Secrets Read online

  Remembering what they’d overheard in the café, Rose dropped her shopping bag, flung her arms around Emily and held her tightly. She heard a kind of whistling buzz, and the ground vibrating beneath their feet. Dust flew up like a snowstorm, and as they bent their heads into each other’s shoulders, Rose felt rather than saw the awning falling down above them, for it was like a black shadow engulfing them. Something else hit them too, knocking them to the pavement, still locked in each other’s arms. The last thing Rose thought as she felt the pounding of rubble burying them, was that they should have followed the man with the monkey.

  It was Myles who first received the news of Rose and Emily’s death. He had spent all day in the courts and had gone back to his chambers at around half past four. He was collecting up some files to take home with him, when his secretary came in and said a policeman wanted to see him.

  Myles was in a jovial mood. He’d had a good day in court, the case he had been prosecuting had been wound up a day early. As he had no real need to be in London tomorrow and the weather was so beautiful, he thought he would go down to Winchelsea tonight for a long weekend and surprise Emily.

  ‘Honest, guv, I didn’t do it, whatever it was,’ he joked as the tall, thin policeman with a rather hangdog face came into his office.

  When the policeman didn’t smile, Myles immediately realized he’d come to report something unpleasant.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘There was a bomb in Oxford Street earlier today. We have reason to believe that one of the victims might be your wife. Was she in London today?’

  Myles went hot, then cold. He’d heard earlier in the day about a doodlebug in Oxford Street, but paid very little attention. In the first few weeks of the V1 attacks there had been panic. The lack of warning, the very nature of a pilotless rocket, was terrifying. But like during the Blitz, people got used to them, even blasé. Although at first cinemas and theatres closed through lack of audiences, that soon changed and everyone carried on with their lives regardless.

  He hadn’t even asked if there had been any loss of life at this attack today.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, trying to control himself. ‘She did say she was planning a day out with a friend. But she didn’t say what day, or where she was going. Why do you think it was her?’

  ‘We found your business card in with her ration book, sir,’ the policeman said. ‘Was her friend a blonde, with the surname of Talbot?’

  ‘Yes,’ Myles whispered, and slumped down into his chair. ‘Are they badly hurt? Which hospital are they at?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the policeman said, bowing his head. ‘They were both fatally injured.’

  ‘They’re dead?’ Myles looked at the uniformed man before him in horror. ‘They can’t be. It must be a mistake.’

  ‘No sir, no mistake. There were several people killed today, and more injured. Is it possible for you to come with me now to identify them? And can you let me know the next of kin of the other woman, Mrs Talbot?’

  ‘Her daughter is a nurse here in London,’ Myles said brokenly, and tears sprang to his eyes. ‘Oh God, I can’t bear this! Why pick them?’

  That same question ran through Myles’s head throughout the procedure of identifying the bodies and taking a taxi afterwards to see Adele. Rose and Emily had been taken to the mortuary just as they had been found, their arms wrapped tightly around each other. Although their bodies had been crushed by falling masonry, their faces were unmarked. In a strange sort of way that was comforting to Myles, for they were both beautiful and somewhat vain women. And he’d loved them both.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘Funerals are always so harrowing, but at least it didn’t rain. Sad her elder son couldn’t get leave though.’

  ‘I don’t think they got on. He hardly ever came to visit his mother. But I think that’s his wife over there talking to the daughter.’

  Adele moved away out of earshot of Mrs Grace and Mrs Mackenzie. They both lived in Winchelsea and were well-known gossips. Adele guessed that by the time they’d had a second sherry they wouldn’t even bother to keep their voices down as they were now.

  It felt strange enough to be back in Harrington House with all the memories it evoked, let alone having to cope with so many people. Both the dining and drawing rooms was crowded, and many more had gone out into the garden. Most Adele knew by sight if not by name, but there were a fair few total strangers too.

