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‘I might as well use the library,’ Sage told her. ‘I’ll get Charles to light the fire in there.’
Even now, knowing there was no point in delaying, she was deliberately trying to find reasons to put off what she had to do. Did she really need a fire in the library? The central heating was on. It startled her, this insight into her own psyche… What was she afraid of? Confirmation that her mother didn’t love her? Hadn’t she accepted that lack of love years ago…? Or was it the reopening of that other, deeper, still painful wound that she dreaded so much? Was it the thought of reading about that time so intensely painful to her that she had virtually managed to wipe her memory clear of it altogether?
What was she so afraid of…?
Nothing, she told herself firmly. Why should she be…? She had nothing to fear…nothing at all. She picked up the coffee-coloured linen jacket she had been wearing and felt in the pocket for her mother’s keys.
It was easy to spot the ones belonging to the old-fashioned partners’ desk in the library, even if she hadn’t immediately recognised them.
‘The diaries are in the drawers on the left side of the desk,’ Camilla told her quietly, and then, as though sensing what Sage thought she had successfully hidden, she asked uncertainly, ‘Do you…would you like us to come with you?’
For a moment Sage’s face softened and then she said derisively, ‘It’s a set of diaries I’m going to read, Camilla, not a medieval text on witchcraft… I doubt that they’ll contain anything more dangerous or illuminating than Mother’s original plans for the garden and a list of sheep-breeding records.’
She stood up swiftly, and walked over to the door, pausing there to ask, ‘Do you still have dinner at eight-thirty?’
‘Yes, but we could change that if you wish,’ Faye told her.
Sage shook her head. ‘No…I’ll read them until eight and then we can ring the hospital.’
As she closed the door behind her, she stood in the hall for a few minutes. The spring sunshine turned the panelling the colour of dark honey, illuminating the huge pewter jugs of flowers and the enormous stone cavern of the original fireplace.
The parquet floor was old and uneven, the rugs lying on it rich pools of colour. The library lay across the hall from the sitting-room, behind the large drawing-room. She stared at the door, and turned swiftly away from it, towards the kitchen, to find Charles and ask him to make up the fire.
While he was doing so she went upstairs. Her bedroom had been redecorated when she was eighteen. Her mother had chosen the furnishings and the colours as a surprise, and she had, Sage admitted, chosen them well.
The room was free of soft pretty pastels, which would have been far too insipid for her, and instead was decorated in the colours she loved so much: blues, reds, greens; colours that drew out the beauty of the room’s panelled walls.
The huge four-poster bed had been made on the estate from their own wood; her name and date of birth were carved on it, and the frieze decorating it had carved in the wood the faces of her childhood pets. A lot of care had gone into its design and execution; to anyone else the bed would have been a gift of great love, but she had seen it merely as the execution of what her mother conceived to be her duty. Her daughter was eighteen and of age, and therefore she must have a gift commensurate with such an occasion.
In the adjoining bathroom, with its plain white suite and dignified Edwardian appearance, Sage washed her hands and checked her make-up. Her lipstick needed renewing, and her hair brushing.
She smiled mirthlessly at herself as she did so… Still putting off the evil hour…why? What was there after all to fear… to reveal… ? She already knew the story of her mother’s life as everyone locally knew it. It was as blameless and praiseworthy as that of any saint.
Her mother had come to this house as a young bride, with a husband already seriously ill, his health destroyed by the war. They had met when her mother worked as a nursing aide, fallen in love and married and come to live here at Cottingdean, the estate her father had inherited from a cousin.
Everyone knew her mother had arrived here when she was eighteen to discover that the estate her husband had drawn for her in such glowing colours—the colours of his own childhood—had become a derelict eyesore.
Everyone knew how her mother had worked to restore it to what it had once been. How she had had the foresight and the drive to start the selective breeding programme with the estate’s small flock of sheep that was to produce the very special fleece of high-quality wool.
