The Hidden Years Read online

  Then, though, she had not been wearing three-inch heels, nor had her body been reacting as violently as though it were suffering the most virulent form of viral flu.

  What had happened to the life of which she had felt so powerfully in control? When had that control started to disintegrate? With her mother's accident… with the knowledge that the strictly controlled physical and emotional involvements which were all she allowed herself to share with the opposite sex were designed to appease an appetite she no longer had…

  The chain had begun to form long before tonight, long before this unwanted resurgence of old memories, but she couldn't deny that seeing Daniel Cavanagh again had formed a link in it, so strong, so fettering that she doubted that she could break it open and slip free and safe back to her old life.

  She saw the car headlights coming towards her, and instinctively walked off the road and on to the grass verge, only realising when the car swept past her that it was Daniel's grey Aston.

  She could hear it slowing down and stopping. Panic splintered into sharp agony inside her. She desperately wanted to run, to hide herself away from him… Not because she feared him as a man… No, she well knew she had nothing sexual to fear from him. No, it was her own memories she wanted to flee, her own pain, her own self-condemnation.

  She heard the car door open and then close, and knew that he had seen her. If she walked away now, if she ran away now… Pride made her stand stiffly where she was, but nothing could make her turn to face him as he walked towards her.

  'I thought you were driving back.'

  'I decided I preferred to walk.'

  'In high heels?'

  He always had been far too observant.

  'There isn't a law against it,' she told him sharply. 'Although, of course, if you get your way and you run a six-lane motorway through here, the days of walking anywhere will be over for all of us.'

  'The motorway will run over a mile from here. You won't even see it from Cottingdean. It won't interfere with your lives there at all. But then you always did prefer emotionalism to logic, didn't you, Sage?'

  'What are you doing here, Daniel? You're on the wrong side of the village for the motorway and London…'

  'Yes. I realise that. I took a wrong taming and had to turn back again.'

  She had the odd feeling that he was lying, although what he was saying sounded plausible. Was it because of her knowledge of the man, her awareness that taking a wrong turning in anything was the last thing he was likely to do, that she found it hard to believe him?

  He was watching her, she realised, refusing to give in to the magnetic pull of his concentration. His eyes were grey, the same metallic colour as his car, and she didn't need to look at him to remember how powerful an effect that intense concentration could have. He also had the most ridiculously long curling lashes. She remembered how she had once thought they gave him a look at times of being almost vulnerable. More fool her; 'vulnerable' was the very last description that could be applied to him. He was solid steel all the way through.

  The sick pounding in her head, which had started to ease a little as she walked, had returned. Automatically she raised her hand and pressed her fingers to her temple.

  'Migraine?'

  She stared at him, forgetting her resolve not to do so, surprise momentarily widening her eyes.

  'How did you…?'

  The ironic look he gave her made her stop, the swift colour burning up under her skin stripping away the veneer of fifteen years of sophistication and reducing her once again to the girl she had once been.

  'I've got a retentive memory,' he told her drily.

  'You must have,' she agreed bitterly.

  'I'll give you a lift. It isn't safe for a woman to walk alone at night these days… Not even out here.'

  'No, thanks, I'd prefer to walk. I need the fresh air…'

  'So go and walk round Cottingdean's gardens once you get home. You should be safe enough there…'

  His calm assumption that she would allow him to make her decision for her infuriated her. 'I don't want a lift,' she repeated tightly, but he had already taken hold of her arm and was walking her towards his car.

  Thankfully the thickness of her jacket muffled the sensation of his fingers on her arm, and his touch, although firm, wasn't constraining.

  It was easier to go with him than to argue, she decided weakly as he opened the passenger door and waited politely until she was safely inside before closing it on her.

  'You really needn't have done this.'

  'I know,' he agreed as he set the car in motion.

  He was a good driver, careful, controlled.

  'Odd,' he mused, as the gates to the house appeared, 'you're the last person I'd envisage chairing a committee for environmental protection.'

  'I'm not,' Sage told him stiffly. 'I'm simply standing in for my mother.'

  'Really? The Sage I knew would have taken that as a heaven-sent opportunity for sabotage rather than a sacred bit of family flag-waving.'

  Sage felt herself stiffening. This was what she had been dreading from the moment she had set eyes on him. Being reminded of the past, of its pain, of its shadows… and most of all being reminded of the person she had been…

  Was it reading her mother's diaries which had thrown so sharply into focus the differences between them, made her so sharply aware of her own shortcomings, of her own faults, not just of omission but of commission as well?

  'No comment?' Daniel asked her softly as he brought the car to a halt.

  'Did you ask me a question?' Sage challenged him acidly as she reached to open her door. 'I thought you were simply making a statement. How I live my life has nothing to do with you, Daniel… it's my own affair.'

  'Or affairs,' he murmured cynically, making her forget that she was still wearing her seatbelt, so that she pushed open the heavy door and tried to get out, only to discover infuriatingly that she was still trapped in her seat.

  'Still the same old Sage. Impatient, illogical. So damn used to getting her own way that she doesn't even have the sense to avoid any obstacles.'

  He opened his own door, and was round her side of the car almost before she had finished unfastening her seatbelt.

