by Penny Jordan
The young Liz, her hopes and dreams, her belief that she was loved, had touched a tender place in her own heart. Unlike Sage, it had not come as an abrupt shock to her to discover that Edward had not been David's physical father.
She loved Liz and she always would do. Liz had given her the best things her life had ever held, both directly in her son, and indirectly, through him, her own precious daughter. And more. Liz had given her love… and not just love. Liz had taught her to distance herself from her past, to stop blaming herself for its dark places… to see herself not as the catalyst of all its pain, but as the victim of events she could not control.
To discover that Liz too had known pain and betrayal… to learn that she too had sinned against the moral code of her peers, only made her feel closer to her mother-in-law.
To discover that David, wonderful, precious David who had brought her so much happiness, wasn't Edward's son did nothing to alter her love either for him or for his mother.
And yet, as it had Sage, the diary gripped her with the compulsive need to discover more about its author's fate, although from a very different viewpoint from Sage's. And at three o'clock she put it to one side, and opened the drawer in the table beside her bed.
Inside it the familiar bottle winked tormentingly in the lamplight.
Her fingers twitched, curling convulsively as she forced herself not to reach out for it. She knew that the sleeping tablets inside it would put an end to the darkness and her fears… that, once taken, just one of them would ensure a dreamless night's sleep. Just one… But no… she was not going to go back down that road.
After David's death, when Dr Palmer had first prescribed them, she had taken first one… and then later, when their effect became diminished, another… and then still another, until she was spending her time in drug-induced lethargy.
It had been Liz who had taken them from her, who had insisted gently but firmly that she must not allow herself to be swept into oblivion on a tide of indifference, Liz who had reminded her that, even though she had lost her husband, she still had his child… her daughter… a daughter who needed her mother very much.
Night after night Liz had sat up with her, talking to her, listening to her, and it had been in those dark days after David's death that she had fought more desperately than she had ever fought anything in her life—and with Liz at her side she had won.
But Liz wasn't at her side any longer, and suddenly tonight the dark shadows… the fears… the panic she had never completely conquered were back in monstrous force, stealthily stalking her… laughing at her weakness and her vulnerability.
Normally on these nights Liz was there, knowing without her having to say anything how afraid she was… But now there was no Liz… and there might not be any Liz ever again.
Already her heart was beating fast, panic clenching her muscles. She felt sick, dizzy… She tried to force herself to breathe deeply, to remind herself that her symptoms were self-induced. And, after all, there was no compulsion on her to go, no real need. Nothing… other than her own guilt, her own belief that in forcing herself to go through this monthly ordeal she was somehow or other appeasing any jealous gods… that she was somehow or other protecting her daughter… that in return for her willingly carrying her burdens of fear and guilt her precious Camilla would be spared all that she herself had to endure.
Downstairs in the kitchen was the jar of herb tea which she and Liz drank together on those nights like this one when she couldn't sleep, when her mind was tormented by the past.
She looked at the bottle again, her fingers bent into stiff claws as she willed herself not to reach for it. It was three o'clock… only a few hours now. This time tomorrow it would be all over. For another month.
Shivering, she pushed back the bedclothes and picked up the pretty cotton robe lying on the bed. David had teased her about this need she had always to keep her body covered. He had teased her about it, but he had never tried to force or dissuade her from that need.
Only when they made love had she allowed him to remove her nightdress, and then afterwards had come the ritual bathing, done secretly and guiltily at first until he had reassured her that he understood… After that a clean nightdress, and then back to bed…
She had once asked David if he minded that no matter how gentle he was, how caring and understanding, she could never distance herself from the past enough to do any more than merely accept his possession of her body.
'I love you… you, the person,' he had told her softly. And then, with that illuminating, wonderful smile of his, he had added, almost self-mockingly, 'And anyway, I'm not highly motivated sexually, Faye. In another age I suspect I could quite happily have settled to life as a celibate. As it is, I don't have the religious motivation for the priesthood, otherwise… You and I are a pair… what happens within the privacy of our relationship is our affair and no one else's, and perhaps if it weren't for the fact that we both want a family…'
A family. Yes, they had both wanted that. They had both been overjoyed when she had first conceived; and both equally devastated when she lost that child.
Although David had tried his best to reassure her that it was not so, she had seen it as a sign that she was being punished… When she had conceived and then carried Camilla full term she had hardly been able to believe it. Then, for an all too short period of time, she had known true happiness.
And then had come David's death. Another blow. Another reinforcement of her guilt.
The letter had come a month after David's death. Liz had found her with it in her hand, half hysterical with shock. She had told her then, all of it, sparing herself nothing…
Downstairs she boiled the kettle and found the jar of herb tea. It wasn't the same drinking it alone. She felt so afraid… but she had to go. It was her punishment and she must not avoid it… For Camilla's sake, she must go.
Alaric Ferguson glanced at his watch. Officially this was his day off, but there had been an emergency just as he was leaving the building.