But how her mother had had the vision to know that there would come a time when such wool was in high demand, how she had had the vision to persuade her husband to allow her to experiment with the production of that wool, let alone the run-down mill, Sage realised she had no idea, and with that knowledge came the first stirrings of curiosity.
Everyone knew of the prosperity her mother had brought to the village, of the new life she had breathed into Cottingdean. Everyone knew of the joys and sorrows of her life; of the way she had fought to keep her husband alive, of the cherished son she had borne and lost, of the recalcitrant and troublesome daughter she was herself…
No, there were no real secrets in her mother’s life. No reason why she herself should experience this tension…this dread…this fear almost that made her so reluctant to walk into the library and unlock the desk.
And 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.’
CHAPTER ONE (#u9297192c-5fbb-5fea-9191-c5a976f555f4)
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 wartime and young men did not have the time, or the necessity, to waste their energy, and what might only be a very brief life, in coaxing a girl when there were so many who did not want such coaxing.
The only other men Lizzie met were the patients in the hospital, men who had been so badly injured that it was tacitly admitted that nothing more could be done for them, and so they lay here in the huge, decaying old building, economically and clinically nursed by young women who had learned to seal themselves off from human pity and compassion, who had seen so many broken bodies, so many maimed human beings, so many tormented young male minds that they could no longer agonise over what they saw.
For Lizzie it was different. She had wondered at first when she came to the hospital if she might eventually try to qualify as a nurse, but after a year there, a year when she had seen a constant stream of young men, their minds and bodies destroyed by this thing called war, lying in the wards, when she had seen the hopelessness in their eyes, the anger, the pain, the sheer bitter resentment at their loss of the future they had once anticipated, she had known that she did not have the mental stamina for nursing.
With every familiar patient who left the wards, taken home by a family helpless to cope with the physical and mental burdens of their sons and husbands, and with every new arrival, her heart bled a little more, and she could well understand why the other girls sought relief from the trauma of working with such men by spending their free nights with the healthy, boisterous, whole representatives of manhood they picked up at the dances they attended.
That the Americans were the best was the universal opinion of her colleagues; Americans were generous and fun to be with. There were some stationed on the other side of the village, and once or twice one of them had tried to chat her up when Lizzie walked there to post her weekly duty letter to Aunt Vi.
She always ignored them, steeling her heart against their coaxing smiles and outrageous invitations, but she was only seventeen, and often, once she was safely out of sight, she would wonder wistfully what it would be like to be one half of the kind of perfect whole that was formed when two people loved with the intensity she had envied in her reading.
Lizzie was an avid reader, and a daydreamer. When she had first come to live with Aunt Vi, she had barely opened a book in her life, but, in addition to ceaselessly correcting her speech and her manners, Aunt Vi had also insisted that her great-niece read what she had termed ‘improving books’.
The chance munificence of a large trunkful of books from the vicar’s wife, which had originally belonged to her now adult children, had furnished Lizzie with the ability to escape from Aunt Vi’s strict and sometimes harsh domination into a world she had hitherto not known existed.
From her reading Lizzie discovered the tragedy of the love between Tristan and Iseult, and started to dream of emotions which had nothing in common with the clumsy overtures of the outwardly brash young men with whom she came into contact. Their very brashness, the fact that her sensitive soul cringed from their lack of finesse and from the often unwelcome conversation and revelations of the other girls in her dormitory, made it easy for her to bear in mind Aunt Vi’s strictures that she was to keep herself to herself and not to get up to any ‘funny business’.
By funny business Aunt Vi meant sex, a subject which was never openly referred to in her aunt’s house. As far as Aunt Vi was concerned, sex was something to be ignored as though it did not exist. Lizzie had naïvely assumed that all women shared her aunt’s views, until she had come to work at the hospital. From her peers’ conversations she had learned otherwise, but until now she had felt nothing other than a vague yearning awareness that her life was somehow incomplete… that some vital part of it was missing. She had certainly never contemplated sharing with any of the men she had met the intimacies she heard the other girls discussing so openly and shockingly… Until now…
She stared dreamily at her diary. It had been at Aunt Vi’s insistence that she had first started keeping a diary, not to confide her most private thoughts in, but as a factual record of the achievements of her days.
