The Hidden Years Read online

'We wanted to go to see her, but the hospital said she'd asked for you…'

  'Yes, there was something she wanted me to do.'

  Both of them were looking at her, waiting…

  'She said she wanted us…all of us, to read her diaries… She made me promise that we would.' Sage grimaced slightly. 'I didn't even know she kept a diary.'

  'I did,' Camilla told them. 'I came downstairs one night when I couldn't sleep and Gran was in the library, writing. She told me then that she'd always kept one. Ever since she was fourteen, though she didn't keep the earliest ones…'

  Ridiculous to feel pain, rejection over something so insignificant, Sage told herself.

  'She kept the diaries locked in the big desk—the one that belonged to Grandpa,' Camilla volunteered. 'No one else has a key.'

  'I've got the key,' Sage told her gruffly. They had given it to her at the hospital, together with everything else they had found in her mother's handbag. She had hated that… hated taking that clinically packaged bundle of personal possessions…hated knowing why she had been given them.

  'I wonder why she wants us to read them,' Faye murmured. She looked oddly anxious, dread shadowing her eyes.

  Sage studied her. She had got so used to her sister-in-law's quiet presence in the background of her mother's life that she never questioned why it was that a woman— potentially a very attractive and certainly, at forty-one, a relatively young woman—should want to choose that kind of life for herself.

  Sage knew Faye had been devoted to David… that she had adored him, worshipped him almost, but David had been dead for over fifteen years, and, as far as she knew, in all that time there had never been another man in Faye's life.

  Why did she choose to live like that? In another woman, Sage might have taken it as a sign that her marriage held so many bad memories that any kind of intimate relationship was anathema to her, but she knew how happy David and Faye had been, so why did Faye choose to immure herself here in this quiet backwater with only her mother-in-law and her daughter for company? Sage studied her sister-in-law covertly.

  Outwardly, Faye always appeared calm and controlled—not in the same powerful way as her mother, Sage recognised. Faye's self-control was more like a shield behind which she hid from the world. Now the soft blue eyes flickered nervously, the blonde hair which, during the days of her marriage, she had worn flowing free drawn back off her face into a classic chignon, her eyes and mouth touched with just the merest concession to make-up. Faye was a beautiful woman who always contrived to look plain and, watching her, it occurred to Sage to wonder why. Or was her curiosity about Faye simply a way of putting off what she had come here to do?

  Now, with both Faye and Camilla watching her anxiously, Sage found herself striving to reassure them as she told them firmly, 'Knowing Mother, she probably wants us to read them because she thinks whatever she's written in them will help us to run things properly while she's recovering.'

  Faye gave her a quick frown. 'But Henry's in charge of the mill, and Harry still keeps an eye on the flock, even though his grandson's officially taken over.'

  'Who's going to chair the meeting of the action group against the new road, if Gran isn't well enough?' Camilla put in, making Sage's frown deepen.

  'What road?' she demanded.

  'They're planning to route a section of the new motorway to the west of the village,' Faye told her. 'It will go right through the home farm lands, and within yards of this side of the village. Your mother's been organising an action group to protest against it. She's been working on finding a feasible alternative route. We had a preliminary meeting of the action group two weeks ago. Of course, they elected your mother as chairperson…'

  The feelings of outrage and anger she experienced were surely wholly at odds with her feelings towards Cottingdean and the village, Sage acknowledged. She'd been only too glad to escape from the place, so why did she feel this fierce, protective swell of anger that anyone should dare to destroy it to build a new road?

  'What on earth are we going to do without her?' Faye demanded in distress.

  For a moment she seemed close to tears, and Sage was relieved when the door opened and her mother's housekeeper came in with the tea-trolley.

  Afternoon tea was an institution at Cottingdean, and one which had begun when her parents had first come to the house. Her father, an invalid even in those days, had never had a good appetite, and so her mother had started this tradition of afternoon tea, trying to tempt him to eat.

  Jenny and Charles Openshaw had worked for her mother for over five years as her housekeeper and gardener-cum-chauffeur, a pleasant Northern couple in their mid-fifties. It had been Charles's unexpected redundancy which had prompted them to pool their skills and to look for a job as a 'live-in couple'.

  Charles's redundancy money had been used to purchase a small villa in the Canaries. They had bought wisely on a small and very strictly controlled development and, until they retired, the villa was to be let through an agency, bringing them in a small extra income.

  Sage liked them both very much; brisk and uncompromising in their outlook, they had nothing servile or over-deferential in their manner. Their attitude to their work was strictly professional—they were valued members of the household, treated by her mother, as they had every right to be, with the same respect for their skills as she treated everyone else who worked for her.

  Now, once she had informed Sage that her old bedroom was ready for her, Jenny asked how her mother was.

  Sage told her, knowing that Jenny would guess at all that she was not saying and be much more aware of the slenderness of the chances of her mother's full recovery than either Faye or Camilla could allow themselves to be.

  'Oh! I almost forgot,' Jenny told Sage. 'Mr Dimitrios telephoned just before you arrived.'