He could have left the man to be operated on by his intern, but Alaric had a Scots Presbyterian grandfather on his mother's side, and duty, responsibility, putting work before play and others before himself were ingrained soul-deep in him.
Jancis had said to him that he enjoyed playing the martyr… that he liked the demands his job placed upon him. Other surgeons didn't behave as he did, she had told him. They found time for their wives, their families… to enjoy themselves… and still managed to advance their careers far faster than he had done his.
'Look at yourself,' she had commanded acidly. 'How many of those who qualified with you are still stuck in a run-down NHS hospital, living on a pittance, working all the hours God sends—and for what? You were top of your year, Alaric. And look at what you've done with that—nothing…'
And behind her anger he had sensed her frustration and seen more clearly than he had ever seen before how much marriage to him had embittered and disappointed her.
She had been a medical student herself when they'd first met. He had just qualified, and he had been both bemused and flattered when she'd begun to show an interest in him. His stark and sometimes hard upbringing had left him with little time to play.
His mother had been widowed young, and, while she had supported him devotedly in his determination to become a surgeon, both of them had had to make sacrifices so that he could attain that achievement. It hadn't been easy, and to have this pretty, blue-eyed, blonde-haired young woman flirting with him, teasing him had opened a door into a completely new world.
When he had married her six months later, he had been fathoms deep in love with her, content to allow her to direct the mutual course of their lives, laughing gently at her when she told him what she wanted… what she hoped for… when she told him that he was going to become a world-famous surgeon, that they would live in a beautiful house, and she would entertain his colleagues and famous patients…
He had thought then that she was simpl
y indulging in fanciful daydreams. He had no idea that what she was telling him was that these were her expectations of him, and by the time he did understand it it was too late. Even if he had wanted to, he could not have changed himself by then. The lifestyle she wanted was so diametrically opposed to the one he'd envisaged for both of them. And when he had come home early one day and discovered her in bed with one of his colleagues— the kind of clever, determined man who already had his sights firmly set on private and lucrative practice pandering to the vanity of women idiotic enough to believe that the skilled hands of a surgeon could magically transform their lives at the same time as they transformed their faces and bodies—he had known that their marriage was finally over.
He didn't blame her. She had been as deceived in him as he had been in her. That her deception was deliberate and his not, he preferred not to dwell on. He was thankful that they had no children. His mother had been very upset.
He was almost forty-two. Every time he saw her, his mother told him that he ought to remarry. He smiled and said nothing. If he was lonely at times, well, it was by his own choice. He was a brilliant and dedicated surgeon. Wasted outside private practice, so many of his colleagues considered, but Alaric felt he had a duty, a responsibility towards the sick and weak… a duty to use his skills to the advantage of the majority and not the minority, and sometimes, like now, he worked far longer hours than he should. If sometimes weeks, months went by when he was barely aware of a larger, more free world outside his own, he had no real regrets.
He had given up the large, uncomfortable house they had bought together when Jancis had left him, and had bought a small, convenient service flat instead.
If it rarely felt like a home, well, he hardly spent enough time in it for that to matter. If he sometimes woke up from a deep sleep aware of a need, an ache almost for the comfort and intimacy of having someone next to him in the large bed, he had only to remind himself of the disaster of his marriage to Jancis… the reality of modern relationships which meant that rarely did they involve the kind of almost spiritual intimacy and oneness which his Celtic spirit sometimes craved.
It was eight o'clock in the morning before he was able to leave the hospital. The man who had been brought in, the victim of a stabbing, was now recovering on the ward. He would have a long curving scar to show for his injury but nothing else. He had been lucky: the knife had just missed causing the kind of internal injury no surgeon, however skilled, could ever repair. There was such a lot still to be learned about the human body… so much that frustrated and angered Alaric, taunting him with his inability to help everyone who came into his hands. That woman upstairs, for instance.
He had never thought she would survive. And yet she had… Soon she would be strong enough for him to operate, to remove the pressure on her brain. What was it that gave some people the will to live no matter how severe their injuries, while others…?
Sighing faintly, he left the building. Outside it was light, the sky pearled with the promise of a clear day. As he got into his car, the same ordinary model he had driven for the past four years, he remembered that it was a long time since he had last visited his mother. She was living on the south coast now, in a small, lazy seaside town where the pace of life was slow and calm, and where most of the residents were retired. Sometimes when he went there he found the place faintly depressing, and yet his mother loved it.
After the council flat in one of Manchester's worst areas of deprivation he supposed her small bungalow in its neat complex of protected retirement homes was the kind of sanctuary she must often have dreamed of finding.
He felt guilty sometimes, aware of the barrenness of her life. As a child and then a student, he had been conscious of the small and large sacrifices she made for him, the pinching and scraping which had allowed him first to accept the scholarship he had won, and then later to follow his dream of becoming a surgeon.
As soon as she could he had repaid her. He had bought the bungalow for her; he gave her a monthly allowance to ensure that she never again had to go without any of life's material comforts. She asked nothing from him, not even, as other parents did, his time and attention.
