The Hidden Years (31 page)

She loved Liz and she always would do. Liz had given her
the best things her life had ever held, both directly in her son, and
indirectly, through him, her own precious daughter. And more. Liz had
given her love… and not just love. Liz had taught her to
distance herself from her past, to stop blaming herself for its dark
places… to see herself not as the catalyst of all its pain,
but as the victim of events she could not control.

To discover that Liz too had known pain and
betrayal… to learn that she too had sinned against the moral
code of her peers, only made her feel closer to her mother-in-law.

To discover that David, wonderful, precious David who had
brought her so much happiness, wasn't Edward's son did nothing to alter
her love either for him or for his mother.

And yet, as it had Sage, the diary gripped her with the
compulsive need to discover more about its author's fate, although from
a very different viewpoint from Sage's. And at three o'clock she put it
to one side, and opened the drawer in the table beside her bed.

Inside it the familiar bottle winked tormentingly in the
lamplight.

Her fingers twitched, curling convulsively as she forced
herself not to reach out for it. She knew that the sleeping tablets
inside it would put an end to the darkness and her fears…
that, once taken, just one of them would ensure a dreamless night's
sleep. Just one… But no… she was not going to go
back down that road.

After David's death, when Dr Palmer had first prescribed
them, she had taken first one… and then later, when their
effect became diminished, another… and then still another,
until she was spending her time in drug-induced lethargy.

It had been Liz who had taken them from her, who had
insisted gently but firmly that she must not allow herself to be swept
into oblivion on a tide of indifference, Liz who had reminded her that,
even though she had lost her husband, she still had his
child… her daughter… a daughter who needed her
mother very much.

Night after night Liz had sat up with her, talking to her,
listening to her, and it had been in those dark days after David's
death that she had fought more desperately than she had ever fought
anything in her life—and with Liz at her side she had won.

But Liz wasn't at her side any longer, and suddenly
tonight the dark shadows… the fears… the panic
she had never completely conquered were back in monstrous force,
stealthily stalking her… laughing at her weakness and her
vulnerability.

Normally on these nights Liz was there, knowing without
her having to say anything how afraid she was… But now there
was no Liz… and there might not be any Liz ever again.

Already her heart was beating fast, panic clenching her
muscles. She felt sick, dizzy… She tried to force herself to
breathe deeply, to remind herself that her symptoms were self-induced.
And, after all, there was no compulsion on her to go, no real need.
Nothing… other than her own guilt, her own belief that in
forcing herself to go through this monthly ordeal she was somehow or
other appeasing any jealous gods… that she was somehow or
other protecting her daughter… that in return for her
willingly carrying her burdens of fear and guilt her precious Camilla
would be spared all that she herself had to endure.

Downstairs in the kitchen was the jar of herb tea which
she and Liz drank together on those nights like this one when she
couldn't sleep, when her mind was tormented by the past.

She looked at the bottle again, her fingers bent into
stiff claws as she willed herself not to reach for it. It was three
o'clock… only a few hours now. This time tomorrow it would
be all over. For another month.

Shivering, she pushed back the bedclothes and picked up
the pretty cotton robe lying on the bed. David had teased her about
this need she had always to keep her body covered. He had teased her
about it, but he had never tried to force or dissuade her from that
need.

Only when they made love had she allowed him to remove her
nightdress, and then afterwards had come the ritual bathing, done
secretly and guiltily at first until he had reassured her that he
understood… After that a clean nightdress, and then back to
bed…

She had once asked David if he minded that no matter how
gentle he was, how caring and understanding, she could never distance
herself from the past enough to do any more than merely accept his
possession of her body.

'I love you… you, the person,' he had told her
softly. And then, with that illuminating, wonderful smile of his, he
had added, almost self-mockingly, 'And anyway, I'm not highly motivated
sexually, Faye. In another age I suspect I could quite happily have
settled to life as a celibate. As it is, I don't have the religious
motivation for the priesthood, otherwise… You and I are a
pair… what happens within the privacy of our relationship is
our affair and no one else's, and perhaps if it weren't for the fact
that we both want a family…'

A family. Yes, they had both wanted that. They had both
been overjoyed when she had first conceived; and both equally
devastated when she lost that child.

Although David had tried his best to reassure her that it
was not so, she had seen it as a sign that she was being
punished… When she had conceived and then carried Camilla
full term she had hardly been able to believe it. Then, for an all too
short period of time, she had known true happiness.

And then had come David's death. Another blow. Another
reinforcement of her guilt.

The letter had come a month after David's death. Liz had
found her with it in her hand, half hysterical with shock. She had told
her then, all of it, sparing herself nothing…

Downstairs she boiled the kettle and found the jar of herb
tea. It wasn't the same drinking it alone. She felt so
afraid… but she had to go. It was her punishment and she
must not avoid it… For Camilla's sake, she must go.

Alaric Ferguson glanced at his watch. Officially this was
his day off, but there had been an emergency just as he was leaving the
building.

He could have left the man to be operated on by his
intern, but Alaric had a Scots Presbyterian grandfather on his mother's
side, and duty, responsibility, putting work before play and others
before himself were ingrained soul-deep in him.

Jancis had said to him that he enjoyed playing the
martyr… that he liked the demands his job placed upon him.
Other surgeons didn't behave as he did, she had told him. They found
time for their wives, their families… to enjoy
themselves… and still managed to advance their careers far
faster than he had done his.

'Look at yourself,' she had commanded acidly. 'How many of
those who qualified with you are still stuck in a run-down NHS
hospital, living on a pittance, working all the hours God
sends—and for what? You were top of your year, Alaric. And
look at what you've done with that—nothing…'

And behind her anger he had sensed her frustration and
seen more clearly than he had ever seen before how much marriage to him
had embittered and disappointed her.

