Secrets (15 page)

‘Then get the police and make them take me away,’ she shouted back. ‘I haven’t done anything to you, except hope that you might care about your granddaughter. I can see where Mum got her nastiness from. It’s you!’

She expected a blow. She quickly covered her head with her arms in self-defence when the woman moved towards her. But surprisingly no blow came, just a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’d better get back on that couch and go back to sleep,’ she said gruffly. ‘You’ve been out in the sun for too long, and we’re both overtired.’

Chapter Seven

‘How on earth do I deal with this?’ Honour grumbled to herself as she got into her bed later that night.

The candle was flickering in a breeze from the window, making the shadow of her bed posts on the wall move in a disconcertingly eerie manner, and she shivered.

It had been a tremendous shock to open her door and find that waif of a child there. In the last ten or so years she had done her best to erase Rose from her mind. She had been forced to, for the bitterness and anger she felt towards her daughter had almost destroyed her. Yet on the rare occasions Rose covertly slipped into her mind again, Honour had always imagined her living in luxury, the spoiled and cosseted wife of a wealthy man. She had never once considered that she might have had children.

If the news of Rose’s present plight had come from any other source, Honour would undoubtedly have felt some kind of grim satisfaction. But to hear a mere child spilling out such a tale was utterly chilling.

Honour picked up the framed photograph of Frank from the bedside table. It had been taken just before he was sent to France in the spring of 1915. He looked so happy, dashing and handsome in his uniform, yet just two years later he was brought back to England a physical and mental wreck.

Honour knew that millions of young men shared the same horrors in the trenches as Frank did. A huge proportion of them didn’t live to tell their loved ones about it either. She could well imagine the men’s terror at seeing their comrades die and wondering when it would be their turn. She felt for every one of them who had endured living in mud, with rats and lice their constant companions. But Frank’s story was even more horrific, for he had fallen into a fox hole after being shot in the leg and was buried alive beneath other fatally wounded men who tumbled in after him.

It was believed he was trapped there for three days before he was found. It was hardly surprising that he lost his mind as he became drenched in his comrades’ blood, heard their death throes, and thought he would surely die too.

‘What do I do, Frank?’ she whispered at his picture. ‘I don’t want her here, not after what her mother did to us.’

Honour had known Frank Harris all her life. Her father, Ernest Cauldwell, was the local schoolmaster in Tunbridge Wells, and Frank’s father, Cedric, owned Harris’s, the most prestigious grocery shop in town.

Harris’s was a splendid shop, all shiny walnut and white marble, stacked from floor to ceiling with every kind of delicacy. Honour remembered as a small child being morbidly fascinated by the fantastic displays of dead pheasants, rabbits and hares lying on a bed of greenery. Her mother had to hold her tightly so she wouldn’t attempt to stroke them.

Frank and his younger brother Charles only stayed at the local school, where they had often been Honour’s playmates, until they were eight, then they were sent to boarding school. But they remained friends, and always came to see Honour in their holidays. Both boys helped out in their father’s shop as they got older, and Frank often delivered groceries on a bicycle with a big basket for goods on the front. Whenever he came past the schoolhouse, he always stopped to chat to Honour, and he often gave her a ride on the front of the bike.

By the time he left school at seventeen and came home to work for his father, Honour only had eyes for the tall, slender young man with bright blue twinkly eyes and a mop of unruly blond hair. Frank wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had a joyful nature and he was kind, funny and interested in nature, music, art and books. With him as a friend Honour didn’t need anyone else.

She was seventeen when she began officially ‘walking out’ with Frank, and both families were delighted. The Cauldwells might not have been wealthy like the Harrises but they were well respected. Frank often joked to Honour that his father kept begging him to marry her because she had brains, and that would improve the family business.

They were married in 1899, when Honour was twenty and Frank twenty-two. They moved into the flat above the shop, which had been empty for some years since the Harrises had bought a house on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells. Honour remembered being deliriously happy at having such a lovely home. The Harrises were so generous, showering them with gifts of furniture, linen and glass – there was even a maid to do the rough work. And as Frank was the assistant manager in the shop, he was in and out all day, so she never felt lonely as some of her girlfriends did when they left their own families to be married.

