The Strength Of Desire. Alison Fraser

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      Hope followed her daughter to her room. She found her face down on the bed, crying like a baby.

      Hope sat down beside her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

      Maxine stiffened, then, turning on her back, sobbed out, ‘I don’t care. I hate him! I hate him!’

      ‘I know. I know. It’s all right,’ Hope said in comforting tones, and stroked strands of hair from her daughter’s tear-soaked face.

      Maxine looked at her in utter misery, then accused, ‘It was your fault, all your fault!’

      It hurt. Of course it hurt, but Hope did not retaliate. Maxine was right. The whole mess was her fault.

      Hope contained her own feelings, but Maxine read the pain in her mother’s eyes, and hesitated between attack and remorse. In the end she sat up and threw her arms round Hope’s neck, and began crying again.

      ‘I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!’ she cried into her mother’s neck.

      ‘No, I know.’ Hope held her daughter and rocked her gently, as she had when Maxine was a baby.

      But her thoughts were elsewhere. With another baby. A baby held briefly in her arms, all those years ago.

      She remembered how much she’d wanted children, how she’d imagined being a mother would make her complete. She hadn’t questioned why she’d felt incomplete.

      She’d also imagined Jack would be happy, too, but, of course, she’d been quite wrong…

      

      ‘You’re what?’ he had almost shouted at her when she’d told him.

      The joy had drained from her face as she’d repeated, ‘I’m pregnant. Three months.’

      She’d waited and waited. For a smile. A flicker of happiness. A gesture of concern. Anything other than Jack’s expression of utter dismay.

      He’d recovered himself eventually, saying, ‘It’s a shock. I thought we’d have some time together. We agreed…’

      ‘I know.’ Hope nodded. They had agreed to take precautions, but something had gone wrong. ‘I didn’t plan it. I didn’t realise you’d mind so much.

      ‘It’s not that,’ Jack denied, although his lack of enthusiasm was almost palpable. He strode across to the drinks cabinet and fixed himself a stiff drink, before running on, ‘It just doesn’t fit in very well with our plans. My world tour starts in three months and won’t finish before the baby would be born…Perhaps we should wait.’

      ‘Wait?’ Hope echoed, confused. ‘Wait before you go on tour, you mean?’

      ‘No, that’s impossible. The tour can’t be cancelled,’ he told her firmly. ‘I just thought…Well, if you’re only three months along…’ He left the idea hanging there.

      Hope caught it and her heart sank. ‘You think we should cancel the baby.’ She finally said the words aloud. They were like stones in her heart.

      ‘I’d hardly term it that,’ Jack said, ‘but, yes, I feel we should consider the alternatives…’

      

      Perhaps Maxine was right. It really was her fault. If she’d listened to Jack, terminated that baby and waited for another, their marriage might have survived. But that baby had been real to her, a person even in the early stages of pregnancy. To terminate on a matter of convenience had been abhorrent to her.

      ‘Look, Maxine.’ She spoke quietly to her daughter now. ‘I realise you haven’t seen much of your father over the years, but, as I’ve explained before, it was never personal to you.’

      ‘I know—he didn’t like children.’ Maxine grossly simplified what Hope had actually told her over the years. “Then why did he come those times? Why did he bother?’

      Hope had asked herself the same question many times. After ten years’ silence, Jack had turned up on impulse on her doorstep one afternoon, and been all charm to a daughter who, at ten, was already promising to be beautiful. With Hope’s blue eyes and wide, smiling mouth, Maxine still managed to look quite different, her features more defined and her hair a mass of thick black waves.

      ‘It would have been better if he’d never come,’ Maxine said now, her tears turned to anger as she scrambled off the bed and went to wash in the basin in her room.

      Hope agreed with her, but at the time she’d been unable to control the situation. Jack had wanted a daughter, for a while at least, and Maxine had wanted a father. But Jack’s interest hadn’t, of course, lasted.

      ‘I’m sorry about the way things turned out, Maxine,’ Hope said gently, when her daughter finished drying her face.

      She realised the inadequacy of her words even before Maxine looked at her with accusing eyes. ‘Are you? You never wanted me to go places with him.’

      Hope remained silent. It was true enough. In fact, after a year of Jack letting Maxine down with a string of broken promises, Hope had deliberately put an end to the relationship.

      ‘That’s Katie,’ Maxine added as the doorbell downstairs rang. ‘We’re going to do our homework together. I’d better let her in.’

      ‘Yes, OK.’ Hope blinked a little as her daughter disappeared downstairs to greet her best friend. She heard them laughing in the hallway. From utter misery to girlish giggles in one short move.

      How wonderful it would be to be twelve again. To forget so easily. To live in the present. To be free of the past.

      Hope had never quite managed it. She was thirty-two next birthday, and had spent twelve years on her own, yet she was still haunted by the past, still tortured by a sense of failure…

      

      She was six months pregnant and miserable. She had read that women bloomed in similar circumstances but she seemed to have wilted. Jack was fed up with her. She didn’t blame him. She was fed up with herself.

      “There’s no choice,’ Jack said for the hundredth time as they drove down to Cornwall. ‘It would have been different if your pregnancy was straightforward, but, with your iron-levels, you’d be fainting all over the place. You can’t come on tour with me and you can’t stay at home.’

      ‘I could have stayed with Vicki,’ Hope lamented, still hoping that Jack might change his mind.

      ‘Vicki,’ Jack repeated her best friend’s name, ‘is a nice kid, but, be honest, how much use would she be in a crisis? She is the original dizzy blonde.’

      Hope bristled silently, but couldn’t deny the truth of it. Vicki had been enormous fun at boarding-school and a good friend since. Catering for the needs of a pregnant woman, however, wasn’t one of her talents.

      ‘Anyway, Vicki’s asked if she can come on the tour,’ Jack reminded her. ‘I don’t know if she’ll be much help, but, as a favour to you, I’ve agreed.’

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