Second Chance

by Claire Lorrimer

Genres: Sagas

Synopsis

Louise Endor is just seventeen when she discovers she is pregnant. The father, a married man with two other children, has no intention of leaving his wife, but Louise is determined to keep her son Paul, and to work towards a better life for him. Disowned by her father, she goes to work on a farm in Sussex. The location is idyllic, the work hard but enjoyable, and her relationship with her new employer, Howis Windlesham, gets off to a flying start. There is only one serious drawback: Louise has had to leave Paul with foster parents, and visiting him at weekends is breaking her heart. She must find a way for them to be together soon. Can she turn to Howis for help, or does she risk losing everything she has worked so hard to achieve?

Release date: January 30, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Louise Endor looked at her mother with an expression of understanding far beyond her seventeen years. She could appreciate Mrs Endor’s conflicting loyalties and the struggle to choose between them. To make it easier, she said:

‘I think it would be best if we make a clean break, Mum! If Dad finds out you’ve been to see me, there’ll be a row and you’ll be miserable. It isn’t worth busting up your life as well.’

Tears came into the older woman’s eyes. It was almost as if she were the younger as she pleaded now with her daughter.

‘But you’re my child, my only child. And …’ she brought the words out with difficulty ‘… the baby is my grandchild, whatever your father may say.’

‘I know, Mum! But I’ll write to you and keep you in touch. Father may come round in time and then we can all be together again. Meanwhile, if you go on trying to see me, he’ll only get more angry and it will delay the time when we can be reconciled.’

Mrs Endor was now weeping with silent helplessness into her handkerchief. Louise stroked her hair, her heart too numbed from all the recent emotions connected with her problems to be able to feel more than an anxious concern for her mother’s unhappiness; concern — and guilt.

‘I’m … sorry, Mother!’

Mrs Endor grabbed at Louise’s hand and held it fiercely.

‘I don’t blame you, Louise. I blame him. To think we all trusted him, believed him. Your father would take a horsewhip to him if he knew.’

A curious smile passed across Louise’s face.

‘But he doesn’t know. Nor do you know, Mother. You’re just guessing — and I’ll never tell you or Father the name of my baby’s father.’

Mrs Endor looked at Louise with complete lack of understanding.

‘I just don’t understand you, Louise. Of course it was Max — you haven’t been out with any other young men — it’s been Max for months. You loved him. I know you did, and he took advantage of you. He —’

‘Mother!’ Louise’s interruption was sharp and silencing. ‘Max is a married man. He has two children and his wife loves him. He doesn’t want to divorce her and I don’t want him to.’

‘He should be made to!’ Mrs Endor said vehemently. ‘It’s his duty — the very least he could do.’

‘Mum, try to understand. I don’t love him — not now. And he doesn’t love me. That’s no basis for marriage. He’d resent my poor little Paul and hate him just as he would hate me for forcing him to do what he did not want to do.’

Mrs Endor shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. Louise, who had always been such an easy child, so adaptable and compliant, was like a rock over the question of her future. Yet she was only seventeen, little more than a child. Perhaps, after all, she had inherited her father’s strong will and determination. Let him start talking about what he considered to be a matter of principle and there was no moving him. In all the months that had passed since they had discovered Louise was going to have a baby, Mrs Endor had begged her husband to take a less Victorian attitude.

‘Everything’s changed since the war,’ Mrs Endor had pleaded. ‘We are in the 1960s, dear, people aren’t so strait-laced as they were when we were young.’ But he had never wavered. Louise had to leave home, go to lodgings and unless she were prepared to give up the child, have it adopted, she would not be allowed to come home.

‘Don’t be too hard on Father,’ Louise said gently, guessing her mother’s thoughts. ‘He’s been very generous, paying for everything.’

She thought of some of the other girls in the Unmarried Mothers’ Home, girls like Joan who had had to work up to the last week in order to pay her way. By the time Joan gave birth to her little girl, she was too worn out and discouraged to keep her. The baby was going to be adopted and parting from her had all but broken Joan’s heart.

