The Hidden Years (54 page)

The shocked disgust in Faye's voice irritated Sage.

'For goodness' sake,' she broke in cynically, 'what
difference is it going to make to Mother? All I'm suggesting is using a
healthy diversionary tactic to prevent Camilla from going into a
headlong rebellion which could result in something far more dangerous
than sulks and a bout of tears.'

Faye went pale. 'You aren't suggesting that she'd defy me
and go to this affair behind my back?'

Was Faye really so naive? Sage wondered grimly. Couldn't
she see that by her refusal to find some middle road that she and
Camilla could travel together she was virtually alienating her
altogether, and that Camilla might see her refusal to accept that she
was almost adult and that she had a right to govern her own life, at
least in part, as the kind of challenge no right-minded teenager could
ignore?

'But she's never done anything like this,' Faye protested,
genuinely shocked and disturbed. 'She's always been so
well-behaved…'

When Sage remained silent she frowned. 'You think I'm
being unreasonable and unfair, don't you?' she said bitterly into the
silence. 'Can't you see that all I want to do is protect her? To keep
her safe to make sure…'

She broke off, but not before Sage had heard the fierce
passion in her voice.

'I'm not trying to criticise, Faye,' she said quietly.
'God knows in your shoes I'd have made every mistake in the book, and I
can understand how you feel, but you can't protect her all the
time… not without making her so vulnerable that the moment
she's exposed to reality she'll be in mortal danger, like a child kept
in a totally germ-free environment who is so vulnerable to infection
that it could die from a common cold.

'It's only natural that a girl of her age should want to
go out and have fun. I'm simply suggesting that if you allow her to
have some measure of that fun here in the relative safety of her own
home she'd be less at risk than if she did defy you and go off to this
party, which I agree with you sounds very suspect indeed.'

'A bit like saying that it's all right for a child to play
with matches as long as there's someone around with a fire
extinguisher,' Faye suggested sarcastically.

Sage refused to rise to the bait, saying only, 'Something
like that, yes. With any luck she'll burn her fingers and nothing else
and the shock of that small pain will ensure that she doesn't run the
risk of a much bigger and possibly fatal one.'

'I'm not listening to any more of this—' Faye
began, her mouth tightening, making her look oddly like her daughter.
She stopped as the phone rang imperiously.

Sage, who was closest to the receiver, reached for it, her
muscles tensing as she heard a female voice saying crisply that Dr
Ferguson wanted to speak with her.

She had to wait several seconds before she was put
through; something which would normally have irritated her
immeasurably, but on this occasion she found she was holding her
breath, mentally praying, Dear God, please let her be all right.
Please… please…

'Miss Danvers, I wanted to have a word with you about your
mother.'

How on earth did he always manage to sound so exhausted
and clinically distant at the same time? Sage wondered as she tightened
her grip on the receiver.

'She's holding her own very nicely now, and we think her
condition has stabilised enough for us to go ahead and
operate…'

Sage tried to speak and found she couldn't. Her mouth had
gone dry, her throat muscles locking against the spasm of fear that
wrenched through her.

'When?' was all she could croak into the heart-numbing
silence. She found herself wishing desperately she could see him. If
she could she was sure that by looking into his eyes she would know
whether or not he expected her mother to survive, whether he was simply
talking about an operation for form's sake, knowing how limited were
its chances of success, or whether he really believed her mother had a
fighting chance.

'The day after tomorrow.'

Two days… Two days, that was all. After
that…

'I… We… Can we see her first? Today?'

'Not today—we've only just got her stabilised.
She is conscious though, and the excitement and anxiety of having
visitors could destabilise her too easily. You can see her before we
operate. I'll get my secretary to get in touch with you and let you
know when…'

Sage was just about to hang up when he asked her in a
totally different voice, almost as though the question was being
dragged from him against his will, 'Your sister-in-law got home safely,
did she?'

Sage just stared across the table. Faye must have been
able to hear what he was saying because her face, which had been pale
and set, suddenly burned with the hot colour that crawled up under her
skin.

'Yes… yes, she did,' Sage told him, not taking
her eyes off Faye. 'Would you like to have a word with her?'

Faye was making frantic dismissive signals to her, anger
sparkling in her eyes.

The faint hesitancy had gone completely from his voice as
he denied curtly, 'No, that won't be necessary. Goodbye, Miss Danvers.'

Sage stared at her sister-in-law as she replaced the
receiver, waiting for Faye to say something, to make some comment, but
to her surprise Faye stood up awkwardly and said only, 'So they're
going to go ahead and operate… Oh, my God, I hope they know
what they're doing…'

'So do I,' Sage agreed. In the desk drawer there were
still several unread diaries, and suddenly she had a fierce urge to
read them now, as though there was a compelling need to do so before
her mother's operation.

There was plenty of time, she told herself… She
could read them tonight while she waited for Daniel Cavanagh to let her
know his decision—perhaps he might call today, instead of
tomorrow.

Daniel Cavanagh… Odd how she had never realised
he had met her mother, but then why should she? She and Liz had not
exactly been close confidantes over the years. Enmity rather than love
had been the strongest emotion between them. On her part at
least… The coldness her mother had always shown her, which
had so distressed her during the years of her growing-up, repelled and
angered her once she was adult, and yet the Liz she was coming to know
so well through the diaries was the exact opposite of the woman she had
always believed her mother to be. There was no coldness in that woman;
no lack of compassion, of emotion—far from it… So
why had she reacted so differently to her? She had heard of some women
rejecting a particular child. Was that -what had happened to her? Had
her mother rejected her for some reason—was that why she had
held her so much at a distance?

