Secrets Page 26

  The joy of being with Adele again, and his excitement at his recent acceptance into the RAF, had meant he hadn’t yet got around to any gentle interrogation about The Firs. For the last two days he’d been a bit of a Flying Bore, talking non-stop about it, and of course the strong possibility of war and what it could mean to them. Adele might find herself transferred to a military hospital, or even to a civilian one in London, and he had no real idea where he would be based. But time was getting short now, and after today he probably wouldn’t get to see her till late June or July.

  ‘Come on! Tell me about it,’ he urged.

  ‘You don’t want to hear about that place,’ she said dismissively. ‘It isn’t interesting and I wasn’t there that long.’

  ‘It’s interesting because you ran away from it,’ he insisted. ‘Why did you?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. I wanted to find out if I had got grandparents. It just took longer to get there than I imagined it would. Now, give me a kiss and tell me that you love me.’

  She lay on her back and held out her arms. Michael looked down at her and smiled at her beauty. Cheeks pink with the sun, wind-tossed hair and eyes almost the colour of amber. Most girls these days seemed to go for the artificial kind of dazzling beauty inspired by Hollywood. They curled their hair, shaped their eyebrows to give them a look of permanent surprise, and often wore so much makeup they looked old beyond their years. But Adele wore her hair loose when she wasn’t on duty and it bounced and shone, inviting his touch. She didn’t powder her nose or strive to change her body shape with corsetry. She was as natural and graceful as a swan. And he knew he’d love her till he died.

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked, leaning on his hands either side of her, and bringing his face down close to hers.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she giggled, fluttering her long lashes.

  ‘Then say it,’ he said.

  ‘I love you, Michael,’ she said softly, looking faintly bashful.

  ‘How much do you trust me?’

  She frowned then. ‘With my life? Will that do?’

  ‘Then surely you can tell me what happened at The Firs?’

  ‘Nothing happened, I just didn’t like it.’

  ‘You’re lying to me,’ he said firmly. ‘Now, tell me the truth. If you don’t, it will stand between us all our lives.’

  He could read her thought processes in her eyes. A look that said she wanted to reveal it, but didn’t dare. Then a slight narrowing of her eyes as she tried to think of something plausible to fob him off with.

  ‘I’ve gone over everything that happened that day in January on the marsh,’ he said. ‘Trying to think what it was that upset you so suddenly. Then I remembered. I touched your breast.’

  Her eyes turned fearful then, and all at once he knew the disturbing ideas that had kept creeping into his mind at night were right. By day he could dismiss them – she was after all very earthy, she could talk about bodily functions without embarrassment, she wasn’t nervous or shy. Yet she always called a halt when kissing became too passionate. She didn’t press her body against his the way other girls he had taken out did.

  ‘It made you remember a man who hurt you at The Firs, didn’t it?’ he asked, and he could feel tears welling up in his eyes because he couldn’t bear the thought.

  ‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘But don’t ask me any more.’

  Michael lay down beside her and drew her into his arms with her head on his shoulder. ‘I’m not asking you anything more,’ he said gently. ‘You are just going to tell me what happened.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, and he felt her shudder as she began to cry.

  ‘I want to marry you, Adele. I want us to be together for ever and have children. How can we do that if there is a ghost of someone evil standing between us?’

  He waited a few moments before continuing. ‘Your grandmother knows, doesn’t she? So you must have told her when you first got there. She was a stranger to you then. I’m not, we’ve known each other for going on five years. You aren’t just my love, but my best friend too.’

  ‘It was the warden,’ she suddenly blurted out, covering her face with her hands. ‘I thought he was wonderful because he took a special interest in me. No one had ever been that way with me before.’

  She poured it out in a fast torrent once she got started, but kept her hands over her face. Michael didn’t interrupt her, but just let it flow out. When she’d finished, she sobbed and sobbed while he held her.

