The Hidden Years (3 page)

Until today she had thought she had stopped loving her
mother over fifteen years ago, her love eroded by too much pain, too
much betrayal—and she had decided then that the only way to
survive the catalyst of that betrayal was for her to forge a separate,
independent life of her own.

And that was what she had done.

She now had her own career, her own life. A life that took
her from London to New York, from New York to LA to Rome, to Paris, to
all those places in the new world where people had heard by word of
mouth of her skills as a muralist.

There were houses all over the world—the kind of
houses owned by people who would never dream of wanting them to be
featured in even the most upmarket of glossy
publications—where one of her murals was a prized feature of
the decor. She was sought after and highly paid, working only on
favoured commissions. Her life was her own… or so she had
thought.

Why me? she had asked, and even in extremity her mother
had not spared her. Of course, gentle, tender Faye would never have
been able to bring herself to read another person's diaries…
to pry into their privacy. What was it, then, that made it so important
that she read them… that they all read them… so
important that her mother should insist with what might well be her
dying breath that they do so?

There was only one way that she was going to find out.

There was nothing to be gained in putting off what had to
be done, Sage acknowledged as she left the hospital. As chance would
have it, she was in between commissions at the moment and there was
nothing of sufficient urgency in her life to excuse her from fulfilling
the promise she had made to her mother, nothing to stop her from going
immediately to Cottingdean, no matter how little she wanted to do so.

Cottingdean, the family's house, was on the outskirts of
an idyllic English village set in a fold of the hills to the south-east
of Bath. It was a tiny rural community over which her mother presided
as its loving and much-loved matriach. Sage had never felt the same
love for it that the rest of her family shared—for some
reason it had stifled her, imprisoned her, and as a teenager she had
ached for wider skies, broader horizons.

Cottingdean: Faye and Camilla would be waiting there for
her, waiting to pounce on her with anxious questions about her mother.

How ironic it was that Faye, her sister-in-law, should be
able to conjure from her mother the love she herself felt she had
always been denied—and yet she could not resent Faye for it.

She sighed a little as she drove west heading for the M4.
Poor Faye—life had not been kind to her, and she was too
fragile… too vulnerable to withstand too many of its blows.

Sage remembered how Faye had looked the day she and David
married…a pale, fragile, golden rose, openly adoring the man
she was marrying, but that happiness had been short-lived. David had
been killed in a tragic, useless road accident, leaving Faye to bring
up Camilla on her own.

Sage hadn't been surprised when her mother had invited
Faye to make her home at Cottingdean; after all, in the natural course
of events, David would eventually have inherited the estate. Faye had
accepted her offer— the pretty ex-vicarage in the village,
which David had bought for his bride, was sold and Faye and her
one-year-old daughter moved into Cottingdean. They had lived there ever
since and Camilla had never known any other home, any other way of life.

Sage smiled as she thought of her niece; almost eighteen
years old and probably in the eyes of the world spoiled rotten by all
of them. If the three of them suffered deeply in losing David then some
of the suffering had been eased by the gift he had left behind him.

One day Cottingdean and everything that it represented
would be Camilla's, and already Sage had seen that her mother was
discreetly teaching and training her one grandchild in the duties that
would then fall on her shoulders.

Sage didn't envy her that inheritance, but she did
sometimes envy her her sunny, even-tempered disposition, and the warmth
that drew people to her in enchantment.

As yet she was still very much a child, still not really
aware of the power she held.

Sage sighed. Of all of them Camilla would be the most
deeply affected if her mother… Her hands gripped the wheel
of the Porsche until her knuckles whitened. Even now she could not
allow her mind to form the word 'die', couldn't allow herself to admit
the possibility…the probability of her mother's death.

Unanalysed but buried deep within the most secret, sacred
part of her, the instinctive, atavistic part of her that governed her
so strongly, lay the awareness that to have refused the promise her
mother had demanded of her, or even to have given it and then not to
have carried out the task, would somehow have been to have helped to
still the pulse of her mother's life force; it was as though there was
some primitive power that linked the promise her mother had extracted
from her with her fight against death, and if she broke that promise,
even though her mother could not possibly know that it had been broken,
it would be as though she had deliberately broken the symbolic silver
thread of life.

She shuddered deeply, sharply aware as she had been on
certain other occasions in her life of her own deep-rooted and
sometimes disturbing awareness of feelings, instincts that had no
logical basis.

Her long fingers tightened on the steering-wheel. She had
none of her mother's daintiness—that had bypassed her to be
inherited by Camilla. She had nothing of her mother in her at all,
really, and yet in that brief moment of contact, standing beside her
mother's bed, it had been for one terrifying milli-second of time as
though their souls were one and she had felt as though it were her own
her mother's fear and pain, her desperation and her determination; and
she had known as well how overwhelmingly important it was to her mother
that she kept her promise.

Because her mother knew she was going to die? A spasm of
agony contracted Sage's body. She ought not to be feeling like this;
she had dissociated herself from her mother years ago. Oh, she paid
lip-service to their relationship, duty visits for her mother's
birthday in June, and at Christmas, although she had not spent that
Christmas at Cottingdean. She had been working in the Caribbean on the
villa of a wealthy French socialite. A good enough excuse for not going
home, and one her mother had accepted calmly and without comment.

