Читать книгу The Hidden Years - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 5

JUDGED by the laws of logic, the accident should never have happened at all.

A quiet—or at least quiet by London’s frenetic standards—side-street; a clear, bright spring morning; a taxi driver who prided himself on his accident-free record; a slender, elegant woman who looked and moved like someone ten years younger than she actually was; none of the parts that went to make up the whole was in any way logically vulnerable, and yet, as though fate had decreed what must happen and was determined that it would happen, even though the woman crossed the road with ease and safety, even though the taxi driver had seen her and logged the fact that she had crossed the road ahead of him, even though the pavement and road were free of debris and frost, for some reason, as she stepped on to the pavement, the woman’s heel caught on the kerb, throwing her off balance so that she turned and fell, not on to the relative safety of the pavement, but into the road and into the path of the taxi, whose driver was safely and law-abidingly not driving along its crown in the sometimes dangerous and arrogant manner of taxi drivers the world over, but well into his correct side of the street.

He saw the woman fall, and braked instinctively, but it was too late. The sickening sensation of soft, vulnerable human flesh hitting his cab was a sound he would carry with him the rest of his life. His passenger, a pin-stripe-suited businessman in his early fifties, was jolted out of his seat by the impact. Already people were emerging from the well-kept, expensive houses that lined the street.

Someone must have rung for an ambulance because he could hear its muted siren wailing mournfully like a dirge… He could hardly bear to look at the woman, he was so sure that she must be dead, and so he stood sickly to one side as the ambulance arrived and the professionals took over.

‘She’s alive…just,’ he heard someone say, and in his mind’s eye he pictured the people somewhere who were still at this moment oblivious to the tragedy about to darken their lives.

Somewhere this woman would have family, friends, dependants—she had had that look about her, the confident, calm look of a woman in control of her life and those lives that revolved around her own. Somewhere those people still went about their daily business, unaware and secure.

Her mother, injured in a road accident and now lying close to death in a hospital bed—it seemed impossible, Sage thought numbly; her mother was invulnerable, omnipresent, indestructible, or so she had always seemed.

Vague, disconnected, unreal thoughts ricocheted through her brain: memories, fears, sensations. The Porsche, which had been a celebratory thirtieth birthday present to herself, cut through the heavy traffic, her physical ability to control and manoeuvre the expensive piece of machinery oddly unaffected by her mental turmoil.

There was a sensation in the pit of her stomach which she remembered from her childhood and adolescence: an uncomfortable mixture of apprehension, pain and anger. How dared her mother do this to her? How dared she intrude on the life she had built for herself? How dared she reach out, as she had reached out so very many times in the past, to cast her influence, her presence over her own independence?

She wasn’t a child any more, she was mature, an adult, so why now was she swamped with those old and oh, so familiar feelings of resentment and guilt, of pain and anger and, most betraying of all, of fear?

The hospital wasn’t far away, which was presumably why they had contacted her and not Faye. And then she remembered that she was her mother’s closest blood relative…the next of kin. A tiny tremor of pure acid-sharp horror chilled her skin. Her mother, dying… She had told herself for so long that she felt nothing for the woman who had given birth to her—that her mother’s treachery and deceit had made it impossible for any emotion other than hatred to exist between them—that it was doubly shocking to feel this dread…this anguish.

She turned into the hospital, parked her car, and climbed out of it, frowning, the movement of her elegant, lithe body quick and impatient. A typical Leo was how Liz Danvers had once ruefully described her second child: fiery, impetuous, impatient, intemperate and intelligent.

That had been almost twenty years ago. Since then time had rubbed smooth some of the rough edges of her restless personality, experience gentling and softening the starkness of a nature that weaker souls often found too abrasive. Now in her early thirties, she had learned to channel those energies which had once driven her calmer and far more self-possessed mother behind the wall of reserve and dignity which Sage had wasted so much of her childhood trying to batter down, in an effort to reach the elusive core of her personality which she had sensed her mother withheld from her; just as she had always felt that in some way she was not the child her mother had wanted her to be.

