Free Spirit. Penny Jordan
she was, but she just wished that she would relax a little more; for instance, what had happened to that infamous temper Hannah had had as a child, a temper which her brothers had so often unkindly sparked off by tormenting her?
These days Hannah was everything that was reasoned and controlled. Too controlled, perhaps. Hannah started the engine and, with a final wave to her mother, set off down the overgrown drive.
The Dorset village which was home to her parents, and which had been home to her until she’d left for university, was small and picturesque, but that didn’t mean that life for its inhabitants was without its problems. Parents mourned as their sons and daughters, unable to get jobs, moved away from home. Work on the land, which had once been labour-intensive, was now mechanised to such an extent that farm workers’ cottages fell into disrepair as they became vacant, and farmers neither had the inclination nor the need to replace their workforce.
Now many of those cottages were being snapped up by people from London, up and coming career men and women, much like herself, with a keen eye for a bargain, and the knowledge that money invested in property was a wise investment. The village had changed even in her short lifetime.
Her father was close to retirement, and even though neither her father nor her mother had said anything Hannah knew they were both worrying about how they would manage and where they would live once her father had to give up the vicarage.
She and her brothers had discussed this problem the last time they were all together the previous Christmas. None of her brothers was married, preferring like her to be footloose and fancy free, and between the five of them they had agreed that they would all start saving towards being able to buy their parents a comfortable home.
After all, it was only right that they should do so, Mark had commented earnestly. Had their father invested his inheritance in bricks and mortar, instead of in their education, he would not be worrying about his retirement now.
Who else but a vicar would call his sons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Hannah wondered as she turned into the traffic. The boys took it well, even though there had been a period in their teens when all of them had opted to use their second and less conspicuous names. Once, their mother had confessed that it had been she who had called them after the Apostles, and Luke had teased her that the only reason she had chosen such names for them was because, in her disappointment at not producing the daughter she longed for so much, she had simply thought of the most convenient names.
Hannah had grown up surrounded by love and laughter. Her father was a gentle, intelligent man, who cared deeply about the human race and who suffered with it. Her mother was everything a vicar’s wife should be: supportive, understanding, generous both with her time and her patience, cheerfully tolerant of the demands others made on her husband’s time and of the financial hardship their life together had involved.
Even now, her mother still made her own jams and chutneys, still used every scrap of produce the huge, rambling vicarage garden gave, not so much these days because they needed it—after all, there were now only two mouths to feed, three if one counted Simon, a cat who had adopted them—but simply because for so many years she had not been able to afford to waste anything that now the habit had become ingrained with her. Hannah thought wryly of the half-opened cartons of this and that, discarded from her own fridge without a second thought. She rarely cooked for herself, preferring to eat out.
Most lunchtimes she ate with clients of the company for whom she worked. Most evenings she ate either snacks while working at home or went out with friends. How different her life-style was now from her mother’s!
This visit home, as always, her mother had probed gently into her personal life. What she wanted to know was if Hannah had fallen in love. Hannah had gently evaded her questions, not because she resented them but simply because she didn’t know how to explain to her mother that falling in love for her was something that just wasn’t going to happen. She had seen what the pressures of modern living did to too many of her friends’ relationships to risk such intimacy herself, and vicars’ daughters weren’t like the rest of the female population, they either revolted and went completely wild or, like Hannah herself, they lived by a set of rules and regulations, so totally out of step with modern mores as to be archaic.
Not that either parent had ever put any pressure on Hannah to conform to special standards different from those of her peers, but she and the boys, most especially Hannah herself, had grown up desperately aware of how very vulnerable their father was to public opinion. While it might be all very well for the daughter of the local entrepreneur to be out discoing at fourteen years old, while the local landlord’s daughter might have her name splashed all over the gossip press with impunity, and while other stalwarts of the Women’s Guild might discreetly let slip that their daughters were involved in intimate relationships which did not include a wedding ring, Hannah was in no doubt at all that the local community as a whole would not only strongly disapprove of any such behaviour on her part, but would also carry that disapproval to the ears of her father, and, quite simply, Hannah had never felt able to put that burden on him.
Now, of course, she was living away from home and in London, where she had her own airy apartment in the refurbished docklands area, and she had grown into the habit of evading intimacy, preferring solitude to ‘coupledom’, so that she automatically fended off those men who did approach her sexually. Fair-mindedly, she had to admit that her single state wasn’t entirely because of her parents.
There had also been her career. She had worked single-mindedly to achieve the high position she now held: consultant to one of the managers of a very small but well-established firm of financial experts. The genteel poverty of her childhood wasn’t something she had enjoyed, she felt ashamed to admit now.
There had been times when she had envied other children their possessions, their toys, their spending money, even though with wisdom and security she could appreciate that the gifts she had received from her parents had been of far more value than mere material possessions. Even so, she had been left with a desire, almost a craving, for financial security, not the kind of security that came from marriage to a wealthy man, but the kind of security she could earn for herself.
The village wasn’t busy. It was half-day closing. Hannah’s mother had been surprised when she had telephoned early in the week to say that she was taking a couple of days off, and to ask if it was convenient for her to come home. She hadn’t said anything then about Linda’s desperate telephone call to her the previous day, begging her to advise her.
Linda Askew was the daughter of a local businessman. She and Hannah had been at school together, and their friendship had been established then. The only child of wealthy parents, Linda had chosen not to go on to university as Hannah had, but her parents’ death in a car crash two years ago had revealed the shocking fact that the business was virtually bankrupt. In order to pay off her father’s outstanding debts, Linda had sold virtually everything.
Forced to confront the necessity of earning her own living, she had bought a small property in the village and decided to use her interest and expertise in various forms of needlework to establish a small shop. The business had done well. Linda was a sympathetic and caring person. She had a flair for designing, and her tapestries had become much sought after.
An approach from a glossy magazine had resulted in them marketing one of her tapestries as a special offer to their readers. The offer had been wildly successful, and it was because of the funds she had received via this offer that Linda found that she had now run into problems with the Inland Revenue. They had confronted her with a demand for tax which, she had told Hannah tearfully, she simply could not pay.
Having previously dealt with her own accounting system, she had not known whom to turn to, and so Hannah had offered to come down to the village and go with her on her appointment to see the tax inspector. Because it was half-day closing, it was relatively easy for her to park in the main street of the village.
Checking that the burglar alarm was in place and firmly locking her door, Hannah walked briskly towards Linda’s shop, not going to the front door but going the full length of the row of stone-built houses and then round the back, past the long, narrow gardens, where the richness of the autumn-hued