  Michael was deeply shocked. He couldn’t imagine how any man could do such a thing to a child in his care. But it did make sense of so many aspects of Adele’s personality. When he first met her he’d found it curious that she appeared to have no other friends when she was so likable. He also found her very mature for her age, yet it was a maturity mixed with a don’t-come-too-close manner.

  Looking back, Michael was sure he’d loved her right from the start for she was always on his mind, but that manner of hers, lack of experience with girls on his part, and of course his circumstances had prevented anything more than friendship. Yet it shamed him to think how he had gone off to the Continent, then to Oxford, blithely enjoying himself, flying planes, drinking with his friends, even taking other girls out, while his friend had that secret locked inside her. He had let her take care of his mother, which not only subjected her to more ill-treatment, but prevented her from having any fun and a life of her own. And now, acting like an amateur psychiatrist, he might have hurt her even more.

  ‘Have I made it worse?’ he whispered to her, feeling utterly helpless at seeing her so upset.

  She gave a hiccupping sob. ‘I thought I’d put it behind me. I never thought about it.’

  ‘But it came back when I touched you?’ he whispered, tears running down his cheeks too. ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

  ‘Don’t you be sorry,’ she said in a small voice. ‘You couldn’t know, any more than I could. It took me by surprise and I didn’t know how to deal with it.’

  She sat up then and blew her nose and dried her eyes. She turned back to him and tried to smile. ‘I bet you wish you hadn’t pestered me to tell you now?’

  ‘Yes. No, I really don’t know,’ he said sadly. ‘I have to believe it’s better to have no secrets between us, but I’ll be afraid to ever touch you again.’

  ‘You mustn’t be,’ she said, taking his hand in hers and kissing his fingers. ‘It’s all different now, that other time it just caught me unawares. It’s out now, over.’

  They sat side by side, hands linked, for some time. It was such a clear day they could see for miles over a patchwork of fields. Behind them beneath the cliff they could hear the sea pounding on the rocks, seagulls wheeled and squawked overhead. The sun was warm on their heads, the breeze soft on their faces, and as they sat there silently, Michael could sense that Adele was glad she’d finally been able to tell him.

  ‘You are lovely, Michael,’ she said suddenly, lifting one hand and running it down his cheek. ‘So patient, so understanding. If I had known it would feel this good to let all that out, I would have done it long ago.’

  Michael was deeply touched. ‘There’s a time for everything. I probably wouldn’t have understood if you’d told me before. Loving you has made me understand a great many things better, even my parents.’

  Adele nodded. ‘I understand a little better now why my grandparents chucked everything up and went to live on the marsh. I used to look at Granny’s lovely things and imagine what their old home in Tunbridge Wells was like. I even felt cross that she didn’t live like that any more. But I don’t feel like that now, just the way she is sometimes tells me she and Frank had the kind of love most of us want.’

  ‘That’s what’s wrong with my parents,’ Michael said thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think they ever really loved each other. Mother was beautiful and much admired, and Father was rich, ambitious and shrewd. They married because everyone else thought they were a good match. I don’t suppose they ever stopped to think t
hat they hadn’t got a single thing in common.’

  He had told Adele the previous day that nothing had been resolved between his parents. They were both equally unyielding. When Emily got proof that Myles had a mistress, rather than divorce him, she insisted he came down to Winchelsea every other weekend so she could pretend to her friends that there was nothing wrong with their marriage.

  Myles played along with this charade because he was afraid Emily might start a scandal which could jeopardize his legal career. Michael despaired of them, and he was sick of being stuck in the middle with loyalties on both sides.

  Adele knew that when the Baileys did find out that she and Michael were not only still seeing each other, but planning a future together, there would be an uproar. His parents were at least united in thinking she wasn’t good enough for their son. But Michael didn’t seem concerned about that.

  ‘Were you serious about wanting to marry me?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, looking surprised she thought otherwise. ‘But we’ll have to wait until you’ve finished your training.’

  ‘And saved some money,’ she laughed.

  ‘But we could get engaged,’ he said eagerly. ‘This summer when you are nineteen.’

