The Hidden Years

by Penny Jordan

  Certainly she knew logically that it wasn't his fault, that Scott's father had insisted on taking him home, nor that Scott had never once attempted to get in touch with her.

  What she had not been able to tell anyone, though, was the confusion and self-disgust caused by her own sexual responsiveness to Daniel. Nor had she confided in anyone how Daniel had rejected her… Why? She paused, frowning a little.

  Was it because she had been ashamed of those feelings, or of her behaviour… or was it because she had felt even David, even had he been alive, might not have been able to understand… Much as she had loved her brother, she had always known instinctively that he did not share her deep-running, silent vein of sensuality; that for David, sex was not a human appetite, but a gift of God sanctified by the procreation of children… that David did not possess the sharp curiosity about others, about their motivations, about all that was hidden and secret in their lives in the way that she did… That David preferred not to look too closely into the dark places of the human soul, whereas she often surprised in herself a thirst to know and understand what motivated others, not just sexually but emotionally as well.

  Yes, she had loved David… She missed his gentle presence in her life even now, his calming presence, but it surprised her a little that Faye as a woman—a mature and very attractive woman now—had never looked back towards her relationship with David, and perhaps realised that sexually it might not have withstood the pressures of her own growing maturity and needs. Faye was not a cold woman; rather she was an almost totally unawakened one, Sage recognised, and, knowing what she now knew about her own mother, she suspected that Liz must know this as well. Was that why she had always been so protective towards Faye? Not because she loved her more than she did her own daughter, not because she approved of Faye's reticence and modesty and wanted to hold them up as an example to her own erring child, but because she had long ago sensed in Faye the need and vulnerability, the fear that Sage herself, to her shame, was only just beginning to recognise?

  Why had she never noticed before the way Faye flinched away from men? Why had she never noticed the tension in her eyes and her body whenever she was in unfamiliar male company? That fear hadn't been put there by David, Sage was sure, but it might explain why Faye had married him, and why she had stayed so fiercely, determinedly under Liz's protective wing after his death. It was only now, with her mother removed from them, that Sage was beginning to see the real emotions that Faye had always cloaked beneath her air of remote calm. To see them and realise the danger of the strain her sister-in-law was placing upon herself.

  Tonight, when Faye came in, she would talk to her, she decided firmly. She would find out what was wrong. She would encourage Faye to confide in her…

  As an escape route from her own problems, or because she genuinely cared?

  Of course she cared… She had always cared about her family, more than she had ever allowed even herself to know. As a child she had lived under the constant shadow of her father's dislike of her and her mother's coldness towards her… Unlike others in a similar position, she had not spent her adult life seeking male approval—instead she had taken the opposite stance. She had punished men… rejected them for her father's rejection of her, she recognised grimly. And most of them had let her… Most of them, but not Daniel… Never Daniel…

  Daniel, Daniel… her thoughts were locked in a circle that always ended up at the same point. Daniel Cavanagh… Would he ring her, or would he simply ignore her ultimatum? If he did…

  She found that she was shaking. She took a deep breath and then another, quickly turning the pages of the new diary. She didn't want to think about that morning. She didn't want to get caught up in the folly of remembering, or recalling, of allowing her body… her femininity to hold sway over logic and intelligence.

  She read swiftly, quickly absorbing the brief, dry facts noted down in the diary's early pages; the new ram had proved a great success, his progeny developing the valuable fleeces her mother had sought, and if she sensed the pathos behind the curt inscription, 'Heard from young Vic today. Beth is pregnant,' Sage did not allow herself to dwell on it, or to feel pity, knowing that self-pity was the very last thing her mother would have indulged in.

  It was a diary of brief entries, even briefer the winter Edward was severely ill with influenza and had to go into hospital. That spring was a productive one for lambs and Liz wrote that she was thinking of buying another ram.

  She had been looking into the feasibility of reopening the mill and weaving their own wool. At present she was selling the fleeces to a small concern just inside the Scottish border. She had been in touch with the mill's owners and had arranged to visit them. She had also been making tentative enquiries to see what if any government help she could get with her new venture.

  People were gradually recovering from the dark years of the war… gradually beginning to think in terms of the years ahead and not merely the weeks. Those people who had lived through it, who had experienced its horrors, who had known what it meant to live constantly with the threat of death, were promising themselves that for their children things would be different.

  There was a new mood spreading over the land—a new purposefulness, a sense of determination that things must change for the better, that no one could live through what had been lived through, could endure what had been endured and not emerge from such a holocaust without undergoing some kind of rebirth. Coupled with this awareness was a desire to make sure the next generation, those children conceived at a time of great darkness and despair, should throughout their lives know only happiness and light, and so a mother who had perhaps throughout the war years only possessed poor quality cheap clothes now hungered, even if only subconsciously, for better things, not for herself but for her child.

  The market was there for the cloth her sheep could produce, Liz knew it, and she was determined to be ready to cater for it.