But then of course she was not, and never could be, another David. David… her brother. She missed him even now…missed his gentle wise counsel, missed his love, his understanding. David…everyone who had known him had loved him, and deservedly so. To describe his virtues was to make him appear insipid, to omit due cognisance of the essential sweetness and selflessness of both David the child and David the man, which had made him so deeply loved by everyone who knew him. But she had never been jealous of David, had never felt that, but for him, her mother would have loved her more or better…so the schism between them went too deep to be explained away by a maternal preference for a more favoured sibling. Once it had hurt, that knowledge that there was something within her that turned the love her mother seemed to shower on everything and everyone else around her into enmity and dislike, but maturity had taught her acceptance if nothing else, acceptance and the ability to distance herself from those things in her past which were too painful to confront. Things which she avoided, just as she avoided all but the most necessary contact with her mother. She seldom went home to Cottingdean these days.

Cottingdean: the house itself, the garden, the village; all of them her mother’s domain, all of them created and nurtured by her mother’s will. They were her mother’s world.

Cottingdean. How she had hated and resented the place’s demands on her mother throughout her childhood, transferring to it the envy and dislike she had never felt for David. Too young then to analyse why it was that her mother seemed to hold her at a distance, to dislike her almost, she had jealously believed that it was because of Cottingdean and its demands upon her mother’s time; that Cottingdean meant far more to her mother than she ever could.

In that perhaps she had been right, and why not? she thought cynically—Cottingdean had certainly repaid to her mother the time and devotion she had invested in it, in a way that she, her child, her daughter, never could.

Cottingdean, David, her father—these had been the main, the important components of her mother’s life, and she had always felt that she stood apart from them, outside them, an interloper…an intruder; how fiercely and verbally she had resented that feeling.

She pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the hospital’s reception area. A young nurse listened as she gave her name, and then consulted a list nervously before telling her, ‘Your mother is in the intensive care unit. If you’d like to wait in reception, the surgeon in charge of her case would like to have a word with you.’

Self-control had been something she had learned long ago, and so Sage allowed nothing of what she was feeling to be betrayed by her expression as she thanked the nurse and walked swiftly over to a seat. Was her mother dead already? Was that why the surgeon wanted to see her? A tremor of unwanted sensation seized her, a panicky terror that made her want to cry out like a child. No, not yet… There’s too much I want to know… Too much that needs to be said.

Which was surely ridiculous given the fact that she and her mother had long ago said all that there was to say to one another… When she herself had perhaps said too much, revealed too much. Been hurt too much.

As she waited, her body taut, her face smooth of any expression, even in repose there was something about her that reflected her inherent inner turbulence: her dark red hair so vibrant with life and energy, her strong-boned face quick and alive, the green eyes that no one knew quite where she had inherited as changeable as the depths of a northern lake under spring skies. The nurse glanced at her occasionally, envying her. She herself was small and slightly plump, a pretty girl in her way, but nowhere near in the class of the stunning woman who sat opposite her. There was elegance in the narrowness of her ankles and wrists, beauty that owed nothing to youth or fashion in the shaping of her face, mystery and allure in the colour of her hair and eyes, and something about every smallest movement of her body that drew the eye like a magnet.

Somewhere in this huge anonymous building lay her mother, Sage told herself, impossible though that seemed. Her mother had always seemed almost immortal, the pivot on which so many lives turned. Even hers, until she had finally rebelled and broken away to be her own person. Yes, her mother had always seemed indestructible, inviolate, an immutable part of the universe. The perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect employer—the epitome of all that her own peer group was striving so desperately to achieve. And she had achieved it against the kind of odds her generation would never have to face. Her mother was a woman thirty years ahead of her time, a woman who had taken a sick man, at one time close to death, and kept him alive for over twenty-five years. A woman who had become the mistress of a sick house and a dying estate and had turned them both into monuments of what could be achieved if one was single-minded and determined enough, if one had the skill, and the vision, and the sheer dogged will-power needed to perform such miracles.

