The Hidden Years (14 page)

She let him bluster and protest, and then when he started
to become angry and abusive she simply ended the conversation by
replacing the receiver. After she had done so, she discovered that she
was shaking. It wasn't the first time a man had grown angry with
her…not the first time she had been on the receiving end of
the insults Alexi had just voiced. But it was the first time she had
recognised in them a hard core of truth, the first time she had
acknowledged that her own behaviour had been responsible for such a
reaction.

When she stepped into the hall, it was half in darkness and
silent. She paused outside the library door, her hand reaching for the
doorknob before she realised what she was doing. If she started reading
again tonight, she would probably be up all night. Tomorrow she would
have to visit her mother in hospital, call in at her office, make
arrangements to have her messages relayed here to Cottingdean. It had
been a long day and a traumatic one, which her body recognised, even if
her mind refused to admit just how difficult it had all been.

She stepped back from the door. The diaries weren't going
to go away; after all, they had waited for over forty years already.
Forty years… how many other revelations did those silent
pages hold?

Her mother's first love-affair, described so
rawly…so openly in the pages she had read tonight, had been
written so honestly and painfully that it had almost been as though she
was reliving… suffering…

She had never imagined…never
dreamed… And now there were questions clamouring for
answers…questions which she half dreaded to have
answered… and the most urgent one of all was why, why had
her mother chosen to do this… to reveal herself and her past
like this… to open a door into her most private and secret
life, and to open it to the one person who she knew had more reason
than anyone else to want to hurt her?

It was as though silently, deliberately, she was saying,
Look, I too have suffered, have endured, have known pain, humiliation,
and fear.

But why now, now, after all these years… unless
it no longer mattered, unless she thought she was going to die?

Sage stopped halfway up the stairs, her body suddenly
rigid with pain and a frantic, desperate fear.

She didn't want her mother to die, and not just selfishly
because she didn't want the burden of Cottingdean, or the mill: those
would fall on other shoulders anyway; that inheritance was surely
destined for Camilla, the granddaughter who was everything that she,
Sage, was not.

She wanted her mother to live… she needed her
to live, she recognised, overwhelmed by the knowledge of that
discovery, overwhelmed by the discovery that some-where inside her
mature, worldly thirty-four-year-old self, a small girl still crouched
in frightened terror, desperately yearning for the security represented
by the presence of her mother.

She slept badly, her dreams full of vague fears, and then
relived an old nightmare which she had thought had stopped haunting her
years ago.

In it she was endlessly trying to reach the man she loved.
He was standing at the end of a long, shadowy path, but, whenever she
tried to walk down it towards him, others stepped out of the shadows in
front of her, preventing her from doing so.

Always in the past these others had had familiar faces;
her mother's, her father's, sometimes even David's; but on this
occasion it wasn't her love she was striving to reach, but her mother,
and this time the motionless figure turned so that she could see her
mother's face quite clearly, and then she started to walk towards her.

In her dream a tremendous feeling of relief, so strong
that it almost made her feel giddy, encompassed her, but even as she
experienced it the shadows masking the path deepened so that she
couldn't see her mother any longer, and couldn't move towards her,
couldn't move at all, as invisible bonds held her immobile no matter
how much she struggled against them.

It was only when she woke up, sweating and shivering,
after some time that she realised that in all the years she had
experienced the dream before, out of all those times, never once had
her lover turned and walked towards her as her mother had done. It was
a simple, small thing, but it was like suddenly being confronted with a
stranger in the place of a familiar face. She shivered, recognising a
truth she didn't really want to know. A truth she wasn't ready to know.

As she sat up in bed, dragging the quilt round her to keep
her warm, she wondered if it was reading about her mother's first
love-affair, and recognising in it the raw, painful fact that the man,
Kit, had never really loved her mother as she had so naively believed,
that had made her recognise that she too had made the mistake of loving
too well a man who could not match that commitment.

She moved abruptly in mute protest at her own thoughts,
her own disloyalty. The two cases were poles apart. Her mother had been
callously and uncaringly seduced by a man who had never felt anything
more than momentary desire for her.

She and Scott had been deeply, agonisingly in love.
Physically that love never had been consummated, which was
why… She bit down hard on her bottom lip, a childish habit
she had thought she had long ago outgrown.

She had loved Scott… He had loved
her… They had been cruelly and deliberately torn apart, and
why? Was it because her mother had wanted to put the final social gloss
on her own success… had wanted her to marry the only son of
a peer? An impoverished peer, it was true, but possessed of a title
none the less. And had she wanted that marriage for no better reason
than to be able to boast of 'My daughter, Lady Hetherby'? Sage
remembered accusing her of as much, angrily and bitterly, flinging out
the words like venom-tipped knives, but as always her mother's reaction
had been calm and controlled.

'Jonathon would make you an excellent husband,' she had
said quietly. 'His temperament would complement yours—'

'Not to mention his father's title complementing your
money,' she had snapped back.

'In my view you're still far too young for marriage,
Sage,' was all her mother had said.

'In your view, but not in the law's… which is
of course why Scott's father had him dragged back to
Australia… We love each other… Can't you
see…? Don't you understand…?'

'You're nineteen, Sage—you might think you love
Scott now, but in ten years' time, in
five
years'
time you'll be a different person. You're an intelligent
girl… You know what the odds are against marrying at your
age and having that marriage last.'

'You married at eighteen…'

'That was different… There was the
war…'

'Which was virtually over when you married
Father… Oh, what's the use—you're determined to
keep us apart, you and Scott's father. I hate you, I hate you both,'
she had finished childishly, racing upstairs to collapse in tears of
anger and impotent and helpless emotion.

