The Hidden Years Read online

  She was now approaching the seventh month of her pregnancy and Liz's body was inexorably preparing itself for the birth. She had an odd wish that her child might have been born in the spring at the start of nature's life-cycle, and not in January, the heart of its life's end. Although she did not wish to alarm Edward, she was dreading the coming winter. Already in November there were signs apparently that they would have snow. The stock of logs in the stable was dangerously depleted. She had seen on her walks that there were trees which should be cut down for wood, but who was to do it? They could not continually rely on the help of their neighbours, and Edward was so sensitive about his inability to do anything.

  After Ian Holmes had offered to ensure that Jim Sutton received the message that his landlord wished to see him to discuss the matter of his outstanding rents, he asked Liz how she was feeling.

  Although the pair of them had managed to survive through the summer and the autumn, he was not sure they could continue to do so over the winter.

  He had said as much to young Vic, when the doctor had seen the shepherd in the village the previous day. What they needed was a young and reliable farm labourer, someone to chop wood, and clear the kitchen garden, someone to ensure that the range was lit every morning without Liz herself having to do it. Someone adept at doing all the small running repairs on a property like Cottingdean, which had suffered too much already from neglect.

  He also mentioned this to Edward, gently suggesting that the rental income from the water meadows might be put to this use.

  'We need someone,' Edward agreed, but then said doubtfully, 'But there's no good labour to be had…'

  'There are men returning from the war who will need jobs,' Ian reminded him.

  Liz hoped that the seed Ian had planted would take root. She herself had longed to make a similar suggestion but she knew Edward well enough now to accept that he had an old-fashioned reservation about accepting such ideas from her. She was a woman. Her place was in the drawing-room, supervising the house and its staff. That was the image Edward had of her role, never mind the fact that the drawing-room was a damp, mouldering room in which the plaster was falling from the ceiling, and the paper from the walls… Edward had certain fixed ideas which he was almost afraid to let go of. Afraid because he was frightened that, if he did so, his whole world might fall apart, Liz recognised com-passionately, and so she said nothing and hoped that Ian's words would bear fruit.

  She was excluded from the interview with Jim Sutton, a large, swaggering man whom she instinctively disliked, and who she suspected had presented himself at the house driven more by the weight of public opinion than by any recognition of his omissions as a tenant.

  What was said between him and Edward she was not told, merely that the arrears of rent were to be paid, although Edward did not say how much these would be, and Liz suspected that Edward had quite probably allowed himself to be cheated of their rightful due.

  No matter, if they had some money. Enough to pay the wages of one man… but Edward had made no mention of taking anyone on, and Liz was reluctant to bring up the subject.

  They had their first fall of snow at the end of November. Liz woke up one morning alerted to its arrival by the unfamiliar brightness beyond the window.

  She and Edward slept in separate rooms on the ground floor, sharing the facility of a large, draughty bathroom. Only Liz knew how much she dreaded any kind of physical intimacy between them and how ashamed and guilty this made her feel.

  Edward had regained some measure of independence since their arrival at Cottingdean and no longer needed help in getting dressed. He had learned to operate his wheelchair to get him around the ground floor of the house, but on days when it was cold and wet the pain in his amputations made him irritable and withdrawn, and so Liz sighed as she realised what the unusual clarity of the light meant.

  Once—and it seemed a very long time ago indeed— her first sight of snow had thrilled her beyond measure. She had never totally lost that wondering awe at this ability of nature to completely transform the landscape overnight, but now practicalities outweighed wonder. They were running desperately short of fuel. The hens would need to be cooped for the winter, and as for the goats—she had resigned herself to not getting them.

  She was downstairs lighting the range when she heard the shrill barking of the dogs, her spine tensing as she realised what the sound meant.

  The only dogs at Cottingdean belonged to young Vic, and as she stood up and walked stiffly over to the window she saw him walking into the yard, his back bent under the strain of the sledge he was pulling.

  Frowning, Liz opened the door. Despite the cold, his skin looked warm, glowing with life and health. He seemed not to feel the cold which iced into her own body. Like his dogs, he seemed impervious to the thick flakes of snow.

  'I've brought down the logs,' he told her quietly. 'I'll stack them in the usual place, shall I? Sorry they're a bit late, but I've had some trouble with one of the ewes. By rights they should be stored until next winter to burn really well.'

  While Liz stared at him he dragged the sled across to the stable, and removed the cover. She saw that it was piled high with neatly spliced logs. Enough of them to feed the boiler throughout the entire winter.

  Tears shimmered unexpected in her eyes, clogging her throat. She realised as she fought against them how long it had been since she had cried, how long it had been since she had wept ceaseless tears for her dead love. Kit… she seldom allowed herself to think about him now. What was the use? Kit was dead. He would never hold her in his arms again, never tell her how much he loved her, never…

  She had no idea that Vic had worked all through the night to cut down and prepare the logs, no idea, from his casual, matter-of-fact attitude, that the provision of them was not something he did as a routine matter of course, but rather was something done by him for her, out of compassion for her weakness and respect for her strength.

