to feel pain, rejection over something so insignificant, Sage told herself.
‘She kept the diaries locked in the big desk—the one that belonged to Grandpa,’ Camilla volunteered. ‘No one else has a key.’
‘I’ve got the key,’ Sage told her gruffly. They had given it to her at the hospital, together with everything else they had found in her mother’s handbag. She had hated that…hated taking that clinically packaged bundle of personal possessions… hated knowing why she had been given them.
‘I wonder why she wants us to read them,’ Faye murmured. She looked oddly anxious, dread shadowing her eyes.
Sage studied her. She had got so used to her sister-in-law’s quiet presence in the background of her mother’s life that she never questioned why it was that a woman—potentially a very attractive and certainly, at forty-one, a relatively young woman—should want to choose that kind of life for herself.
Sage knew Faye had been devoted to David…that she had adored him, worshipped him almost, but David had been dead for over fifteen years, and, as far as she knew, in all that time there had never been another man in Faye’s life.
Why did she choose to live like that? In another woman, Sage might have taken it as a sign that her marriage held so many bad memories that any kind of intimate relationship was anathema to her, but she knew how happy David and Faye had been, so why did Faye choose to immure herself here in this quiet backwater with only her mother-in-law and her daughter for company? Sage studied her sister-in-law covertly.
Outwardly, Faye always appeared calm and controlled—not in the same powerful way as her mother, Sage recognised. Faye’s self-control was more like a shield behind which she hid from the world. Now the soft blue eyes flickered nervously, the blonde hair which, during the days of her marriage, she had worn flowing free drawn back off her face into a classic chignon, her eyes and mouth touched with just the merest concession to make-up. Faye was a beautiful woman who always contrived to look plain and, watching her, it occurred to Sage to wonder why. Or was her curiosity about Faye simply a way of putting off what she had come here to do?
Now, with both Faye and Camilla watching her anxiously, Sage found herself striving to reassure them as she told them firmly, ‘Knowing Mother, she probably wants us to read them because she thinks whatever she’s written in them will help us to run things properly while she’s recovering.’
Faye gave her a quick frown. ‘But Henry’s in charge of the mill, and Harry still keeps an eye on the flock, even though his grandson’s officially taken over.’
‘Who’s going to chair the meeting of the action group against the new road, if Gran isn’t well enough?’ Camilla put in, making Sage’s frown deepen.
‘What road?’ she demanded.
‘They’re planning to route a section of the new motorway to the west of the village,’ Faye told her. ‘It will go right through the home farm lands, and within yards of this side of the village. Your mother’s been organising an action group to protest against it. She’s been working on finding a feasible alternative route. We had a preliminary meeting of the action group two weeks ago. Of course, they elected your mother as chairperson…’
The feelings of outrage and anger she experienced were surely wholly at odds with her feelings towards Cottingdean and the village, Sage acknowledged. She’d been only too glad to escape from the place, so why did she feel this fierce, protective swell of anger that anyone should dare to destroy it to build a new road?
‘What on earth are we going to do without her?’ Faye demanded in distress.
For a moment she seemed close to tears, and Sage was relieved when the door opened and her mother’s housekeeper came in with the tea-trolley.
Afternoon tea was an institution at Cottingdean, and one which had begun when her parents had first come to the house. Her father, an invalid even in those days, had never had a good appetite, and so her mother had started this tradition of afternoon tea, trying to tempt him to eat.
Jenny and Charles Openshaw had worked for her mother for over five years as her housekeeper and gardener-cum-chauffeur, a pleasant Northern couple in their mid-fifties. It had been Charles’s unexpected redundancy which had prompted them to pool their skills and to look for a job as a ‘live-in couple’.
Charles’s redundancy money had been used to purchase a small villa in the Canaries. They had bought wisely on a small and very strictly controlled development and, until they retired, the villa was to be let through an agency, bringing them in a small extra income.
Sage liked them both very much; brisk and uncompromising in their outlook, they had nothing servile or over-deferential in their manner. Their attitude to their work was strictly professional—they were valued members of the household, treated by her mother, as they had every right to be, with the same respect for their skills as she treated everyone else who worked for her.
Now, once she had informed Sage that her old bedroom was ready for her, Jenny asked how her mother was.
Sage told her, knowing that Jenny would guess at all that she was not saying and be much more aware of the slenderness of the chances of her mother’s full recovery than either Faye or Camilla could allow themselves to be.
‘Oh! I almost forgot,’ Jenny told Sage. ‘Mr Dimitrios telephoned just before you arrived.’
‘Alexi.’ Sage sighed. He would be furious with her, she suspected. She was supposed to be having dinner with him tonight and she had rung his apartment before leaving the hospital to leave a message on his answering machine, telling him briefly what had happened, and promising to try to ring him later.
He had been pursuing her for almost two months now, an unknown length of time for him to pursue any woman without taking her to bed, he had informed her on their last date.
There was no real reason why they should not become lovers. He was a tall, athletic-looking man with a good body and a strong-boned face. Sage had been introduced to him in Sydney while she had been working there on a commission. He was one of the new generation of Greek Australians; wealthy, self-assured, macho, in a way which she had found amusing.
She had forgotten what it was like to be pursued so aggressively. It had been almost two years since she had last had a lover; a long time, especially when, she was the first to admit, she found good sex to be one of life’s more enjoyable pleasures.
That was the thing, of course. Good sex wasn’t that easy to come by—or was it simply that as the years passed she was becoming more choosy, more demanding…less inclined to give in to the momentary impulse to respond to the ache within herself and the lure of an attractive man?
Of course, her work kept her very busy, allowing her little time for socialising or for self-analysis, which was the way she liked things. She had spent too many wearying and unproductive hours of her time looking for the impossible, aching for what she could not have…yearning hopelessly and helplessly until she had made a decision to cut herself off from the past to start life anew and live it as it came. One day at a time, slowly and painfully like a person learning to walk again after a long paralysis.
Sage acknowledged that her lack of concern at Alexi’s potential anger at her breaking of their date suggested that her desire for him was only lukewarm at least. She smiled easily at Jenny and told her that she wasn’t sure as yet how long she would be staying.
Tomorrow