No, Scott might not have been able to stop his father
taking him back home, but later…later, surely, he could have
got in touch with her… come back for her…?

Now for the first time she was confronting a truth she had
sought desperately and successfully to avoid for a long time.

If Scott had loved her, loved her with the intensity and
passion she had felt for him, he would have found a way of coming back
to her.

Never mind that he was his father's only
child…never mind the fact that he had been brought up from
birth in the knowledge that one day he would be solely responsible for
the vast sheep station owned and run by his father, and for all the
complex financial investments that had stemmed from the profits made
from those sheep. Never mind the fact that he had always known that it
was his father's dearest wish that he would marry the daughter of a
neighbouring station owner, thus combining the two vast tracts of land.
Never mind the fact that until he'd met her, Sage, he had been quite
content with this future. Never mind anything that had stood between
them. He had told her he loved her and he had meant it, she knew that.
He had loved her as she loved him. He had wanted to marry her, to spend
the rest of his life with her.

Or had he…? Had he had a change of heart back
there in Australia? Had he somehow stopped loving her, stopped wanting
her, blocked her out of his mind, started hating her for what she had
done? She shuddered, remembering how his father had refused to see her
that night at the hospital, how he had also given instructions that she
wasn't to be allowed to see Scott. He had blamed her for the accident,
she knew that, but surely Scott, Scott who had loved her, understood her, been a part of
her almost, surely he could not have blamed her? Even
though… even though she deserved to be blamed!

She knew he had married… Not the neighbour's
daughter, but someone equally suitable from his father's point of view.
The daughter of a wealthy Australian entrepreneur.
She
ought to have been his wife… the mother of his children. But
she wasn't, and until now she had blamed her mother and his father for
that fact. Now, abruptly, she was being forced to recognise that
Scott's love might not have been the all-consuming, intensely
passionate, unchangeable force that was her own.

After the nightmare she did not get back to sleep properly
and she was awake at seven when Jenny knocked on her door and came in
with a tray of tea, served, she noticed, on one of the pretty antique
sets of breakfast boudoir china that her mother had collected over the
years. When her friends expressed concern that she should actually use
anything so valuable Liz always smiled and replied that the pleasure of
using beautiful things far outweighed the. small risk of their being
damaged by such use.

Sage frowned as Jenny put the delicate hand-painted
breakfast set on her bedside table, and then said abruptly, 'Jenny,
that Sevres boudoir set my mother likes so much—I'd like to
take it to the hospital with me… I think once she's feeling
a little better she'd appreciate having something so familiar.'

'Yes. That particular set always has been her favourite.
She used to say that that special first morning cup of tea always
tasted even better when she drank it from the Sevres.'

She used to say… Sage felt her stomach muscles
clench anxiously. Unable to look at the housekeeper, she said huskily,
'Has there…? Have the hospital…?'

'No, nothing,' Jenny quickly reassured her. 'And as they
always say, no news must be good news. Don't you fret… if
anyone could pull through that kind of accident it would be your
mother. She's such a strong person. Emotionally as well as
physically…'

'Yes, she is,' Sage agreed. 'But even the strongest among
us have our vulnerabilities… Faye and Camilla, are they up
yet?'

'Camilla is; she's gone out riding, she said she'd be back
in time for breakfast. I'm just about to take Faye her tea. I don't
think she'll have slept very well… These headaches she gets
when she's under pressure…'

Faye… Headaches… Sage frowned. No
one had ever told her that Faye suffered bad headaches… But
then, why should they? She had long ago opted out of the day-to-day
life of the house and its occupants. Long, long ago made it plain that
she was going to go her own way, and that that way was not broad enough
to allow for any travelling companions.

It was a perfect late spring morning, with fragile wisps
of mist masking the grass, and the promise of sunshine once it had
cleared.

The telephone was ringing as Sage went downstairs. She
picked up the receiver in the hall, and heard a woman whose name she
did not recognise asking anxiously after her mother.

'We heard about the accident last night, but, of course,
we didn't want to bother you then. And it's very awkward, really.
There's this meeting tonight about the proposed new road. Your mother
was going to chair it… I doubt that we'll be able to get it
cancelled, and there's no one really who can take her place…'

The action committee Faye had told her about. Sage
suppressed a sigh of irritation. Surely the woman realised that the
last thing they wanted to concern themselves with right now was some
proposed new road…? And then she checked. Her mother would
have been concerned; her mother, whatever her anxiety, would, as she
had always done, have looked beyond the immediate present to the future
and would have seen that no matter how irritating, no matter how
inconvenient, no matter how unimportant such a meeting might seem in
the face of present happenings, there would come a time when it would
be important, when it would matter, when she might wish that she had
paid more attention.

'Faye and I have already discussed the problem,' she said
now, suppressing her impatience. 'She suggested that I might stand in
for my mother, as a representative of the family and the interests of
the mill. I believe my mother had files and reports on what is being
planned. The meeting's tonight, you say…? I should have read
them by then…'

She could almost hear the other woman's sigh of relief.

'We hate bothering you about it at such a time, but your
mother was insistent that we make our stance clear right from the
beginning, that we fight them right from the start. The Ministry are
sending down a representative to put their side of things, and the
chairman of the contractors who'll be doing the work will be there as
well… If you're sure it's not going to be too much trouble,
it would be wonderful if you could take your mother's place.'

Sage could hear the relief in her voice and wondered a
little wryly if her caller would continue to place such faith in her
abilities to step into her mother's shoes once they had met.

'No trouble at all,' she responded automatically, as she
made a note of the exact time of the meeting and promised to be there
fifteen minutes earlier so that she could meet the rest of the
committee.