The Hidden Years Read Free Page A

really
knowing what she was crying out for.
    Then she heard the light, quiet voice saying reassuringly,
'I'm here, Sage. When you read the diaries,
then
you will understand.' She closed her eyes, so obviously exhausted that
for a moment Sage thought she had actually died.
    It was the surgeon's firm touch on her arm, his quiet
words of reassurance that stilled her panic.
    'She wants me to read her diaries,' she told him, too
bewildered to understand her need to confide, to understand…
    'Sometimes when people are closest to death they sense
what is happening to them and they dwell on certain aspects of their
lives and the lives of those around them.'
    'I never even knew she kept a diary.' Sage was speaking
more to herself than him. 'I never knew… She made me
promise,' she told him inconsequentially, knowing already that it was a
promise she must keep. A promise she
had
to keep,
and yet already she was dreading doing so, dreading what she might
read… dreading perhaps confronting the truth and the pain
she thought she had long ago put behind her.
    As the surgeon escorted her from the ward, she cast a
last, lingering look at her mother. 'Will she…?'
    Will she die? she wanted to ask, even while she knew that
she didn't want to know the answer, that she wanted to hold on to the
hope… the belief that because her mother was alive she would
live.
    She had often heard people say that there was no pain, no
guilt, no awareness of life passing too quickly more sharp-edged than
when an adult experienced the death of a parent.
    Her father had died while she was a teenager, his death a
release to him and something that barely touched her life. She had been
at home then. Her father, because of his poor health, had never played
a large part in her life. He was a remote, cosseted figure on whom her
mother's whole life pivoted and yet somehow someone who was distant
from her own.
    Until today she had thought she had stopped loving her
mother over fifteen years ago, her love eroded by too much pain, too
much betrayal—and she had decided then that the only way to
survive the catalyst of that betrayal was for her to forge a separate,
independent life of her own.
    And that was what she had done.
    She now had her own career, her own life. A life that took
her from London to New York, from New York to LA to Rome, to Paris, to
all those places in the new world where people had heard by word of
mouth of her skills as a muralist.
    There were houses all over the world—the kind of
houses owned by people who would never dream of wanting them to be
featured in even the most upmarket of glossy
publications—where one of her murals was a prized feature of
the decor. She was sought after and highly paid, working only on
favoured commissions. Her life was her own… or so she had
thought.
    Why me? she had asked, and even in extremity her mother
had not spared her. Of course, gentle, tender Faye would never have
been able to bring herself to read another person's diaries…
to pry into their privacy. What was it, then, that made it so important
that she read them… that they all read them… so
important that her mother should insist with what might well be her
dying breath that they do so?
    There was only one way that she was going to find out.

    There was nothing to be gained in putting off what had to
be done, Sage acknowledged as she left the hospital. As chance would
have it, she was in between commissions at the moment and there was
nothing of sufficient urgency in her life to excuse her from fulfilling
the promise she had made to her mother, nothing to stop her from going
immediately to Cottingdean, no matter how little she wanted to do so.
    Cottingdean, the family's house, was on the outskirts of
an idyllic English village set in a fold of the hills to the south-east
of Bath. It was a tiny rural community over which her mother presided
as its loving and much-loved matriach. Sage had never felt the same
love for it that the rest of her family