  Adele got to her feet and spread her arms out wide with joy. They were just twenty or thirty yards from the cliff edge at Beachy Head. The bright blue cloudless sky, the sea, the white cliffs and the deep green of the grass were so very beautiful it brought a lump to her throat. ‘I could scream with happiness,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Michael said nervously as he noticed some ramblers coming in their direction. ‘They might think you are about to jump off the cliff.’

  ‘If I did, I’d fly,’ she said, and flapping her arms, she ran yelling down over the grass away from the cliff top.

  Michael began to laugh then too, relieved that he’d found out the truth, happy that his days at Oxford were now numbered and that soon he’d be flying for a living. He waited until the ramblers were nearly upon him, then he got up, waved his arms wide and ran full tilt down to Adele. He hoped the ramblers would think they were a pair of escaped lunatics.

  Two months later, in June, Honour washed and dried the tea things, then switched on the wireless to listen to the six o’clock news. Michael had brought round the battery wireless for her a few weeks earlier. He said someone he knew in Oxford was throwing it out, though she didn’t believe that, it looked too new. But wherever it came from, she loved it. The evenings flew by listening to plays and comedy programmes.

  She sat down in her chair and picked up her knitting. She thought perhaps Michael was right in suggesting she ought to get the electricity put on too. Oil lamps and candles were all very well, but the light wasn’t really bright enough for reading now that her sight wasn’t quite so sharp.

  The news was as gloomy as it always seemed to be these days. More about Germany invading Austria and all Austrian Jews being given two weeks’ notice by their employers. Just the previous week she and Adele had gone to the pictures together and had seen Adolf Hitler on the Pathe News. Honour had of course seen his picture in the papers, but to see him in action on a screen brought home to her what a real threat he was. He was filmed at some kind of rally, shouting and bawling with his eyes rolling and his arms waving like a madman’s. She couldn’t think why anyone should want to follow such a nasty little man, and as for those ridiculous salutes everyone gave him! If she was in Germany she’d be tempted to give him a very rude salute with two fingers.

  Adele had made her laugh when they got home by sticking a bit of black wool under her nose and goose-stepping round the living room in an imitation of him. Yet however much they laughed about this man, and however much the Government insisted England would not be drawn into another war with Germany, Honour wasn’t convinced.

  The final piece of news on the wireless was a little jollier. A new zoo had been opened in Regent’s Park, and they said it was the biggest and finest in the world. She thought she would like to go and see it. Perhaps she and Adele could go on the train later in the summer.

  A rapping on the front door took her by surprise. It was extremely rare for anyone to call on her in the evening.

  ‘Who on earth could that be?’ she muttered to herself, irritated at being interrupted when she’d just got comfortable.

  She opened the door, and there stood a woman. She looked a real floozy, in a bright blue dress that was too tight, with red lipstick, blonde hair, very high-heeled shoes and no stockings or hat.

  ‘Yes?’ Honour asked, wondering how anyone dressed that way could be wandering around the countryside.

  The woman just smirked at her, and Honour realized there was something strangely familiar about her. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

  ‘I should say so,’ the woman replied. ‘I am your daughter!’

  Honour reeled back in shock. Yet she knew it had to be true, for the only person she’d ever known with eyes that particular blue was Rose. ‘W-w-what are you d-d-doing here?’ she stuttered, feeling quite faint.

  ‘I came to see you, Mother,’ Rose said, giving the last word a sarcastic twist.

  ‘I don’t want to see you,’ Honour said quickly, trying to pull herself together. ‘You lost all right to visit my home the day you stole my things and disappeared.’

  ‘I thought you might have mellowed as you took Adele in,’ Rose said, and walked in, closing the door behind her, before Honour could stop her. ‘Where is she?’

  Honour had never seriously considered that Rose might come here one day, and now she was suddenly frightened. The Rose who had walked out of here going on twenty years ago might have been defiant, insensitive and heartless, but she had been softly spoken and well-mannered. This Rose was coarse in both voice and behaviour, and for once in her life, Honour was intimidated.