  She would have felt a little more comfortable if she could have gone out into the kitchen and helped there, but Myles had hired four women to serve the refreshments, and she knew neither he nor her grandmother would approve if they saw her handing out cakes and sandwiches.

  Myles and Honour were together in the corner of the drawing room, their heads bent together in earnest conversation, and even though Adele knew she could and should join them, she felt unable to do so.

  Sidling out into the hall, she took a quick look round to make sure no one was watching, then, opening the front door, she let herself out.

  From the night nine days ago when Myles had come to the nurses’ home to tell her Rose and Emily were dead, she hadn’t been able to sleep or eat. She had been chatting to some of her friends when he arrived, and she’d barely taken in the devastating news before he bundled her into a taxi to catch the last train from Charing Cross back to Rye.

  There was no taxi at the station and so they walked to Curlew Cottage. As they got to the end of the lane, they saw Honour waiting, torch in hand. It transpired that she had expected Emily and Rose back around eight, and when they hadn’t turned up she had assumed that they’d stopped to see a show or a film and would catch the last train. Afraid that they might trip in the dark without a torch, she’d come out to meet them.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ she called out, while they were still some distance from her. ‘Have they stopped off in Rye?’

  Adele remembered how Myles gripped her hand. He didn’t know how to respond. Then all at once Honour must have realized it wasn’t some sort of wild coincidence that they’d also been on the last train, and she began to wail.

  Adele thought she had witnessed every kind of grief while nursing in London, yet she had never seen or heard anything so tragic as her grandmother’s reaction.

  It wasn’t a sob, or a scream, but the sound of pure heartbreak. A dirge-like howl that came from deep within her. The light from her torch was moving every which way, and Adele ran to her blindly, Myles following close behind her.

  Since that first terrible long night when Honour sat hunched in a chair, rocking and wailing like a madwoman, Adele had watched her closely, for she was afraid that in her grief, Honour might attempt to take her own life.

  In the days that followed she became completely silent. While she was able to wash, dress, feed the animals, and even chop wood, she was locked into a world of her own. She didn’t even seem to be aware Adele was with her.

  Adele knew all about shock, she saw it daily in the hospital and was aware that it took many forms. But she was equally shocked herself, and she needed to talk about her mother, to express how she felt about her, both alive and now in death. She couldn’t deal with a wall of silence, or the way her grandmother looked at her as if she were an intruder.

  The vicar from the church in Winchelsea called at Myles’s request, for he had felt Emily and Rose should be buried, as they died, together. But it was as if he was invisible to Honour. She stalked around the room as he was asking her about hymns she liked, and even when he got up and took both her hands, there was no light of recognition in her eyes.

  It was only yesterday, the day before the funeral, that Adele finally broke through to her.

  ‘You’ve got to listen to me,’ she shouted at her angrily. ‘Mum wouldn’t have wanted this, and you know it. She’d be telling you to pull yourself together.’

  Honour was kneading some dough on the table. They didn’t need any bread, Jim the postman had brought them a loaf the day bef
ore. But Honour had always made bread on Fridays, and Adele hadn’t tried to stop her, thinking it might help her out of her darkness naturally. But as she banged and kneaded, making the table judder on the floor, it began to get on Adele’s nerves, and that was when she shouted for her to stop and listen to her.

  She got no response, so Adele snatched the dough away and slapped her grandmother’s face. ‘I’m talking to you, that bloody bread isn’t important. This is! Rose is going to be buried tomorrow. You’ve got to be there at the church with me and Myles. You can’t act like a madwoman, not even if your heart is broken.’

  Still getting no response, Adele grew furious. ‘What about me?’ she screamed at her. ‘How do you think I feel? Rose was an appalling mother to me. All the worst things that ever happened to me were her fault, and you were all I had. Are you going to turn away from me now because she’s dead? Don’t I mean anything to you?’

  Honour turned to her slowly. ‘No one can know how I feel,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘I’ve been through all this before. I can’t do it again.’

