The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  She got out of her car, a small, slender woman whose comparative youth was glaringly out of place among Fellingham's residents. Several of them stared at her with envy and a touch of resentment, until they saw where she was going.

  The house was one of the largest in the quiet road. Once a private home, now it was discreetly protected from the outside world with iron railings which were not merely decorative, and a security system which meant that Faye had to wait a dozen or more agonising moments before the gate opened to let her in.

  This was one of the worst moments… this awareness that once she stepped inside she was a prisoner, trapped… and yet the immaculate orderliness of the gardens was surely anything but threatening. She remembered when she had first come here with Liz, how she had gently pointed out to her the pleasantness of their surroundings.

  She walked up to the front door. The woman who opened it to her might have been any well-built, slightly reserved middle-aged housewife, and yet to Faye there was something immediately self-betraying about her. Or was it just that she, with her guilt and her fears, could too easily sense the purposefulness, the steely-eyed determination that no one who should not do so should pass through those doors? That knowledge should have comforted her, but instead she shrank from it like a child shrinking from an unacceptable fact of life.

  The woman greeted Faye by name, smiling warmly at her. 'I think you'll find that we're having one of our better days today. It's the weather, I think. Always seems to cheer them up.'

  She was looking over Faye's shoulder as she spoke, and, sensing that she was looking for Liz, Faye said quickly, 'I'm on my own today. My mother-in-law has had an accident.'

  She heard the few quick words of professional sympathy and knew she must have responded to them, but already it was beginning… the panic, the sickness, the fear… and most of all the anger. The sheer weight of it pressed down on her, suffocating her… threatening her. She could feel her knees buckling under the pressure of it. She could feel it building up inside her like a scream…the kind of scream she had learned to suppress.

  'Would you like someone to go up with you, then?'

  The woman's voice was carefully neutral. God knew how many times a day she must ask the same questions… how many other tortured souls came here with the same reluctance and guilt that brought her…

  She gave her a too-bright smile and shook her head. 'No, that won't be necessary…'

  After all, she wasn't violent, wasn't dangerous… wasn't likely to hurt her. Not like some of the women here. She heard them sometimes, screaming and crying, the noise like so many darts of fire in her flesh.

  They couldn't help it, poor souls, one of the nurses had once said to her. They didn't know what they were doing… thank God in his mercy for that at least…

  She had been an Irish girl, young and raw, unaware that, for so many of the visitors who came here, the thought that their relatives were free of the knowledge of what was happening to them was the smallest particle of comfort in a vast sea of anguish and misery.

  Call it what you liked, explain it away how you wished… madness was what it was, plain and simple. A madness that attacked and destroyed, the madness sometimes of old age, sometimes not… and no one could witness it without suffering, without asking why it was that the human race should be punished in this way… asking what it had ever done to merit this unholy destruction of all that was in humankind that made it what it was.

  Faye went up to the top floor, ignoring the lift, wanting to delay the moment of confrontation as long as she could.

  Outside the door stood a nurse. She smiled warmly and approvingly at Faye.

  This visitor was one of the better ones. She hadn't just stuck the woman away in here, ignoring her existence. She was one of their most regular visitors, always insisting on seeing her, no matter how bad a day she was having. Still, she wasn't the worst of their patients…not violent, not like some of them… pathetic it was to see her sometimes, crouching in a corner like a baby, gibbering away to herself, screaming and crying when they tried to get her to her feet, to clean her up… Hard it had been, at first, to realise what could happen to the human mind and with it the human body. Old people with strength you'd never expect, behaving like helpless babies. And some of them… violent and foul-mouthed like you'd never believe, and when you tried to help them… She had scratches the like of which you'd never imagined.

  She'd stuck it out, though. The pay was good. This wasn't one of your run-down NHS homes. This one was private—and expensive… Each patient had her own room, and bathroom. Not that most of them bothered to use it.

  When it had first opened all the bedrooms had had carpet, she'd been told by one of the other nurses, but that hadn't lasted long. Replaced the lot now, they had, with washable floors and rugs. Some of them even had to have disposable sheets on their beds.

  Still, it wasn't their fault. They didn't know what they were doing most of the time. And when they did…

  'Like me to come in with you?' she asked Faye, shrugging when she shook her head. Hated coming here, this one did. You could see it in her eyes. Pretty woman, too. Didn't know how she could stomach it. In her shoes…

  As she unlocked the door, Faye hesitated, and then, summoning all her strength, she walked in and said brightly, 'Hello, Mother. How are you today?'

  As she heard the door close behind her, heard it being locked, she tried not to acknowledge the sound but instead to concentrate on the small, frail figure sitting in the window. Her head turned. She focused on her, but Faye knew that she hadn't recognised her. She never did. That was what made it all so stupid… This woman whom she called Mother… this woman who had given her birth… this woman for whom she felt such a huge burden of responsibility, and such an enormity of guilt and hatred, no longer knew her.