Was this perhaps the root cause of the disaffection between her and her mother? Not that her mother had not loved her enough, but that she had always unknowingly been jealous and resentful of her mother’s gifts? Was she jealous of her mother’s achievements? Was she masking those feelings by letting herself believe that it was her right to feel as she did…that the guilt, the betrayal, the blame were her mother’s and not her own?

‘Miss Danvers?’

Her head snapped round as the impatient male voice addressed her. She was used to the male awareness that momentarily overwhelmed this doctor’s professionalism. It was a dubious gift, this dark, deep vein of sexuality that seemed to draw men to her in desire and need. Desire but not love. Something sharp and bitter moved inside her—an old wound, but one that had never healed.

To banish it she asked crisply, ‘My mother…?’

‘Alive. At the moment,’ he told her, anticipating her question. He was focusing on her properly now, banishing his earlier awareness of her; a tall, thin man who was probably only six or seven years older than she was herself, but whose work had aged him prematurely. A gifted, intelligent man, but one who, at the moment, looked exhausted and impatient.

Fear smothered Sage’s instinctive sympathy as she waited for him to go on.

‘Your mother was unconscious when she was brought in—as yet we have no idea how serious her internal injuries are.’

‘No idea…’ Sage showed her shock. ‘But…’

‘We’ve been far too busy simply keeping her alive to do anything more than run the most cursory of tests. She’s a very strong woman, otherwise she’d never have survived. She’s conscious at the moment and she’s asking for you. That’s why I wanted to see you. Patients, even patients as gravely injured as your mother, react very quickly to any signs of distress or fear they pick up from their visitors, especially when those visitors are close family.’

‘My mother was asking for me?’ Sage queried, astonished.

‘Yes!’ He frowned at her. ‘We had the devil of a job tracing you…’

Her mother had asked for her. Sage couldn’t understand it. Why her? She would have expected her to ask for Faye, David’s wife—David’s widow—or for Camilla, David and Faye’s daughter, but never for her.

‘My sister-in-law—’ she began, voicing her thoughts, but the surgeon shook his head brusquely.

‘We have notified her, but at this stage we have to limit your mother’s visitors. There’s obviously something on her mind, something distressing her… With a patient as gravely ill as your mother, anything we can do to increase her chances of recovery, no matter how small, is vitally important, which is why I must stress that it is crucial that whatever it is your mother wants to say to you, however unlikely or inexplicable it seems, you must try to find a way of reassuring her. It’s essential that we keep her as calm as we possibly can.’

The look he was giving her suggested that he had severe doubts that she would be able to do any such thing. Doubts which she herself shared, Sage acknowledged wryly.

‘If you’d like to follow me,’ he said now, and, as she followed him down the narrow, empty corridor leading off the main reception area, Sage was amused by the way he kept a wider than necessary physical distance between them. Was he a little intimidated by her? He wouldn’t be the first man to react to her like that. All the nice men, the ones with whom she might have found something approaching peace and contentment, shared this ambiguous, wary attitude towards her. It was her looks, of course: they couldn’t see beyond them, beyond the dangerous sensuality they invoked, making them see her as a woman who would never need their tenderness, never make allowances for their vulnerabilities. They were wrong, though. She had far too many vulnerabilities of her own to ever mock or make light of anyone else’s. And as for tenderness—she smiled a bitter smile—only she knew how much and how often she had ached for its healing balm.

‘This way,’ he told her. Up ahead of them were the closed doors barring the way to the intensive care unit.

Sage shivered as he pushed open the door, an instinctive desire to stop, to turn and run, almost halting her footsteps. Somewhere beyond those doors lay her mother. Had she really asked for her? It seemed so out of character, so unbelievable almost, and the shock of it had thrown her off guard, disturbing the cool, indifferent, self-protective shield she had taken up all those years ago when the pain of her mother’s final betrayal had destroyed her reluctant, aching love for her.

She shivered again, trying to recognise the unfamiliar image of her mother which the surgeon had held up for her. Surely in such extremity as her mother now suffered a person must always ask for whoever it was they most loved, and she had known almost all her life that for some reason her mother’s love, given so freely and fiercely to others, had never really been given to her. Duty, care, responsibility…they had all been there, masquerading under the guise of mother love, but Sage had learned young to distinguish between reality and fiction and she had known then, had felt then that insurmountable barrier that existed between them.