  She discovered that she was trembling as she got out of the car, not with dread any longer, but with anger…anger, and something else, something that fuelled her adrenalin and banished the pain from her temples.

  'Thanks for the lift.'

  'You're welcome.'

  His face was in the shadows, but as he turned away from her to walk back to the driver's door his expression was briefly illuminated by the moon, and for an instant he might have been the old Daniel she had once known so well, only to discover she had not really known him at all.

  Daniel Cavanagh… Why had he come back into her life, and now of all times, reopening doors—wounds-she had thought long since sealed?

  Daniel Cavanagh… She discovered she was shivering again as she walked towards the house, fighting against the threatening avalanche of memories she was only just managing to keep at bay.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was no use—she wasn't going to sleep tonight, Sage acknowledged, sitting up in bed. She didn't want to sleep… she was actually afraid of going to sleep, afraid of the memories which might be unleashed once she was no longer in complete control of her own mind.

  She moved restlessly in her bed, and stared at her watch. Two o'clock. She might as well be doing something constructive as lying here like this, trying not to think, not to remember… something constructive such as… such as reading the diaries?

  What was she hoping to find there? Or was she simply using them as a panacea, a deterrent, a means of holding her own thoughts at bay?

  She went downstairs, the house making the familiar creaks of an old building. She opened the desk drawer and extracted the diary she had been reading, taking it back up to bed with her, plus a couple of apples from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. They were the slightly so
ur, crunchy variety she had always preferred, different from the soft juicy red fruit both her mother and Faye loved.

  Her mother always explained away her sweet tooth by saying it was a result of the war, of being deprived of sweet things. When she made this explanation she was always slightly defensive; it was a small enough weakness in an otherwise very strong woman. Sage felt an unfamiliar twinge of guilt over the way she had often childishly and sometimes cruelly drawn attention to it. Children were cruel, she acknowledged wryly—they had no compunction about using whatever weapons fell into their hands, no guilt, no remorse… especially when driven by a sense of righteousness as she had been.

  How old had she been when she had first started to blame her mother for her father's indifference to her? Eight, nine…even younger. Certainly it seemed when she looked back that she had always been aware of the fact that, while David had always been free to approach their father directly, when she had tried to do the same thing her mother had always come between them, so that all her contact with her father was made either through or in the company of a third party, and that invariably that third party was her mother.

  Anger, bitterness, resentment; she had felt the destructive lash of all those emotions, and yet why had her mother felt it necessary to stop her from becoming close to her father? Surely not because she had feared that such a closeness would threaten her own relationship with him?

  He had adored her mother, loved her with an intensity which as an adult Sage herself recognised she would have found too possessive. She remembered how her mother had scarcely been able to leave the house without first explaining where she was going and how long she would be.

  Sage tensed, her own body automatically reacting to the thought of so much possessive love. Possessive love? She frowned, recognising reluctantly how much she would have resented the burden of that kind of love, how much her freedom-loving nature would have kicked and fought against him. She tried to imagine how she would have reacted to her father's possessiveness had she been her mother. She would have left him, probably, she recognised grimly. But she was not her mother. Her mother was far too saintly, far too morally perfect to put her own needs above those of someone as dependent and helpless as her husband had been.

  Sage's frown deepened as she realised that this was the first time she had ever looked closely at her parents' marriage, ever questioned a relationship which for years she had seen enviously as an ideal, feeling both resentful and envious of her mother's role as the pivot of her father's life. The first time she had seen it as a relationship which she as a woman would have found both stultifying and caging.

  And yet her mother had obviously not done so. She shrugged the thought away—she and her mother were two different women, two very different women. They had nothing in common other than the fact that they were mother and daughter, an accident of birth which had brought them together in a relationship which neither of them enjoyed, even if her mother was rather better at concealing her antipathy than she was herself.

  And yet despite that, despite everything that had happened between them, despite her resentment, her bitterness, there was still a part of her that was drawn compulsively towards the girl she was discovering in the diaries.

  Which was why she was here at gone two in the morning, turning the pages of her mother's diary, pushing aside the memories which had kept her from sleeping. Memories stirred up by that unexpected and unwanted meeting with Daniel Cavanagh.

  Daniel Cavanagh. For a moment she closed her eyes, trying hard not to feel as though the living, breathing man had somehow or other forced his presence into the room with her.

  Daniel Cavanagh, what was he after all? Only a man. Nothing more. Just a man, like so many others.

  She opened her eyes and quickly turned the pages of the diary, to find the place where she had previously stopped reading, resolutely pushing away all thoughts of Daniel Cavanagh and the past, and instead concentrating on her mother's record of her life.

  A week passed and then another and still Lizzie hadn't heard from Kit. Every day she waited hopefully for a letter, but none came, and then one morning when she woke up the world swung dizzily around her, her stomach heaved and a vast welling nausea had her running desperately to the bathroom where she was violently and painfully sick.

  That the reason for her sickness didn't immediately occur to her was due in the main to the prudery which ruled her great-aunt's life.