As he drove towards the south coast, he wondered if there had ever been a time when she had wanted more from life, when she had hungered for a man to take the place of his father, other children, a more physically comfortable lifestyle… If she had, she had never allowed him to see it.
On impulse, just before he left the city, he pulled up outside a florist's, parking on the yellow line with unfamiliar disregard for the law. Inside the shop a girl was placing huge, still dew-fresh bunches of flowers into large vases. She smiled at him as he walked in.
Fifteen minutes later, feeling both awkward and a little foolish, he went back to his car, his arms full of the flowers he had just bought. The girl who had just sold them to him watched him, sighing romantically, wondering if her lover would ever think to stop and buy her market-fresh flowers… not in a single bunch, but by the armful, as her customer had just done.
When Sage got up, Faye had already gone. When she asked Camilla if she knew where her mother was, Camilla glanced at her watch and said absently, 'Oh, it's her day for that monthly WI thingy that she and Gran always go to…'
Sage frowned. It was true that she was out of touch with her mother's day-to-day routine, but the news that Liz, who thrived on the challenges of single-handedly controlling the reins of a busy business whose product was known in every part of the globe where people had the money and the inclination to buy clothes made from the famous Cottingdean Wools, should have the time to give up a whole day each and every month to spend involving herself in the affairs of a local Women's institute surprised her.
'Where exactly has your mother gone?' she questioned Camilla.
'I don't know. I've told you, Ma and Gran took off like this one day a month for ages. Ask Jenny, she might know…'
Sage was still frowning when Jenny came in carrying their breakfast. Breakfast for two, Sage noticed.
Yes, Jenny confirmed willingly when Sage questioned her. Liz and Faye always left early on the first Tuesday in the month, generally not returning until early evening, but no, she had no idea where they went.
Plainly these Tuesdays, wherever they were spent, were such an accepted part of life at Cottingdean as to provoke no curiosity. But Sage was curious, and her curiosity was like a tiny piece of grit rubbing against a tender place. It seemed so out of character that Faye, who was so obviously devoted to Liz, should disappear for a whole day without leaving any indication of where she had gone, or how she might be contacted in case of an emergency.
Not that she was going to have much time to worry about Faye's whereabouts, Sage acknowledged. The local paper had arrived with the post, and there was a write-up in it about the planned motorway. The paper was printed in Siddington, five miles away, where it was obvious that opinion as to the effects of the new motorway was divided.
There were those who believed it would bring new prosperity to the small market town, who claimed that in the wake of the motorway would come new industry, bringing in its turn much needed jobs for the school leavers, who at present often had to leave home for the large cities in order to get work.
Others, like Liz, were concerned about the effects of such a motorway on their environment and lifestyle.
Protest groups had sprung up in each small village affected by the road; as she read the list of them and how to contact their organisers, Sage gnawed at her bottom lip, wondering cynically if Daniel would attend each and every one of the meetings or only those where Ms Ordman was representing the Ministry. She suspected she already knew the answer. Although why blame Daniel? He was no hunting, aggressive male in the mould of Alexi, despite his obvious sexuality. Rather, she suspected, in this case it was Ms Ordman who was doing the hunting. Telling herself that she was allowing herself to be distracted down avenues which were as unprofitable as they were idiotic, Sage gathered up her post, pou
red herself a second cup of coffee, told Camilla that she would drive her to school… and acknowledged mentally to herself that she was likely to have to spend the rest of the day in her mother's study, not, as she would have liked, avidly reading the diaries to which she had become almost compulsively addicted, almost as though she was searching for something, or someone, from them, but instead trying as conscientiously as she could to stand in her mother's shoes and protect Cottingdean from the onslaught of Daniel Cavanagh's bulldozers.
Faye reached the outskirts of the town at nine o'clock. She always arrived far too early, something which Liz good-humouredly accepted. Generally they would spend the time before visiting time drinking cups of tea in one of the many old-fashioned seaside cafes.
Fellingham was a town that catered well to the needs of its inhabitants. Not for them the brash modernity of hamburger bars and pubs; Ye Olde Tea Shoppes and Copper Kettle Cafes were the order of the day, all of them boasting Earl Grey tea and home-made confectionery.
Earl Grey or not, Faye decided that tea was the last thing she wanted. Her stomach was already churning nauseously. Driving had at least given her something to do, something on which to fasten her mind.
She had automatically parked on the sea-front facing out to sea. Today the Channel was calm, reflecting the clear sharp blue of the sky. Already Fellingham's residents were filling the neat pathways running alongside the immaculately maintained flower-beds between the road and the sea-front. Why was it that so much order, cleanliness and neatness should have such a depressing effect? she wondered idly as she tried not to focus on the car's clock, silently marking the passage of time.
Why did she always do this—arrive so early? It wasn't as though she was anxious to see… She could restart the car now, turn around and go home. No one would know. Just for a moment the temptation overwhelmed her, and then she checked it. She was a grown woman, not a child. She was here now… here, yes, but the ordeal still lay ahead of her. Five to ten. Time now surely to go. If she walked slowly…