The Hidden Years (4 page)

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 hospital 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.