  The opposition to her plans was such that another person, a weaker person, would have given up, given in to the pressure, albeit a gentle caring pressure, which was being subtly placed on her.

  Edward had begun to retreat into a distant silence whenever she tried to discuss her plans with him… the kind of silence often used by a spoilt child to punish a caring adult, Liz recognized uneasily.

  Edward's health was a constant source of concern to her. He would never be strong, always need care and cosseting, and this latest bout of influenza had left him even frailer than before, and not just physically but emotionally…more inclined to cling and demand, more inclined to sulk and lapse into aggrieved silences when he felt he was not getting enough of her attention.

  It was just as well that David was such an easy child… Almost too easy, she sometimes felt, contrasting his behaviour with that of other boys his age.

  When she had confided her concern to Ian Holmes, he had quickly assured her that David was perfectly healthy, adding gently, 'He is quiet, I know, but it is a happy quietness, I think, not a discontented one.'

  'But he spends so much time alone…'

  'Again, he's happy solitary, although that's bound to change once he's off at school.'

  This was another small bone of contention between Edward and herself, Liz reflected. Edward wanted to send David to the small public school he had attended, but she was concerned that seven was far too young to send a child away from home. Here again it seemed that almost everyone else totally opposed her view. The vicar's wife said sympathetically that she had hated sending her two away, but that boys really did need the discipline of a good school. Edward had told her that it was at school that David would make the contacts, the friends which would establish his position in adult life, and, although nothing else was said, for the first time she felt as though Edward was subtly reminding her of the fact that her own birth had been into a far different way of life from his.

  The last thing on her mind when she had married Edward had been any idea of elevating herself socially, but she was
not a fool, and even now in these post-war days deference was still paid to people with the right accents… the right backgrounds… They could just afford to pay the fees, but Liz knew she would have to make some savings in their household expenditure.

  When challenged, she was forced to agree that of course she wanted the best for David. David himself, when she discussed it with him, seemed quite happy with the idea of going away to school. He was a pragmatic, sunny-natured child, who gently reassured her that he would not be lonely or unhappy… Much as though she were the child, she thought wryly.

  For all that she had achieved at Cottingdean, for all the work she had done, it irritated her at times that she should still be subtly so much under the domination of the men in her life.

  Edward had made it plain to her that he thoroughly disapproved of the idea of her reopening the mill. It wasn't fitting, especially not for a woman, he had told her, but something in her rebelled. She owed him so much, everything really, and she had repaid him as best she could. She had a lovely son, a home which she was coming to cherish and love, and if they were not well off financially, well, at least they were better off than many. The vegetable garden was productive enough to make sure that they were never without fresh fruit and vegetables; they kept enough livestock for their own needs, hens for their eggs, and with careful management they were actually able to live well within Edward's pension and the money coming in from the rich arable fields they let out.

  It was true that the process of refurbishing the house was a slow one, but Liz had a good eye for a bargain, and since that unscheduled stop on the way back from Southampton she had spent many a happy hour rummaging through the sale rooms and attending country house sales.

  The latest one had provided the very handsome brocade curtains which now covered the drawing-room windows. She had bought them for next to nothing, and had brought them home and cut them down to size for their own drawing-room, which was much smaller than the crumbling double-height ballroom they had originally been made for.

  The success of their subtle colouring and the richness of the fabric, which she suspected had originally been woven when Victoria was on the throne, and which far surpassed anything she could have bought even if she had had the wherewithal to do so, had made her consider repainting the drawing-room in its entirety.

  The original paint had faded to a dirty indeterminate colour, but the library—now with the books carefully placed on the shelves which had received the loving attention of Chivers's linseed oil and then some homemade beeswax polish—had yielded a set of original design details for the drawing-room, from which she had discovered that the walls had originally been painted a soft yellowy green which she suspected would have gone beautifully with her gold brocade curtains.

  White distemper could be obtained, Chivers had informed her judiciously, but as for staining it…

  Undeterred, she had been experimenting with various vegetable dyes, keeping to herself the fact that already, in her own secret plans, she was looking ahead to the day when such knowledge would not just enable her to find an economical way of dyeing distemper. What she had in mind were the subtle colours of some of Lady Jeveson's hand-me-downs; the soft muted tones of her Scottish tweeds, which had none of the harshness of modern wools.

  Liz had a very clear idea of what she wanted from her mills. The best and only the best would be good enough to carry the Cottingdean label.

  At one of her house sales she had been standing next to a party of American tourists and their conversation had been illuminating. These people had quite obviously been very wealthy and very discerning. They had been on an antique-buying trip, and had snatched a very pretty bonheur du jour from right under her nose at a price that made her sigh with slight envy. These were the people who would one day buy her wools…

  Let the others tease her, and gently mock her dreams… she knew that one day she would be proved right. She knew, but being Liz she held her peace and smiled pacifyingly while making her plans. She didn't want to antagonise Edward to the extent that he refused outright to allow her to continue. The mill was, after all, his. property and not hers, and besides, she had genuinely come to like him… to want to make his painful life as easy as possible.

