The Hidden Years Read Online Free

ought not to be feeling like this;
she had dissociated herself from her mother years ago. Oh, she paid
lip-service to their relationship, duty visits for her mother's
birthday in June, and at Christmas, although she had not spent that
Christmas at Cottingdean. She had been working in the Caribbean on the
villa of a wealthy French socialite. A good enough excuse for not going
home, and one her mother had accepted calmly and without comment.
    She turned off the motorway, following the familiar road
signs, frowning a little at the increased heaviness of the traffic,
noting the unsuitability of the enormous eight-wheel container trucks
for the narrow country lane.
    She overtook one of them on the small stretch of bypass
several miles east of the village, glad to be free of its choking
diesel fumes.
    They had had a hard winter, making spring seem doubly
welcome, the fresh green of the new hedges striking her eye as she
drove past them. In the village nothing seemed to have changed, and it
amused her that she should find that knowledge reassuring, making her
pause to wonder why, when she had been so desperate to escape from the
place and its almost too perfect prettiness, she experienced this dread
of discovering that it had changed in any way.
    She had rung the house from the hospital and spoken to
Faye, simply telling her that she was driving down but not explaining
why.

    Whoever had first chosen the site for Cottingdean had
chosen well. It sat with its back to the hills, facing south, shielded
from the east wind by the ancient oaks planted on the edge of its
parkland.
    The original house had been built by an Elizabethan
entrepreneur, a merchant who had moved his family from Bristol out into
the quiet and healthy solitude of the countryside. It was a solid,
sensible kind of house, built in the traditional style, in the shape of
the letter E. Later generations had added a jumble of extra buildings
to its rear, but, either through lack of wealth or incentive, no one
had thought to do anything to alter its stone frontage with its ancient
mullions and stout oak door.
    The drive still ran to the rear of the house and the
courtyard around it on which were the stables and outbuildings, leaving
the front of the house and its vistas completely unspoiled.
    Sage's mother always said that the best way to see
Cottingdean for the first time was on foot, crossing the bridge
spanning the river, and then through the wooden gate set into the
house's encircling garden wall, so that one's first view of it was
through the clipped yews that guarded the pathway to the terrace and
the front entrance.
    When her mother had come to Cottingdean as a bride, the
gardens which now were famous and so admired had been nothing more than
a tangle of weeds interspersed with unproductive vegetable beds. Hard
to imagine that now when one saw the smooth expanses of fresh green
lawn, the double borders with their enviable collections of seemingly
carelessly arranged perennials, the knot garden, and the yew hedges
which did so much to add to the garden's allure and air of enticing,
hidden secrets. All this had been created by her mother—and
not, as some people imagined, with money and other people's hard work,
but more often than not with her own hands.
    As she drove into the courtyard Sage saw that Faye and
Camilla were waiting for her. As soon as she stopped the car both of
them hurried up to her, demanding in unison, 'Liz…
Gran… how is she?'
    'Holding her own,' she told them as she opened the door
and climbed out. 'They don't know the extent of her injuries as yet. I
spoke to the surgeon. He said we could ring again tonight…'
    'But when can we see her?' Camilla demanded eagerly.
    'She's on the open visiting list,' Sage told them. 'But
the surgeon's told me that he'd like to have her condition stabilised
for at least forty-eight hours before she has any more visitors.'
    'But
you've
seen her,' Camilla
pointed out.
    Sage reached out and put her arm round her.