Nest of Sorrows by Ruth Hamilton

way would she stay in this house of misery.
    Dora Saunders’ pale blue eyes were narrowed with shock as she studied Kate’s engagement ring. ‘So, when’s it to be, then?’
    ‘As soon as she finishes college.’ Geoff’s tone was conciliatory. ‘We shan’t be too far away, Mum. It’s not as if you’re being abandoned to the elements. Not emigrating to China, are we?’ He hugged his fiancée, then pulled his mother into the crook of his other arm. ‘We’ll be a family, a real family.’
    Kate and Dora stared at one another, the younger woman feeling a brief shiver of fear as she caught the animosity in Dora’s face. The woman hated her. God, what was she coming into at all?
    Dora, meanwhile, was fighting with very mixed emotions. He was getting married, so at least that proved he was normal. There’d been a few snide comments in the Co-op over the years, remarks about lads staying with their mothers longer than was good for them, loud conversations about ‘nancy-boys’ and the like. This would stop the wagging tongues. But he was leaving her. And she’d three bedrooms, there was plenty of space here for them. She repeated her plea, trying not to sound too desperate in front of ‘that girl’. ‘You know you’re welcome here. Stop here till you find somewhere decent.’
    ‘We’ve a year to do that.’ Geoff patted his mother’s shoulder. ‘And I’ve plenty for a deposit. We’ll come and see you often, won’t we, Kate?’
    ‘Yes.’ She looked hard at the woman who would be her mother-in-law. In her own way, this old biddy was nearly as bad as Kate’s father! Kate wanted a life of her own, a life without parents in it. She wanted a cottage with roses . . . no. Mike Wray was gone, gone forever. This was a different kind of love, real love, she told herself stubbornly.
    In later years, Kate would look back at this moment, seeing herself, Geoff and Dora caught up, frozen in a sliver of time. Because, somehow, this particular instant summed up everything that was wrong with Kate’s life. It all came down to lack of communication. If there had only been honesty. If Dora could have said, ‘I’m scared of losing him’, if Geoff had said, ‘I can never really leave my mother’. Better still, if the man could have admitted there and then that he knew as little of love as Kate herself did.
    And in other areas, too. If Kate had only opened up to her mother, ‘I must marry him, I almost had his child and he needs me’. Or to her father, ‘Dad, I know you started loving me in your own way, I know that way is limited’. But no-one ever said anything. Rachel never expressed her love for her younger daughter; Kate herself seldom gave out any positive emotion. But should she blame herself? Should she? After all, in the summers of ’53 and ’54, she had been so young . . .
    In July 1954, Kate and Geoff were married at the registry office in Bolton. Rachel wore a blue suit and an air of great hurt because her daughter’s marriage was not a ‘proper’ one. Dora wept copious tears into a scrap of lace while Judith, down from Oxford for the summer, looked gorgeous in pink. Peter, still drunk from the night before, kept a reasonably low profile as the couple walked in together – there was none of the traditional giving away in this brief ceremony.
    Afterwards, the reception was held in the semi Geoff had bought with his dead father’s legacy. One or two of Kate’s old friends from school were present, but the majority of the guests were Geoff’s, colleagues from work who took an abundant interest in plumbing, new windows and the greenhouse at the bottom of the back garden. Kate, who looked stunning in a princess line dress of cream satin, felt everyone’s loneliness during the catered buffet meal. The hired servants seemed to have a better time than anyone – Kate caught them sipping furtively in the kitchen. Her poor mother looked so bereft and solitary seated in a corner, yet every time Kate