  She smiled up at Faye, a timid, hesitant smile, her eyes watchful and frightened, and as Faye went towards her she flinched back in her chair, tiny mewling noises of frantic fear bubbling in her throat.

  Instantly Faye was gripped by the familiar mixture of anger and anguish, rendered at once helpless by her inability to do anything to reach out and reassure whatever awareness still lived within the blanked-off emptiness of her mother's mind, and seized by a fierce, overwhelming surge of angry resentment that this woman—her mother—should be able to escape from their shared past when she herself could not.

  And yet nothing of what she was feeling showed in her face. She had schooled herself long ago not to allow it to do so. Those interminable, awful, painful sessions with the psychiatrist who had counselled her had taught her the impossibility of confronting the reality of what her mother had become with the agony of her own past.

  To grow strong and guilt-free for herself, for David and for Camilla—that had been her aim. Some strength she had found… but to rid herself of the guilt the psychiatrist had told her she had no need to feel—that was different, and entwined with all that guilt, a living, breathing serpent twined with it, was her anger, her resentment and, yes, her hatred… And yet what had her mother ever done? Wasn't she as much a victim as she herself had been? But, even while she tried to analyse, while the dull questions she might have addressed to a stranger, any stranger, fell automatically and unanswered from her lips, she was remembering, resenting… filled with anger and bitterness.

  In her mother's shoes, would she…? But no, she had told herself long ago that she would have maimed, killed… fought with every part of her mind and flesh to prevent anyone from hurting Camilla. However, she and her mother were two different creatures. She had never had to contend with the life that had been her mother's. It was unfair of her to blame, to make comparisons. And besides, what good did it do? There was no going back… no altering the past. She had lived through it… She had found David. She had had Camilla. She had found a goodly measure of peace and contentment… And in these visits she had the means to ensure that her daughter, her precious child, would never, ever know the torment that she had
known. If the price of that knowledge, that security was these monthly visits to this place, the monthly reality of facing the woman who had given her birth and who had also betrayed her, then so be it.

  She stayed for four hours, talking quietly to her mother of this and that, using her voice to soothe her fear enough for her to relax and watch her timidly, but never once was there any sign in her mother's eyes that she knew who she was… that she recognised her.

  Before Faye left there was the ritual of lunch, watching her mother toy with her food, crumbling it into small pieces. Unlike many of the people here, her mother was physically able to take care of herself. She had not degenerated, as so many of them had, into an appalling second childhood that was a grotesque parody of all that a childhood should be.

  The sounds and smells from some of the rooms when one passed by the briefly open doors were stomach-rendingly nauseating. Faye had seen other relatives leaving this place harrowed by what they had seen and heard, and yet knowing that here their money was buying their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers the very best care there was.

  In these locked rooms, encased in their too strong bondage of flesh and bone, were women who had given life to others and then unwittingly destroyed that life, as their illness, their dependence had inexorably destroyed their offspring's lives.

  Her mother's dementia was different, its cause mental rather than physical, its sources easy to find. Unlike the majority of the visitors here, Faye did not have the harrowing fear of being confronted by her own future. She did not see, in the tormented features at once familiar and yet frighteningly unrecognisable, a terrifying shadow of her own face.

  It was mid-afternoon when she left, her head pulsing with the onset of a migraine, her body trembling visibly as she headed for the sanctuary of her car.

  There was a pedestrian crossing in front of the house. A car drew up to it and stopped for her to cross. She gave the driver a blind, glittering smile that made him frown. He had recognised her as she walked towards the crossing. The daughter-in-law of the woman in ICU, but looking very different from the last time he had seen her.

  Then she had been shocked, fearful, as so many of the relatives of his patients were, but those emotions had been controlled, at least until he had reached out to touch her. As he watched her now his trained eye saw someone in a dangerous state of near collapse. Someone who, he suspected, if he hadn't stopped for her might easily have simply stepped in front of his car. The road was quiet, no traffic waiting for him to move off, so he watched curiously as Faye walked towards the sea-front and her car.

  He frowned as he watched her unlock the door. In the interests of safety she should not be allowed to drive, but to his relief she made no attempt to do so, and he could see quite clearly the way she was slumped in the passenger seat.

  He glanced back towards the house she had just left, frowning again as he saw the discreet plaque set into one of the stone supports of the gate.

  There were many such establishments in Fellingham; this one, as he recalled, was rather better than most and had a good reputation. It specialised in taking women suffering from advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease, or senile dementia as it was more commonly known, and no one who had ever witnessed its devastating effects both on the sufferer and on those who tried to nurture and support that sufferer could wonder at the need for such homes.

