The Hidden Years (19 page)

'Yes. I realise that. I took a wrong taming and had to
turn back again.'

She had the odd feeling that he was lying, although what
he was saying sounded plausible. Was it because of her knowledge of the
man, her awareness that taking a wrong turning in anything was the last
thing he was likely to do, that she found it hard to believe him?

He was watching her, she realised, refusing to give in to
the magnetic pull of his concentration. His eyes were grey, the same
metallic colour as his car, and she didn't need to look at him to
remember how powerful an effect that intense concentration could have.
He also had the most ridiculously long curling lashes. She remembered
how she had once thought they gave him a look at times of being almost
vulnerable. More fool her; 'vulnerable' was the very last description
that could be applied to him. He was solid steel all the way through.

The sick pounding in her head, which had started to ease a
little as she walked, had returned. Automatically she raised her hand
and pressed her fingers to her temple.

'Migraine?'

She stared at him, forgetting her resolve not to do so,
surprise momentarily widening her eyes.

'How did you…?'

The ironic look he gave her made her stop, the swift
colour burning up under her skin stripping away the veneer of fifteen
years of sophistication and reducing her once again to the girl she had
once been.

'I've got a retentive memory,' he told her drily.

'You must have,' she agreed bitterly.

'I'll give you a lift. It isn't safe for a woman to walk
alone at night these days… Not even out here.'

'No, thanks, I'd prefer to walk. I need the fresh
air…'

'So go and walk round Cottingdean's gardens once you get
home. You should be safe enough there…'

His calm assumption that she would allow him to make her
decision for her infuriated her. 'I don't want a lift,' she repeated
tightly, but he had already taken hold of her arm and was walking her
towards his car.

Thankfully the thickness of her jacket muffled the
sensation of his fingers on her arm, and his touch, although firm,
wasn't constraining.

It was easier to go with him than to argue, she decided
weakly as he opened the passenger door and waited politely until she
was safely inside before closing it on her.

'You really needn't have done this.'

'I know,' he agreed as he set the car in motion.

He was a good driver, careful, controlled.

'Odd,' he mused, as the gates to the house appeared,
'you're the last person I'd envisage chairing a committee for
environmental protection.'

'I'm not,' Sage told him stiffly. 'I'm simply standing in
for my mother.'

'Really? The Sage I knew would have taken that as a
heaven-sent opportunity for sabotage rather than a sacred bit of family
flag-waving.'

Sage felt herself stiffening. This was what she had been
dreading from the moment she had set eyes on him. Being reminded of the
past, of its pain, of its shadows… and most of all being
reminded of the person she had been…

Was it reading her mother's diaries which had thrown so
sharply into focus the differences between them, made her so sharply
aware of her own shortcomings, of her own faults, not just of omission
but of commission as well?

'No comment?' Daniel asked her softly as he brought the
car to a halt.

'Did you ask me a question?' Sage challenged him acidly as
she reached to open her door. 'I thought you were simply making a
statement. How I live my life has nothing to do with you,
Daniel… it's my own affair.'

'Or affairs,' he murmured cynically, making her forget
that she was still wearing her seatbelt, so that she pushed open the
heavy door and tried to get out, only to discover infuriatingly that
she was still trapped in her seat.

'Still the same old Sage. Impatient, illogical. So damn
used to getting her own way that she doesn't even have the sense to
avoid any obstacles.'

He opened his own door, and was round her side of the car
almost before she had finished unfastening her seatbelt.

She discovered that she was trembling as she got out of
the car, not with dread any longer, but with anger…anger,
and something else, something that fuelled her adrenalin and banished
the pain from her temples.

'Thanks for the lift.'

'You're welcome.'

His face was in the shadows, but as he turned away from
her to walk back to the driver's door his expression was briefly
illuminated by the moon, and for an instant he might have been the old
Daniel she had once known so well, only to discover she had not really
known him at all.

Daniel Cavanagh… Why had he come back into her
life, and now of all times, reopening doors—wounds-she had
thought long since sealed?

Daniel Cavanagh… She discovered she was
shivering again as she walked towards the house, fighting against the
threatening avalanche of memories she was only just managing to keep at
bay.

It was
no use—she wasn't going to sleep tonight, Sage acknowledged,
sitting up in bed. She didn't want to sleep… she was
actually afraid of going to sleep, afraid of the memories which might
be unleashed once she was no longer in complete control of her own mind.

She moved restlessly in her bed, and stared at her watch.
Two o'clock. She might as well be doing something constructive as lying
here like this, trying not to think, not to remember…
something constructive such as… such as reading the diaries?

What was she hoping to find there? Or was she simply using
them as a panacea, a deterrent, a means of holding her own thoughts at
bay?

She went downstairs, the house making the familiar creaks
of an old building. She opened the desk drawer and extracted the diary
she had been reading, taking it back up to bed with her, plus a couple
of apples from the fruit bowl in the kitchen. They were the slightly
sour, crunchy variety she had always preferred, different from the soft
juicy red fruit both her mother and Faye loved.

Her mother always explained away her sweet tooth by saying
it was a result of the war, of being deprived of sweet things. When she
made this explanation she was always slightly defensive; it was a small
enough weakness in an otherwise very strong woman. Sage felt an
unfamiliar twinge of guilt over the way she had often childishly and
sometimes cruelly drawn attention to it. Children were cruel, she
acknowledged wryly—they had no compunction about using
whatever weapons fell into their hands, no guilt, no
remorse… especially when driven by a sense of righteousness
as she had been.

