by Penny Jordan
'Come on,' Camilla urged her. 'Please hurry… I'm so afraid… I've never seen her like this before. Everything's changed,' Camilla told her passionately, angrily almost as though unable to accept that fate had dared to alter a single aspect of her life. 'Since Gran's accident nothing's been the same… Nothing feels right any more…'
For all her burgeoning maturity, she was still so much the cherished, cosseted, protected child, Sage reflected as she followed her out of the room.
Faye in tears… Faye behaving in a way that was more evocative of her own emotional bravura in those early days of rebellion and resentment against her mother than the kind of thing one expected from calm, controlled Faye, and as she hurried upstairs some of Camilla's apprehension communicated itself to her.
Faye's bedroom door was closed and she knocked on it, saying quietly to Camilla, 'I think it might be a good idea if you went downstairs and asked Jenny if she could make us all some tea…'
'You mean you think it would be a good idea if I disappeared for a while?' Camilla contradicted her shrewdly.
'Perhaps… If your mother is as upset as you say…'
'You mean she might not want me to know what's upset her?'
Sage nodded and waited until her niece had gone to push open Faye's door.
Her sister-in-law was sitting on her bed, her head in her hands, her whole body heaving with the violence of her silent racking tears.
Instinctively Sage dropped to her knees in front of her, placing her hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently as she asked, 'Faye… My dear, what is it? What's wrong?'
Faye raised her head and stared at her, her eyes so wild, so feral that for one heart-stopping moment Sage almost feared that she had actually gone beyond any form of reason, but then she focused on her, the wildness abating a little.
'What's wrong?' Her voice was sharp, bordering on hysteria—she was plainly fighting for self-control. 'Oh, nothing much… nothing at all… I've just spent the afternoon watching my mother die, that's all… Nothing really… Nothing's wrong—how could there be? After all, it's what I've been waiting for for the last twenty-five years or more… I should be laughing, not crying, shouldn't I? She's dead…and at last I'm free… Oh, God, Sage… I don't know why I'm behaving like this. I don't recognise myself any more… Perhaps I'm more like her than I ever thought… Perhaps I'm going mad too… Oh, God…'
'Faye, stop it. And listen to me… You've had a bad shock, but it might help if you tell me about it…'
'Tell you about it?' Her mouth twisted. 'If you only knew how often I've wanted to do that—to tell the world about it, to cry out to it everything that I feel, to tell people that it wasn't my fault, that I wasn't to blame, that I didn't know…'
She was crying again, dry, racking sobs that made Sage's own chest feel sore. 'It's all right, Faye… It's all right. It's over now…'
Unwittingly she had found the right words, because Faye muttered rawly, 'Yes… it's all over now… Thank God. I'm all right really—this is just a reaction, shock, I suppose… I've been waiting for her to die for so long, and yet somehow I never really believed that she would, or that I'd feel such… such pain…'
Her eyes were focusing not on Sage, but into the distance, as though she could see events unfolding beyond the confines of the room.
'You think you know what it's like to hate your mother, don't you?' she asked Sage bitterly. 'But you don't, you don't… You think your mother destroyed your life, but that was nothing… Nothing…'
'Do you know what my mother did to me? Do you?' she demanded savagely, her fingers locking round Sage's wrist, her nails pressing painfully into her skin. 'Do you know what my mother did to me? She let my stepfather rape me… She let him abuse me and destroy me and she stood by and did nothing…'
Sage couldn't speak, couldn't think beyond thanking God that she had had the foresight to send Camilla downstairs.
'You're shocked, disgusted… You're wondering if I'm lying… exaggerating… You're probably even wondering if I encouraged him, wanted him—'
'No,' Sage assured her. 'No, Faye, I believe you…'
And she did… Automatically, instinctively she felt as though a key had suddenly turned in a locked door, exposing to her horrified gaze a view so tortured, so filled with pain and misery that, like Pandora, she wished she had never turned the key. But it was too late for that now… Faye obviously needed the catharsis of talking, of describing all that she had suffered, and since she was the only person here who could listen, listen she must.
In a voice more like her mother's than she herself knew she suggested softly, 'Why don't you tell me all about it, Faye? Why don't you start at the beginning, and tell me everything?'
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Faye took a deep breath and then another. Ever since she had received that phone call early this morning to tell her that her mother was seriously ill and not expected to live she had been trying to fight against her emotions. Not the normal emotions of a child, even an adult child, learning that she was about to lose her only parent, but emotions that made Faye shrink from herself, because they were ugly: anger, fear, relief, resentment that she was actually experiencing all this… that through her mother's lack of care for her she had been forced to suffer the guilt of not being able to love her. How often during the night had she woken, shivering and sweating, fighting to break free of the nightmare that engulfed her…the nightmare that had always taken the same course? The slow opening of her bedroom door, the shadowy unseen and yet so terrifyingly familiar figure coming closer and closer to her bed… smiling at her, the hated dreadful smile of a torturer, of someone who enjoyed inflicting pain and degradation.
She had tried to scream, to escape… but every time she reached the door she found it barred. Not by him, but by her… her mother.
