The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  He laughed then, even though the laughter sounded slightly forced.

  They had talked, the two of them, or rather she had talked and he had listened, as her enthusiasm had caught fire and she had told him of how ultimately she would like to revive the old tradition of weaving wool cloth locally from the Cottingdean flock… of bringing back to life the old mill which belonged to the Cottingdean estate, and which now lay empty and neglected, the water wheel which had once powered its machine rotting in its weed-choked mill pond.

  'Goodbye, Vic,' she whispered to him, her voice suddenly deserting her as she leaned up and kissed him briefly on the cheek, and then, without daring to look back, she turned and hurried to join the others leaving the ship.

  She didn't stay to watch it weigh anchor, getting back into her car and setting off back to Cottingdean, forcing herself as she drove homewards to concentrate not on what she had left behind but on what lay ahead of her. That was where her life lay… In Cottingdean with her son… with her husband… with her responsibilities to them.

  So she analysed the situation, defusing it until she was sure she had made it quite safe… Until she was sure she could return to her home and her family with her heart and mind clear of any stain of guilt.

  As she drove through one small village she had to stop to allow a small procession of people to cross the road. They were carrying an enormous heavily carved oak chest and as she watched them it suddenly struck her that the chest would be ideal for Cottingdean's empty hall.

  On an impulse she couldn't define she stopped the car and parked it, hurrying after the slow-moving procession, and then stopping them to enquire breathlessly what they were doing with the chest.

  'Throwing it out,' one of the men told her grimly. 'Been cluttering up our front room since my old mother moved in with us, it has, and now that she's gone the wife says it can go too.'

  It was old… very old, worn in places, and very dirty, and yet beneath that she could see the potential beauty of the wood, could almost feel how much it called out for care and attention.

  'I'll buy it from you,' she told him impulsively, not allowing herself time to think, to hesitate. 'I'll give you five pounds for it,' she added quickly. 'Six if you can secure it on the roof of the car…'

  It was plain that he thought she was crazed. He eyed her uncertainly, saying dourly, 'Firewood, that's all he's good for… Still, if you're sure you wants 'im… I don't want no husband coming down here and making us take 'im back…'

  'No, no, he won't do that,' Liz assured him, quickly producing six pounds from her purse and thinking how fortunate it was that Edward had made her take some extra money just in case she should decide not to make the return journey until the morning.

  It took the men a good hour to secure the chest to her satisfaction, but at last it was done, the money handed over, and she was on her way home.

  A feeling of well-being and excitement had replaced her earlier malaise and, although she didn't know it, she had just begun what was to be a lifelong love-affair with antique furniture. There would be occasions when she would find and buy far more valuable pieces than this ancient oak chest, but there would never be a time when the thrill of finding them would exceed the sweet pleasure she felt now, as she drove slowly and proudly along the empty English lanes, humming contentedly under her breath, while the chest rocked precariously on the car's roof.

  The six months of Vic's absence were very busy ones; there were the inevitable problems with the flock, and David was growing quickly, a placid, endearing child with such a quality of sweetness about him that sometimes he made Liz catch her breath in wonder. There was nothing of his father in him… none of Kit's cruelty or vice. He was his own person.

  Vic wrote to them that the owner of Woolonga's prize rams was being stubborn about selling them one of his beasts, and Liz formed the impression that the Australian was tough and uncompromising, with little room in his life for sentiment or emotion.

  From Vic's letters she gained the impression that he had fallen a little under the Australian's influence, and she began to worry about whether, once he returned, Vic would ever be content to settle for their quiet unexciting life. Vic was a young man—just as she was a young woman, a rebellious inner voice reminded her. It was a voice she didn't want to hear…a voice she could not afford to hear.

  They had a hard winter, but somehow or other between them they managed to keep the flock's losses to a minimum. Liz lost count of the number of nights she sat up with a birthing ewe, grimly determined to honour the trust Vic had placed in her, reminding herself over and over again of the night David was born.

  The kitchen seemed full of orphaned lambs. She watched David with them, surprised and moved by his tenderness towards them. He was a child who seemed instinctively to sense the suffering of others and feel compassion for it. She wondered sometimes if it was a good thing that he spent as much time as he did with Edward… if she ought not to be encouraging him to become more boisterous and adventurous like the village boys—but they enjoyed one another's company so deeply, communicating without any need for words.

  Chivers had abandoned his care of Edward to help her with the sheep, and just when she thought that winter would never be over, that spring would never come, the snow started to melt; crocuses blossomed in sheltered patches of the garden, and then best of all they had a letter from Vic saying that he was on his way home and that he was bringing with him their much-needed new ram.

  There was nothing in his letter to say how he had managed to persuade the Australian to part with this beast, but Liz was too overjoyed by the news to worry about how such a miracle had been achieved.

  Vic himself arrived within weeks of his letter… a sunburned, broader, different Vic, whose eyes seemed to look far beyond the enclosed horizons of their own hills, a Vic who took her to one side and told her quietly that he had brought more than the new ram home with him.

  'It was you who put the idea in my head,' he told her quietly, and the sensation of knowledge and loss that touched her as he looked at her made her throat close up in anguish.

