The Hidden Years (5 page)

But how her mother had had the vision to know that there
would come a time when such wool was in high demand, how she had had
the vision to persuade her husband to allow her to experiment with the
production of that wool, let alone the run-down mill, Sage realised she
had no idea, and with that knowledge came the first stirrings of
curiosity.

Everyone knew of the prosperity her mother had brought to
the village, of the new life she had breathed into Cottingdean.
Everyone knew of the joys and sorrows of her life; of the way she had
fought to keep her husband alive, of the cherished son she had borne
and lost, of the recalcitrant and troublesome daughter she was
herself…

No, there were no real secrets in her mother's life. No
reason why she herself should experience this tension… this
dread… this fear almost that made her so reluctant to walk
into the library and unlock the desk.

And yet it had to be done. She had given her word, her
promise. Sighing faintly, Sage went back downstairs. She hesitated
outside the library door for a second and then lifted the latch and
went in.

The fire was burning brightly in the grate and someone,
Jenny, no doubt, had thoughtfully brought in a fresh tray of coffee.

As she closed the door behind her, Sage remembered how as
a child this room had been out of bounds to her. It had been her
father's sanctuary; from here he had been able to sit in his wheelchair
and look out across the gardens.

He and her mother had spent their evenings in
here… Stop it, Sage told herself. You're not here to dwell
on the past. You're here to read about it.

She surprised herself by the momentary hope that the key
would refuse to unlock the drawers, but, of course, it did. They were
heavy and old, and slid surprisingly easily on their wooden runners. A
faint musty scent of herbs and her mother's perfume drifted up towards
her as she opened them.

She could see the diaries now; far more of them than she
had imagined, all of them methodically numbered and dated, as though
her mother had always known that there would come a time, as though she
had deliberately planned…

But
why
! Sage wondered as she
reached tensely into the drawer and removed the first diary.

She found her hands were shaking as she opened it, the
words blurring as she tried to focus on them. She didn't want to do
this… could not do it, and yet even in her reluctance she
could almost feel the pressure of her mother's will, almost hear her
whispering, You promised…

She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and then read the
first sentence.

'Today I met Kit…'

'Kit…' Sage frowned and turned back the page to
check on the date. This diary had begun when her mother was seventeen.
Soon after her eighteenth birthday she had been married. So who was
this Kit?

Nebulous, uneasy feelings stirred inside her as Sage
stared reluctantly at the neat, evenly formed handwriting. It was like
being confronted with a dark passage you had to go down and yet feared
to enter. And yet, after all, what was there to fear?

Telling herself she was being stupid, she picked up the
diary for the second time and started to read.

'Today I met Kit.'

Spring 1945

'Today
I met Kit
.'

Just looking at the words made her go dizzy with
happiness, Lizzie acknowledged, staring at them, knowing it was
impossible to translate into cold, dry print the whole new world of
feelings and emotions which had opened up in front of her.

Yesterday her life had been bound and encompassed by the
often arduous routine of her work as a nursing aide: long hours, low
pay, and all the horrid dirty jobs that real nurses were too valuable
to spend their time on.

She would rather have stayed on at school, but, with her
parents killed in one of the many bombing raids on London, she had had
no option but to accept her great-aunt's ruling that she must leave
school and start to earn her living.

Aunt Vi didn't mean to be unkind, but she wasn't a
sentimental woman and had never married. She had no children of her
own, and, as she was always telling her great-niece, she had only
agreed to take Lizzie in out of a sense of family duty. She herself had
been sent out to work at thirteen, skivvying in service at the local
big house. She had worked hard all her life and had slowly made her way
up through the levels of service until she had eventually become
housekeeper to Lord and Lady Jeveson.

Lizzie had found it bewildering at first, leaving the
untidy but comfortable atmosphere of the cramped terraced house where
she had lived with her parents and grandparents, evacuated from the
busy, dusty streets so familiar to her to this place called 'the
country', where everything was strange and where she missed her ma and
pa dreadfully, crying in her sleep every night and wishing she were
back in London.