  The sled was half empty before she managed to force herself to walk out to the stable with a mug of tea for him, and a slice of her homemade bread.

  The smile he gave her was warm and natural, his appreciation of her thoughtfulness making her realise again what a truly kind person he was, even while she felt uncomfortable within his masculine presence.

  He brought the empty mug back to the kitchen when he had finished unloading the logs. 'Best get back to the flock,' he told her matter-of-factly as she thanked him for them.

  The overnight fall of snow soon melted, but it was a warning of the winter to come, a winter they weren't really prepared for, Liz acknowledged as she shivered in her cold bedroom.

  During the second week in December they had an unexpectedly fine spell, when the sun shone and for some inexplicable reason Liz experienced an overwhelming need to be outside.

  In the autumn she had started trying to restore the panelling in the hall to what it must once have been, but in recent weeks she had grown too bulky to feel comfortable working on the lower portions of it, and every time she walked through the hall it seemed to reproach her for her lack of diligence.

  Only that morning she had received a visit from the vicar's wife, tactfully enquiring about her preparations for the birth of her baby. In these days of clothing coupons, shortages and rationing, and without any close family for her to turn to, it must be difficult for her to get a layette together, she had suggested.

  She was right; Liz had spent hours searching through the trunks full of clothes stored away in the attic, wishing she had a sewing machine she could use so that she could make more use of the yellowing linen sheets and old-fashioned baby clothes.

  She had also found a cradle up there, covered in cobwebs and dust and too heavy for her to get down unaided.

  She mentioned this fact to Louise Ferndean, who promptly said that she would send her gardener round to help and that Liz must on no account attempt any kind of heavy lifting.

  As for the sewing machine, she had one Liz could borrow, she offe
red, hiding her pity. She was so young, and her husband so badly injured. A tragic couple really, and so very brave… Look at the way they were living in this desolate, decaying house. The vicarage was bad enough, but at least it was sound and dry.

  Liz knew better by now than to tell Edward about the vicar's wife's helpfulness. She was well acquainted with the stiffness of his pride and the fact that he hated their dependence on others and his jealousy when she sometimes made friendships which did not include him. She disliked this possessiveness she sensed in him, but she put it to the back of her mind, having neither the energy nor the desire to dwell on it. She found it easier to bear that way, although she sympathised with him. Financially things must now surely be a little better with the rents coming in from the water meadow land, but times were hard, for everyone, and for some more than others.

  There was a mood of unrest in the village as men slowly came home from the war. Wives complained that their husbands were different, changed… that they couldn't seem to settle… and as yet Edward seemed to have done nothing about finding someone they could employ.

  As she walked away from the house, taking the narrow track that led up into the hills, Liz reflected on how very much her life had changed in one short year.

  It frightened her sometimes that Kit, who had been responsible indirectly for so many of those changes, should have become such a shadowy figure in her memory. Often at night she woke up, her face wet with tears from her struggles to picture him in sharper detail. She still loved him, of course she did… nothing would ever change that, but the sharpness of her memories of him seemed to be slipping away from her.

  Cottingdean, the problems of her life here with Edward, Edward himself and her more immediate problems overshadowed her memories of her dead love.

  And now Cottingdean itself and Edward with it were being pushed to the back of her mind by the demanding force of the child growing within her. Somehow without her knowing how it had happened she had ceased to think so passionately of the child as Kit's and instead it was as though both the child she carried and the house had somehow become entwined, as though both the birth of her son and her determination to breathe new life into Cottingdean itself were inextricably linked.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The path climbed more steeply than she had realised, causing her to stop to ease the nagging ache in her side. No one in the village knew just when she and Edward had been married; the fact that she had known him for some months beforehand had made it easy to allow people to assume their marriage was well established, and if they wondered what had made such a young girl marry a man like Edward they were too polite to say so. Some of them, Liz assumed, must think that she had perhaps married Edward before he was injured, and neither of them had said anything to correct that impression.

  She knew that it was important to Edward that her child was accepted as his, and, because she felt—despite the hardness of her life—that it was better than bringing up her child on her own in shame and completely alone, she was grateful enough to him to accept his need.

  Besides, she knew with female wisdom and growing maturity that for her child's sake it was far better that Edward should want to accept him wholly as his own rather than to be reminded that he had been fathered by his cousin.

  Edward had resented Kit. She had come to learn that much, and for all their sakes she must take care that none of the resentment was passed to her child.

  The climb was more tiring than she remembered from her first walk along this path. But that had been three months ago, on a warm autumn afternoon. Now, up here, it was cold despite the sunshine, and she was only wearing a flimsy coat, but from the top of this hill she knew she would have a panoramic view of both Cottingdean and the land around it. Quite what was driving her to come up here she had no real idea; she only knew that she had felt a need to do so.

  Towards the top the hill was bare of grass, rough and stony with poor, thin soil on which little grew. Liz was panting by the time she reached it, her legs and back aching. She knew she had perhaps come too far, but the summit was in sight now and determinedly she pressed on.

