The Hidden Years. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      How old had she been when she had first started to blame her mother for her father’s indifference to her? Eight, nine…even younger. Certainly it seemed when she looked back that she had always been aware of the fact that, while David had always been free to approach their father directly, when she had tried to do the same thing her mother had always come between them, so that all her contact with her father was made either through or in the company of a third party, and that invariably that third party was her mother.

      Anger, bitterness, resentment; she had felt the destructive lash of all those emotions, and yet why had her mother felt it necessary to stop her from becoming close to her father? Surely not because she had feared that such a closeness would threaten her own relationship with him?

      He had adored her mother, loved her with an intensity which as an adult Sage herself recognised she would have found too possessive. She remembered how her mother had scarcely been able to leave the house without first explaining where she was going and how long she would be.

      Sage tensed, her own body automatically reacting to the thought of so much possessive love. Possessive love? She frowned, recognising reluctantly how much she would have resented the burden of that kind of love, how much her freedom-loving nature would have kicked and fought against him. She tried to imagine how she would have reacted to her father’s possessiveness had she been her mother. She would have left him, probably, she recognised grimly. But she was not her mother. Her mother was far too saintly, far too morally perfect to put her own needs above those of someone as dependent and helpless as her husband had been.

      Sage’s frown deepened as she realised that this was the first time she had ever looked closely at her parents’ marriage, ever questioned a relationship which for years she had seen enviously as an ideal, feeling both resentful and envious of her mother’s role as the pivot of her father’s life. The first time she had seen it as a relationship which she as a woman would have found both stultifying and caging.

      And yet her mother had obviously not done so. She shrugged the thought away—she and her mother were two different women, two very different women. They had nothing in common other than the fact that they were mother and daughter, an accident of birth which had brought them together in a relationship which neither of them enjoyed, even if her mother was rather better at concealing her antipathy than she was herself.

      And yet despite that, despite everything that had happened between them, despite her resentment, her bitterness, there was still a part of her that was drawn compulsively towards the girl she was discovering in the diaries.

      Which was why she was here at gone two in the morning, turning the pages of her mother’s diary, pushing aside the memories which had kept her from sleeping. Memories stirred up by that unexpected and unwanted meeting with Daniel Cavanagh.

      Daniel Cavanagh. For a moment she closed her eyes, trying hard not to feel as though the living, breathing man had somehow or other forced his presence into the room with her.

      Daniel Cavanagh, what was he after all? Only a man. Nothing more. Just a man, like so many others.

      She opened her eyes and quickly turned the pages of the diary, to find the place where she had previously stopped reading, resolutely pushing away all thoughts of Daniel Cavanagh and the past, and instead concentrating on her mother’s record of her life.

      A week passed and then another and still Lizzie hadn’t heard from Kit. Every day she waited hopefully for a letter, but none came, and then one morning when she woke up the world swung dizzily around her, her stomach heaved and a vast welling nausea had her running desperately to the bathroom where she was violently and painfully sick.

      That the reason for her sickness didn’t immediately occur to her was due in the main to the prudery which ruled her great-aunt’s life.

      Lizzie had been sick before, when she had first come to work at the hospital, when her stomach had revolted against the unappetising diet, and, if she had any time to spare from her aching longing to hear from Kit and her constant daydreams about him to dwell on the nausea which seemed to be plaguing her, she simply assumed that it was a return of that earlier sickness.

      That was until one of the other girls heard her one morning and accidentally enlightened her, assuming that she must already know the reason for her sickness.

      A baby… No, not just a baby, but Kit’s baby. Hard on the heels of her first thrill of appalled recognition of the fact that in her great-aunt’s eyes she had now joined that unmentionable band of her sex who had ‘got themselves into trouble’, and was therefore now a social and moral outcast, came a tiny pang of pleasure. Kit’s baby. She was having Kit’s baby.

      Alone in the dormitory, she sank down on to her bed, trembling slightly, clasping her hands protectively over her stomach. She felt dizzy but not sick any longer. Rather the dizziness sprang from elation and joy.

      Kit’s child… A sudden urgency to share her news with him, to be able to marvel with him over the new life they had created together, overwhelmed her. Kit! How much she longed to see him.

      She sat staring into space, lost in a wonderful daydream in which Kit suddenly appeared, sweeping her off her feet and announcing that they must get married immediately…that he loved her to distraction.

      He would take her away with him in his shiny little green car, and they would be married secretly and excitingly. She would live in a tiny rose-smothered cottage hidden away from the world, but close enough to where he was based for her to see him whenever he was off duty.

      She would wait there for the birth of their child…a son, she knew it would be a son, and they would be so blissfully happy…

      It took one of the older and far, far more worldly-wise girls in the dormitory to shatter her daydreams with brutal reality.

      Donna had been nominated by the others to talk to her. Kind girls in the main, they found Lizzie’s attitude baffling. Had they found themselves in her condition, they wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for Mr Wonderful to turn up and make things right. Didn’t the poor sap realise what had happened? Didn’t she know what would happen to her when the hospital authorities found out about her condition?

      Donna Roberts was the eldest of a family of eight, five of them girls; she had seen her mother pregnant far too often to have any illusions about the male attitude to the careless and unwanted fathering of a child, but even she quailed a little when faced with the childish luminosity of Lizzie’s unwavering belief that he, whoever he was, was going to come back and marry her.

      ‘Look, kid,’ she began awkwardly. She was dating an American airman and had picked up not just his habit of chewing gum, but something of his accent as well. ‘We all know about the fix you’ve got yourself in… I know it isn’t easy, but you’ve got to face up to it… You don’t want to end up like Susan Philpott, do you?’

      ‘Susan Philpott.’ Lizzie stared at her. ‘But she went home.’

      ‘Like hell she did,’ Donna told her inelegantly. ‘God knows where she is right now, but she hasn’t gone home. Told me that herself—said her dad would kill her for getting herself in trouble. Of course when the dragon found out it was the end for her here. Probably on the street somewhere now,’ Donna added, explaining explicitly what she meant when Lizzie looked uncomprehendingly at her.

      ‘He isn’t going to come back. They never do,’ she told her with brutal honesty. ‘And you’re going to have to do something about that…’ she added, gesturing towards Lizzie’s still flat stomach.

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