Aunt Vi wasn't like her ma… for a start she
didn't talk the way her ma did. Aunt Vi talked posh and sounded as
though her mouth was full of sharp, painful stones. She had made Lizzie
speak the same way, endlessly and critically correcting her, until
sometimes poor Lizzie felt as though she dared not open her mouth.

That had been four years ago, when she had first come to
the country. Now she had almost forgotten what her ma and pa had looked
like; her memories of them and the dusty terraced house seemed to
belong to another life, another Lizzie. She had grown accustomed to
Aunt Vi's pernickety ways, her sharp manner.

Only yesterday one of the other girls at the hospital, a
new girl from another village, had commented on Lizzie's lack of
accent, taunting her about her 'posh' speech, making her realise how
much she had changed from the awkward, rebellious thirteen-year-old who
had arrived on Aunt Vi's doorstep.

Aunt Vi knew how things should be done. No great-niece of
hers was going to grow up with the manners and speech of a kitchen
tweeny, she had told Lizzie so many times that she often thought the
words were engraved in her heart.

She had hated it at first when her aunt had got her this
job at the hospital, but Aunt Vi had firmed up her mouth and eyed her
with cold determination when Lizzie had pleaded to be allowed to stay
on at school, telling her sharply that she couldn't afford to have a
great lazy girl eating her out of house and home and not bringing in a
penny piece.

Besides, she had added acidly, in case Lizzie hadn't
realised it, there was a war on and it was her duty to do what she
could to aid her countrymen. Aunt Vi had made up her mind. The matron
of the hospital was one of her friends, and, before Lizzie had time to
draw breath, she was installed in the hostel not far from the hospital
grounds, in a dormitory with a dozen other girls, all of them working
the same long, gruelling hours, although the others, unlike Lizzie,
spent their free time not on their own but in giggling, excited groups,
vying with one another to present the most enticing appearance for
their weekly visits to nearby barracks to attend their Saturday night
dances.

They made fun of Lizzie, taunting her because she held
herself aloof from them, because she was 'different', and not just
because of the way she spoke.

Aunt Vi was very strict, and, even though Lizzie was no
longer living under her jurisdiction, the lessons she had enforced on
her made it painfully difficult for Lizzie to throw off her aunt's
warnings about what happened to girls foolish enough to listen to the
brash flattery of boys who 'only wanted one thing' and who 'would get a
girl into trouble as soon as look at her'.

Aunt Vi had no very high opinion of the male sex, which,
in her view, was best kept at a distance by any right-minded female.

She herself had grown up in a harsh world, where a single
woman who managed to rise to the position of housekeeper in a wealthy
upper-class home was far, far better off than her married sisters, who
often had half a dozen dependent children and a husband who might or
might not be inclined to support them all.

Men, in her opinion, were not to be trusted, and Lizzie
had a natural sensitivity that made her recoil from the often clumsy
and always suggestive passes of the few young men she did come into
contact with.

This was wartime and young men did not have the time, or
the necessity, to waste their energy, and what might only be a very
brief life, in coaxing a girl when there were so many who did not want
such coaxing.

The only other men Lizzie met were the patients in the
hospital, men who had been so badly injured that it was tacitly
admitted that nothing more could be done for them, and so they lay here
in the huge, decaying old building, economically and clinically nursed
by young women who had learned to seal themselves off from human pity
and compassion, who had seen so many broken bodies, so many maimed
human beings, so many tormented young male minds that they could no
longer agonise over what they saw.

For Lizzie it was different. She had wondered at first
when she came to the hospital if she might eventually try to qualify as
a nurse, but after a year there, a year when she had seen a constant
stream of young men, their minds and bodies destroyed by this thing
called war, lying in the wards, when she had seen the hopelessness in
their eyes, the anger, the pain, the sheer bitter resentment at their
loss of the future they had once anticipated, she had known that she
did not have the mental stamina for nursing.