  When she stepped unsuspectingly on a patch of loose shale she could do nothing to save herself, falling heavily to the ground, the shock of losing her balance so immediate and intense that she could only lie there frozen with it, deprived of any ability to think or reason as her body trembled and her heart pounded.

  It was several minutes before she dared to move, to stretch out her arms and legs to discover in relief that they were not injured.

  It wasn't just her own safety she had risked, she acknowledged as she started to move cautiously downhill. It was her child's as well.

  Now, abruptly, she could not understand why she had attempted something so reckless. Her need to be back within the safe confines of Cottingdean was like a frantic pulse beating inside her. She had to force herself to walk slowly and carefully, not to break into a frantic lumbering run. Not to keep on touching the huge mound of her belly in reassurance both to herself and her child.

  As she walked she talked softly to it, telling it what a foolish mother it had, begging its forgiveness. She had fallen into this habit quite a lot recently, even sometimes sitting beside the empty cradle which the vicar's gardener had brought down from the loft and taken away with him, only to return it several days later, marvellously cleaned and equipped with a full set of bedding, which the vicar's wife had told her was a small gift…

  What she had not told her was that she had shamelessly cajoled her own sister-in-law to beg the items from her daughter, who had just had her third child and who had sworn she was not going to have any more.

  She was halfway down the hill, and just beginning to breathe a little more easily, to relax her tense muscles, when the first pain struck, sharp enough to make her stand still and quiver with the intensity of it. Sharp enough for her to know even while she formed the comforting words that it was not merely a stitch.

  Doggedly she walked on, faster now. After all, what need was there now to walk slowly? Doggedly she pleaded with her child to wait. Bitterly she chastised herself for what she had done. Grimly she told herself that she was panicking for nothing, that her baby wasn't due to be born for at least another four weeks, and then, just when she had managed to reassure herself that panic was all it had been, the pain came again.

  Vic saw her coming down the hill and frowned. She had no business straying so far from the house, not in her condition. She reminded him of one of his young and skittish ewes, unused to the burdens of motherhood.

  As he watched, he saw her stop and clasp her stomach. Too far away to see her expression, he could nevertheless visualise it, so graphically telling were her actions.

  He discovered that he was walking, almost running towards her without realising he had made the decision.

  She was over two miles away from Cottingdean and half a mile from the farm. As he moved he summoned his dogs, setting them to guard the flock.

  Liz hadn't seen the shepherd. She was too caught up in her own physical needs, in trying to cope with the waves of pain that battered her. She knew she must reach Cottingdean, but each succeeding wave of pain slowed her down, confusing her, so that when Vic reached her, she was crouched over, hugging her arms around her body, her eyes wide with pain and shock. She saw him and yet did not see him, too engrossed in her fear to be aware of anything other than her immediate needs.

  Vic spoke her name and took hold of her arm gently, hesitantly, watching her as she focused on him, pain giving way to the realisation of his presence, shock giving way to relief…

  As she recognised him, Liz felt her animosity towards him evaporate in the relief of knowing she wasn't alone any longer. She let him take hold of her and guide her down the path, struggling against the pain to tell him through chattering teeth, 'Vic… the baby…'

  He looked indulgently at her. She was so very strong that sometimes he forgot how young she was as well. Too young to be married to Edwa
rd… He frowned. Those were thoughts he should not be having. They were married. She was Edward's wife.

  'I must get back to Cottingdean. In…'

  Vic had seen how close together her pains were. He knew already that there would not be time to reach Cottingdean. There might not even be time to reach the farmhouse. He knew that it was unusual for a first birth to happen so quickly, and that often when it did it could be followed by heavy, sometimes fatal bleeding. It always caused him concern when one of his first time ewes went into too speedy labour. Now, as he silently guided Liz towards the farmhouse, that concern was intensified tenfold.

  When she realised where he was taking her, Liz stopped dead and stared at him, fear clouding her eyes. 'No, Vic. I must get home… the baby—'

  'Will come too soon for us to get there,' he told her quietly. 'The farmhouse is closer…'

  Liz felt her heart jump in her breast. What was he saying? How could he know? And yet sharply she knew that he was right, and panic struck through her. 'Dr Holmes…'

  Vic saw the fear in her eyes and pity washed through him. He didn't tell her what he knew: that there would be no time to summon the doctor, no time for anything other than allowing the child to be born, but something in his touch on her arm reassured her, and numbly she allowed him to urge her over the last few yards of the track and across the farmyard.

  She had never been inside the small farmhouse before. The kitchen was pin-neat, its table scrubbed as clean as her own; the homely smell of stew cooking in the range reached her nostrils. She was surprised to discover that she felt hungry, and then abruptly the pain struck her again, fierce and compelling, turning her mind in upon itself, so that she had only a dim perception of Vic guiding her upstairs and into the small cold bedroom where his grandfather had once slept, and which was now bare of everything but its bed.