Kathryn could still remember the first day she’d gone to school. Not on the first day that all the other children had started, of course. Her mother hadn’t remembered to take her then.
Kathryn had been two days late. Her uniform had been second-hand and way too big for her emaciated frame. Her lunch had been two Vegemite sandwiches, carried in a plastic bag.
The really tragic thing was that she hadn’t been upset by any of this. She was used to her mother’s neglect and hadn’t known any different. But the children in her class had soon made her realise she was very different indeed.
She had quickly become the object of their scorn. She’d been teased and tormented. Not bashed, but emotionally bullied.
The teacher hadn’t seemed to have any pity on her. Neither had she said anything to anyone about the days Kathryn didn’t go to school—the days when her mother hadn’t been able to get out of bed.
School had become a misery. It was no wonder her grades had been hopeless back then. How could she have learnt anything when she’d spent every day there in a state of stomach-churning anxiety?
‘By the look on your face,’ Hugh said, ‘things must have been very bad for you as a kid.’
She turned to look at him. To really look at him. Not as her devilishly handsome, wickedly sexy boss, but as a person, a fellow human being whose eyes weren’t just beautiful, but also very kind.
‘Yes,’ she choked out, ‘they were.’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ he said gently. ‘But if you do, I promise I won’t judge, or make facile comments. I’ll just listen.’
Which he did, amazingly, not saying a word as she did her best to paint a picture of her life before Val.
‘I desperately wanted a friend,’ she explained at one stage. ‘But I couldn’t have one, even if by some miracle anyone had wanted to befriend me. I could never take anyone home, you see. You’ve no idea what it was like there, Hugh. The place was always a shambles. Because of her illness, my mother had become a hoarder. There was wall-to-wall junk in every room. I was ashamed of it and ashamed of her.’
When tears pricked at her eyes, Kathryn quickly brushed them aside. ‘Sorry. No point in crying. Look, to cut this long story short again, one day—it was during Easter, just after I’d turned nine—a man from the Salvation Army knocked on our door. In hindsight, someone must have called them and said we needed help. I don’t know who. A neighbour perhaps. Anyway, I’ll never forget the shocked look on his face when he walked inside. I’d never felt so ashamed. But, really, he was very sweet and kind. When my mum started crying he put his arm around her and said that he’d help her fix the place up. But he added that it really wasn’t a fit place for a little girl. And then he did the most wonderful thing of all. He sent me to Val’s place for the rest of the holidays.’
Kathryn smiled at that memory. ‘Val had been having needy and neglected kids for holidays ever since she’d become a widow, I eventually found out. That holiday, however, there was just me and her.’
‘How old was she back then?’ Hugh asked.
‘When I first met Val she was sixty-five. But she seemed younger. She was so full of life. Yet she’d had a sad life, really. Her only two children—both boys—had died in accidents. One when he was twelve. He fell out of a tree, a Norfolk pine. The second one was killed in a motorcycle crash when he was eighteen. She told me they’d been just like their father: thrill-seekers. Her husband had also died in an accident, you see. He’d bought a gyrocopter for his fiftieth birthday and crashed it on his first flight. Silly bugger he was, Val used to say.’
‘People say I’m just like my father, too,’ Hugh remarked drily.
Kathryn frowned. ‘In what way? You don’t look like him.’
‘No, I take after Mum with my looks. Though I get my height from Dad. And, according to him, my intelligence. I suspect, however, when people say I’m a chip off the old block, they’re referring to my inability to commit to one woman, a flaw which I recognised shortly after I hit puberty. By the time I reached eighteen I’d had about fifty girlfriends. I decided then and there never to follow dear old Dad’s example and buy a wedding ring every time I fell into lust.’
‘Till now,’ Kathryn said before she could think better of it.
Hugh just laughed. ‘Touché. So you’d better make it worth my while, lover. But back to your story. Tell me more about your relationship with Val and about her house.’