She had been a medical student herself when they'd first
met. He had just qualified, and he had been both bemused and flattered
when she'd begun to show an interest in him. His stark and sometimes
hard upbringing had left him with little time to play.

His mother had been widowed young, and, while she had
supported him devotedly in his determination to become a surgeon, both
of them had had to make sacrifices so that he could attain that
achievement. It hadn't been easy, and to have this pretty, blue-eyed,
blonde-haired young woman flirting with him, teasing him had opened a
door into a completely new world.

When he had married her six months later, he had been
fathoms deep in love with her, content to allow her to direct the
mutual course of their lives, laughing gently at her when she told him
what she wanted… what she hoped for… when she
told him that he was going to become a world-famous surgeon, that they
would live in a beautiful house, and she would entertain his colleagues
and famous patients…

He had thought then that she was simply indulging in
fanciful daydreams. He had no idea that what she was telling him was
that these were her expectations of him, and by the time he did
understand it it was too late. Even if he had wanted to, he could not
have changed himself by then. The lifestyle she wanted was so
diametrically opposed to the one he'd envisaged for both of them. And
when he had come home early one day and discovered her in bed with one
of his colleagues— the kind of clever, determined man who
already had his sights firmly set on private and lucrative practice
pandering to the vanity of women idiotic enough to believe that the
skilled hands of a surgeon could magically transform their lives at the
same time as they transformed their faces and bodies—he had
known that their marriage was finally over.

He didn't blame her. She had been as deceived in him as he
had been in her. That her deception was deliberate and his not, he
preferred not to dwell on. He was thankful that they had no children.
His mother had been very upset.

He was almost forty-two. Every time he saw her, his mother
told him that he ought to remarry. He smiled and said nothing. If he
was lonely at times, well, it was by his own choice. He was a brilliant
and dedicated surgeon. Wasted outside private practice, so many of his
colleagues considered, but Alaric felt he had a duty, a responsibility
towards the sick and weak… a duty to use his skills to the
advantage of the majority and not the minority, and sometimes, like
now, he worked far longer hours than he should. If sometimes weeks,
months went by when he was barely aware of a larger, more free world
outside his own, he had no real regrets.

He had given up the large, uncomfortable house they had
bought together when Jancis had left him, and had bought a small,
convenient service flat instead.

If it rarely felt like a home, well, he hardly spent
enough time in it for that to matter. If he sometimes woke up from a
deep sleep aware of a need, an ache almost for the comfort and intimacy
of having someone next to him in the large bed, he had only to remind
himself of the disaster of his marriage to Jancis… the
reality of modern relationships which meant that rarely did they
involve the kind of almost spiritual intimacy and oneness which his
Celtic spirit sometimes craved.

It was eight o'clock in the morning before he was able to
leave the hospital. The man who had been brought in, the victim of a
stabbing, was now recovering on the ward. He would have a long curving
scar to show for his injury but nothing else. He had been lucky: the
knife had just missed causing the kind of internal injury no surgeon,
however skilled, could ever repair. There was such a lot still to be
learned about the human body… so much that frustrated and
angered Alaric, taunting him with his inability to help everyone who
came into his hands. That woman upstairs, for instance.

He had never thought she would survive. And yet she
had… Soon she would be strong enough for him to operate, to
remove the pressure on her brain. What was it that gave some people the
will to live no matter how severe their injuries, while
others…?

Sighing faintly, he left the building. Outside it was
light, the sky pearled with the promise of a clear day. As he got into
his car, the same ordinary model he had driven for the past four years,
he remembered that it was a long time since he had last visited his
mother. She was living on the south coast now, in a small, lazy seaside
town where the pace of life was slow and calm, and where most of the
residents were retired. Sometimes when he went there he found the place
faintly depressing, and yet his mother loved it.

After the council flat in one of Manchester's worst areas
of deprivation he supposed her small bungalow in its neat complex of
protected retirement homes was the kind of sanctuary she must often
have dreamed of finding.

He felt guilty sometimes, aware of the barrenness of her
life. As a child and then a student, he had been conscious of the small
and large sacrifices she made for him, the pinching and scraping which
had allowed him first to accept the scholarship he had won, and then
later to follow his dream of becoming a surgeon.

As soon as she could he had repaid her. He had bought the
bungalow for her; he gave her a monthly allowance to ensure that she
never again had to go without any of life's material comforts. She
asked nothing from him, not even, as other parents did, his time and
attention.

As he drove towards the south coast, he wondered if there
had ever been a time when she had wanted more from life, when she had
hungered for a man to take the place of his father, other children, a
more physically comfortable lifestyle… If she had, she had
never allowed him to see it.

On impulse, just before he left the city, he pulled up
outside a florist's, parking on the yellow line with unfamiliar
disregard for the law. Inside the shop a girl was placing huge, still
dew-fresh bunches of flowers into large vases. She smiled at him as he
walked in.

Fifteen minutes later, feeling both awkward and a little
foolish, he went back to his car, his arms full of the flowers he had
just bought. The girl who had just sold them to him watched him,
sighing romantically, wondering if her lover would ever think to stop
and buy her market-fresh flowers… not in a single bunch, but
by the armful, as her customer had just done.

When Sage got up, Faye had already gone. When she asked
Camilla if she knew where her mother was, Camilla glanced at her watch
and said absently, 'Oh, it's her day for that monthly WI thingy that
she and Gran always go to…'

Sage frowned. It was true that she was out of touch with
her mother's day-to-day routine, but the news that Liz, who thrived on
the challenges of single-handedly controlling the reins of a busy
business whose product was known in every part of the globe where
people had the money and the inclination to buy clothes made from the
famous Cottingdean Wools, should have the time to give up a whole day
each and every month to spend involving herself in the affairs of a
local Women's institute surprised her.