How old had she been when she had first started to blame
her mother for her father's indifference to her? Eight, nine…even younger. Certainly it seemed
when she looked back that she had always been aware of the fact that,
while David had always been free to approach their father directly,
when she had tried to do the same thing her mother had always come
between them, so that all her contact with her father was made either
through or in the company of a third party, and that invariably that
third party was her mother.

Anger, bitterness, resentment; she had felt the
destructive lash of all those emotions, and yet why had her mother felt
it necessary to stop her from becoming close to her father? Surely not
because she had feared that such a closeness would threaten her own
relationship with him?

He had adored her mother, loved her with an intensity
which as an adult Sage herself recognised
she
would have found too possessive. She remembered how her mother had
scarcely been able to leave the house without first explaining where
she was going and how long she would be.

Sage tensed, her own body automatically reacting to the
thought of so much possessive love.
Possessive
love? She frowned, recognising reluctantly how much she would have
resented the burden of that kind of love, how much her freedom-loving
nature would have kicked and fought against him. She tried to imagine
how she would have reacted to her father's possessiveness had she been
her mother. She would have left him, probably, she recognised grimly.
But she was not her mother. Her mother was far too saintly, far too
morally perfect to put her own needs above those of someone as
dependent and helpless as her husband had been.

Sage's frown deepened as she realised that this was the
first time she had ever looked closely at her parents' marriage, ever
questioned a relationship which for years she had seen enviously as an
ideal, feeling both resentful and envious of her mother's role as the
pivot of her father's life. The first time she had seen it as a
relationship which she as a woman would have found both stultifying and
caging.

And yet her mother had obviously not done so. She shrugged
the thought away—she and her mother were two different women,
two very different women. They had nothing in common other than the
fact that they were mother and daughter, an accident of birth which had
brought them together in a relationship which neither of them enjoyed,
even if her mother was rather better at concealing her antipathy than
she was herself.

And yet despite that, despite everything that had happened
between them, despite her resentment, her bitterness, there was still a
part of her that was drawn compulsively towards the girl she was
discovering in the diaries.

Which was why she was here at gone two in the morning,
turning the pages of her mother's diary, pushing aside the memories
which had kept her from sleeping. Memories stirred up by that
unexpected and unwanted meeting with Daniel Cavanagh.

Daniel Cavanagh. For a moment she closed her eyes, trying
hard not to feel as though the living, breathing man had somehow or
other forced his presence into the room with her.

Daniel Cavanagh, what was he after all? Only a man.
Nothing more. Just a man, like so many others.

She opened her eyes and quickly turned the pages of the
diary, to find the place where she had previously stopped reading,
resolutely pushing away all thoughts of Daniel Cavanagh and the past,
and instead concentrating on her mother's record of her life.

A week passed
and then another and
still Lizzie hadn't heard from Kit. Every day she waited hopefully for
a letter, but none came, and then one morning when she woke up the
world swung dizzily around her, her stomach heaved and a vast welling
nausea had her running desperately to the bathroom where she was
violently and painfully sick.

That the reason for her sickness didn't immediately occur
to her was due in the main to the prudery which ruled her great-aunt's
life.

Lizzie had been sick before, when she had first come to
work at the hospital, when her stomach had revolted against the
unappetising diet, and, if she had any time to spare from her aching
longing to hear from Kit and her constant daydreams about him to dwell
on the nausea which seemed to be plaguing her, she simply assumed that
it was a return of that earlier sickness.

That was until one of the other girls heard her one
morning and accidentally enlightened her, assuming that she must
already know the reason for her sickness.

A baby… No, not just a baby, but Kit's baby.
Hard on the heels of her first thrill of appalled recognition of the
fact that in her great-aunt's eyes she had now joined that
unmentionable band of her sex who had 'got themselves into trouble',
and was therefore now a social and moral outcast, came a tiny pang of
pleasure. Kit's baby. She was having Kit's baby.

Alone in the dormitory, she sank down on to her bed,
trembling slightly, clasping her hands protectively over her stomach.
She felt dizzy but not sick any longer. Rather the dizziness sprang
from elation and joy.

Kit's child… A sudden urgency to share her news
with him, to be able to marvel with him over the new life they had
created together, overwhelmed her. Kit! How much she longed to see him.

She sat staring into space, lost in a wonderful daydream
in which Kit suddenly appeared, sweeping her off her feet and
announcing that they must get married immediately…that he
loved her to distraction.

He would take her away with him in his shiny little green
car, and they would be married secretly and excitingly. She would live
in a tiny rose-smothered cottage hidden away from the world, but close
enough to where he was based for her to see him whenever he was off
duty.

She would wait there for the birth of their
child… a son, she knew it would be a son, and they would be
so blissfully happy…

It took one of the older and far, far more worldly-wise
girls in the dormitory to shatter her daydreams with brutal reality.

Donna had been nominated by the others to talk to her.
Kind girls in the main, they found Lizzie's attitude baffling. Had they
found themselves in her condition, they wouldn't be sitting around
waiting for Mr Wonderful to turn up and make things right. Didn't the
poor sap realise what had happened? Didn't she know what would happen
to her when the hospital authorities found out about her condition?

Donna Roberts was the eldest of a family of eight, five of
them girls; she had seen her mother pregnant far too often to have any
illusions about the male attitude to the careless and unwanted
fathering of a child, but even she quailed a little when faced with the
childish luminosity of Lizzie's unwavering belief that he, whoever he
was, was going to come back and marry her.

'Look, kid,' she began awkwardly. She was dating an
American airman and had picked up not just his habit of chewing gum,
but something of his accent as well. 'We all know about the fix you've
got yourself in… I know it isn't easy, but you've got to
face up to it… You don't want to end up like Susan Philpott,
do you?'