  Faye had struck him as a frail, dependent sort the first time he'd seen her. She had not seemed the type to have the strength to visit somewhere like this… Her sort normally turned their backs, made excuses, installed their relatives somewhere conveniently too distant from their own homes to allow regular visiting…

  He told himself that it was in the interests of safety that he drove his car a short distance away from Faye's and parked it discreetly where he could watch her. After all, if she made any attempt to drive in her present condition she would be a liability to herself and, more importantly, to others. It would be his duty to stop her, to caution her…

  Faye was oblivious to him. She felt spent, drained… weak to the point where she felt as though if she closed her eyes the life would simply flood from her. She felt sick, light-headed, weak in the way she had when she had given birth to her aborted foetus. She shivered, suddenly cold, knowing that she should move, that she ought to get into the driver's seat and start her car, but she had no will to do so… no will to do anything other than simply crouch in the passenger seat, barely daring to breathe, panting like a hunted creature on guard for the killer stalking it.

  Why couldn't she let go of the past? It was all so long ago, over, part of another life… And yet she could not let go… could not forget. Images, sharp and clear, danced through her head, feelings, memories clearer by far than those she had of David… sharper than any of the happier images with which she sought to overlay them.

  Incest. It was a word few feared to use these days… and yet to Faye it smouldered with the sulphurous smell of hell, conjuring up such images, such pain that she felt as though it was written in flames of fire.

  As a child she hadn't even known such a word existed. She had, in her innocence, her naiveté, imagined that no one else in the world had been bad enough to suffer what she was forced to suffer. That there were no other bad girls who had to be punished as her stepfather had punished her… That there were no other six-year-olds who lay awake in such fear that when eventually the dreaded footstep came… when eventually the hurting male hand cajoled and then demanded… when the disgusting intrusion of that alien, adult male body made her want to scream and scream again, it was almost a relief to have it actually happen, because she knew that afterwards she would be allowed to sleep, to escape from her fear.

  It was because she was a bad girl that he had to do these things to her, he always told her. He used to whisper the words over and over again, telling her how bad she had been as his flesh pushed and tore and his hand clamped over her mouth, stifling her with its scent and heat.

  It was because she was such a bad girl that her own father had died… and he had married her mother because God had wanted him to punish her… But she was not to tell anyone about what happened, because if she did God would be very angry with her, and would take her mother away from her.

  Eventually there had come a time when her intelligence had told her he was lying to her… when she was old enough to understand properly what was happening. When every night she'd prayed that her mother would find out what he was doing to her and make him stop. Because even though she knew by then that her father had died of cancer and that it was for his own pleasure that her stepfather abused her, he had told her that the authorities would take her away from her mother and lock her up in a children's home if she dared to tell anyone what was going on.

  She had known that that was true. There were children in her class at school who lived with foster parents, who had been taken away from their own parents.

  Later, as she grew older still, the threat had been that her mother would be sent to prison, and with the development of her body come the sickening self-realisation that she was, as he had always told her, bad… that it was bad and wrong to have let him do to her what he had. She heard the other children at school making jokes about sex, talking about girls who did 'it', and her self-revulsion grew, but she could not stop his visits to her room… to her bed…

  She'd fantasised about her mother discovering him with her and sending him away. Every day she'd prayed that it would happen… but no matter how much noise he made her mother remained deeply asleep.

  And then had come the final catalyst. On the morning of her fourteenth birthday she had woken up and immediately been violently sick. For over a week she had kept on being sick, and she had seen the nervous way her mother's eyes flicked over her when she came out of the bathroom, her own dark with misery… pleading for her to say something, to notice something… But she hadn't.

  Others had, though. She never knew which of her teachers guessed that she was pregn
ant. She was sent for by her headmistress, and questioned gently but firmly. Which boy was it who had got her into trouble? A lecture had followed about her age, about the law, about the irresponsibility of both herself and the boy concerned, but it wasn't until the headmistress had threatened to send for her parents that she had broken down and told her what had happened…

  Now she knew that she had been lucky. The older woman had accepted what she had told her, and had acted swiftly to protect her. She had not, as so many others in the same circumstances had, been sent back home with a note to her parents about her telling lies.

  The child she carried was aborted, the staff at the hospital kind and caring, but nothing had been able to take away her horror, the pain, the shock of her brutal emergence from childhood into the world of women.

  She had been taken into care, and had discovered that it was not after all the prison-like life she had been told. Her foster parents were kind and caring, and chosen especially for their experience in dealing with damaged children. She was given her own room, with a door that locked and her own bathroom. No one came into her room without being invited, and Mr Masters—Uncle Bob—never made any attempt to touch her in any way. Her nightmare was over, or so it had seemed.

  And then had come the court case, and the shock of discovering that her mother had known all along what was happening. Had known and done nothing, nothing at all to help her.

  Faye had been too young to understand then, as she had come to understand later, that some women were incapable of standing up to men like her stepfather. But it was in that courtroom that her fear, her pain, her agony had given birth not just to shock, but also to anger, resentment and bitterness against her mother.