  She would have been surprised had she known how many people who knew them marvelled at her patience with him, and not just her patience, but her obvious devotion. Especially Ian Holmes.

  As he regularly remarked to his wife, it was no life for a young woman… He knew of course that David was not Edward's son, and initially in the early days of their return to Cottingdean he had half expected that eventually nature would take its course and that she would take a lover. He would not have blamed her if she had. She was a beautiful woman, not just physically but mentally as well, and in the end it was Ian who persuaded Edward to allow her to go ahead with her plans, simply by pointing out to him that a young healthy woman needed a natural outlet for her energies, needed something on which to hook her dreams, needed something to plan for.

  Edward had given him a sharply suspicious glance and for the first time in their long friendship had treated him with the same almost childish silence which Ian had so often helplessly watched him use against Liz. But at heart Edward was a fair man, a caring man, and if it was his love for Liz, his insecurity, his fear that a woman like her must surely one day grow bored with him, must surely one day leave him, that made him sometimes unkind to her, he was honest enough to admit that his doubts were self-inflicted and that no man had a more devoted wife than he.

  And so, reluctantly, he agreed that maybe—some time in the future, finances permitting—they could consider reopening the mill.

  Finances permitting. Liz kept her thoughts to herself. She had her own plans for raising that much needed money. Following upon Vic's advice to her before he left for Australia, she and the new shepherd had been diligently and selectively cross-breeding their stock with the purpose of producing prize-winning rams, not to sire flocks for wool which their own flocks would produce, but to capitalise on the sudden demand for lambs for meat.

  Just as the war had bred in people a hunger for a new richness, a new luxury, so it had also bred in them a different kind of hunger—a hunger for food, for a diet that was not pared down to absolute necessities, a diet that tempted the taste-buds and the eye. Farmers all over the country were busy raising stock to meet these new demands, and Liz with her far-seeing intelligence was steadfastly working towards her own goals.

  Edward had been angrily opposed to it when she had first mooted the idea of showing their young tups at some of the local county fairs. She could almost see his aristocratic nose quiver a little in disgust, and she had had to subtly remind him that there was a great English tradition to support farming as a suitably gentrified pursuit.

  Reluctantly he had given way, and so, slowly, carefully, never overreaching themselves, Liz and her shepherd had begun to make a name for themselves and for their rams.

  So much so that at Smithfield this last year they had taken the Best of Breed award for one of their tups, and it was his male progeny which, when sold, would start to produce for her the capital she needed to start work on renovating the mills:

  Secretly, she had already been round it many times, trying to see, not its dilapidation, but its advantages.

  If she was honest its only real advantage was that it was slap bang in the middle of the village, and in an area where work was hard to come by. For that reason and that alone, her plans might just find favour with those in authority. Men who fought for their country did not take kindly to being without jobs, without money… Anyone who could guarantee to provide work, especially in such a rural area, was already in an advantageous position.

  Ian Holmes was on his way to visit Edward, not a social visit this time but a professional one. Several times a year he examined Edward and tried to talk to him about his condition, but Edward wasn't the kind of man who found it easy to confide in others, and he tended to become brusque a
nd withdrawn on these occasions, no matter how tactful Ian tried to be.

  At least he had been successful in persuading Edward to look more favourably on Liz's new business venture. It had been at his suggestion that Edward had on Liz's behalf approached some of his contacts among the local county fraternity, including the Lord Lieutenant, a hard-hunting man and a good landlord, with considerable influence at Whitehall.

  Liz was beginning to know how to play the game. Officially, now, the mill was Edward's idea—she was simply his mouthpiece, putting forward his views, since his own poor health made it difficult for him to attend long, wearying meetings.

  It was through the Lord Lieutenant that Liz had managed to obtain an introduction to a small private merchant bank looking for new investments. Ian ad-mired her and sincerely hoped that the mill would succeed. She needed something in her life after all, poor girl. David was now away at school, and as for Edward…

  He frowned to himself as he drove up to the house. Edward's increasingly frequent bouts of depression were beginning to worry him, all the more so because the other man refused to admit that they existed.

  Ian had tried to suggest to him on several occasions that it might be a good idea, both from his own point of view and from Liz's, for him to spend a week or so in one of the new private convalescent homes being organised for men like himself, men who had been grievously injured by the war, but he had refused point-blank to even consider it.

  The strain of looking after him was beginning to tell on Liz; it couldn't be very easy for her, after all, a young, healthy and very beautiful woman married to a man like Edward. Liz was always remarkably patient and gentle with him, but he had been there on several occasions when Edward's behaviour towards her had made him long to intervene and to point out to the other man that his jealousy had no foundation whatsoever.