‘I’ll never part with Paul, never!’ she said aloud.

She looked down into the pram where the child lay sleeping and a surge of love for her baby strengthened and upheld her in her decision. Mrs Endor’s gaze followed her daughter’s. The baby was like any other and yet the fact that it was her first grandchild touched her deeply. She would have liked to pick the baby up and cradle him in her arms but Louise had said it was best not to waken him. Maybe Louise had realised how hard it would be for her mother to behave as if Paul didn’t exist once she had held him close to her.

Mrs Endor started to cry again. Louise said gently:

‘You mustn’t worry, Mum. I’ll be all right. As long as I have Paul. I won’t be lonely. It isn’t my life I worry about, it’s you. I hate to think I’m responsible for making you so miserable.’

‘Oh, Louise, how could you? How could you?’ Mrs Endor sobbed. But it was not meant as a reproof so much as a straightforward question.

‘I loved him!’ Louise said very quietly. ‘I — I thought we would be married very soon anyway. It was wrong, I know, but somehow I can’t be sorry anymore — not now I have Paul.’

There was a time when she had longed desperately to be rid of the child growing in her; weeks and months when she had cried herself into a stupor regretting that moment of weakness; regretting that she had ever known or loved Max. Then, slowly as the months went by, she had begun to feel differently. As the child moved inside her, she had become curious; then a desire to know the child, for it to be born and to live had overcome the fear and dislike of what had happened to her. She had cried once more because her baby would have no father; because Max, whom she had loved so much, had turned out to be a cheat, a fraud, unworthy of what she had given him. She had cried for her own stupidity; and slowly, her heart had hardened against Max and against love for any man. She would build her future around her baby. She would make up to it somehow for the lack of a father.

In the Home, she had nearly weakened. It was suggested to her that her little boy might have a better chance in life if she allowed him to be adopted. She would not find it easy to get work with a child on her hands; he would lack for material benefits; being a boy, the time would come when he would need a father.

Her mother’s letters, begging her to give up the child and come home, weakened her still further until she looked down at the baby in the cot beside her bed. Then the great surge of love she felt for him gave her new strength.

‘He may lack material benefits,’ she told the welfare officer, ‘but he will never lack the most important thing of all, love. I’m keeping him … I’ll never part with him.’

‘You don’t understand what it will be like,’ they had cautioned her. ‘You aren’t used to hard drudgery. You haven’t any qualifications so there’ll only be domestic work for you to do. There’ll be no time for dances, boyfriends, parties; no money for new clothes.’

Then Joan’s baby had been taken away and Louise had heard her weeping, very quietly, hopelessly, throughout the night. But she wasn’t like Joan … she was young, strong — strong enough to take good care of Paul no matter how hard the work. Joan was ill and afraid. She wasn’t afraid — at least not so afraid that she was willing to give in now.

Louise had refused to see her mother until the day before she left the Home. Then, when her mind was made up irrevocably, she had allowed her mother to pay her a visit. She had done so secretly, for Mr Endor had forbidden his wife to go near Louise. He didn’t really mean to be cruel.

‘He’s hoping that if things are hard for you, you’ll make up your mind all the sooner to come back to us,’ Mrs Endor had tried to explain.

Louise wanted to be fair to her father. She believed what her mother said and yet she knew that there was more to it this time than a matter of her father’s ‘principles’; he was in the police force and he was afraid of the disgrace. But there was no point in distressing her mother by pointing this out. She, Louise, was no longer bitter. She realised that she had brought everything on herself and that she had no right to expect her parents to share the burden if they did not wish to do so. Even these days, an illegitimate baby was a disgrace, and especially so for the daughter of a police officer. She couldn’t possibly have gone back to live in the familiar surroundings of her childhood, amongst her school friends and their parents, living the same life as before. It would only have worked out if her father had been willing to ask for a transfer and Louise was far too proud to make the suggestion that could only come from him.