  'You've found yourself a wife,' she said simply.

  'Yes. She's the daughter of Woolonga's foreman. The thing is… the thing is, she's lived all her life out there in the outback and it's a strange thing… a magic place almost. It gets a hold of you. I felt it myself… She wanted to come over here, to see what England looks like.' He smiled briefly and painfully. 'But once we've got the ram settled in and I've found you a new shepherd, I reckon we'll be going back to Woolonga…'

  Woolonga… Woolonga… The name tasted bitter in her mouth and as she raised her eyes to Vic's she now saw in his all that he was not saying to her… all that he could not say to her.

  'Who knows?' she had said brightly. 'You might even bring a pretty Australian bride back with you…'

  But she had not meant it… had never meant to drive him from her and from Cottingdean. They both needed him too much to lose him.

  The knowledge was like a knife twisting inside her, a double-edged pain that came from knowing how much she would miss him and from acknowledging her own selfishness. She had no right to expect him to stay when she knew she could offer him nothing… Or at least when she could not offer him what he would find with his new wife.

  She had no right to even think of feeling what she was feeling, no right at all.

  She met his wife a couple of days later. Beth was a small dark-haired girl with deeply tanned skin and vivid blue eyes. Her manner towards Liz was both curious and slightly aggressive, and Liz acknowledged with a sinking heart that the two of them could never have forged an easy relationship. Whether because she felt that Liz was somehow a threat to her own relationship with Vic, or whether it was simply that, as a girl brought up in a land which did not acknowledge any class barriers, she refused to treat Liz and Edward with the old-fashioned deference given to them by Vic himself, Liz had no way of knowing… All she did know was that, much as it made her own he
art ache, Vic's decision to make a new life for himself in Australia was probably the wisest one for all concerned.

  True to his word, though, he refused to leave until he had found them a new shepherd he considered worthy of the task. This took over three months, during which time Liz became heartily sick of hearing from Beth the words, 'At the homestead,' and 'Woolonga.' Both the sheep station and its owner, or so it seemed, were larger than life, and certainly far more imposing than anything Cottingdean had to offer. It was ridiculous to feel this resentment of a place she had never seen, to feel that every time Beth boasted about Woolonga she was challenging Liz to deny that Cottingdean was inferior to it in every way, but that was what Liz did feel.

  She was astonished to hear herself saying crossly to Edward one evening, 'I shall be glad when young Vic and Beth leave… I'm getting quite sick of hearing the name Woolonga.'

  'Beth is homesick,' Edward pointed out mildly. 'That does tend to make people defensive. I'll admit, though, she is a trifle abrasive in her defence of all things Australian. I suppose part of her is afraid that Vic will change his mind and stay on here.'

  'Oh, he won't do that,' Liz denied flatly. She could sense that Edward was watching her and remembered that Edward had always been slightly antagonistic towards the young shepherd ever since he had been the one to deliver David, and so, even though it hurt her to do so, she added as carelessly as she could, 'And perhaps it's a good thing that he's going… There's no real future here at Cottingdean for him. This new shepherd is older, more likely to stay with us—and from all that Vic says he's already settling in well with the flock.'

  'Mm… Well, I hope you're not going to be disappointed with all this money you've laid out on this new ram. I applaud your determination to build up the flock, but it's meat this country needs, not wool…'

  'At the moment it's meat,' Liz agreed, 'but I'm looking to the future, to a time when goods aren't rationed… when people want and can have a wider range of things. This country's starved of good-quality cloth. Few companies make it any more, but there's going to come a time when there will be a demand for it.'

  'And you're going to provide it?' Edward asked. 'My dear, I don't want to spoil your dreams… Once, a long time ago, it's true that Cottingdean flocks produced fine-quality wool, and wove it into cloth in our own mill, but those days are gone… The mill is fit for nothing other than knocking down, there's no machinery, no labour force, nothing… and we certainly don't have the money to pay for either. We can barely keep a roof above our heads…'

  'It will all come in time,' Liz protested stubbornly. 'You'll see. This country needs new industry, people need what we could produce. We will find a way.'

  She heard Edward sigh, saw the way his mouth pursed with rejection, and felt an intense build-up of frustration inside her. She had so many plans, so many hopes… and so little of anything else. Couldn't he see how much she needed to believe in what she was doing? Couldn't he see how much she needed this dream? After all, what else had she to occupy her mind? David wasn't a baby any more and already scarcely seemed to need her… He was such a self-possessed child… Edward was turning more and more to Chivers for the physical help he needed and Ian Holmes and the vicar for mental stimulation. She needed something in her life, something to work for, something to challenge her… something in which she could pour those energies which sometimes tormented her so restlessly.

  She was a young woman with all her life stretching out ahead of her. What had happened with young Vic had opened her mind to the pitfalls that could confront her, the dangers she could fall prey to if she wasn't careful, if she didn't have something else to occupy her thoughts, her time. It wasn't enough any longer to work herself so physically hard that she fell into bed exhausted every night, and, besides, they were getting to the stage where they had done as much to the house as they could by themselves. What still needed to be done needed expert hands. She needed this dream of building from the ashes of the past a new, strong future for the house and its lands. Sheep had been Cottingdean's wealth before and sheep could be its wealth again. And if she no longer had anyone to share that dream with her, if she had to pursue it on her own, well, then, she would do so, she decided stubbornly.