  Adele had to assume she was referring to the time when Rose disappeared as a young girl. ‘She hasn’t left you because she wanted to,’ she shouted. ‘She’s dead, killed by a bomb. It can happen to anyone. It’s not right that she should go before you do, but she has, and there’s nothing that can change that.’

  ‘I was always on at her for something,’ Honour said, her voice still flat. ‘After that supper-party I said some very cruel things.’

  Adele sighed. On the train ride back from London Myles had told her about what came out at the supper-party. It was astounding, almost unbelievable, but it had lost much of its impact coming on top of hearing her mother and Emily were both dead.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you did or said to Rose in the past,’ she said tersely. ‘It was over before she and Emily went to London. And whatever came out at that supper-party, it was for the best. They became friends again. They died together in each other’s arms.’

  ‘It was me who suggested they had a day out together,’ Honour said brokenly.

  ‘So maybe you did, but that doesn’t make it your fault they died,’ Adele said in exasperation. ‘Blame Hitler. Blame the Government for not shooting down the rocket. Blame anyone you like. But not yourself. They were enjoying themselves when they died. They probably didn’t even know what happened. That’s a better way to go than most get.’

  ‘You don’t care, do you?’ Honour said, her voice suddenly returning to normal. ‘You still hated Rose!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Adele snapped. ‘Of course I care. I didn’t hate her. Maybe I wasn’t always capable of forgetting some of the nastier things she did to me. But I’d forgiven her. I liked her. I could even say I grew to love her. That’s what I bloody well wanted to talk to you about. Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might be feeling guilty? You haven’t got the monopoly on guilt, you know.’

  She had stomped out of the cottage then, too angry to deal with anything more.

  She did feel guilty, and very sorry that she hadn’t actually told Rose how glad she was that she’d come back into her life, and how much she had come to mean to her. She felt bitterly ashamed, too, that even as she was crying for Rose and Emily, she could barely contain her joy that Michael wasn’t her brother after all. What sort of a person was she that she could only think of herself at such a time?

  For a couple of hours she walked and walked, crying most of the time. When she finally returned home, Honour was more like her old self. Sad, a little bewildered, but not mad or withdrawn.

  Honour dressed herself this morning in the same black dress and cloche hat she’d worn for Frank’s funeral over twenty years earlier. Adele hadn’t known she still had them, for they’d been packed away in a box beneath her bed. Adele guessed, but didn’t dare ask for confirmation, that Honour had made the dress especially for Frank’s homecoming from France, for it had elaborate pin-tucks down the bodice and handmade lace collar and cuffs. It had been dyed black, but she guessed it was originally pale blue, and the miracle was that it still fitted her.

  Myles had brought Adele down a dress and hat of Emily’s, for she had nothing suitable to wear. Ironically, she could remember admiring the dress when she once pressed it for Emily. It was the height of fashion at the time, linen with drawn thread-work details, mid-calf length, with padded shoulders, a boat neckline and a wide belt around the waist. The hat was small and veiled, and Emily had always worn it with an artificial rose pinned to one side.

  ‘Rose would have liked to have seen you wearing that,’ Honour said with a break in her voice as Adele came out of the bedroom wearing it. ‘She would’ve said you looked like a film star.’

  Adele’s eyes prickled with tears, for she remembered only too well that Rose had always taken a great deal of interest in what film stars wore. Even moving to the marsh hadn’t entirely ended her love of glamour. It seemed appropriate then that she should be dressing the way her mother would have liked.

  It was a beautiful, moving service, and the church was packed. To Adele’s surprise there were a great many more people there for Rose than there were for Emily. Honour had often said in her letters that Rose had become well liked, that when they went into Rye together they could hardly get up the High Street for people stopping to chat to her. Adele had always been cynical about it, imagining they were just gossips hoping to get some titbit of information, but like so many hard-held ideas she had about her mother, once again she was mistaken.

  Several women had come up to Adele in the churchyard and spoken of Rose with affection, clearly genuinely upset that she was gone. Their little stories all had a similar tone, that she’d been a memorable woman, gay and lively, funny and warm. They said too how proud she’d been of Adele, and how excited she always was when she was coming home for a holiday.

