The Hidden Years

Why me? she had asked, and even in extremity her mother had not spared her. Of course, gentle, tender Faye would never have been able to bring herself to read another person’s diaries…to pry into their privacy. What was it, then, that made it so important that she read them…that they all read them…so important that her mother should insist with what might well be her dying breath that they do so?

There was only one way that she was going to find out.

There was nothing to be gained in putting off what had to be done, Sage acknowledged as she left the hospital. As chance would have it, she was in between commissions at the moment and there was nothing of sufficient urgency in her life to excuse her from fulfilling the promise she had made to her mother, nothing to stop her from going immediately to Cottingdean, no matter how little she wanted to do so.

Cottingdean, the family’s house, was on the outskirts of an idyllic English village set in a fold of the hills to the southeast of Bath. It was a tiny rural community over which her mother presided as its loving and much-loved matriach. Sage had never felt the same love for it that the rest of her family shared—for some reason it had stifled her, imprisoned her, and as a teenager she had ached for wider skies, broader horizons.

Cottingdean: Faye and Camilla would be waiting there for her, waiting to pounce on her with anxious questions about her mother.

How ironic it was that Faye, her sister-in-law, should be able to conjure from her mother the love she herself felt she had always been denied—and yet she could not resent Faye for it.

She sighed a little as she drove west heading for the M4. Poor Faye—life had not been kind to her, and she was too fragile…too vulnerable to withstand too many of its blows.

Sage remembered how Faye had looked the day she and David married…a pale, fragile, golden rose, openly adoring the man she was marrying, but that happiness had been short-lived. David had been killed in a tragic, useless road accident, leaving Faye to bring up Camilla on her own.

Sage hadn’t been surprised when her mother had invited Faye to make her home at Cottingdean; after all, in the natural course of events, David would eventually have inherited the estate. Faye had accepted her offer—the pretty ex-vicarage in the village, which David had bought for his bride, was sold and Faye and her one-year-old daughter moved into Cottingdean. They had lived there ever since and Camilla had never known any other home, any other way of life.

Sage smiled as she thought of her niece; almost eighteen years old and probably in the eyes of the world spoiled rotten by all of them. If the three of them suffered deeply in losing David then some of the suffering had been eased by the gift he had left behind him.

One day Cottingdean and everything that it represented would be Camilla’s, and already Sage had seen that her mother was discreetly teaching and training her one grandchild in the duties that would then fall on her shoulders.

Sage didn’t envy her that inheritance, but she did sometimes envy her her sunny, even-tempered disposition, and the warmth that drew people to her in enchantment.

As yet she was still very much a child, still not really aware of the power she held.

Sage sighed. Of all of them Camilla would be the most deeply affected if her mother… Her hands gripped the wheel of the Porsche until her knuckles whitened. Even now she could not allow her mind to form the word ‘die’, couldn’t allow herself to admit the possibility…the probability of her mother’s death.

Unanalysed but buried deep within the most secret, sacred part of her, the instinctive, atavistic part of her that governed her so strongly, lay the awareness that to have refused the promise her mother had demanded of her, or even to have given it and then not to have carried out the task, would somehow have been to have helped to still the pulse of her mother’s life force; it was as though there was some primitive power that linked the promise her mother had extracted from her with her fight against death, and if she broke that promise, even though her mother could not possibly know that it had been broken, it would be as though she had deliberately broken the symbolic silver thread of life.

She shuddered deeply, sharply aware as she had been on certain other occasions in her life of her own deep-rooted and sometimes disturbing awareness of feelings, instincts that had no logical basis.

Her long fingers tightened on the steering-wheel. She had none of her mother’s daintiness—that had bypassed her to be inherited by Camilla. She had nothing of her mother in her at all, really, and yet in that brief moment of contact, standing beside her mother’s bed, it had been for one terrifying millisecond of time as though their souls were one and she had felt as though it were her own her mother’s fear and pain, her desperation and her determination; and she had known as well how overwhelmingly important it was to her mother that she kept her promise.

Because her mother knew she was going to die? A spasm of agony contracted Sage’s body. She ought not to be feeling like this; she had dissociated herself from her mother years ago. Oh, she paid lip-service to their relationship, duty visits for her mother’s birthday in June, and at Christmas, although she had not spent that Christmas at Cottingdean. She had been working in the Caribbean on the villa of a wealthy French socialite. A good enough excuse for not going home, and one her mother had accepted calmly and without comment.

She turned off the motorway, following the familiar road signs, frowning a little at the increased heaviness of the traffic, noting the unsuitability of the enormous eight-wheel container trucks for the narrow country lane.

She overtook one of them on the small stretch of bypass several miles east of the village, glad to be free of its choking diesel fumes.

They had had a hard winter, making spring seem doubly welcome, the fresh green of the new hedges striking her eye as she drove past them. In the village nothing seemed to have changed, and it amused her that she should find that knowledge reassuring, making her pause to wonder why, when she had been so desperate to escape from the place and its almost too perfect prettiness, she experienced this dread of discovering that it had changed in any way.

She had rung the house from the hospital and spoken to Faye, simply telling her that she was driving down but not explaining why.

Whoever had first chosen the site for Cottingdean had chosen well. It sat with its back to the hills, facing south, shielded from the east wind by the ancient oaks planted on the edge of its parkland.