How often had she woken David with that nightmare, with her fear, finding comfort in the warm, tender hold of his arms? David, who in some ways had been both the mother and the father she had never known… David, who had been her protector, who had surrounded her with the deep but sexless love she had craved so much from her mother and yet never received.
The lack of passion in their marriage had been their secret… hers and David's. Something she had not even shared with Liz. He had loved her, he had told her that and she had known it was true. But he did not have the desire that motivated other men, he had said it was as though that motivating force had somehow been excluded from his make-up.
Neither of them had felt its loss. She had been happy with him and he with her. She had given him a child and would have given him more had they had the time fate had not allowed them.
He had told her before they married that he wanted children. Children were important to him, he had told her, far more important than sex. They had been lucky to find one another, but then she had lost him. Another punishment…
'Faye.'
She focused briefly on Sage's face, noting absently that these last days had changed her sister-in-law in some indefinable way… had wiped away the taut mask which had begun to harden her features and had left her face somehow younger and more vulnerable.
She had always deliberately held Sage at a distance. How could she, a woman so obviously sexually orientated and experienced, ever understand her own dark fears? And yet now somehow she sensed that in Sage she would find the one confidante who would not make judgements, whom it would be impossible to shock…or would it? She smiled grimly to herself, even now almost unable to believe what she had actually done.
'My mother's dead.'
She said it unemotionally this time, wearily, tasting the words and finding as she had already suspected that they had no meaning for her, no flavour… that in her mother's death there was for her no joy, no release, nothing other than a vast melancholic sea of pity, not for herself but for the woman who in her own way had surely endured just as much, and maybe even more than she had done herself.
'Look, if you'd rather not talk… I've sent
Cam for some tea…'
'No.' Faye reached out and touched Sage's arm. 'I do want to talk—I need to talk.'
She started speaking, slowly at first, anxious to find the words… the phrases that would lay bare the stark reality of what had happened to her, knowing with distaste that the last thing she wanted to do was to shroud what had happened to her in drama, not realising that, as Sage stiffened with shock and disgust at what she was hearing, the very fact that Faye was paring her past down to its bones made what she was saying all the more horrendous and appalling.
They were interrupted once when Camilla arrived with the tea.
Sage took the tray from her, reassuring her that Faye was no longer hysterical, watching half enviously as mother and daughter embraced and then Faye said firmly, 'I think you ought to be doing your homework. You've still got those exams ahead of you, you know…'
'Homework… exams… I'm tired of them,' Camilla protested, but Sage could see that she was reassured by her mother's calm and placid manner.
She hesitated a moment in the doorway, but Faye clapped her hands and said quietly, 'Homework, please, Cam. After all, after Liz has had her operation we'll be spending a lot of time at the hospital.'
'Do you think Gran will be all right? I mean…'
'We don't know, Cam. What we do know is that she has a very strong constitution and that she's in the best possible hands,' Faye told her, and once again Sage reflected how wise Faye was in not giving her daughter any false promises, any false hopes, in treating her as the adult she was starting to become without burdening her too much with the reality of Liz's chances of recovery.
After Camilla had reluctantly closed the door behind her, both women were silent for a moment while Sage automatically poured the tea.
She was handing Faye her cup when the other suddenly laughed shakily.
'What is it?' Sage asked her anxiously, fearing another outburst of hysteria.
'Nothing. It's just that for a moment you were so like Liz—you poured the tea without spilling a single drop…'
Sage stared down at the pristine white tray cloth, frowning a little as she searched for the familiar stains which were the normal result of any attempt on her part to wield the heavy antique silver teapot which her mother always insisted on using for afternoon tea.
'Heavens, so I have…' She smiled too, and then her smile quickly changed, her eyes sombre and vulnerable, so that Faye immediately read her mind.
'Don't,' she chided quietly, putting her hand over Sage's. 'It isn't an omen, a sign that… that things won't go well for Liz. She will be all right. Don't ask me how I know it… I just have this feeling…' She flushed and looked uncomfortable before adding huskily, 'It may sound strange, but today in some way I've felt so close to David. Almost as though he's here with us, but just in another room, if you can understand that… I felt it this morning, when… when I was with… with her, and then again afterwards…'
'You still miss him, don't you?'
'Don't you? He was such a unique person—so very special.'
'Yes,' Sage agreed. So much that she had never understood before about the relationship between her sister-in-law and her brother was now becoming clear to her. She thought she had suffered, had known pain, but her pain was nothing when compared with Faye's… Nothing.
They talked for a long time. Faye held nothing back, her hands twisting frantically together when she explained how much she had resented her mother. How much she had dreaded going to see her.
'Then why did you?' Sage asked her. 'In your shoes—'
'I had to. It was a compulsion, a bargain I had made with the gods, if you like. I can't explain… I only know it was something I had to do. A bargain I had made with fate—payment for the good things in my life.
'You see, when I married David I refused to let her come to the wedding. I refused to have anything to do with her, in fact, and then after he was killed…' She gave a tiny shudder, and Sage squeezed her hand sympathetically, understanding all too well what she was struggling to say.