  Maybe if those friends and acquaintances had taken up Myles’s invitation to come back to Harrington House, Adele might have felt able to stay, but they’d obviously felt the class and social gulf when they saw Emily’s old friends and family flocking into the big house.

  Adele certainly felt it. Emily’s closest friends would know that Rose had played an important role in her recent life, and might want to talk to Adele and her grandmother. But Ralph’s wife and his sister Diana had looked at her with contempt. To them she was just the girl from the marshes, an ex-servant who had got above herself.

  Adele was weeping by the time she got down to the river. For Michael, who would soon get the letter telling him his mother was dead. For Myles, who’d finally found a friend in Emily, only to have her snatched away, and for Honour, who held herself responsible for everything and everyone.

  But over and above the tears for those she cared about, she was crying for her mother. If only there had been more time!

  Why didn’t she ever tell Rose that she’d become proud of her, that she looked forward to seeing her? That her letters made her laugh, that she felt warm inside knowing Granny was being taken care of, and that the past didn’t matter any more?

  She felt ashamed of herself that she’d never prompted Rose to talk about her memories of Pamela, how she felt about Jim Talbot, or where she was during those missing years after she was sent to the asylum. Adele had always wanted to, not to lay blame or stand in judgement, but just so she could see the whole picture of her mother.

  It would’ve helped Rose to know her daughter cared, and Adele had no doubt Rose would have told the more disturbing parts with her customary self-deprecating humour. That, Adele realized now, was one of the most attractive aspects of her mother’s character. She wasn’t afraid to admit her mistakes, and when she told a story she could paint the characters in such a vivid manner that they became as clear to the listener as they were to her. She had always claimed to be entirely self-centred, yet her understanding of her own and others’ failings suggested this wasn’t entirely true.

  Maybe she was deeply flawed, no saint – that much wa
s certain. But she had proved she was capable of honesty, kindness, loyalty and bravery. Adele just wished she’d been big enough herself to step back from her old grievances and see all the good in Rose. Before it was too late.

  Letting herself into the cottage, she went into the bedroom. She had always thought of it as being her own room, but today she was very much aware that it had been Rose’s first, and last. She opened the wardrobe, and sniffed. It smelled of lavender, and she remembered that Granny had said Rose had always loved that smell right from a young girl when she would stuff little pillows with the dried heads of the flowers.

  Adele ran her hands over the clothes. Most of them were pre-war ones, bright pinks, reds and emerald-green, confirmation that Rose had always liked to be noticed.

  Granny had once said that she was exactly the same as a young woman, that she’d never liked conventions or rules. She had joked at the time that Adele’s father must have been quite a sober man, for Adele didn’t appear to have inherited Honour and Rose’s wild side.

  ‘I would have loved to have been a little wilder,’ she murmured wistfully to herself. It had never been possible, for poverty, the Depression and then the war had moulded her into a cautious, sober role. ‘When the war ends, then I’ll cut loose,’ she promised herself. She didn’t dare voice the hope that she and Michael might be reunited, for even though there was no real obstacle any more, she might have hurt him so badly that his love had died.

  In the late afternoon of 8 May 1945, Adele stood at the window of Men’s Surgical, gazing thoughtfully out on to Whitechapel Road. Last night they had been told the news on the wireless that this would be a public holiday to mark the end of the war in Europe, yet the news had been met with surprisingly little excitement. Adele supposed this was because everyone had been virtually holding their breath since the news broke on the 2nd that Hitler had been found dead in his bunker.

  But at midnight, every single ship in the docks and on the river let off their sirens, and church bells began to ring joyously. In the nurses’ home, all the girls had clambered out on to the roof, to see fireworks being let off all over London. It was so thrilling – from the same spot they’d seen the fires of the Blitz, the doodlebugs and V2s, but now the noise and light were all for peace.