The Hidden Years Read online

  'Alexi?' she queried now, almost as though the name meant nothing to her.

  She glanced involuntarily at the open diary she was holding and Faye felt a tiny flutter of apprehension stir in her own stomach. What was in the diaries that was so compelling that Sage was still here reading them hours after she had first walked into the room? The fire had burned low in the grate, and, apart from the pool of light cast by the reading lamp on the desk, the room was heavily shadowed; sombrely shadowed, Faye thought, shivering in a faint stirring of unease.

  'Yes. He was most insistent about speaking with you… Oh, and when you didn't come out for your evening meal—we didn't like to disturb you—I rang the hospital . again. Liz is still holding her own…'

  Holding her own… Sage slowly closed the diary, wincing as she felt pins and needles prickling her legs. She had been curled in her mother's chair in a semi-foetal position for so long that her body had gone numb without her even noticing it.

  She glanced at her watch, half shocked to discover it was gone midnight, and remembered that she had intended to ring Alexi at eleven, thinking that by that time she would have had more than enough of her mother's diaries with their clinical, businesslike description of how she had run her life.

  The reality couldn't have been a greater contrast to what she had expected. In some ways she found it hard to believe that the girl who had written so openly and painfully in the diaries, pouring out her deepest emotions and vulnerabilities, was her mother. Even more astonishing was that her mother had wanted her to read them.

  Would she in the same circumstances have been able to sanction such an intrusion into her past, into her life?

  Perhaps if she had thought that she might be dying… if this might be her last chance to reach out… to explain.

  She shivered suddenly. When Faye had interrupted her she had been so reluctant to stop reading, so very reluctant that initially she had resented her intrusion… but now, sharply, she didn't want to read any more, didn't want to…to what? What was she afraid of discovering?

  'Alexi,' Faye reminded her diffidently.

  Poor Faye. No doubt Alexi had been extremely rude to her, demanding that Sage be brought to the phone. Alexi was a very demanding man; despite his veneer, inwardly he still believed that man was infinitely superior to woman and that it was woman's duty to pander to man's needs and desires.

  'I'm sorry, Faye,' she apologised now as she stood up, replaced the diary in the desk drawer and automatically locked it.

  As she had anticipated, when she picked up the receiver Alexi was seething. 'You said you'd ring this evening,' he challenged her. 'Where were you?'

  Sage had an obstinate streak in her make-up which she herself considered to be a childish flaw and one which she had long ago mastered, but abruptly it resurfaced as she heard the arrogant challenge in Alexi's voice. Suddenly those things which initially she had found amusingly attractive in him began to grate.

  'I said I'd try to ring you, Alexi,' she corrected him flatly. 'As it happens, I've been too busy. I'm sorry I had to break our date at such short notice…'

  She could tell he was fighting to control his breathing and with it his temper, and she felt a brief resurgence of mocking contempt.

  Poor Alexi, he must want her very much if he was prepared to tolerate her defiance. But his tolerance wouldn't last very long or go very far. She had no illusions; Alexi desired and intended to dominate her, to subjugate her if he could. In bed he would be a powerful, commanding lover, and ultimately a selfish one. He would have no doubts or hesitancy about his prowess; her eagerness for his lovemaking, her desire to please him sexually would be things he would expect as his due. Oh, at first he would be prepared to indulge and coax her, but once he was sure of her…

  It was a game she had played so often before… and yet suddenly she was tired of it, sickened by it just as though she had suffered a surfeit of a once favourite food, her nausea tinged with faint self-disgust.

  Why? Because of the innocent outpourings of a girl so naive, so trusting that to read them had brought into sharp focus the girl she herself had once been and the woman she now was?

  Or was it simply that the times and their low-key sexual climate, their caution, their emphasis on separate contained lives geared for high materialistic achievement, were at last beginning to have their effect on her?

  Whatever the reason, she suddenly knew that she was bored with this game she was playing with Alexi, and with that knowledge came a faint twinge of self-dislike because she knew that she would have gone to bed with him, probably simply to prove to him that in bed or out of it he couldn't dominate her… certainly not because she was overwhelmed by physical desire for him. Which made her stop and think, and try to remember the last time she had felt like that… the last time she actually wanted the man rather than merely the act of sex, as a means of demonstrating her power over him…and over her mother, and the strict morality with which she had seemed to live her life. Was that what it had been all about…the men, the sexual freedom…? Had it not just been because, having loved so desperately and then lost that love, she had turned herself into a woman for whom sex was simply an appetite which she appeased whenever the need seized her? Was it an outright act of defiance, chosen deliberately to shock and hurt her mother?

  'Sage, are you still there?'

  Now Alexi wasn't bothering to control his irritation. Once that would have made her smile, the small secret triumphant smile that she knew drove her lovers mad, but now she merely dismissed the knowledge that she had annoyed him, as uncaringly as though it meant nothing to her… which it didn't, she realised tiredly.

  Suddenly there was an unpleasant taste in her mouth, a tiredness in her body and her mind, a weariness with her life and everything it embraced.