  Lizzie had been sick before, when she had first come to work at the hospital, when her stomach had revolted against the unappetising diet, and, if she had any time to spare from her aching longing to hear from Kit and her constant daydreams about him to dwell on the nausea which seemed to be plaguing her, she simply assumed that it was a return of that earlier sickness.

  That was until one of the other girls heard her one morning and accidentally enlightened her, assuming that she must already know the reason for her sickness.

  A baby… No, not just a baby, but Kit's baby. Hard on the heels of her first thrill of appalled recognition of the fact that in her great-aunt's eyes she had now joined that unmentionable band of her sex who had 'got themselves into trouble', and was therefore now a social and moral outcast, came a tiny pang of pleasure. Kit's baby. She was having Kit's baby.

  Alone in the dormitory, she sank down on to her bed, trembling slightly, clasping her hands protectively over her stomach. She felt dizzy but not sick any longer. Rather the dizziness sprang from elation and joy.

  Kit's child… A sudden urgency to share her news with him, to be able to marvel with him over the new life they had created together, overwhelmed her. Kit! How much she longed to see him.

  She sat staring into space, lost in a wonderful daydream in which Kit suddenly appeared, sweeping her off her feet and announcing that they must get married immediately…that he loved her to distraction.

  He would take her away with him in his shiny little green car, and they would be married secretly and excitingly. She would live in a tiny rose-smothered cottage hidden away from the world, but close enough to where he was based for her to see him whenever he was off duty.

  She would wait there for the birth of their child… a son, she knew it would be a son, and they would be so blissfully happy…

  It took one of the older and far, far more worldly-wise girls in the dormitory to shatter her daydreams with brutal reality.

  Donna had been nominated by the others to talk to her. Kind girls in the main, they found Lizzie's attitude baffling. Had they found themselves in her condition, they wouldn't be sitting around waiting for Mr Wonderful to turn up and make things right. Didn't the poor sap realise what had happened? Didn't she know what would happen to her when the hospital authorities found out about her condition?

  Donna Roberts was the eldest of a family of eight, five of them girls; she had seen her mother pregnant far too often to have any illusions about the male attitude to the careless and unwanted fathering of a child, but even she quailed a little when faced with the childish luminosity of Lizzie's unwavering belief that he, whoever he was, was going to come back and marry her.

  'Look, kid,' she began awkwardly. She was dating an American airman and had picked up not just his habit of chewing gum, but something of his accent as well. 'We all know about the fix you've got yourself in… I know it isn't easy, but you've got to face up to it… You don't want to end up like Susan Philpott, do you?'

  'Susan Philpott.' Lizzie stared at her. 'But she went home.'

  'Like hell she did,' Donna told her inelegantly. 'God knows where she is right now, but she hasn't gone home. Told me that herself—said her dad would kill her for getting herself in trouble. Of course when the dragon found out it was the end for her here. Probably on the street somewhere now,' Donna added, explaining explicitly what she meant when Lizzie looked uncomprehendingly at her.

  'He isn't going to come back. They never do,' she told her with brutal honesty. 'And you're going to have to do something about that…' she
added, gesturing towards Lizzie's still flat stomach.

  'Do something?' Lizzie questioned, puzzled, focusing on her, ignoring her comments about Kit. Donna didn't know Kit… Donna didn't realise how she and Kit felt about one another, how much in love they were. She had known it the moment they met, had seen it in Kit's eyes, had felt it, she remembered almost maternally, in the roughness of his possession, his inability to control his passion, his desire for her.

  'What do you mean "do something"?' she questioned softly.

  She could see the pity in Donna's eyes, feel it in the waiting silence of the others in the dormitory. She could feel their rough sympathy enveloping her, sense their affinity with her, and yet she felt outside their concern, untouched by it, in no need of it. She knew they meant to be kind, and she herself was too gentle, too sensitive to rebuff them directly.

  Donna sighed and lifted her eyes to heaven. This was going to be worse than she had thought. Why was it always these idiotic naive ones who got themselves into this kind of trouble? she wondered. Hadn't they got the sense…? But she already knew the answer to that question, had heard it often enough in her mother's slow Dorset voice, as she repeated over and over again warningly to her eldest child, showing her, by the example of her own life, just what happened to girls foolish enough to believe in the lies told by men. She had been sixteen when she had conceived her first child, and at thirty-five, when Donna had left home, she had looked and moved like a woman of twice her age, worn down by too many pregnancies, too much hardship and poverty.

  The war had come as a welcome escape for Donna, releasing her from having to follow in her mother's footsteps, from early marriage and too many children, and she had been glad to go. Glad to leave the damp, insanitary farm worker's cottage where she had shared a bedroom and a bed with her sisters, glad to escape from the bad temper of her father and the rough manners of her brothers. Glad to cut herself free of too many pairs of clinging hands and too many demanding voices.

  'You're going to have to get rid of it, aren't you? Look, I know what you think but he isn't going to marry you. They never do,' she said bluntly. Her own life had not given her tact or sensitivity. As far as she was concerned the best thing she could do for the silly little fool was to make her see sense and then, if it wasn't already too late, to sit her in a bath of near-boiling hot water, and pour as much gin into her as they could get their hands on in the hope that it would bring on a spontaneous abortion.