Wickham Hall, Part 2 by Cathy Bramley

today.’
    â€˜What?’ Esme spluttered, a forkful of salad halfway to her mouth.
    I darted back to the kitchen where I’d left my handbag and returned with the photograph from Steve’s studio.
    â€˜One of these Morris dancers?’ Her jaw dropped.
    I tutted and pointed at the blonde girl behind them. ‘Look at her. It’s Mum and she’s holding hands with a man.’
    Esme squinted and moved the picture backwards and forwards to focus. ‘Are you sure it’s your dad?’
    â€˜Admittedly it is only his hand and a bit of his arm. But that’s definitely Mum and this picture was taken in 1984, so yes.’ Esme looked dubious but I tapped the picture confidently. ‘Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. And now I want to know who he is.’
    My heart thumped as I stared at the photograph. My head had been full of Mum’s story ever since she’d revealed that she’d fallen in love with someone at the Wickham Hall Summer Festival. In all my twenty-nine years I’d never been particularly curious about my father. I’d just accepted that he wasn’t around and that was that. But now I’d had this tiny glimpse of him, I’d never been more curious about anything in my life.
    I remember the first time I asked Mum why I didn’t have a daddy. She had wrapped her arms around me, pulled me onto her knee and told me how a fairy had knocked at her door and asked her to look after a very special baby. The baby being me, of course. I’d adored the story, boasted to all my slightly less gullible friends about it and it wasn’t until I was eleven and along with my classmates watched the excruciating ‘Birds and Bees’ video at school that I noticed the flaws in her tale.
    But I’d never asked her again. Not outright, anyway. It made her too anxious. And if anything remotely related to fathers ever came up, Mum’s stock response was that she loved me twice as much to make up for not having two parents.
    â€˜Can’t you ask her?’ Esme asked. She turned back to her dinner, swooping a tiny potato through mayonnaise and popping it in her mouth.
    I shook my head. ‘Not yet.’
    I filled Esme in on the online reading and research I’d been doing. Although Mum hadn’t begun seeing a counsellor yet she was making progress in terms of tackling some of the stuff she’d been accumulating. To date she’d managed to part with my cot, my baby toys and a box of old nylon bedspreads that had given us electric shocks every time we’d touched them. But I still felt as though I hadn’t got to the heart of it yet.
    â€˜All sorts of things can trigger hoarding as a coping mechanism: a traumatic event, bereavement, anxiety,stress . . .’ I said, spearing a pile of rocket with my fork. ‘Mum says that she felt like she had everything that summer of 1984 and she let it slip away. And she was only seventeen, poor thing.’
    Esme pulled a sympathetic face. ‘Wasn’t your granddad there?’
    â€˜I don’t know exactly when he died.’ I frowned. ‘But I know he never met me. So I’m guessing she was completely on her own.’
    â€˜Finding herself single and alone and about to have a baby would be traumatic enough to trigger the hoarding behaviour, I guess,’ Esme mused, topping up our glasses.
    I nodded. ‘She said something else, too, about her father not being proud of her. It’s as if she is ashamed of something. And that’s the key to it.’ I gazed at Esme and rested my cutlery against my plate. ‘That’s when she clammed up on Saturday. But what I don’t understand is why she feels to blame. I mean, she’s not the first teenage girl to get pregnant, is she? And it was the eighties not the twenties. Besides it takes two . . . Oh God.’ I clapped a hand over my mouth as a thought hit me.
    â€˜What is it? Holly, you’ve gone