As she hesitated at the door, the surgeon turned impatiently towards her.

‘Are you sure she asked for me?’ she whispered.

As he watched her for a moment he saw the self-confident, sensually stunning woman reduced to the nervous, uncertain child. It was the dangerous allure of seeing that child within such a woman that made him say more brusquely than he otherwise might, ‘There’s nothing for you to fear. Your mother’s injuries are all internal. Outwardly…’

Sage glared at him. Did he really think she was so weak, so self-absorbed that it was fear of what she might see that kept her chained here outside the ward? And then her anger died as swiftly as it had been born. It wasn’t his fault; what could he know of the complexities of her relationship with her mother? She didn’t really understand them herself. She pushed open the door and walked into the ward. It was small, with only four beds, and bristling with equipment.

Her mother was the ward’s only occupant. She lay on one of the high, narrow beds, surrounded by machinery.

How tiny she looked, Sage marvelled as she stared down at her. Her once naturally fair hair, now discreetly tinted blonde, was hidden out of sight beneath a cap; her mother’s skin, so white and pale, and so different from her own with its decidedly olive tint, could have been the skin of a woman in her late forties, not her early sixties, Sage reflected as she absorbed an outer awareness of the tubes connected to her mother’s body, which she deliberately held at bay as she concentrated instead on the familiar and less frightening aspects of her still figure.

Her breathing was laboured and difficult, but the eyes fixed on her own hadn’t changed—cool, clear, all-seeing, all-knowing… a shade of grey which could deepen to lavender or darken to slate depending on her mood.

She was frowning now, but it was not the quick, light frown with which Sage was so familiar, the frown that suggested that whoever had caused it had somehow not just failed but disappointed as well. How many times had that frown marked the progress of her own life, turning her heart to lead, shredding her pride, reducing her to rebellious, helpless rage?

This frown, though, was different, deeper, darker, the eyes that watched her full of unfamiliar shadows.

‘Sage…’

Was it instinct alone that made her cover her mother’s hand with her own, that made her sit down at her side, and say as evenly as she could, ‘I’m here, Mother…’?

Mother…what a cold, distant word that was, how devoid of warmth and feeling. As a small child she had called her ‘Mummy’. David, ten years her senior, had preferred the affectionately teasing ‘Ma’, but then David had been permitted so much more licence, had been given so much more love… Stop it, she warned herself. She wasn’t here to dwell on the past. The past was over.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered softly. ‘It’s all right, Mother. You’re going to be fine…’

Just for a moment the grey eyes lightened and mocked. They seemed to say that they knew her platitude for exactly what it was, making Sage once more feel a child in the presence of an adult.

‘Sage, there’s something I want you to do…’ The words were laboured and strained. Sage had to bend closer to the bed to catch them. ‘My diaries, in my desk at Cottingdean… You must read them… All of you…’

She stopped speaking and closed her eyes while Sage stared at her. What on earth was her mother talking about? What diaries? Had her mind perhaps been affected by her injuries?

She stared uncertainly at the woman in the bed, as her mother opened her eyes and demanded fiercely, ‘Promise me, Sage… Promise me you will do as I say … Promise me…’

Dutifully, docilely almost, Sage swallowed and whispered, ‘I promise…’ and then, unable to stop herself, she cried out, ‘But why me…? Why did you ask for me? Why not Faye? She’s so much closer to you…’

The grey eyes seemed to mock her again. Without her knowing it, her fingers had curled tightly round the hand she was still holding.

‘Faye doesn’t have your ruthlessness, your discipline… Neither does she have your strength.’ The voice dropped to a faint sigh.

Beneath her fingers, Sage felt the thready pulse flicker and falter and a fear greater than anything she had ever known, a fear that overwhelmed anger, resentment, pain and even love poured through her and she cried out harshly, ‘Mother…no,’ without really knowing what she was crying out for.

Then she heard the light, quiet voice saying reassuringly, ‘I’m here, Sage. When you read the diaries, then you will understand.’ She closed her eyes, so obviously exhausted that for a moment Sage thought she had actually died.

