Penny Jordan - The Hidden Years

‘Mmm…’ she answered, responding to Camilla’s question, her forehead furrowing. She had read them, but nothing in them had given her any clue as to how her mother had hoped to prevent the construction of the new motorway. Far from it.

‘You don’t think we’ll be able to stop them, do you?’ Camilla guessed astutely.

‘It’s too soon to say, but it doesn’t look very hopeful. If the road was being constructed near a site of particular archaeological significance, or special natural beauty, then we’d have something to work on, but as far as I can see—’

‘Gran would have found a way,’ Camilla told her, almost belligerently. ‘But then I suppose you don’t really care anyway, do you? I mean, you don’t care about Cottingdean…’

‘Camilla!’ Faye objected, flushing a little. ‘That’s most unfair and untrue…’

‘No, she’s right,’ Sage said as calmly as she could, replacing her teacup in its saucer. ‘I don’t feel the same way about Cottingdean as the rest of you. It’s a beautiful house, but it is only a house—not a sacred trust. But it isn’t just the house that’s at risk; it’s the village as well, people’s livelihoods. Without the mill there’d be no industry here to keep people in jobs; without jobs the village would soon start to disintegrate—but I don’t expect that the planners in Whitehall will be inclined to put the needs of a handful of villagers above those of road-hungry motorists.’

‘Gran has offered them another site on the other side of the water meadows…’

‘Yes, on land which is marshy and unstable, and which will require a good deal of expensive drainage and foundation work on it before it can be used, as well as adding countless millions of pounds to the cost.’

‘I don’t know why you’re going to the meeting, when it’s obvious that you don’t care—’

‘That’s enough, Camilla,’ Faye reproved.

‘I do care, Cam. I just don’t know how Mother planned to persuade the authorities to reroute the road… I’ve no idea what she had in mind, and I can’t find out from what I’ve read in the files. I’ve no doubt she had some plan of action in view, but whatever it is only she knows… The best I can hope for is to use delaying tactics and to hope that somehow or other a miracle will occur enabling Mother to take over before it’s too late.’

Since all of them knew just how much of a miracle would be needed for that, the three of them fell silent.

She wasn’t looking forward to the evening’s meeting, Sage acknowledged later as she went upstairs to change. She was not accomplished at using guile—she was too blunt, too tactless. She did not have her mother’s gifts of subtle persuasion and coercion. She had no experience of dealing with officialdom, nor a taste for it either. She remembered that David had once tried to teach her to play chess and how he had chided her in that gentle, loving way he had had for her impatience and lack of logic, her inability to think forwards and to plan coolly and mathematically. No, the skills of the negotiator were not among her gifts, but for tonight she must somehow find, somehow adopt at least a facsimile of her mother’s mantle.

She recognised with wry amusement how much she was already changing, how much she was already tempering her own beliefs and attitudes—even her mode of dress.

Tonight she was automatically rejecting the nonchalant casualness of the clothes she bought impulsively and sometimes disastrously, falling in love with the richness of their fabric, the skill of their cut or simply the beauty of their colour and then so often finding once she got them home that she had nothing with which to wear them.

Not for her the carefully planned and organised wardrobe, the cool efficiency of clothes chosen to project a certain image…

But tonight she would need the armouring of that kind of image, and as she rifled through her wardrobe she recognised ruefully that the best she could manage was a cream silk shirt worn with a fine wool crěpe coffee-coloured skirt designed by Alaia. If it clung rather more intimately to her body than anything her mother might have chosen to wear, then hopefully that fact would be concealed by the table behind which she was bound to be seated.

An elegant Chanel-style knitted jacket in the same cream as the shirt would add a touch of authority to the outfit, she decided, taking it off its hanger and glancing at her watch.

Seven o’clock…time she was on her way. She thought fleetingly of the diaries, acknowledging something she had deliberately been pushing to the back of her mind all day.

At the same time as she was eager to read more, to discover more about this stranger who was her mother, she was also reluctant to do so, afraid almost… Of what? Of finding out that her mother was human and fallible, and in doing so finding out that she herself was no longer able to hold on to her anger and resentment? Why should she want to hang on to them?

Perhaps because they added weight and justification to her refusal to allow her mother into any part of her life, her determination to sever the emotional ties between them and to keep them severed—to continue to punish her mother. But for what? For failing to love her as she had loved David? For destroying her happiness—for allowing Scott to be taken from her? Or was she simply still inside an angry, resentful child, kicking at her mother’s door, demanding that her attention and her love be given exclusively to her…?

Exclusively… She frowned at her reflection in the mirror. Had she wanted that? Had she wanted her mother to love her exclusively…? Surely not. She had always known that love must be shared. Or had she? Had she perhaps always inwardly resented having to share her mother with anyone else, refusing to acknowledge her right to love others, just as she had refused to acknowledge Scott’s right to share his for her with his father, to feel that he owed his father a loyalty, a duty that went before even his love for her?

They had quarrelled about that, and bitterly, Scott insisting that before they could marry he had to return to Australia and explain the situation to his father. He had wanted her to go with him but she had refused. Why should she subject herself to his father’s inspection when they both knew that he would reject her? Why couldn’t Scott see that there was no need for them to bow to his father’s will, that they could make a comfortable life for themselves away from his father’s vast acres, that they did not need either his father or her mother?

‘But can’t you see,’ he had asked her, ‘they need us?’

She had lost her temper then… They had quarrelled angrily, almost violently on her part. When Scott had slowed down the car, she had reached for the door, surely never really intending to open it and jump out; but in the heat of the moment…her unforgivable, relentless temper had driven her so hard. Ridden her so hard.

Anyway, now she would never know what she might or might not have done, because Scott had reached across her to grab the door-handle and in doing so had failed to see the oncoming car.

Ironically it had been his arm across her body that had protected her from greater injury and prevented him from saving himself, so that he took the full brunt of the collision, so that he suffered the fate which should by rights have been hers…

Oh, God, she couldn’t start thinking about that now… Not now. Hadn’t she paid enough, suffered enough, endured enough guilt to wash away even the blackest sin?

Downstairs the grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour. Thankfully she abandoned the painful introspection of her thoughts and hurried downstairs.

‘We’ve put you next to the man from the construction company,’ Anne Henderson told Sage once their mutual introductions were over. ‘I don’t seem to have a note of his name… Our secretary’s little boy has been rushed into hospital for an emergency appendix operation…quite the worst possible time for something like that to happen but what can you do…? Fortunately I do have records of the names of the two people from the Ministry. They’re a Mr Stephen Simmonds and a Ms Helen Ordman. They’re all due to arrive together. I hope they won’t be late. The meeting’s due to start at seven forty-five.’