  ‘She’s working,’ she said, giving her daughter the kind of look that would once have made her quake. ‘And I haven’t mellowed towards you. I don’t know how you’ve got the nerve to come here after all this time.’

  Rose merely smirked, opened her handbag and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Everything’s just the same,’ she said as she lit one and gazed reflectively round the room. ‘You, the cottage and the furniture. It’s like time’s stood still for nearly twenty years. I thought you’d be really old and wrinkly, but you don’t look so bad.’

  Honour was astounded at her insolence. ‘Clear off,’ she said. ‘Go on, go. I don’t want you in here.’

  ‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ Rose said, languidly exhaling smoke. ‘I have a perfect right to come and ask about my daughter.’

  ‘You don’t,’ Honour retorted. She wasn’t used to feeling afraid and she didn’t know how to deal with it. Even when desperate out-of-work men used to come to the door asking for something to eat, she had never lost her nerve. She sensed Rose had come to make mischief, for if her motive had been purely to see Adele, surely she would have used charm rather than menace.

  She supposed that most people would consider Rose still very attractive, considering she was thirty-seven now. She was much heavier than she’d been at seventeen, but her figure was still good and her eyes very beautiful. But she looked so hard and brassy, her skin had a greyish tone, her teeth were dingy and even her blonde hair had lost its silky sheen.

  ‘You lost all rights to Adele when you were committed to an asylum,’ Honour said firmly. She wasn’t going to let herself be browbeaten. ‘If I’d only known you had ill-treated her before that, I would have come and taken her away. So don’t think for one moment you are going to walk back into her life and undo all the good I’ve done.’

  ‘Who said anything about walking back into her life? I only want to know about her,’ Rose shot back.

  ‘You escaped from the asylum. Where did you go?’ Honour asked.

  Rose perched on the arm of the couch and crossed her legs, flicking her cigarette ash towards the stove and missing. ‘Back to London, where else?’ she
said.

  Honour snatched the cigarette from her fingers and put it in the stove. ‘How did you live?’

  ‘A bit of this, a bit of that,’ Rose said vaguely. ‘I got by.’

  Honour’s hackles rose. That sounded very much as if she’d been selling herself on the streets, and to look at her that seemed very possible.

  ‘And your husband? Jim Talbot. Where is he?’

  Rose shrugged. ‘How would I know? He scarpered when they put me away. Now, tell me about Adele. Have you got a photo of her?’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ Honour snapped. ‘She’s training to be a nurse. She’s happy. So get on your way and don’t come back.’

  ‘Is she courting?’ Rose asked, as calmly as if she hadn’t heard what Honour said.

  ‘She has a young man, yes,’ Honour said starchily. ‘A very nice young man too. And I am not going to tell you where she is nursing, so don’t bother to ask. The last thing she would want is you turning up to see her.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Rose sneered. ‘I bet you’ve smothered her, the way you did me. Girls don’t like that, you know.’

  ‘I did not smother you.’ Honour’s voice rose indignantly.

  ‘Yes you did. I had to eat what you said, do what you said, go where you said. I never got a choice about anything. You dragged me away from a nice school and home, to here!’ Rose’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘“We’re going to live in the country, and it will be such a big adventure,”’ she said, mimicking Honour speaking in a simpering way. ‘Country! It’s a bloody marsh, with the wind howling and not a soul for miles. Adventure! It was hell. What sort of a mother were you?’

  ‘You loved it when we came for holidays,’ Honour said defensively. ‘Maybe it didn’t turn out to be all your father and I hoped, but when we lost the shop we really had no other choice.’

  ‘Oh yes we did, we could have lived with Grandma,’ Rose retorted, and smirked as if she’d won a couple of points. ‘I was eleven then, remember, not a baby. I heard things, saw things, I knew what was going on. You and Father might have been happy without all our relatives and friends around us, but I wasn’t. Why didn’t Father get a job like anyone else?’