She tried to think kindly of her father. He had offered to have her home, without the baby. He had paid her a generous allowance while Paul was coming.

And today, Mother had brought with her a cheque for fifty pounds which would help her to get on her feet.

‘You’ve got a job then, dear?’ her mother asked now. ‘One you think you’ll like?’

‘It sounds fine!’ Louise lied quickly. She had not told her mother that it was an office-cleaning job, starting at 5.30 in the morning. The welfare officer had got it for her.

‘It’s 4/6d. an hour, Louise, and it will enable you to spend your afternoons with the baby.’

In the evenings, there was another office-cleaning job from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. She and Paul would live in lodgings where the landlady would keep an eye on Paul while Louise was at work.

At least, Louise told herself wryly, she had learned how to scrub floors at the Home. All the ‘Mothers’ shared the domestic duties of the Home, some cooking, others washing and ironing, as well as having to look after their babies.

‘Don’t you think you ought to be getting home?’ she asked her mother, afraid lest she should be further questioned about the job; she knew her mother would be horrified to think of her spending her days as a ‘char.’

Mrs Endor stood up, once again the tears spilling over on to her cheeks.

‘I suppose I’d better go. I — I think the baby is lovely. I wish I could knit him something but …’

‘Yes, I know, Mother. Please, don’t worry. We’ll be all right. It will all come out all right, you’ll see.’

But after her mother had gone, a little of Louise’s self assurance left her and she was once more desperately afraid; not for herself, but for Paul. She understood then how her mother felt about her. This worry for one’s child was part of the price of being a mother. Louise supposed it would always be with her now. Not so long ago she had been a child; thinking only of herself and having a good time; of what life had in store for her. Now that was all gone. She thought of the future in so far as it would affect Paul. She wanted things for him; was afraid only of what could harm him.

It was the moment of growing-up and she was half aware of it. She wheeled the pram slowly back towards the large, ugly Victorian house which she would be leaving tomorrow, unaware of the fact that to an onlooker, she might appear only a child herself.

It was 1963 and she was, after all, only seventeen.

The girl was walking slowly and gracefully up the gravel drive towards the large white house. She was bareheaded and the sun beat down upon her short light-brown hair and rather thin white arms. Her easy stride made the full floral-patterned cotton skirt swing out from side to side, so that she appeared to the woman, watching her from the terrace, to be very young.

It was still impossible to the observer to see her face. The woman waited with irritable impatience for the girl to get nearer, but not because she was interested in her features, or in the least curious about the visitor. She was merely anxious to get the interview over quickly and be gone. Her red-tipped fingers curled round the white riding gloves and then flicked them against her jodhpurs, yet she made no move towards the drive to hasten the meeting.

Her full, discontented mouth went down at the corners in a little exclamation of annoyance, as she saw the girl pause and look up at the house for a minute or two — no doubt to admire the beauty of the white building in its emerald-green surround of lawns. The wisteria was in full flower, dripping over the sun-drenched balcony like great clusters of ripe grapes. Against the lower walls, crimson and pink climbing roses were already in bud. Suddenly, a small, lithe, grey squirrel leapt from the massive copper-beech tree, pausing for a moment to sun itself on the sun-warmed stone of the wall, then scuttled into the shadowy world of fallen leaves. So much beauty, but the woman was anxious to leave it.

Presently, the girl resumed her slow walk and disappeared for a moment behind the sentinel yew trees. Then she appeared again, walking towards the front door, and the woman herself moved at last and called out.

Louise Endor heard the voice and saw the woman coming across the terrace. She waited quietly, admiring the slender figure in tight-fitting jodhpurs. A thin, cream silk shirt was tucked in neatly at her waist. The long, sun-tanned throat and arms were bare.

‘Miss Endor? You’re late. Why didn’t you take the taxi? I’ve been waiting half an hour.’

Louise flushed, glancing quickly down at her watch and away again.
. . .