  It could be done. She knew it could be done, she knew that one day there would be a market, a demand for all that her mill could produce, and when that demand came she wanted to be ready for it… She would be ready for it.

  This time when she said goodbye to Vic she didn't say goodbye to him alone. He and Beth had a semi-formal send-off from Cottingdean; Liz had organised a farewell party for him, inviting almost everyone in the neighbourhood.

  She and Edward had no money with which to buy them an expensive gift, but instead she had carefully selected from two of the house's dusty cupboards a pretty Wedgwood tea service in delicate bone china.

  She saw Beth eye it disparagingly, and then watched Vic handling the fragile cups in his large hands, his touch so gentle and familiar that she felt a deep inner pain. She tried not to think how different things might have been, if… If what? If she hadn't been married to Edward? But she was married to Edward and she ought to be damn grateful for that fact. Even in the village there were girls without fathers for their children, some of them widowed by the war, others…

  Others were the result of wartime affairs, fatherless and condemned for it. She would have hated that fate for David…

  When it finally came time for her to say goodbye to Vic, he avoided looking at her and, even though she knew that what he was doing was probably for the best, watching him go hurt her. She wished him well with deep sincerity, and yet she knew that her own life would be the poorer for his going.

  As though he sensed what she was feeling, David came over to her side and slipped his hand into hers. His flesh felt soft and warm, when what she really yearned for was a stronger, harder grip… A man's grip, and not a child's. She blinked back tears which she told herself were stupid and self-indulgent. It was the future she must look to and not the past. The future… And what after all did she want with a man like Vic, a man who would ultimately demand of her the sexual intimacy her relationship with Kit had shown her she was not capable of sustaining? And yet there were nights—long, wearying nights when she lay awake tormented by the ache of her body, by the beginnings of a need she could neither understand nor explain. A need that confused and shamed her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As she reached for the next diary, Sage reflected wryly to herself that she was discovering in her mother an unexpected and no doubt accidental gift for drama.

  All through this last section of the diaries she had been conscious of a growing sense of urgency, a feeling that her mother's life was slowly reaching some kind of climactic turning point. Or was it simply that her impatience, her sense of sharp tension and awareness sprang from other influences; influences outside the diaries?

  The fact was that while she was reading about her mother's past Liz herself was fighting for her future; the fact was that her own life seemed to be reaching some kind of turning point… Or was it simply that in her desperation to lose herself, to escape from her own thoughts, her own problems, she was investing the diaries with a sense of mystery, of secrecy almost, that they really did not possess…?

  Or was it perhaps that having at last seen her mother through the eyes of an adult and not of a child, she was suddenly and sympathetically aware that her mother was a woman, with emotions and needs which could hardly have been fulfilled by her relationship with Edward?

  As she picked up the next diary she frowned over the dates written inside it, just inside the cover. It was obvious that the contents of this diary spanned virtually an entire decade of her mother's life.

  The decade which would have included the year of her own conception, she recognised, her heart suddenly thumping fiercely, heavily.

  She had never had the kind of relationship with her mother which had allowed her to ask what had prompted her, a woman with a
son of ten, a husband whose health was declining, a place like Cottingdean to run and a very new and fragile business barely off the ground, to go to such lengths to conceive and give birth to a child which she then seemed to spend a great deal of time holding at a distance.

  Previously, aside from the fact that she and her mother were just two people with temperaments which did not jell, Sage had also believed that her mother was one of those women who simply did not have the facility or the desire to express their emotions freely, and yet she had realised very early on in reading the diaries just how wrong she was. So why had she always been held at such a distance?

  She had a momentary and vivid memory of running into the house as a child and running into her mother's arms, or at least trying to do so. Liz had been in the study with Edward, and Sage could picture so clearly the look of displeasure, of resentment, on her father's face as she burst into the room… the quick, almost angry way in which her mother fended her off and bundled her out, the feeling even as a child of being an outsider…of being unwanted.

  If it hadn't been for David, for his love… She smiled sadly to herself, remembering how much she had longed to emulate her older brother… How much she had ached to have his calm gentle temperament, his way of turning aside anger with the sweetness of his smile. She had been adult herself before discovering how rare people like David were. She could understand how much Faye must miss him as a human being. She still did herself… In those wild years after losing Scott, David would have been the person she could have turned to for counsel. In David alone she would have felt able to confide, to admit how very betrayed she had felt by Scott's defection. But David hadn't been there for her. David could never be there for her again, because he had died. She had no outlet for her hurt and, instead of turning her anger against Scott and against his father, she had found that she had, for some obscure reason, turned it against Daniel Cavanagh, perhaps because she had felt that in doing so she was leaving the door open for Scott to change his mind and come back into her life… perhaps because she had felt in some subconscious way that only Daniel was strong enough, secure enough in himself to accept her anger.