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scarred so many lives, yet war could not be blamed for the scar on Katrin Hawley’s life. That blow had been struck years ago, hurled at her by angry children in a school playground. It was a scar only revenge could remove and Katrin Hawley would have that revenge.

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    ‘ You tricked Jacob Hawley  . . . ’
         ‘ . . . others might not fool so easy  . . . ’
         ‘ . . . the loss of a husband  . . . ’
         Like insistent bluebottles of thought, her sister’s words buzzed in Violet Hawley’s brain, words which had plagued like a thorn in her flesh since her return to Hollies Drive, words which even now, sitting in her gleaming sitting room, refused to be silenced.
         ‘ Jacob knew of your lying with a man who refused to wed you, knew your backstreet abortion had deprived him of a family. ’
         Staring at patterns of sunlight trickling through windows criss-crossed with brown sticky tape, a precautionary measure against glass shattered by bomb blast, Violet heard other words, words spoken some twenty-one years before.
         ‘. . . He told me of the child you carried, the child he were father of .’
         Jacob had stared at his pain.
         ‘ . . . he laughed on saying I’d been hooked like a fish, taken in by a wench no better than her should be .’
         ‘. . . Jacob that is a horrible lie. . . ! ’
         In the space of a moment the look of pain so vivid in his eyes had become cold anger then disgust.
         ‘ No Violet, the lie is the one we have lived this twelve month, the lie of believing we can have a life together, now that lie is ended, tomorrow  . . . ’
         Violet’s eyes followed the dancing gold of afternoon sunlight. What might Jacob have gone on to say of that tomorrow? What was his intention?
         He had not said, not that night nor at any time since; but instinct told then what passing years had confirmed, whatever love Jacob Hawley may once have held for her was dead.
         Caught in the web of memory, Violet saw again a young fair-haired man, grey eyes regarding her across a dimly lit room. They held no trace of righteous anger, no look of disgust nor the dullness of pain, the eyes that looked at her were devoid of emotion: empty, soulless, robbed of life.
         ‘ Tomorrow  . . . ’
         He had begun to speak again. To say what she had kept hidden in her own heart these twenty-one years? To tell her their marriage was ended? That the next day would see him gone from the tiny terraced house? It had not been said yet nor had it been foregone or renounced. Ella had been right. Jacob was biding his time, simply waiting to see his daughter wed and then he would leave, turn his back on a life he had no pleasure in, on the wife he held no love for. And Katrin? Violet drew a long breath. Surely the child she had taken and reared as her own would not leave, she would not turn her back on the mother who had given her everything. Katrin had not been born of her body, but that would prove of no consequence! Violet shrugged away the sudden coldness touching her insides. Katrin loved her, that was evident in every aspect of the girl’s behaviour and marriage would not alter that.
         So what if Jacob left her?. . . Life would not be so very changed. From the day he found out about that pregnancy, discovering she had married him not for love but for security of name, they had not lived as man and wife. They shared a room but not a bed, he had provided food and home  . . .
         Jacob had provided a home! He had taken her from the smoke-blackened two up two down, tiny back to back in Cross Street, one of a long line of terraced houses each sharing a garden privy with four other families. Jacob had taken her from that drab dark house and brought her here to Hollies Drive, to Elm House, a tall detached villa with its own garden, a private toilet and running water piped directly into the house.
         Hollies Drive! A