With every familiar patient who left the wards, taken home
by a family helpless to cope with the physical and mental burdens of
their sons and husbands, and with every new arrival, her heart bled a
little more, and she could well understand why the other girls sought
relief from the trauma of working with such men by spending their free
nights with the healthy, boisterous, whole representatives of manhood
they picked up at the dances they attended.

That the Americans were the best was the universal opinion
of her colleagues; Americans were generous and fun to be with. There
were some stationed on the other side of the village, and once or twice
one of them had tried to chat her up when Lizzie walked there to post
her weekly duty letter to Aunt Vi.

She always ignored them, steeling her heart against their
coaxing smiles and outrageous invitations, but she was only seventeen,
and often, once she was safely out of sight, she would wonder wistfully
what it would be like to be one half of the kind of perfect whole that
was formed when two people loved with the intensity she had envied in
her reading.

Lizzie was an avid reader, and a daydreamer. When she had
first come to live with Aunt Vi, she had barely opened a book in her
life, but, in addition to ceaselessly correcting her speech and her
manners, Aunt Vi had also insisted that her great-niece read what she
had termed 'improving books'.

The chance munificence of a large trunkful of books from
the vicar's wife, which had originally belonged to her now adult
children, had furnished Lizzie with the ability to escape from Aunt
Vi's strict and sometimes harsh domination into a world she had
hitherto not known existed.

From her reading Lizzie discovered the tragedy of the love
between Tristan and Iseult, and started to dream of emotions which had
nothing in common with the clumsy overtures of the outwardly brash
young men with whom she came into contact. Their very brashness, the
fact that her sensitive soul cringed from their lack of finesse and
from the often unwelcome conversation and revelations of the other
girls in her dormitory, made it easy for her to bear in mind Aunt Vi's
strictures that she was to keep herself to herself and not to get up to
any 'funny business'.

By funny business Aunt Vi meant sex, a subject which was
never openly referred to in her aunt's house. As far as Aunt Vi was
concerned, sex was something to be ignored as though it did not exist.
Lizzie had naively assumed that all women shared her aunt's views,
until she had come to work at the hospital. From her peers'
conversations she had learned otherwise, but until now she had felt
nothing other than a vague yearning awareness that her life was somehow
incomplete… that some vital part of it was missing. She had
certainly never contemplated sharing with any of the men she had met
the intimacies she heard the other girls discussing so openly and
shockingly… Until now…

She stared dreamily at her diary. It had been at Aunt Vi's
insistence that she had first started keeping a diary, not to confide
her most private thoughts in, but as a factual record of the
achievements of her days.

It was only since she had come to work at the hospital
that she had found herself confiding things to her diary that were
little more than nebulous thoughts and dreams.

Kit… Even now she was dazzled by the wonder of
meeting him… of being able to whisper his name in the
secret, private recess of her mind, while her body shivered with
nervous joy.

Kit… He was so different… so
special, so breath-takingly wonderful.

She had known the moment she saw him. He had turned his
head and smiled at her, and suddenly it was as though her world had
been flooded with warmth and magic.

And to think, if she hadn't decided to go and visit poor
Edward, she would never have met Kit… She shook with the
enormity of how narrowly she had averted such a tragedy.

Edward Danvers had been with them for many months now; a
major in the army, he had been badly injured in Normandy…
his legs crushed and his spine injured, resulting in the eventual
amputation of both his legs.

He had come to them supposedly to recuperate from a second
operation, but Lizzie knew, as they all knew, that in fact he had come
to them because there was nowhere else for him to go. His parents were
dead, he wasn't married, and privately Lizzie suspected that he himself
no longer had any desire to live. He wasn't like some of the men who
came to them: he didn't rage and rail against his fate; outwardly
placid and calm, he seemed to accept it, but Lizzie had seen the way he
looked inwards into himself, instead of out into the world, and had
known that she was looking at a man who was gradually closing himself
off from that world. Willing himself to die, almost.