The Hidden Years. Penny Jordan
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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