THREE
‘SAGE, I’m awfully sorry to interrupt you, but Alexi is on the phone and he’s insisting on speaking with you.’
Sage stared so blankly at her that for a moment Faye wondered if she had actually heard her.
The large, comfortably upholstered chair which had replaced Edward’s leather chair when Liz had taken over the library had been pushed away from the desk, and when she had opened the door Sage had been curled up in the chair, her knees drawn up into her body, a silky wing of hair falling across her face, so deeply absorbed in what she was reading that for a moment Faye had been reminded of that much younger and far more vulnerable Sage she had known when she herself first came to Cottingdean.
Now, though, as Sage raised her head, the illusion was shattered and Faye wondered to herself if Sage actually knew how very commanding and autocratic she could look when that cool, distant reserve shuttered her expression.
‘Alexi?’ she queried now, almost as though the name meant nothing to her.
She glanced involuntarily at the open diary she was holding and Faye felt a tiny flutter of apprehension stir in her own stomach. What was in the diaries that was so compelling that Sage was still here reading them hours after she had first walked into the room? The fire had burned low in the grate, and, apart from the pool of light cast by the reading lamp on the desk, the room was heavily shadowed; sombrely shadowed, Faye thought, shivering in a faint stirring of unease.
‘Yes. He was most insistent about speaking with you… Oh, and when you didn’t come out for your evening meal—we didn’t like to disturb you—I rang the hospital again. Liz is still holding her own…’
Holding her own… Sage slowly closed the diary, wincing as she felt pins and needles prickling her legs. She had been curled in her mother’s chair in a semi-foetal position for so long that her body had gone numb without her even noticing it.
She glanced at her watch, half shocked to discover it was gone midnight, and remembered that she had intended to ring Alexi at eleven, thinking that by that time she would have had more than enough of her mother’s diaries with their clinical, businesslike description of how she had run her life.
The reality couldn’t have been a greater contrast to what she had expected. In some ways she found it hard to believe that the girl who had written so openly and painfully in the diaries, pouring out her deepest emotions and vulnerabilities, was her mother. Even more astonishing was that her mother had wanted her to read them.
Would she in the same circumstances have been able to sanction such an intrusion into her past, into her life?
Perhaps if she had thought that she might be dying…if this might be her last chance to reach out…to explain.
She shivered suddenly. When Faye had interrupted her she had been so reluctant to stop reading, so very reluctant that initially she had resented her intrusion…but now, sharply, she didn’t want to read any more, didn’t want to…to what? What was she afraid of discovering?
‘Alexi,’ Faye reminded her diffidently.
Poor Faye. No doubt Alexi had been extremely rude to her, demanding that Sage be brought to the phone. Alexi was a very demanding man; despite his veneer, inwardly he still believed that man was infinitely superior to woman and that it was woman’s duty to pander to man’s needs and desires.
‘I’m sorry, Faye,’ she apologised now as she stood up, replaced the diary in the desk drawer and automatically locked it.
As she had anticipated, when she picked up the receiver Alexi was seething. ‘You said you’d ring this evening,’ he challenged her. ‘Where were you?’
Sage had an obstinate streak in her make-up which she herself considered to be a childish flaw and one which she had long ago mastered, but abruptly it resurfaced as she heard the arrogant challenge in Alexi’s voice. Suddenly those things which initially she had found amusingly attractive in him began to grate.
‘I said I’d try to ring you, Alexi,’ she corrected him flatly. ‘As it happens, I’ve been too busy. I’m sorry I had to break our date at such short notice…’
She could tell he was fighting to control his breathing and with it his temper, and she felt a brief resurgence of mocking contempt.
Poor Alexi, he must want her very much if he was prepared to tolerate her defiance. But his tolerance wouldn’t last very long or go very far. She had no illusions; Alexi desired and intended to dominate her, to subjugate her if he could. In bed he would be a powerful, commanding lover, and ultimately a selfish one. He would have no doubts or hesitancy about his prowess; her eagerness for his lovemaking, her desire to please him sexually would be things he would expect as his due. Oh, at first he would be prepared to indulge and coax her, but once he was sure of her…
It was a game she had played so often before…and yet suddenly she was tired of it, sickened by it just as though she had suffered a surfeit of a once favourite food, her nausea tinged with faint self-disgust.
Why? Because of the innocent outpourings of a girl so naïve, so trusting that to read them had brought into sharp focus the girl she herself had once been and the woman she now was?
Or was it simply that the times and their low-key sexual climate, their caution, their emphasis on separate contained lives geared for high materialistic achievement, were at last beginning to have their effect on her?
Whatever the reason, she suddenly knew that she was bored with this game she was playing with Alexi, and with that knowledge came a faint twinge of self-dislike because she knew that she would have gone to bed with him, probably simply to prove to him that in bed or out of it he couldn’t dominate her…certainly not because she was overwhelmed by physical desire for him. Which made her stop and think, and try to remember the last time she had felt like that…the last time she actually wanted the man rather than merely the act of sex, as a means of demonstrating her power over him…and over her mother, and the strict morality with which she had seemed to live her life. Was that what it had been all about…the men, the sexual freedom…? Had it not just been because, having loved so desperately and then lost that love, she had turned herself into a woman for whom sex was simply an appetite which she appeased whenever the need seized her? Was it an outright act of defiance, chosen deliberately to shock and hurt her mother?
‘Sage, are you still there?’
Now Alexi wasn’t bothering to control his irritation. Once that would have made her smile, the small secret triumphant smile that she knew drove her lovers mad, but now she merely dismissed the knowledge that she had annoyed him, as uncaringly as though it meant nothing to her…which it didn’t, she realised tiredly.
Suddenly there was an unpleasant taste in her mouth, a tiredness in her body and her mind, a weariness with her life and everything it embraced.
‘Yes. I’m still here, Alexi,’ she responded. ‘I’m sorry if you’re annoyed. I should have rung you, but—’
‘It isn’t your telephone call I want, Sage. It’s you, you…here with me…filling my bed, the way you’ve been filling my mind. You know I want you, Sage, you know how good we’d be together. Let me come down there now and drive you back to London. Your sister-in-law told me that your mother’s condition is stable. You can do nothing for her down there…here you would be closer to the hospital, in any case. Let me take care of you, Sage. You know