  'Alexi.' Sage sighed. He would be furious with her, she suspected. She was supposed to be having dinner with him tonight and she had rung his apartment before leaving the hospital to leave a message on his answering machine, telling him briefly what had happened, and promising to try to ring him later.

  He had been pursuing her for almost two months now, an unknown length of time for him to pursue any woman without taking her to bed, he had informed her on their last date.

  There was no real reason why they should not become lovers. He was a tall, athletic-looking man with a good body and a strong-boned face. Sage had been introduced to him in Sydney while she had been working there on a commission. He was one of the new generation of Greek Australians; wealthy, self-assured, macho, in a way which she had found amusing.

  She had forgotten what it was like to be pursued so aggressively. It had been almost two years since she had last had a lover; a long time, especially when, she was the first to admit, she found good sex to be one of life's more enjoyable pleasures.

  That was the thing, of course. Good sex wasn't that easy to come by—or was it simply that as the years passed she was becoming more choosy, more demanding… less inclined to give in to the momentary impulse to respond to the ache within herself and the lure of an attractive man?

  Of course, her work kept her very busy, allowing her little time for socialising or for self-analysis, which was the way she liked things. She had spent too many wearying and unproductive hours of her time looking for the impossible, aching for what she could not have… yearning hopelessly and helplessly until she had made a decision to cut herself off from the past to start life anew and live it as it came. One day at a time, slowly and painfully like a person learning to walk again after a long paralysis.

  Sage acknowledged that her lack of concern at Alexi's potential anger at her breaking of their date suggested that her desire for him was only lukewarm at least. She smiled easily at Jenny and told her that she wasn't sure as yet how long she would be staying.

  Tomorrow she'd have to drive back to London and collect some clothes from her flat, something she ought to have done before coming down here, but when she'd left the hospit
al she had been in no mood to think of such practicalities. All she had been able to concentrate on was her mother, and fulfilling her promise to her. Her mother had always said she was too impulsive and that she never stopped to think before acting.

  After Jenny had gone, she drank her tea impatiently, ignoring the small delicacies Jenny had provided. She admitted absently that she probably ought to eat some-thing, but the thought of food nauseated her. It struck her that she was probably suffering from shock, but she was so used to the robustness of her physical health that she barely gave the idea more than a passing acknowledgement.

  Seeing her restlessness, Faye put down her teacup as well. 'The diaries,' she questioned uneasily. 'Did Liz really mean all of us to read them?'

  'Yes. I'm afraid so. I'm as reluctant to open them as you are, Faye. Knowing Mother and how meticulous she is about everything, I'm sure they contain nothing more than detailed records of her work on the house, the estate and the mill. But I suspect the human race falls into two distinct groups: those people like you and me who feel revulsion at the thought of prying into something as intimate as a diary, and those who are our opposites, who relish the thought of doing so. I have no idea why Mother wants us to read the things… I don't want to do it any more than you do, but I gave my promise.' She paused, hesitating about confiding to Faye her ridiculous feeling that if she didn't, if she broke her promise, she would somehow be shortening the odds on her mother's survival and then decided against it, feeling that to do so would be to somehow or other attempt to escape from the burden of that responsibility by putting it on to Faye's so much more fragile shoulders.

  'I suppose I might as well make a start. We may as well get it over with as quickly as possible. We can ring the hospital again at eight tonight, and hope that all of us will be able to visit tomorrow… I thought that as I read each diary I could pass them on to you, and then you could pass them on to Camilla, once you've read them.'

  'Where will you do it?' Faye asked her nervously. 'In here, or…?'

  'I might as well use the library,' Sage told her. 'I'll get Charles to light the fire in there.'

  Even now, knowing there was no point in delaying, she was deliberately trying to find reasons to put off what she had to do. Did she really need a fire in the library? The central heating was on. It startled her, this insight into her own psyche… What was she afraid of? Confirmation that her mother didn't love her? Hadn't she accepted that lack of love years ago...? Or was it the reopening of that other, deeper, still painful wound that she dreaded so much? Was it the thought of reading about that time so intensely painful to her that she had virtually managed to wipe her memory clear of it altogether?

  What was she so afraid of…?

  Nothing, she told herself firmly. Why should she be… ? She had nothing to fear… nothing at all. She picked up the coffee-coloured linen jacket she had been wearing and felt in the pocket for her mother's keys.

  It was easy to spot the ones belonging to the old-fashioned partners' desk in the library, even if she hadn't immediately recognised them.

  'The diaries are in the drawers on the left side of the desk,' Camilla told her quietly, and then, as though sensing what Sage thought she had successfully hidden, she asked uncertainly, 'Do you… would you like us to come with you?'

  For a moment Sage's face softened and then she said derisively, 'It's a set of diaries I'm going to read, Camilla, not a medieval text on witchcraft… I doubt that they'll contain anything more dangerous or illuminating than Mother's original plans for the garden and a list of sheep-breeding records.'

  She stood up swiftly, and walked over to the door, pausing there to ask, 'Do you still have dinner at eight-thirty?'

  'Yes, but we could change that if you wish,' Faye told her.

  Sage shook her head. 'No… I'll read them until eight and then we can ring the hospital.'

