The Hidden Years (59 page)

It
could
be done. She knew it could
be done, she knew that one day there would be a market, a demand for
all that her mill could produce, and when that demand came she wanted
to be ready for it… She
would
be ready
for it.

This time when she said goodbye to Vic she didn't say
goodbye to him alone. He and Beth had a semi-formal send-off from
Cottingdean; Liz had organised a farewell party for him, inviting
almost everyone in the neighbourhood.

She and Edward had no money with which to buy them an
expensive gift, but instead she had carefully selected from two of the
house's dusty cupboards a pretty Wedgwood tea service in delicate bone
china.

She saw Beth eye it disparagingly, and then watched Vic
handling the fragile cups in his large hands, his touch so gentle and
familiar that she felt a deep inner pain. She tried not to think how
different things might have been, if… If what? If she hadn't
been married to Edward? But she was married to Edward and she ought to
be damn grateful for that fact. Even in the village there were girls
without fathers for their children, some of them widowed by the war,
others…

Others were the result of wartime affairs, fatherless and
condemned for it. She would have hated that fate for David…

When it finally came time for her to say goodbye to Vic,
he avoided looking at her and, even though she knew that what he was
doing was probably for the best, watching him go hurt her. She wished
him well with deep sincerity, and yet she knew that her own life would
be the poorer for his going.

As though he sensed what she was feeling, David came over
to her side and slipped his hand into hers. His flesh felt soft and
warm, when what she really yearned for was a stronger, harder
grip… A man's grip, and not a child's. She blinked back
tears which she told herself were stupid and self-indulgent. It was the
future she must look to and not the past. The future… And
what after all did she want with a man like Vic, a man who would
ultimately demand of her the sexual intimacy her relationship with Kit
had shown her she was not capable of sustaining? And yet there were
nights—long, wearying nights when she lay awake tormented by
the ache of her body, by the beginnings of a need she could neither
understand nor explain. A need that confused and shamed her.

As she
reached for the next diary, Sage reflected wryly to herself that she
was discovering in her mother an unexpected and no doubt accidental
gift for drama.

All through this last section of the diaries she had been
conscious of a growing sense of urgency, a feeling that her mother's
life was slowly reaching some kind of climactic turning point. Or was
it simply that her impatience, her sense of sharp tension and awareness
sprang from other influences; influences outside the diaries?

The fact was that while she was reading about her mother's
past Liz herself was fighting for her future; the fact was that her own
life seemed to be reaching some kind of turning point… Or
was it simply that in her desperation to lose herself, to escape from
her own thoughts, her own problems, she was investing the diaries with
a sense of mystery, of secrecy almost, that they really did not
possess…?

Or was it perhaps that having at last seen her mother
through the eyes of an adult and not of a child, she was suddenly and
sympathetically aware that her mother was a woman, with emotions and
needs which could hardly have been fulfilled by her relationship with
Edward?

As she picked up the next diary she frowned over the dates
written inside it, just inside the cover. It was obvious that the
contents of this diary spanned virtually an entire decade of her
mother's life.

The decade which would have included the year of her own
conception, she recognised, her heart suddenly thumping fiercely,
heavily.

She had never had the kind of relationship with her mother
which had allowed her to ask what had prompted her, a woman with a son
of ten, a husband whose health was declining, a place like Cottingdean
to run and a very new and fragile business barely off the ground, to go
to such lengths to conceive and give birth to a child which she then
seemed to spend a great deal of time holding at a distance.

Previously, aside from the fact that she and her mother
were just two people with temperaments which did not jell, Sage had
also believed that her mother was one of those women who simply did not
have the facility or the desire to express their emotions freely, and
yet she had realised very early on in reading the diaries just how
wrong she was. So why had she always been held at such a distance?

She had a momentary and vivid memory of running into the
house as a child and running into her mother's arms, or at least trying
to do so. Liz had been in the study with Edward, and Sage could picture
so clearly the look of displeasure, of resentment, on her father's face
as she burst into the room… the quick, almost angry way in
which her mother fended her off and bundled her out, the feeling even
as a child of being an outsider…of being unwanted.

If it hadn't been for David, for his love… She
smiled sadly to herself, remembering how much she had longed to emulate
her older brother… How much she had ached to have his calm
gentle temperament, his way of turning aside anger with the sweetness
of his smile. She had been adult herself before discovering how rare
people like David were. She could understand how much Faye must miss
him as a human being. She still did herself… In those wild
years after losing Scott, David would have been the person she could
have turned to for counsel. In David alone she would have felt able to
confide, to admit how very betrayed she had felt by Scott's defection.
But David hadn't been there for her. David could never be there for her
again, because he had died. She had no outlet for her hurt and, instead
of turning her anger against Scott and against his father, she had
found that she had, for some obscure reason, turned it against Daniel
Cavanagh, perhaps because she had felt that in doing so she was leaving
the door open for Scott to change his mind and come back into her
life… perhaps because she had felt in some subconscious way
that only Daniel was strong enough, secure enough in himself to accept
her anger.

Certainly she knew logically that it wasn't his fault,
that Scott's father had insisted on taking him home, nor that Scott had
never once attempted to get in touch with her.

What she had not been able to tell anyone, though, was the
confusion and self-disgust caused by her own sexual responsiveness to
Daniel. Nor had she confided in anyone how Daniel had rejected
her… Why? She paused, frowning a little.