  'Yes. I'm still here, Alexi,' she responded. 'I'm sorry if you're annoyed. I should have rung you, but—'

  'It isn't your telephone call I want, Sage. It's you, you… here with me… filling my bed, the way you've been filling my mind. You know I want you, Sage, you know how good we'd be together. Let me come down there now and drive you back to London. Your sister-in-law told me that your mother's condition is stable. You can do nothing for her down there…here you would be closer to the hospital, in any case. Let me take care of you, Sage. You know how much I want to…'

  How caressing his voice was, low and deep, soft as velvet, and how he knew how to use it, she acknowledged absently.

  'No, I'm sorry, Alexi, that's impossible. I'm needed here.'

  Or rather she needed to be here, she acknowledged. Admitting it was like discovering a small piece of grit on an otherwise smooth surface, irritating… challenging… absorbing… so absorbing that she missed what Alexi was saying to her.

  Suddenly she was irritated both by him and by herself. She didn't want him; she had probably never really wanted him. The contrast between her own behaviour and that of the young untried girl in the diaries was sharply painful. Whatever else her faults might be, they did not include self-deception. She was, she realised, measuring herself against her mother, just as she had done so often during her formative years, and once again she was discovering how far she fell short of her mother's standards and achievements, how far she fell short of her own ideals.

  She didn't want Alexi, so why was she playing this unnecessary and unrewarding game with him?

  'It's no use, Alexi,' she told him flatly, 'I'm not coming back to London tonight, and, even if I were, it would be to sleep alone in my own flat. Find someone else, Alexi. The game's over.'

  She let him bluster and protest, and then when he started to become angry and abusive she simply ended the conversation by replacing the receiver. After she had done so, she discovered that she was shaking. It wasn't the first time a man had grown angry with her…not the first time she had been on the receiving end of the insults Alexi had just voiced. But it was the first time she had recognised in them a hard core of truth, the first time she had acknowledge
d that her own behaviour had been responsible for such a reaction.

  When she stepped into the hall, it was half in darkness and silent. She paused outside the library door, her hand reaching for the doorknob before she realised what she was doing. If she started reading again tonight, she would probably be up all night. Tomorrow she would have to visit her mother in hospital, call in at her office, make arrangements to have her messages relayed here to Cottingdean. It had been a long day and a traumatic one, which her body recognised, even if her mind refused to admit just how difficult it had all been.

  She stepped back from the door. The diaries weren't going to go away; after all, they had waited for over forty years already. Forty years… how many other revelations did those silent pages hold?

  Her mother's first love-affair, described so rawly…so openly in the pages she had read tonight, had been written so honestly and painfully that it had almost been as though she was reliving… suffering…

  She had never imagined…never dreamed… And now there were questions clamouring for answers…questions which she half dreaded to have answered… and the most urgent one of all was why, why had her mother chosen to do this… to reveal herself and her past like this… to open a door into her most private and secret life, and to open it to the one person who she knew had more reason than anyone else to want to hurt her?

  It was as though silently, deliberately, she was saying, Look, I too have suffered, have endured, have known pain, humiliation, and fear.

  But why now, now, after all these years… unless it no longer mattered, unless she thought she was going to die?

  Sage stopped halfway up the stairs, her body suddenly rigid with pain and a frantic, desperate fear.

  She didn't want her mother to die, and not just selfishly because she didn't want the burden of Cottingdean, or the mill: those would fall on other shoulders anyway; that inheritance was surely destined for Camilla, the granddaughter who was everything that she, Sage, was not.

  She wanted her mother to live… she needed her to live, she recognised, overwhelmed by the knowledge of that discovery, overwhelmed by the discovery that some-where inside her mature, worldly thirty-four-year-old self, a small girl still crouched in frightened terror, desperately yearning for the security represented by the presence of her mother.

  She slept badly, her dreams full of vague fears, and then relived an old nightmare which she had thought had stopped haunting her years ago.

  In it she was endlessly trying to reach the man she loved. He was standing at the end of a long, shadowy path, but, whenever she tried to walk down it towards him, others stepped out of the shadows in front of her, preventing her from doing so.

  Always in the past these others had had familiar faces; her mother's, her father's, sometimes even David's; but on this occasion it wasn't her love she was striving to reach, but her mother, and this time the motionless figure turned so that she could see her mother's face quite clearly, and then she started to walk towards her.

  In her dream a tremendous feeling of relief, so strong that it almost made her feel giddy, encompassed her, but even as she experienced it the shadows masking the path deepened so that she couldn't see her mother any longer, and couldn't move towards her, couldn't move at all, as invisible bonds held her immobile no matter how much she struggled against them.

  It was only when she woke up, sweating and shivering, after some time that she realised that in all the years she had experienced the dream before, out of all those times, never once had her lover turned and walked towards her as her mother had done. It was a simple, small thing, but it was like suddenly being confronted with a stranger in the place of a familiar face. She shivered, recognising a truth she didn't really want to know. A truth she wasn't ready to know.

  As she sat up in bed, dragging the quilt round her to keep her warm, she wondered if it was reading about her mother's first love-affair, and recognising in it the raw, painful fact that the man, Kit, had never really loved her mother as she had so naively believed, that had made her recognise that she too had made the mistake of loving too well a man who could not match that commitment.

