Potential Danger

Quiet words, but full of emotion. Kate looked at her mother.

‘It’s lovely to be here, Mum. I don’t think Cherry has talked of anything else since Christmas.’

‘Cherry… what kind of name is that to give the child?’ her father snorted.

And it was Cherry herself who answered him saying brightly, ‘But Mum called me that because the cherry trees were in blossom when I was born.’

They had tea in the large, panelled dining-room that overlooked the gardens at the front of the house. Originally built as a minor hall, the house was much larger than the other stone farmhouses that populated the dale. It had a sunny drawing-room that overlooked the dale itself and, although the ground was barren and the winter winds icy, in the protection of the walled garden countless generations of Seton women had cultivated not only fruit and vegetables, but flowers as well.

The drawing-room was only used on formal occasions, its oak furniture lovingly waxed and its parquet floor polished.

Normally they ate in the large kitchen; and in the summer, as Kate remembered it, their evening meal had often been as late as eight or nine in the evening so that her father could make the most of the long hours of daylight.

Tea was the word used to describe the evening meal in the north, and not dinner, and on this occasion her mother had baked all the things for which she was justly famous in the dale: scones light as feathers from her bantam chickens, bread, still slightly warm from the old-fashioned bread ovens either side of the new Aga and still used by her mother, currant slices, lightly dusted with sugar, summer pudding made from some of the early fruits, the kind of salad that had never dreamed of seeing the inside of a supermarket but came straight from her mother’s garden, and tiny new potatoes, and home-cured ham. All the old-fashioned things she remembered from her childhood, and yet, as she sliced into her mother’s bread, Kate saw that it had been made with wholemeal flour, showing that even up here people were not totally immune to the power of the Press.

Despite the excellence of the food, Kate wasn’t hungry. Cherry was, though, tucking into her food with the healthy appetite of the young.

Already Kate thought she could see a change in her—an opening up, a stretching out and growing—as though somehow she had been cramped in their city life.

Throughout the meal she chatted to her grandparents, telling them about her school and her friends, leaving Kate alone with her own thoughts.

It was disturbing how much Silas was occupying them. She supposed she ought to have expected it and been prepared for it, for, although Silas had never visited her home, the emotional trauma of her own leaving of it was bound to have left a lingering resonance for her sensitive nerves to pick up on.

And yet she had barely thought about him at all in years. He was part of her past, and for Cherry’s sake she could not regret having known him, but the discovery that he had deceived her, that he was married with children, had totally killed her love.

And she had never allowed herself to fall into the same trap again.

Oh, she had dated—fellow schoolteachers, friends of friends who shared her interest in the theatre and with whom she had enjoyed pleasurable evenings—but there had been nothing like the intensity of emotion she had known with Silas.

Why not? She was emotionally and physically capable of that emotion, and yet, for some reason, after Silas she had had no other lovers, no man in her life who was more than a friend.

Was it perhaps because she had been afraid? Afraid of the vulnerability such a commitment would bring?

In the early years, of course, there had been Cherry. Most men shied away from a woman with a young child, and Kate’s life had been too exhausting to allow her to do anything other than care for her child and complete her education. Without Lydia’s help and love, even that much would not have been possible.

‘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.

CHAPTER TWO (#ucf03125d-1d91-52dd-836c-a835ee38b97e)

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.