She turned off the motorway, following the familiar road
signs, frowning a little at the increased heaviness of the traffic,
noting the unsuitability of the enormous eight-wheel container trucks
for the narrow country lane.

She overtook one of them on the small stretch of bypass
several miles east of the village, glad to be free of its choking
diesel fumes.

They had had a hard winter, making spring seem doubly
welcome, the fresh green of the new hedges striking her eye as she
drove past them. In the village nothing seemed to have changed, and it
amused her that she should find that knowledge reassuring, making her
pause to wonder why, when she had been so desperate to escape from the
place and its almost too perfect prettiness, she experienced this dread
of discovering that it had changed in any way.

She had rung the house from the hospital and spoken to
Faye, simply telling her that she was driving down but not explaining
why.

Whoever had first chosen the site for Cottingdean had
chosen well. It sat with its back to the hills, facing south, shielded
from the east wind by the ancient oaks planted on the edge of its
parkland.

The original house had been built by an Elizabethan
entrepreneur, a merchant who had moved his family from Bristol out into
the quiet and healthy solitude of the countryside. It was a solid,
sensible kind of house, built in the traditional style, in the shape of
the letter E. Later generations had added a jumble of extra buildings
to its rear, but, either through lack of wealth or incentive, no one
had thought to do anything to alter its stone frontage with its ancient
mullions and stout oak door.

The drive still ran to the rear of the house and the
courtyard around it on which were the stables and outbuildings, leaving
the front of the house and its vistas completely unspoiled.

Sage's mother always said that the best way to see
Cottingdean for the first time was on foot, crossing the bridge
spanning the river, and then through the wooden gate set into the
house's encircling garden wall, so that one's first view of it was
through the clipped yews that guarded the pathway to the terrace and
the front entrance.

When her mother had come to Cottingdean as a bride, the
gardens which now were famous and so admired had been nothing more than
a tangle of weeds interspersed with unproductive vegetable beds. Hard
to imagine that now when one saw the smooth expanses of fresh green
lawn, the double borders with their enviable collections of seemingly
carelessly arranged perennials, the knot garden, and the yew hedges
which did so much to add to the garden's allure and air of enticing,
hidden secrets. All this had been created by her mother—and
not, as some people imagined, with money and other people's hard work,
but more often than not with her own hands.

As she drove into the courtyard Sage saw that Faye and
Camilla were waiting for her. As soon as she stopped the car both of
them hurried up to her, demanding in unison, 'Liz…
Gran… how is she?'

'Holding her own,' she told them as she opened the door
and climbed out. 'They don't know the extent of her injuries as yet. I
spoke to the surgeon. He said we could ring again tonight…'

'But when can we see her?' Camilla demanded eagerly.

'She's on the open visiting list,' Sage told them. 'But
the surgeon's told me that he'd like to have her condition stabilised
for at least forty-eight hours before she has any more visitors.'

'But
you've
seen her,' Camilla
pointed out.

Sage reached out and put her arm round her. She was so
precious to them all in different ways, this child of David's. 'Only
because she wanted to see
me
, Camilla…
The surgeon was worried that with something preying on her mind she
would—'

'Something preying on her mind… What?'

'Camilla, let Sage get inside and sit down before you
start cross-questioning her,' Faye reproved her daughter gently. 'It
isn't a very comfortable drive down from London these days with all the
traffic… I wasn't sure what your plans are, but I've asked
Jenny to make up your bed.'

'I'm not sure either,' Sage told her sister-in-law,
following her inside and then pausing for a moment as her eyes adjusted
to the dimness of the long panelled passageway that led from the back
to the front of the house.

When her mother had first come to Cottingdean this
panelling had been covered in paint so thick that it had taken her
almost a year to get it clean. Now it glowed mellowly and richly,
making one want to reach and touch it.

'I've asked Jenny to serve afternoon tea in the
sitting-room,' Faye told her, opening one of the panelled doors. 'I
wasn't sure if you would have had time to have any lunch…'

Sage shook her head—food was the last thing she
wanted.

The sitting-room was on the side of the house and faced
west. It was decorated in differing shades of yellow, a golden, sunny
room furnished with an eclectic collection of pieces of furniture which
somehow managed to look as though they were meant to be together.
Another of her mother's talents.

It was a warm welcoming room, scented now with
late-flowering pots of hyacinths in the exact shade of lavender blue
of the carpet covering the floor. A fire burned in the grate, adding to
the room's air of welcome, the central heating radiators discreetly
hidden away behind grilles.

'Tell us about Gran, Sage,' Camilla demanded, perching on
a damask-covered stool at Sage's feet. 'How is she?'

She was a pretty girl, blonde like her mother, but, where
Faye's blondeness always seemed fairly insipid, Camilla's was warm and
alive. Facially she was like her grandmother, with the same startlingly
attractive bone-structure and the same lavender-grey eyes.

'Is she really going to be all right?'

Sage paused. Over her head, her eyes met Faye's. 'I hope
so,' she said quietly, and then added comfortingly, 'She's a very
strong person, Camilla. If anyone has the will to fight, to hold on to
life…'

'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.