Was it because she had been ashamed of those feelings, or
of her behaviour… or was it because she had felt even
David
,
even had he been alive, might not have been able to
understand… Much as she had loved her brother, she had
always known instinctively that he did not share her deep-running,
silent vein of sensuality; that for David, sex was not a human
appetite, but a gift of God sanctified by the procreation of
children… that David did not possess the sharp curiosity
about others, about their motivations, about all that was hidden and
secret in their lives in the way that she did… That David
preferred not to look too closely into the dark places of the human
soul, whereas she often surprised in herself a thirst to know and
understand what motivated others, not just sexually but emotionally as
well.

Yes, she had loved David… She missed his gentle
presence in her life even now, his calming presence, but it surprised
her a little that Faye as a woman—a mature and very
attractive woman now—had never looked back towards her
relationship with David, and perhaps realised that sexually it might
not have withstood the pressures of her own growing maturity and needs.
Faye was not a cold woman; rather she was an almost totally unawakened
one, Sage recognised, and, knowing what she now knew about her own
mother, she suspected that Liz must know this as well. Was that why she
had always been so protective towards Faye? Not because she loved her
more than she did her own daughter, not because she approved of Faye's
reticence and modesty and wanted to hold them up as an example to her
own erring child, but because she had long ago sensed in Faye the need
and vulnerability, the fear that Sage herself, to her shame, was only
just beginning to recognise?

Why had she never noticed before the way Faye flinched
away from men? Why had she never noticed the tension in her eyes and
her body whenever she was in unfamiliar male company? That fear hadn't
been put there by David, Sage was sure, but it might explain why Faye
had married him, and why she had stayed so fiercely, determinedly under
Liz's protective wing after his death. It was only now, with her mother
removed from them, that Sage was beginning to see the real emotions
that Faye had always cloaked beneath her air of remote calm. To see
them and realise the danger of the strain her sister-in-law was placing
upon herself.

Tonight, when Faye came in, she would talk to her, she
decided firmly. She would find out what was wrong. She would encourage
Faye to confide in her…

As an escape route from her own problems, or because she
genuinely cared?

Of course she cared… She had always cared about
her family, more than she had ever allowed even herself to know. As a
child she had lived under the constant shadow of her father's dislike
of her and her mother's coldness towards her… Unlike others
in a similar position, she had not spent her adult life seeking male
approval—instead she had taken the opposite stance. She had
punished men… rejected them for her father's rejection of
her, she recognised grimly. And most of them had let her…
Most of them, but not Daniel… Never Daniel…

Daniel, Daniel… her thoughts were locked in a
circle that always ended up at the same point. Daniel
Cavanagh… Would he ring her, or would he simply ignore her
ultimatum? If he did…

She found that she was shaking. She took a deep breath and
then another, quickly turning the pages of the new diary. She didn't
want to think about that morning. She didn't want to get caught up in
the folly of remembering, or recalling, of allowing her
body… her femininity to hold sway over logic and
intelligence.

She read swiftly, quickly absorbing the brief, dry facts
noted down in the diary's early pages; the new ram had proved a great
success, his progeny developing the valuable fleeces her mother had
sought, and if she sensed the pathos behind the curt inscription,
'Heard from young Vic today. Beth is pregnant,' Sage did not allow
herself to dwell on it, or to feel pity, knowing that self-pity was the
very last thing her mother would have indulged in.

It was a diary of brief entries, even briefer the winter
Edward was severely ill with influenza and had to go into hospital.
That spring was a productive one for lambs and Liz wrote that she was
thinking of buying another ram.

She had been looking into the feasibility of reopening the
mill and weaving their own wool. At present she was selling the fleeces
to a small concern just inside the Scottish border. She had been in
touch with the mill's owners and had arranged to visit them. She had
also been making tentative enquiries to see what if any government help
she could get with her new venture.

People were gradually recovering from the dark years of
the war… gradually beginning to think in terms of the years
ahead and not merely the weeks. Those people who had lived through it,
who had experienced its horrors, who had known what it meant to live
constantly with the threat of death, were promising themselves that for
their children things would be different.

There was a new mood spreading over the land—a
new purposefulness, a sense of determination that things must change
for the better, that no one could live through what had been lived
through, could endure what had been endured and not emerge from such a
holocaust without undergoing some kind of rebirth. Coupled with this
awareness was a desire to make sure the next generation, those children
conceived at a time of great darkness and despair, should throughout
their lives know only happiness and light, and so a mother who had
perhaps throughout the war years only possessed poor quality cheap
clothes now hungered, even if only subconsciously, for better things,
not for herself but for her child.

The market was there for the cloth her sheep could
produce, Liz knew it, and she was determined to be ready to cater for
it.

The opposition to her plans was such that another person,
a weaker person, would have given up, given in to the pressure, albeit
a gentle caring pressure, which was being subtly placed on her.

Edward had begun to retreat into a distant silence
whenever she tried to discuss her plans with him… the kind
of silence often used by a spoilt child to punish a caring adult, Liz
recognized uneasily.

Edward's health was a constant source of concern to her.
He would never be strong, always need care and cosseting, and this
latest bout of influenza had left him even frailer than before, and not
just physically but emotionally…more inclined to cling and
demand, more inclined to sulk and lapse into aggrieved silences when he
felt he was not getting enough of her attention.

It was just as well that David was such an easy
child… Almost too easy, she sometimes felt, contrasting his
behaviour with that of other boys his age.

When she had confided her concern to Ian Holmes, he had
quickly assured her that David was perfectly healthy, adding gently,
'He is quiet, I know, but it is a happy quietness, I think, not a
discontented one.'