The Hidden Years

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.

CHAPTER FIVE (#u9297192c-5fbb-5fea-9191-c5a976f555f4)

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.