It was the surgeon’s firm touch on her arm, his quiet words of reassurance that stilled her panic.

‘She wants me to read her diaries,’ she told him, too bewildered to understand her need to confide, to understand…

‘Sometimes when people are closest to death they sense what is happening to them and they dwell on certain aspects of their lives and the lives of those around them.’

‘I never even knew she kept a diary.’ Sage was speaking more to herself than him. ‘I never knew… She made me promise,’ she told him inconsequentially, knowing already that it was a promise she must keep. A promise she had to keep, and yet already she was dreading doing so, dreading what she might read…dreading perhaps confronting the truth and the pain she thought she had long ago put behind her.

As the surgeon escorted her from the ward, she cast a last, lingering look at her mother. ‘Will she…?’

Will she die? she wanted to ask, even while she knew that she didn’t want to know the answer, that she wanted to hold on to the hope…the belief that because her mother was alive she would live.

She had often heard people say that there was no pain, no guilt, no awareness of life passing too quickly more sharp-edged than when an adult experienced the death of a parent.

Her father had died while she was a teenager, his death a release to him and something that barely touched her life. She had been at home then. Her father, because of his poor health, had never played a large part in her life. He was a remote, cosseted figure on whom her mother’s whole life pivoted and yet somehow someone who was distant from her own.

Until today she had thought she had stopped loving her mother over fifteen years ago, her love eroded by too much pain, too much betrayal—and she had decided then that the only way to survive the catalyst of that betrayal was for her to forge a separate, independent life of her own.

And that was what she had done.

She now had her own career, her own life. A life that took her from London to New York, from New York to LA to Rome, to Paris, to all those places in the new world where people had heard by word of mouth of her skills as a muralist.

There were houses all over the world—the kind of houses owned by people who would never dream of wanting them to be featured in even the most upmarket of glossy publications—where one of her murals was a prized feature of the décor. She was sought after and highly paid, working only on favoured commissions. Her life was her own…or so she had thought.

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.

The parquet floor was old and uneven, the rugs lying on it rich pools of colour. The library lay across the hall from the sitting-room, behind the large drawing-room. She stared at the door, and turned swiftly away from it, towards the kitchen, to find Charles and ask him to make up the fire.

While he was doing so she went upstairs. Her bedroom had been redecorated when she was eighteen. Her mother had chosen the furnishings and the colours as a surprise, and she had, Sage admitted, chosen them well.

The room was free of soft pretty pastels, which would have been far too insipid for her, and instead was decorated in the colours she loved so much: blues, reds, greens; colours that drew out the beauty of the room’s panelled walls.

The huge four-poster bed had been made on the estate from their own wood; her name and date of birth were carved on it, and the frieze decorating it had carved in the wood the faces of her childhood pets. A lot of care had gone into its design and execution; to anyone else the bed would have been a gift of great love, but she had seen it merely as the execution of what her mother conceived to be her duty. Her daughter was eighteen and of age, and therefore she must have a gift commensurate with such an occasion.

In the adjoining bathroom, with its plain white suite and dignified Edwardian appearance, Sage washed her hands and checked her make-up. Her lipstick needed renewing, and her hair brushing.

She smiled mirthlessly at herself as she did so… Still putting off the evil hour…why? What was there after all to fear… to reveal… ? She already knew the story of her mother’s life as everyone locally knew it. It was as blameless and praiseworthy as that of any saint.

Her mother had come to this house as a young bride, with a husband already seriously ill, his health destroyed by the war. They had met when her mother worked as a nursing aide, fallen in love and married and come to live here at Cottingdean, the estate her father had inherited from a cousin.

Everyone knew her mother had arrived here when she was eighteen to discover that the estate her husband had drawn for her in such glowing colours—the colours of his own childhood—had become a derelict eyesore.

Everyone knew how her mother had worked to restore it to what it had once been. How she had had the foresight and the drive to start the selective breeding programme with the estate’s small flock of sheep that was to produce the very special fleece of high-quality wool.

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.’