As an adult she had tried to analyse why her mother had
always been so distant from her, and had ended up persuading herself
that it was simply a matter of two personalities that would always
clash rather than meld. It could not be that she was the result of an
unwanted pregnancy; the mere fact that her mother had gone through what
surely, to a woman of her temperament, must have been a comparatively
difficult and embarrassing set of procedures to even conceive her had
to prove that she had been wanted.

She wondered whose had been the decision to initiate that
conception. There was such a large gap between herself and David that
she could not have been wanted as a companion for an only child.

For her mother to have even contemplated conception by
artificial insemination could only point to a deeply felt need for a
second child in its own right. Had it been perhaps that she had wanted
another boy?

What was the point in asking herself these questions now?
Maybe the diaries would give her the answers. All she could know was
that surely both her parents must have wanted a second child to have
agreed to the procedures necessary to produce her. She had long ago
come to accept that her father most probably had rejected her because
it was not his seed which had given her life…another man had
supplied that all-important spark, even if anonymously and totally
distantly, without any physical contact between himself and her mother.

It seemed ironic to her that she, with her wild, hotheaded
temperament, should be the product of something as cold and clinical as
conception via the instrument of modern technical science.

Jenny came in while she was absorbed in her own thoughts,
her eyebrows lifting when she saw she was alone.

'No one else hungry?' Jenny questioned, eyeing both Faye's
and Camilla's clean plates.

'They had a row,' Sage told her. 'We've had some news
about Mother. They're going to operate in two days. It will be very
much touch and go. They're going to let us see her
beforehand…'

She was surprised when Jenny reached out and hugged her.
Women rarely touched her. She had an aloofness about her which, married
to her elegance and sexuality, made her own sex unnecessarily wary with
her, and now, with Jenny's plump arms around her, she felt an
unexpected urge to give in to a surprisingly childish reaction to her
comfort by bursting into tears.

'It will be all right, Sage, love. You'll see. Your
mother's too strong to give up…'

'I hope so, Jenny, I hope so… Look, I'm going
out for half an hour or so. If anyone should ring…' She
paused, wondering if Daniel would ring while she was out, suspecting
that he might deliberately wait until his forty-eight hours were up
before making any attempt to get in touch with her.

'Tell them… Oh, just tell them I've gone out.'

She took the Porsche, driving into the village where she
stopped at the post office to buy herself a paper. The small
shop-cum-post office was packed. Everyone seemed to know about her
mother and wanted to commiserate with her. They also all seemed to have
strong and voluble views on the new road, which they also wanted to
communicate to her, so that it was almost an hour before she was free
to escape.

A restless gnawing urgency, reminiscent of the worst of
her teenage moods, seemed to have overtaken her; she didn't want to go
back to the house and Camilla and Faye's squabble, and yet she didn't
want to be too far away either. Why? In case Daniel suddenly
unexpectedly arrived? And what if he did? It wouldn't mean anything
other than that he had come to a decision. You didn't blackmail a man
like Daniel and suddenly miraculously transform his dislike and
contempt both for you and for his own physical desire for you into
respect and… And what? What was it she wanted from him?

Nothing, she told herself savagely, climbing into the
Porsche and jerkily starting the engine. She didn't want anything from
him.

Not even the satisfaction of wiping away the memory of how
he had rejected her—not even the satisfaction of supplanting
it with another and far more satisfactory reaction. Her body tensed, a
wild pulse suddenly throbbing at the base of her throat, her skin tight
with heat and shock. Why, why, why did the thought of Daniel finding
her desirable…wanting her…being aroused by her
have such an immediate and erotic effect on her own senses?

Cynically she answered her own question. If you don't know
the answer to that one by now, my girl, then you haven't learned much
over the years.

She knew the answer all right, but she didn't want to
confront the reasons behind it.

Forget Daniel Cavanagh, she warned herself, and yet she
still drove north of the village instead of south, still turned the car
down the lane that led to the land Daniel had bought, still parked it
there, a showy scarlet monstrosity that suddenly had lost its appeal
for her.

What was she trying to prove with it? That she could
afford to buy it, that she could drive as well as any man, that she
liked danger and excitement—was she really still so immature?
She eyed the car with disfavour as she clambered out of it and mentally
made herself a promise to replace it. What with, though? Perhaps an
Aston Martin. She chuckled to herself at the improbability of her ever
being able to afford such a luxury, and she was still smiling as she
climbed over the stile and down on to the overgrown path that led to
the Old Hall.

Derelict now, it had gates to its drives which were
padlocked and bolted. Agnes Hazelby, its last occupant, had lived in it
in a state of eccentric stubbornness, refusing to admit that the place
was falling down around her.

From the top of the slight hill where she was standing,
she had an uninterrupted view of the house. Larger at one stage than
Cottingdean, the oldest section had been built at the same time, with a
wing being added on by a Georgian owner and another by his Victorian
successor.

The Victorian wing had been destroyed by fire; the ancient
lathe and plaster mid-section was still standing-just—while
the Georgian wing, cursed with the inheritance of sound building
principles being sacrificed for outward show, had massive cracks in its
walls and was very obviously subsiding beneath the weight of its
top-heavy structure on insubstantial foundations.

And yet there was an odd raffish charm about it, a
compelling, almost laughable arrogance that demanded recognition and
respect.

She was not surprised that Agnes had stipulated that
whoever bought the land must not tear down the house, and yet what use
was the land to. Daniel if he didn't? The type of people who would buy
his expensive, modern executive houses would never tolerate an eyesore
like the Old Hall on their doorsteps.

It surprised her that she should feel such sharp and
searing pain in the knowledge that he had lied and cheated. She ought
to be glad…

Slowly she made her way down the path, not really knowing
what she was doing here, why she was bothering, what she hoped to
find… or why she should even need to think there might be
something to find.