The Hidden Years

‘Yes. He was most insistent about speaking with you… Oh, and when you didn’t come out for your evening meal—we didn’t like to disturb you—I rang the hospital again. Liz is still holding her own…’

Holding her own… Sage slowly closed the diary, wincing as she felt pins and needles prickling her legs. She had been curled in her mother’s chair in a semi-foetal position for so long that her body had gone numb without her even noticing it.

She glanced at her watch, half shocked to discover it was gone midnight, and remembered that she had intended to ring Alexi at eleven, thinking that by that time she would have had more than enough of her mother’s diaries with their clinical, businesslike description of how she had run her life.

The reality couldn’t have been a greater contrast to what she had expected. In some ways she found it hard to believe that the girl who had written so openly and painfully in the diaries, pouring out her deepest emotions and vulnerabilities, was her mother. Even more astonishing was that her mother had wanted her to read them.

Would she in the same circumstances have been able to sanction such an intrusion into her past, into her life?

Perhaps if she had thought that she might be dying…if this might be her last chance to reach out…to explain.

She shivered suddenly. When Faye had interrupted her she had been so reluctant to stop reading, so very reluctant that initially she had resented her intrusion…but now, sharply, she didn’t want to read any more, didn’t want to…to what? What was she afraid of discovering?

‘Alexi,’ Faye reminded her diffidently.

Poor Faye. No doubt Alexi had been extremely rude to her, demanding that Sage be brought to the phone. Alexi was a very demanding man; despite his veneer, inwardly he still believed that man was infinitely superior to woman and that it was woman’s duty to pander to man’s needs and desires.

‘I’m sorry, Faye,’ she apologised now as she stood up, replaced the diary in the desk drawer and automatically locked it.

As she had anticipated, when she picked up the receiver Alexi was seething. ‘You said you’d ring this evening,’ he challenged her. ‘Where were you?’

Sage had an obstinate streak in her make-up which she herself considered to be a childish flaw and one which she had long ago mastered, but abruptly it resurfaced as she heard the arrogant challenge in Alexi’s voice. Suddenly those things which initially she had found amusingly attractive in him began to grate.

‘I said I’d try to ring you, Alexi,’ she corrected him flatly. ‘As it happens, I’ve been too busy. I’m sorry I had to break our date at such short notice…’

She could tell he was fighting to control his breathing and with it his temper, and she felt a brief resurgence of mocking contempt.

Poor Alexi, he must want her very much if he was prepared to tolerate her defiance. But his tolerance wouldn’t last very long or go very far. She had no illusions; Alexi desired and intended to dominate her, to subjugate her if he could. In bed he would be a powerful, commanding lover, and ultimately a selfish one. He would have no doubts or hesitancy about his prowess; her eagerness for his lovemaking, her desire to please him sexually would be things he would expect as his due. Oh, at first he would be prepared to indulge and coax her, but once he was sure of her…

It was a game she had played so often before…and yet suddenly she was tired of it, sickened by it just as though she had suffered a surfeit of a once favourite food, her nausea tinged with faint self-disgust.

Why? Because of the innocent outpourings of a girl so naïve, so trusting that to read them had brought into sharp focus the girl she herself had once been and the woman she now was?

Or was it simply that the times and their low-key sexual climate, their caution, their emphasis on separate contained lives geared for high materialistic achievement, were at last beginning to have their effect on her?

Whatever the reason, she suddenly knew that she was bored with this game she was playing with Alexi, and with that knowledge came a faint twinge of self-dislike because she knew that she would have gone to bed with him, probably simply to prove to him that in bed or out of it he couldn’t dominate her…certainly not because she was overwhelmed by physical desire for him. Which made her stop and think, and try to remember the last time she had felt like that…the last time she actually wanted the man rather than merely the act of sex, as a means of demonstrating her power over him…and over her mother, and the strict morality with which she had seemed to live her life. Was that what it had been all about…the men, the sexual freedom…? Had it not just been because, having loved so desperately and then lost that love, she had turned herself into a woman for whom sex was simply an appetite which she appeased whenever the need seized her? Was it an outright act of defiance, chosen deliberately to shock and hurt her mother?

‘Sage, are you still there?’

Now Alexi wasn’t bothering to control his irritation. Once that would have made her smile, the small secret triumphant smile that she knew drove her lovers mad, but now she merely dismissed the knowledge that she had annoyed him, as uncaringly as though it meant nothing to her…which it didn’t, she realised tiredly.

Suddenly there was an unpleasant taste in her mouth, a tiredness in her body and her mind, a weariness with her life and everything it embraced.

‘Yes. I’m still here, Alexi,’ she responded. ‘I’m sorry if you’re annoyed. I should have rung you, but—’

‘It isn’t your telephone call I want, Sage. It’s you, you…here with me…filling my bed, the way you’ve been filling my mind. You know I want you, Sage, you know how good we’d be together. Let me come down there now and drive you back to London. Your sister-in-law told me that your mother’s condition is stable. You can do nothing for her down there…here you would be closer to the hospital, in any case. Let me take care of you, Sage. You know how much I want to…’

How caressing his voice was, low and deep, soft as velvet, and how he knew how to use it, she acknowledged absently.

‘No, I’m sorry, Alexi, that’s impossible. I’m needed here.’

Or rather she needed to be here, she acknowledged. Admitting it was like discovering a small piece of grit on an otherwise smooth surface, irritating… challenging… absorbing…so absorbing that she missed what Alexi was saying to her.

Suddenly she was irritated both by him and by herself. She didn’t want him; she had probably never really wanted him. The contrast between her own behaviour and that of the young untried girl in the diaries was sharply painful. Whatever else her faults might be, they did not include self-deception. She was, she realised, measuring herself against her mother, just as she had done so often during her formative years, and once again she was discovering how far she fell short of her mother’s standards and achievements, how far she fell short of her own ideals.

She didn’t want Alexi, so why was she playing this unnecessary and unrewarding game with him?

‘It’s no use, Alexi,’ she told him flatly, ‘I’m not coming back to London tonight, and, even if I were, it would be to sleep alone in my own flat. Find someone else, Alexi. The game’s over.’

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 somewhere 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 naïvely 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—’