The Hidden Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 she'd have to drive back to London and collect
some clothes from her flat, something she ought to have done before
coming down here, but when she'd left the hospital she had been in no
mood to think of such practicalities. All she had been able to
concentrate on was her mother, and fulfilling her promise to her. Her
mother had always said she was too impulsive and that she never stopped
to think before acting.
    After Jenny had gone, she drank her tea impatiently,
ignoring the small delicacies Jenny had provided. She admitted absently
that she probably ought to eat some-thing, but the thought of food
nauseated her. It struck her that she was probably suffering from
shock, but she was so used to the robustness of her physical health
that she barely gave the idea more than a passing acknowledgement.
    Seeing her restlessness, Faye put down her teacup as well.
'The diaries,' she questioned uneasily. 'Did Liz really mean all of us
to read them?'
    'Yes. I'm afraid so. I'm as reluctant to open them as you
are, Faye. Knowing Mother and how meticulous she is about everything,
I'm sure they contain nothing more than detailed records of her work on
the house, the estate and the mill. But I suspect the human race falls
into two distinct groups: those people like you and me who feel
revulsion at the thought of prying into something as intimate as a
diary, and those who