“Friends from school?”
“Yes. Oh, and there was a big place, I can’t remember the name, I’ll check it for you, it was a banqueting place, they did conferences and dinner dances and weddings. Jennifer used to waitress, there was a whole crowd of them did it at the weekends.”
“What was she studying at university?”
“English, I think.”
That hardly narrowed it down.
“And she left home in the autumn?”
“This time of year,” he agreed, “For the new term, I suppose. I don’t know if it was September or October. I was back at school. I wanted to go see her off on the train but one day I got in from school and my mother said she’d left for university. I felt so disappointed. Mainly about the train,” he said ruefully.
“And it was sometime after that they told you she’d left the university?”
“Yes, I think I must have kept asking about her and that’s when they told me that and said she was a disgrace.”
“What do you think happened?”
He took a breath. Looked across at the large, blue abstract painting on my wall. “I think she got pregnant. I can’t think of anything else that would have made them cut her off like that.”
Oh, I don’t know – coming out as a lesbian maybe or moving in with a boyfriend might have had a similar effect on the narrow minded – we were talking nearly a quarter of a century ago. Pregnancy seemed a pretty good bet though, good as any at this stage.
He carried on. “My mother still has a bee in her bonnet about marriage. I’ve friends at work who aren’t married and have children and she thinks it’s appalling.”
“Is she very religious?”
“Yes. She doesn’t get to church anymore but she keeps in touch. Her father was a lay-preacher. Very puritanical. Their church was connected to the Methodists but they were much stricter. All about rules and the proper conduct of a respectable life. ‘The right and proper way’,” he quoted. “They had a hill-farm up in the Yorkshire Dales, I think most of the surrounding farms joined the church. Like a separate community in a way.”
“And your father?”
“That’s how they met. He’d been to university and studied accountancy. Then the war broke out and he joined up. He was an officer. He returned to one of the army camps up in Yorkshire and got involved with the church, met my mother there. After he left the army he set up as an accountant in Manchester and they got married. They established a congregation here, he became the leader. He was very conservative. He thought we should still have National Service, wanted to bring back hanging and preserve the Empire.” He laughed nervously. Speaking ill of the dead? “It wasn’t all stern lectures though. He loved to garden. We’d help him. It was the one time we all seemed to be happy together.”
