Penny Jordan - The Hidden Years

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.