yet it had to be done. She had given her word, her promise. Sighing faintly, Sage went back downstairs. She hesitated outside the library door for a second and then lifted the latch and went in.
The fire was burning brightly in the grate and someone, Jenny, no doubt, had thoughtfully brought in a fresh tray of coffee.
As she closed the door behind her, Sage remembered how as a child this room had been out of bounds to her. It had been her father’s sanctuary; from here he had been able to sit in his wheelchair and look out across the gardens.
He and her mother had spent their evenings in here… Stop it, Sage told herself. You’re not here to dwell on the past. You’re here to read about it.
She surprised herself by the momentary hope that the key would refuse to unlock the drawers, but, of course, it did. They were heavy and old, and slid surprisingly easily on their wooden runners. A faint musty scent of herbs and her mother’s perfume drifted up towards her as she opened them.
She could see the diaries now; far more of them than she had imagined, all of them methodically numbered and dated, as though her mother had always known that there would come a time, as though she had deliberately planned…
But why? Sage wondered as she reached tensely into the drawer and removed the first diary.
She found her hands were shaking as she opened it, the words blurring as she tried to focus on them. She didn’t want to do this…could not do it, and yet even in her reluctance she could almost feel the pressure of her mother’s will, almost hear her whispering, You promised…
She blinked rapidly to clear her eyes and then read the first sentence.
‘Today I met Kit…’
‘Kit…’ Sage frowned and turned back the page to check on the date. This diary had begun when her mother was seventeen. Soon after her eighteenth birthday she had been married. So who was this Kit?
Nebulous, uneasy feelings stirred inside her as Sage stared reluctantly at the neat, evenly formed handwriting. It was like being confronted with a dark passage you had to go down and yet feared to enter. And yet, after all, what was there to fear?
Telling herself she was being stupid, she picked up the diary for the second time and started to read.
‘Today I met Kit.’
Spring 1945
‘TODAY I met Kit.’
Just looking at the words made her go dizzy with happiness, Lizzie acknowledged, staring at them, knowing it was impossible to translate into cold, dry print the whole new world of feelings and emotions which had opened up in front of her.
Yesterday her life had been bound and encompassed by the often arduous routine of her work as a nursing aide: long hours, low pay, and all the horrid dirty jobs that real nurses were too valuable to spend their time on.
She would rather have stayed on at school, but, with her parents killed in one of the many bombing raids on London, she had had no option but to accept her great-aunt’s ruling that she must leave school and start to earn her living.
Aunt Vi didn’t mean to be unkind, but she wasn’t a sentimental woman and had never married. She had no children of her own, and, as she was always telling her great-niece, she had only agreed to take Lizzie in out of a sense of family duty. She herself had been sent out to work at thirteen, skivvying in service at the local big house. She had worked hard all her life and had slowly made her way up through the levels of service until she had eventually become housekeeper to Lord and Lady Jeveson.
Lizzie had found it bewildering at first, leaving the untidy but comfortable atmosphere of the cramped terraced house where she had lived with her parents and grandparents, evacuated from the busy, dusty streets so familiar to her to this place called ‘the country’, where everything was strange and where she missed her ma and pa dreadfully, crying in her sleep every night and wishing she were back in London.
Aunt Vi wasn’t like her ma…for a start she didn’t talk the way her ma did. Aunt Vi talked posh and sounded as though her mouth was full of sharp, painful stones. She had made Lizzie speak the same way, endlessly and critically correcting her, until sometimes poor Lizzie felt as though she dared not open her mouth.
That had been four years ago, when she had first come to the country. Now she had almost forgotten what her ma and pa had looked like; her memories of them and the dusty terraced house seemed to belong to another life, another Lizzie. She had grown accustomed to Aunt Vi’s pernickety ways, her sharp manner.
Only yesterday one of the other girls at the hospital, a new girl from another village, had commented on Lizzie’s lack of accent, taunting her about her ‘posh’ speech, making her realise how much she had changed from the awkward, rebellious thirteen-year-old who had arrived on Aunt Vi’s doorstep.
Aunt Vi knew how things should be done. No great-niece of hers was going to grow up with the manners and speech of a kitchen tweeny, she had told Lizzie so many times that she often thought the words were engraved in her heart.
She had hated it at first when her aunt had got her this job at the hospital, but Aunt Vi had firmed up her mouth and eyed her with cold determination when Lizzie had pleaded to be allowed to stay on at school, telling her sharply that she couldn’t afford to have a great lazy girl eating her out of house and home and not bringing in a penny piece.
Besides, she had added acidly, in case Lizzie hadn’t realised it, there was a war on and it was her duty to do what she could to aid her countrymen. Aunt Vi had made up her mind. The matron of the hospital was one of her friends, and, before Lizzie had time to draw breath, she was installed in the hostel not far from the hospital grounds, in a dormitory with a dozen other girls, all of them working the same long, gruelling hours, although the others, unlike Lizzie, spent their free time not on their own but in giggling, excited groups, vying with one another to present the most enticing appearance for their weekly visits to nearby barracks to attend their Saturday night dances.
They made fun of Lizzie, taunting her because she held herself aloof from them, because she was ‘different’, and not just because of the way she spoke.
Aunt Vi was very strict, and, even though Lizzie was no longer living under her jurisdiction, the lessons she had enforced on her made it painfully difficult for Lizzie to throw off her aunt’s warnings about what happened to girls foolish enough to listen to the brash flattery of boys who ‘only wanted one thing’ and who ‘would get a girl into trouble as soon as look at her’.
Aunt Vi had no very high opinion of the male sex, which, in her view, was best kept at a distance by any right-minded female.
She herself had grown up in a harsh world, where a single woman who managed to rise to the position of housekeeper in a wealthy upper-class home was far, far better off than her married sisters, who often had half a dozen dependent children and a husband who might or might not be inclined to support them all.
Men, in her opinion, were not to be trusted, and Lizzie had a natural sensitivity that made her recoil from the often clumsy and always suggestive passes of the few young men she did come into contact with.
This was