It was only since she had come to work at the hospital that she had found herself confiding things to her diary that were little more than nebulous thoughts and dreams.
Kit… Even now she was dazzled by the wonder of meeting him…of being able to whisper his name in the secret, private recess of her mind, while her body shivered with nervous joy.
Kit… He was so different…so special, so breathtakingly wonderful.
She had known the moment she saw him. He had turned his head and smiled at her, and suddenly it was as though her world had been flooded with warmth and magic.
And to think, if she hadn’t decided to go and visit poor Edward, she would never have met Kit… She shook with the enormity of how narrowly she had averted such a tragedy.
Edward Danvers had been with them for many months now; a major in the army, he had been badly injured in Normandy… his legs crushed and his spine injured, resulting in the eventual amputation of both his legs.
He had come to them supposedly to recuperate from a second operation, but Lizzie knew, as they all knew, that in fact he had come to them because there was nowhere else for him to go. His parents were dead, he wasn’t married, and privately Lizzie suspected that he himself no longer had any desire to live. He wasn’t like some of the men who came to them: he didn’t rage and rail against his fate; outwardly placid and calm, he seemed to accept it, but Lizzie had seen the way he looked inwards into himself, instead of out into the world, and had known that she was looking at a man who was gradually closing himself off from that world. Willing himself to die, almost.
He never spoke about his injuries. Never complained, as some of the men did, about fictitious limbs that were still there. Outwardly, he seemed to have adjusted well to his amputations, quietly allowing the nurses to get him into a chair, so that Lizzie, or one of the other aides, could wheel him into the gardens.
Lizzie liked him, although she knew that most of the other girls found him poor company, complaining that he never laughed or joked like the other men and that he was a real misery.
Lizzie didn’t mind his silences—she knew that he particularly liked to be wheeled round the gardens. He had told her once that they reminded him of the gardens of his grandparents’ home.
Cottingdean, it was called, and when he talked about it Lizzie could tell that it was a place he loved and that, in some way, the memory of it brought him both joy and pain. Sometimes when he mentioned it she would see the bright sheen of tears in his eyes and would wonder why, if he loved it so much, he stayed here, but she was too sensitive to question him, too aware of the deep, raw pain he kept hidden from the others.
She liked him and discovered, as the months went by, that she looked forward to seeing him, to winning from him his fugitive, reluctant smile.
Like her, he enjoyed reading, and when he discovered that she had read, and now reread, everything the vicar’s wife had donated to her he offered to lend her some of his own books. She refused, worrying about the wisdom of leaving them in the dormitory. The other girls would not deliberately damage them, but they were not always as careful with other people’s property as they might have been.
Gradually, a tentative friendship developed between them and often, on her days off, she would spend time with Edward, taking him out in the garden if the weather was fine, sometimes reading aloud to him when it wasn’t, knowing how much the mere effort of holding a book sometimes tired him.
She made no mention of Edward in her letters home to her aunt. Aunt Vi would not have approved. Edward came from a very different world from her own and Aunt Vi did not approve of any mingling of the classes. It always led to trouble, she had warned Lizzie.
It made her blood run cold now to remember that, on this particular Thursday, she had almost decided against spending her precious time off with Edward. She had woken up in an odd, restless, uncomfortable mood, her mind and body filled with vague, unfamiliar yearnings, but then she had reminded herself that Edward would be looking forward to going out. The rhododendrons were in full flower in the park, and he had been looking forward to seeing them for days. The sun was out, the sky a clear, soft blue… No, it wouldn’t be fair to let him down.