The original house had been built by an Elizabethan entrepreneur, a merchant who had moved his family from Bristol out into the quiet and healthy solitude of the countryside. It was a solid, sensible kind of house, built in the traditional style, in the shape of the letter E. Later generations had added a jumble of extra buildings to its rear, but, either through lack of wealth or incentive, no one had thought to do anything to alter its stone frontage with its ancient mullions and stout oak door.

The drive still ran to the rear of the house and the courtyard around it on which were the stables and outbuildings, leaving the front of the house and its vistas completely unspoiled.

Sage’s mother always said that the best way to see Cottingdean for the first time was on foot, crossing the bridge spanning the river, and then through the wooden gate set into the house’s encircling garden wall, so that one’s first view of it was through the clipped yews that guarded the pathway to the terrace and the front entrance.

When her mother had come to Cottingdean as a bride, the gardens which now were famous and so admired had been nothing more than a tangle of weeds interspersed with unproductive vegetable beds. Hard to imagine that now when one saw the smooth expanses of fresh green lawn, the double borders with their enviable collections of seemingly carelessly arranged perennials, the knot garden, and the yew hedges which did so much to add to the garden’s allure and air of enticing, hidden secrets. All this had been created by her mother—and not, as some people imagined, with money and other people’s hard work, but more often than not with her own hands.

As she drove into the courtyard Sage saw that Faye and Camilla were waiting for her. As soon as she stopped the car both of them hurried up to her, demanding in unison, ‘Liz…Gran…how is she?’

‘Holding her own,’ she told them as she opened the door and climbed out. ‘They don’t know the extent of her injuries as yet. I spoke to the surgeon. He said we could ring again tonight…’

‘But when can we see her?’ Camilla demanded eagerly.

‘She’s on the open visiting list,’ Sage told them. ‘But the surgeon’s told me that he’d like to have her condition stabilised for at least forty-eight hours before she has any more visitors.’

‘But you’ve seen her,’ Camilla pointed out.

Sage reached out and put her arm round her. She was so precious to them all in different ways, this child of David’s. ‘Only because she wanted to see me, Camilla…The surgeon was worried that with something preying on her mind she would—’

‘Something preying on her mind… What?’

‘Camilla, let Sage get inside and sit down before you start cross-questioning her,’ Faye reproved her daughter gently. ‘It isn’t a very comfortable drive down from London these days with all the traffic… I wasn’t sure what your plans are, but I’ve asked Jenny to make up your bed.’

‘I’m not sure either,’ Sage told her sister-in-law, following her inside and then pausing for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the long panelled passageway that led from the back to the front of the house.

When her mother had first come to Cottingdean this panelling had been covered in paint so thick that it had taken her almost a year to get it clean. Now it glowed mellowly and richly, making one want to reach and touch it.

‘I’ve asked Jenny to serve afternoon tea in the sitting-room,’ Faye told her, opening one of the panelled doors. ‘I wasn’t sure if you would have had time to have any lunch…’

Sage shook her head—food was the last thing she wanted.

The sitting-room was on the side of the house and faced west. It was decorated in differing shades of yellow, a golden, sunny room furnished with an eclectic collection of pieces of furniture which somehow managed to look as though they were meant to be together. Another of her mother’s talents.

It was a warm welcoming room, scented now with late-flowering pots of hyacinths in the exact shade of lavender blue of the carpet covering the floor. A fire burned in the grate, adding to the room’s air of welcome, the central heating radiators discreetly hidden away behind grilles.

‘Tell us about Gran, Sage,’ Camilla demanded, perching on a damask-covered stool at Sage’s feet. ‘How is she?’

She was a pretty girl, blonde like her mother, but, where Faye’s blondeness always seemed fairly insipid, Camilla’s was warm and alive. Facially she was like her grandmother, with the same startlingly attractive bone-structure and the same lavender-grey eyes.

‘Is she really going to be all right?’

Sage paused. Over her head, her eyes met Faye’s. ‘I hope so,’ she said quietly, and then added comfortingly, ‘She’s a very strong person, Camilla. If anyone has the will to fight, to hold on to life…’

‘We wanted to go to see her, but the hospital said she’d asked for you…’

‘Yes, there was something she wanted me to do.’

Both of them were looking at her, waiting…

‘She said she wanted us…all of us, to read her diaries… She made me promise that we would.’ Sage grimaced slightly. ‘I didn’t even know she kept a diary.’

‘I did,’ Camilla told them. ‘I came downstairs one night when I couldn’t sleep and Gran was in the library, writing. She told me then that she’d always kept one. Ever since she was fourteen, though she didn’t keep the earliest ones…’

Ridiculous to feel pain, rejection over something so insignificant, Sage told herself.

‘She kept the diaries locked in the big desk—the one that belonged to Grandpa,’ Camilla volunteered. ‘No one else has a key.’

‘I’ve got the key,’ Sage told her gruffly. They had given it to her at the hospital, together with everything else they had found in her mother’s handbag. She had hated that…hated taking that clinically packaged bundle of personal possessions… hated knowing why she had been given them.

‘I wonder why she wants us to read them,’ Faye murmured. She looked oddly anxious, dread shadowing her eyes.

Sage studied her. She had got so used to her sister-in-law’s quiet presence in the background of her mother’s life that she never questioned why it was that a woman—potentially a very attractive and certainly, at forty-one, a relatively young woman—should want to choose that kind of life for herself.

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 something, 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.