  She moved abruptly in mute protest at her own thoughts, her own disloyalty. The two cases were poles apart. Her mother had been callously and uncaringly seduced by a man who had never felt anything more than momentary desire for her.

  She and Scott had been deeply, agonisingly in love. Physically that love never had been consummated, which was why… She bit down hard on her bottom lip, a childish habit she had thought she had long ago outgrown.

  She had loved Scott… He had loved her… They had been cruelly and deliberately torn apart, and why? Was it because her mother had wanted to put the final social gloss on her own success… had wanted her to marry the only son of a peer? An impoverished peer, it was true, but possessed of a title none the less. And had she wanted that marriage for no better reason than to be able to boast of 'My daughter, Lady Hetherby'? Sage remembered accusing her of as much, angrily and bitterly, flinging out the words like venom-tipped knives, but as always her mother's reaction had been calm and controlled.

  'Jonathon would make you an excellent husband,' she had said quietly. 'His temperament would complement yours—'

  'Not to mention his father's title complementing your money,' she had snapped back.

  'In my view you're still far too young for marriage, Sage,' was all her mother had said.

  'In your view, but not in the law's… which is of course why Scott's father had him dragged back to Australia… We love each other… Can't you see…? Don't you understand…?'

  'You're nineteen, Sage—you might think you love Scott now, but in ten years' time, in five years' time you'll be a different person. You're an intelligent girl… You know what the odds are against marrying at your age and having that marriage last.'

  'You married at eighteen…'

  'That was different… There was the war…'

  'Which was virtually over when you married Father… Oh, what's the use—you're determined to keep us apart, you and Scott's father. I hate you, I hate you both,' she had finished childishly, racing upstairs to collapse in tears of anger and impotent and helpless emotion.

  No, Scott might not have been able to stop his father taking him back home, but later…later, surely, he could have got in touch with her… come back for her…?

  Now for the first time she was confronting a truth she had sought desperately and successfully to avoid for a long time.

  If Scott had loved her, loved her with the intensity and passion she had felt for him, he would have found a way of coming back to her.

  Never mind that he was his father's only child…never mind the fact that he had been brought up from birth in the knowledge that one day he would be solely responsible for the vast sheep station owned and run by his father, and for all the complex financial investments that had stemmed from the profits made from those sheep. Never mind the fact that he had always known that it was his father's dearest wish that he would marry the daughter of a neighbouring station owner, thus combining the two vast tracts of land. Never mind the fact that until he'd met her, Sage, he had been quite content with this future. Never mind anything that had stood between them. He had told her he loved her and he had meant it, she knew that. He had loved her as she loved him. He had wanted to marry her, to spend the rest of his life with her.

  Or had he…? Had he had a change of heart back there in Australia? Had he somehow stopped loving her, stopped wanting her, blocked her out of his mind, started hating her for what she had done? She shuddered, remembering how his father had refused to see her that night at the hospital, how he had also given instructions that she wasn't to be allowed to see Scott. He had blamed her for the accident, she knew that, but surely Scott, Scott who had loved her, understood her, been a part of her almost, surely he could not have blamed her? Even though… even though she deserved to be blamed!

  She knew he had married… Not the neighbour's daughte
r, but someone equally suitable from his father's point of view. The daughter of a wealthy Australian entrepreneur. She ought to have been his wife… the mother of his children. But she wasn't, and until now she had blamed her mother and his father for that fact. Now, abruptly, she was being forced to recognise that Scott's love might not have been the all-consuming, intensely passionate, unchangeable force that was her own.

  After the nightmare she did not get back to sleep properly and she was awake at seven when Jenny knocked on her door and came in with a tray of tea, served, she noticed, on one of the pretty antique sets of breakfast boudoir china that her mother had collected over the years. When her friends expressed concern that she should actually use anything so valuable Liz always smiled and replied that the pleasure of using beautiful things far outweighed the. small risk of their being damaged by such use.

  Sage frowned as Jenny put the delicate hand-painted breakfast set on her bedside table, and then said abruptly, 'Jenny, that Sevres boudoir set my mother likes so much—I'd like to take it to the hospital with me… I think once she's feeling a little better she'd appreciate having something so familiar.'

  'Yes. That particular set always has been her favourite. She used to say that that special first morning cup of tea always tasted even better when she drank it from the Sevres.'

  She used to say… Sage felt her stomach muscles clench anxiously. Unable to look at the housekeeper, she said huskily, 'Has there…? Have the hospital…?'

  'No, nothing,' Jenny quickly reassured her. 'And as they always say, no news must be good news. Don't you fret… if anyone could pull through that kind of accident it would be your mother. She's such a strong person. Emotionally as well as physically…'

  'Yes, she is,' Sage agreed. 'But even the strongest among us have our vulnerabilities… Faye and Camilla, are they up yet?'

  'Camilla is; she's gone out riding, she said she'd be back in time for breakfast. I'm just about to take Faye her tea. I don't think she'll have slept very well… These headaches she gets when she's under pressure…'