  As she closed the door behind her, she stood in the hall for a few minutes. The spring sunshine turned the panelling the colour of dark honey, illuminating the huge pewter jugs of flowers and the enormous stone cavern of the original fireplace.

  The parquet floor was old and uneven, the rugs lying on it rich pools of colour. The library lay across the hall from the sitting-room, behind the large drawing-room. She stared at the door, and turned swiftly away from it, towards the kitchen, to find Charles and ask him to make up the fire.

  While he was doing so she went upstairs. Her bedroom had been redecorated when she was eighteen. Her mother had chosen the furnishings and the colours as a surprise, and she had, Sage admitted, chosen them well.

  The room was free of soft pretty pastels, which would have been far too insipid for her, and instead was decorated in the colours she loved so much: blues, reds, greens; colours that drew out the beauty of the room's panelled walls.

  The huge four-poster bed had been made on the estate from their own wood; her name and date of birth were carved on it, and the frieze decorating it had carved in the wood the faces of her childhood pets. A lot of care had gone into its design and execution; to anyone else the bed would have been a gift of great love, but she had seen it merely as the execution of what her mother conceived to be her duty. Her daughter was eighteen and of age, and therefore she must have a gift commensurate with such an occasion.

  In the adjoining bathroom, with its plain white suite and dignified Edwardian appearance, Sage washed her hands and checked her make-up. Her lipstick needed renewing, and her hair brushing.

  She smiled mirthlessly at herself as she did so… Still putting off the evil hour… why? What was there after all to fear… to reveal…? She already knew the story of her mother's life as everyone locally knew it. It was as blameless and praiseworthy as that of any saint.

  Her mother had come to this house as a young bride, with a husband already seriously ill, his health destroyed by the war. They had met when her mother worked as a nursing aide, fallen in love and married and come to live here at Cottingdean, the estate her father had inherited from a cousin.

  Everyone knew her mother had arrived here when she was eighteen to discover that the estate her husband had drawn for her in such glowing colours—the colours of his own childhood—had become a derelict eyesore.

  Everyone knew how her mother had worked to restore it to what it had once been. How she had had the foresight and the drive to start the selective breeding programme with the estate's small flock of sheep that was to produce the very special fleece of high-quality wool.

  But how her mother had had the vision to know that there would come a time when such wool was in high demand, how she had had the vision to persuade her husband to allow her to experiment with the production of that wool, let alone the run-down mill, Sage realised she had no idea, and with that knowledge came the first stirrings of curiosity.

  Everyone knew of the prosperity her mother had brought to the village, of the new life she had breathed into Cottingdean. Everyone knew of the joys and sorrows of her life; of the way she had fought to keep her husband alive, of the cherished son she had borne and lost, of the recalcitrant and troublesome daughter she was herself…

  No, there were no real secrets in her mother's life. No reason why she herself should experience this tension… this dread… this fear almost that made her so reluctant to walk into the library and unlock the desk.

  And yet it had to be done. She had given her word, her promise. Sighing faintly, Sage went back downstairs. She hesitated outside the library door for a second and then lifted the latch and went in.

  The fire was burning brightly in the grate and someone, Jenny, no doubt, had thoughtfully brought in a fresh tray of coffee.

  As she closed the door behind her, Sage remembered how as a child this room had been out of bounds to her. It had been her father's sanctuary; from here he had been able to sit in his wheelchair and look out across the gardens.

  He and her mother had spent their evenings in here… Stop it, Sage told herself. You're not here to dwell on the past. Y
ou're here to read about it.

  She surprised herself by the momentary hope that the key would refuse to unlock the drawers, but, of course, it did. They were heavy and old, and slid surprisingly easily on their wooden runners. A faint musty scent of herbs and her mother's perfume drifted up towards her as she opened them.

  She could see the diaries now; far more of them than she had imagined, all of them methodically numbered and dated, as though her mother had always known that there would come a time, as though she had deliberately planned…

  But why! Sage wondered as she reached tensely into the drawer and removed the first diary.

  She found her hands were shaking as she opened it, the words blurring as she tried to focus on them. She didn't want to do this… could not do it, and yet even in her reluctance she could almost feel the pressure of her mother's will, almost hear her whispering, You promised…

  She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and then read the first sentence.

  'Today I met Kit…'

  'Kit…' Sage frowned and turned back the page to check on the date. This diary had begun when her mother was seventeen. Soon after her eighteenth birthday she had been married. So who was this Kit?

  Nebulous, uneasy feelings stirred inside her as Sage stared reluctantly at the neat, evenly formed handwriting. It was like being confronted with a dark passage you had to go down and yet feared to enter. And yet, after all, what was there to fear?

  Telling herself she was being stupid, she picked up the diary for the second time and started to read.

  'Today I met Kit.'

  CHAPTER ONE

  Spring 1945

  'Today I met Kit.'

  Just looking at the words made her go dizzy with happiness, Lizzie acknowledged, staring at them, knowing it was impossible to translate into cold, dry print the whole new world of feelings and emotions which had opened up in front of her.

  Yesterday her life had been bound and encompassed by the often arduous routine of her work as a nursing aide: long hours, low pay, and all the horrid dirty jobs that real nurses were too valuable to spend their time on.