And so, suppressing her rebellious yearnings, she had washed in the cold, shabby bathroom which all the girls shared, allowing herself the luxury of washing her hair, and wondering at the same time if she dared to have it cut. She was the only girl in the hostel who wore her hair in such an old-fashioned style, braided into a neat coronet, which Aunt Vi insisted upon. She wondered idly for a moment what she would look like with one of the shoulder-length bobs worn with such suggestive insouciance by some of the other girls, and then sighed as she studied her make-up-free reflection in the spotted mirror.
The other girls wore powder and lipstick, and cheap perfume given to them by their American boyfriends. They curled their hair and darkened their eyelashes with shoe blacking and, if they were lucky enough to own a pair of the coveted nylons, they deliberately wore their skirts short enough to show off their legs.
As she dressed in the serviceable cotton underwear which Aunt Vi’s strict teachings ensured that she spent her precious allowance of soap scrupulously washing until her hands were almost raw and bleeding, to ensure that it stayed white, she admitted that lipstick and fashionably bobbed hair were not for her.
She knew the other girls laughed at her behind her back, mimicking her accent and making fun of her clothes.
Aunt Vi had practised a lifetime of frugality and, as Lizzie had grown out of the clothes she had originally arrived with from London, the older woman had altered garments from the trunks full of clothes she had been given by her employers over the years to fit her great-niece, and, in doing so, had also turned the exercise into lessons in dressmaking and fine plain sewing.
That the skirt she was wearing now had once belonged to Lady Jeveson would have impressed the other girls in the hostel as little as it impressed her, although for different reasons, Lizzie acknowledged. The other girls would have screamed with laughter and derision at the thought of wearing something which had first been worn by a girl who was now a grandmother.
That quality of cloth never wore out, Aunt Vi declared firmly, and indeed it did not, Lizzie reflected wryly, fingering the heavy, pleated tweed.
It was a pity that Lady Jeveson had not favoured the soft pastel colours more suited to her own fair colouring, rather than the dull, horsy tweeds of which she had apparently been so fond. The blouse she was wearing might be silk, but it was a dull beige colour which did nothing for her skin, just like the brown cashmere cardigan she wore over it.
She had seen the other girls, on their days off, going out in bright, summery dresses, with thin floating skirts and the kind of necklines which would have shocked Aunt Vi, and, while she knew that she could never have worn anything so daring, this morning Lizzie found herself wishing that her blouse might have been a similar shade of lavender-grey to her eyes, and that her skirt might have been made out of a fine, soft wool, and not this heavy, itchy stuff, which was a physical weight on her slender hips.
There were no nylons for her. She had to make do either with bare legs, which the rough wool made itch dreadfully, or the thick, hand-knitted stockings her aunt had sent her for Christmas.
She wasn’t sure what had made her opt for bare legs, what particular vanity had decreed that this morning she would not be sensible and wear the hated stockings, knowing that they made her slender ankles look positively thick, even if they were warm and practical.
The hostel was just across the village from the hospital, and Lizzie cycled there on an ancient bicycle. When they were on duty, the girls ate at the hospital; not the same food as the patients, but meals which the others often angrily derided as ‘not fit for pigs’.
Certainly, the meals were stodgy and unappetising, and not a patch on Aunt Vi’s dishes. Her aunt might almost be bordering on the parsimonious, she might make every penny do the work of two, but she was a good cook, and Lizzie missed her appetising meals, the fresh vegetables and fruit in season which she always managed to obtain by some country means of barter.
This morning, since she wasn’t on duty, there would be no breakfast for her at the hostel, and, since the girls were not allowed to cook food in the hostel, that meant either whatever she could buy and eat on the way to the hospital, or an expensive and not very appetising snack in the village’s one and only café.
Trying not to let herself think about her aunt’s porridge, thick and creamy with the top of Farmer Hobson’s milk, Lizzie told herself stoically that she didn’t really want any breakfast.
All the girls were always hungry; their workload was heavy, and no matter how unappetising they found their food it was always eaten.
All of them were a little on the thin side, Lizzie in particular as she was more fine-boned than the rest, with tiny, delicate wrists and ankles that sometimes looked so frail that they might snap.