She marvelled that Faye had been able to endure, to survive what she had survived, knowing humblingly that in the same circumstances she could never have done so; that her too highly tuned nervous system would have snapped under such an enormous strain. No words she could think of were adequate enough to convey to Faye all that she herself was feeling. She could feel tears of sympathy and rage sting her eyes as she contemplated all that her sister-in-law had had to endure.
Now she could understand Faye's marriage with David… and she could understand something else as well. 'My mother knew, about… about what happened to you?'
'Yes,' Faye said simply. 'I was living here when they wrote to me to tell me that my mother had become ill, that she had had a nervous breakdown of sorts. Your mother came home and found me in the most dreadful state… I confided in her. She was wonderful… not critical in any way.'
'Critical...' Sage stared at her. 'Critical of you, do you mean? Faye, how could anyone criticise you?'
'Quite easily,' Faye assured her sombrely, shadows chasing across her eyes as she remembered her time at university. 'Sometimes I even wonder if it was all my fault, if I didn't somehow subconsciously invite—'
She stopped as Sage shook her head and said fiercely, 'Don't you dare say that—don't you even dare think it. You were six years old, Faye… a child… a baby… My God, when I think of what you must have endured… How could your mother, how could any woman allow that to happen to a child…?'
Sage broke off. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.'
'I'm glad you did. You know, for a moment then you sounded quite frighteningly maternal…'
Sage closed her eyes. Faye wasn't to know that she had suddenly had a mental picture of a child in Daniel's image, with Daniel's features softened into female form—his child, her child… and that the thought of that child suffering in that way made her want to clench her hands and tear at the flesh of the people who had made her suffer until they were screaming in agony… begging for release… begging for death.
The ferocity of her own emotions frightened her. She had never envisaged herself feeling so violently protective towards a child, had never envisaged herself as a maternal woman, and yet this was not the first time recently that her imagination had created for her the child that nature had never allowed her to conceive.
A small voice whispered that it wasn't too late… that Daniel was not sexually indifferent to her, even if his desire was spawned by anger and lust rather than tenderness and love. She could still have his child… she could still steal that most precious of all gifts from him.
It shook her that she, who had always tried to be so honest with herself and with others, should so easily be able to envisage herself acting with such guile and deceit. But she could not do it… would not do it. It wouldn't be fair to the child, the child who would one day want to know who had fathered him or her, who would one day look at her with Daniel's eyes holding all of Daniel's dislike and disgust…
She shuddered again, causing Faye to say anxiously, 'I'm sorry, I've shocked you. I—'
'No, no, you haven't shocked me. I just wish that I'd known sooner, that I'd realised…'
'It wouldn't have made any difference—telling people wasn't any help… I discovered that with David. Oh, for a while it eased the torment, the anguish, but it never made it go away. I loved David. He gave me the happiest years of my life and he gave me Camilla, but sexually…' She hung her head, and Sage's heart ached for her. How could a man be allowed to do this to a child? Destroying her so completely that the woman within her would never be fully allowed to mature, that she would always have her right to her own sexuality shadowed by the crime perpetrated against her.
'David loved you. Sex wasn't important to him… You know, I often used to think that he ought to have been a Jesuit, a priest…'
'Yes, I think he thought the same thing himself. He loved young people, he loved teaching them and guiding them, b
ut he was too honest to enter the church when by his own admission he felt no religious call to do so. He always felt that he could not believe strongly enough to be able to do God justice… at least that was what he told me, and then of course I think he wanted children for Cottingdean, for Edward. He knew how much that meant to Edward…' She broke off as she saw Sage's face, making soft sounds of distress in her throat.
'Oh, Sage, I am sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you… Of course you could have married and had children…in fact I'm sure one day you will, but…'
'My children could never have come anywhere near meaning as much to my father as David's,' Sage supplied heavily for her, waving aside Faye's anguished protest.
'Let's not lie to one another, Faye. You've been honest with me—let me be equally honest with you. My father never loved me, not the way he loved David—not even the way he loved you. As a child I fought desperately hard to make him notice me… all I succeeded in doing was making him dislike me even more. I can never really understand why my mother had me.'
'She loves you, Sage.'
Sage gave her a wry smile. 'Does she?'
'Yes,' Faye told her firmly, surprising her by adding thoughtfully, 'In fact I've always wondered if secretly she didn't love you even more than she did David.'
Sage lifted her eyebrows and gave Faye a glinting, mocking smile so hard-edged with self-dislike that it made Faye wince for her.
'Now I know you're imagining things. David's death killed my father. They both loved him far more than they loved me… and why not? He was far more worthy of being loved.'
'Yes… I often used to think that he was almost saintlike, so far above me in his attitudes to others that I used to despair…'
'I've often wondered why you never remarried… now I do know,' Sage told her quietly. 'You're such a beautiful woman.'
Faye made a sound of embarrassed denial deep in her throat, but Sage insisted, 'Yes, you are… and I'm not the only one to think so. Mother's specialist definitely has a soft spot for you.'
'Alaric Ferguson?'