setons to live here, and I don’t want your mother dying before her time through overwork.’
Kate could scarcely conceal her astonishment. What had happened to the stern, unyielding father who had never allowed either of his children to see any hint of what he might think of as weakness?
‘Times change, lass,’ he said heavily, as though he had seen into her mind. ‘And sometimes they bring hard lessons. I was wrong to say to you what I did. Driving you out of your home like that… Hasty words spoken in the heat of the moment, and both of us too proud to back down, eh?’
Kate had never thought of it like that, never seen in her own refusal to risk rejection by getting in touch with her parents a mirror-image of her father’s notorious pride, but now she saw that he was, in part, right.
‘It took your mother to make me see sense, and thank goodness she did. Yon’s a fine lass you’ve got there. It will do your mother good to have someone to fuss over besides me and the shepherds.’
As he finished speaking Kate heard a whine outside the back door, and to her astonishment her father opened it to let in the dog who had accompanied him to the station.
‘No good in the open, this one,’ he told her slightly shamefacedly. ‘I should have got rid of him, but I hadn’t the heart. Spoiled him to death, your mother has.’
But Kate noticed, when her father carried the tea-tray through into the sitting-room, that it was at his feet that the dog lay.
With Cherry in bed, Kate felt oddly vulnerable and uncomfortable. She had left this house in fear and misery eleven years ago, and now she was back, but how could those years be bridged?
It proved to be astonishingly easy. It became apparent to Kate that there was scarcely a single feature of her and Cherry’s lives that Lydia had left untold, and that her mother was almost as familiar with the regular pattern of their lives as she was herself.
Lydia had been a good friend to both of them, Kate recognised.
Quite what she had hoped to achieve by her precipitous flight to London she didn’t really know, but after two terrifying days and nights of living rough she had suppressed her pride and gone to see her godmother.
Lydia had not, as she had dreaded, insisted on Kate going home, or even agreed with her parents that her pregnancy must be hushed up and her child adopted. Instead she had offered Kate and her baby a home with her for just as long as they needed it.
A career woman with no ties, she had adapted remarkably well to the responsibility of a pregnant teenage girl, Kate thought. It had been Lydia who had encouraged her to go back to her studies and complete her degree, who had insisted on sharing the care of Cherry with her so that she was free to do so, and who had also encouraged her to buy her own small flat once she had finally got a job, thus giving both her and Cherry their independence.
Not once had she ever asked about Silas, and not once had Kate mentioned him. So why start thinking about him now? What was the point?
Her mother hadn’t been wrong to remind her of her father’s habit of early rising, Kate reflected ruefully the next morning when the sound of her father whistling to his dog woke her from her slumbers.
Without even going to the window, she could picture the scene in the yard below: her father in his ancient tweed jacket, crook in one hand,