Free Mixing With Murder by Ann Granger Page B

into the breakfast parlour and peeped from the window. He could still barge after me, hammering on the door and demanding to speak to me. I held my breath. He hung about outside undecidedly for a minute and then strode away. I heaved a sigh of relief but it was only temporary. He’d gone but he’d turn up again. Right now he’d hurry home either to warn the Stallards or Lisa herself about me. But Lisa wasn’t there, he’d said, and certainly no one had answered the door. If I had to make a guess, and guess was all it could be, he wouldn’t say anything about me to the Stallards before he spoke to Lisa. He wouldn’t want to worry them unduly. He’d mentioned Mickey Allerton so he knew too much for my liking. But I didn’t know how much the Stallard parents knew about Lisa’s flight from the Silver Circle. I was ready to gamble they knew only some story she’d chosen to tell them and it wouldn’t necessarily be correct in every detail.
     
    It’s called the Generation Gap. Basically it works like this. Young people don’t tell older ones what they’re doing because they don’t want endless lectures and interference. They excuse their actions by saying they are anxious to prevent their parents worrying.
     
    Parents and other adult relatives play their cards close to the chest out of an instinct born of fear. They don’t know how their children will react to difficult news and how they, as adults, will deal with the reaction, when it comes. They hope that if they ignore the problem, it will go away. They persuade themselves they are protecting their children’s innocence. They pretend to one another that what they are doing is ‘for the best’.
     
    When my mother left home no one told me she had gone for good. I mean, what did they think? That I wouldn’t notice she wasn’t there? I remember asking one evening as we sat down to supper, where was she? Dad looked glum and said nothing. Grandma ladled out goulash as if the survival of the Western world depended on it, and announced that my mother had gone on a little holiday and I should eat up quickly or my food would get cold.
     
    The ‘holiday’ continued indefinitely and my mother didn’t return. No one explained what was going on. I didn’t ask about her again. I’d realised they didn’t want to talk about it. Occasionally my grandmother, especially after sampling the home-made apricot brandy, would stroke my hair and call me a poor motherless child. I wanted to point out I wasn’t motherless. I had a mother but she’d gone on this mysterious holiday. Later I wondered if she was dead but there had been no signs of the usual fuss around funerals. Dad hadn’t got out his black tie. Grandma hadn’t unearthed her rusty black velvet dress. No single flower in a vase stood before the portrait photograph of my mother which had perched on the mantelpiece. That picture disappeared altogether. What happened to it, I wonder. Did my father destroy it in anger or keep it hidden away in sorrow? It wasn’t among his effects when Grandma and I parcelled them up after he died. Or perhaps it was, and Grandma abstracted it before I saw it, still afraid of having to make explanations.
     
    Neither during my childhood nor when I grew older did either of them come out and admit the truth that she’d bolted from the family home. I had to work that out for myself. I never knew why she’d done it and, in the early years, wondered why she hadn’t taken me with her. Years later, when I did meet up with her again, I didn’t ask her. You see, by then I was an adult and I, too, had learned to be wary of explanations. Nor did she offer any reason for having abandoned us, so the conspiracy of silence was complete.
     
    They’re all dead now, Dad, Grandma and my mother. There’s a black hole left in my personal history.
     
    Back to Lisa. Although I suspected, for the reasons given, she might not have told her parents everything, it would appear she’d been confiding