Honour was always aware that Frank had no real love for the grocery business. He was a sensitive and artistic man who would have much preferred to be a gardener or even a gamekeeper than weigh out sugar and cut meat and cheese. But it was his father’s dream that his eldest son should eventually inherit the business, and Frank felt obligated to him. He consoled himself in moments of irritation by saying that the shop ran itself anyway, as the assistants had all been trained so well by his father. He found time in quiet periods for his sketching and for walks in the country, and he often told Honour he considered himself the most fortunate of men.

Two years later, in 1901, Rose was born, a plump, adorable baby with white blonde hair, and made her parents’ happiness complete. But just a few weeks after her birth, Cedric Harris had a severe stroke. Confined to a chair, and knowing he wasn’t going to recover, he made the shop over entirely to Frank.

Until it became his sole responsibility, Frank had never realized just how much work there was in running the shop. All at once there were books to keep, orders to check, and suddenly there was no time left for sketching, walks in the country, or even playing with his baby daughter.

Honour knew she didn’t help him adjust to the extra work load by constantly complaining that she was bored being alone all day with Rose. But she was young and unthinking, and she missed the carefree times they’d had previously.

The following year Frank tried to make it up to her by arranging a holiday for the three of them in Hastings, at the same hotel where they’d spent their honeymoon. But to their disappointment it was fully booked. They weren’t happy about going to a strange hotel with a baby, so when one of their wealthier customers offered them the use of a small cottage in Rye, a place he claimed was much prettier than Hastings, they were delighted to accept.

Almost from the moment they stepped off the train, they fell in love with Rye. They were enchanted by the quaint old houses, the narrow cobbled streets, and the long and fascinating history of a place which had once been an important port. Frank wanted to sketch everything he saw, from the old fishermen sitting with their pipes outside the sail sheds, to ancient buildings and the wildlife on the marshes. Honour loved waking up in the morning to the smell of the sea, instead of cheese and bacon. It was wonderful to have Frank’s complete attention, and she felt free for the first time in her life.

Rye had none of the genteel sophistication of Tunbridge Wells, or the heady delights of Hastings with its pier and concerts. Most of its residents had never been further than ten miles away from their home, they worked the land, they fished or built boats. They were friendly, simple people, who had to work too hard to keep their many children to concern themselves with fashion, world news, or even politics.

Honour found that there were none of the social restraints in Rye that she had had drummed into her from babyhood. She could run down the street with Rose in her perambulator if she wished, abandon her hat and gloves without raising an eyebrow. The outsiders who’d settled there were people like herself and Frank, attracted by the beauty and serenity of the town and the surrounding marshes. Many of them were writers, musicians and artists. Frank would point out the artists, sitting at their easels sketching and painting in the sunshine, and he became obsessed with the idea of having a holiday cottage there.

They heard about Curlew Cottage just two days before they were due to go home, and Frank wanted it even before they saw it. Honour tried to talk him out of it, pointing out that it was a long walk from Rye, water came from an outside pump, and the cottage was almost falling down. But Frank wouldn’t listen: the rent was cheap, he loved it, and he was determined to have it.

‘We have to have a little world of our own,’ he said, his blue eyes shining with excitement. ‘Everything back in Tunbridge Wells is Father’s. His shop, his flat, his customers. We live our life secondhand. But I could cope with that if we could escape now and then.’

Put like that, Honour could only agree. She thought it would be fun to have holidays in such a wild place – they could get bicycles and explore everywhere, take dips in the sea, tramp miles on the marsh. It would be lovely for Rose as she got older, for there was no garden at the shop for her to play in. Honour was also excited at the idea of turning the tumbledown cottage into a real little home.

*

Honour could still look back on the first holiday they spent at the cottage and smile, despite all the trouble and hardship which came later. They were like a couple of children playing house as Frank whitewashed the walls and she hung cheap gingham at the windows for curtains. Every afternoon they’d take Rose for a walk, and fill bags with wood for the fire at night. They had almost no furniture then, just a cheap bed bought in Rye, a table and two chairs, and they hung their clothes on nails. They would go to bed with the windows wide open, listening to the sounds of the wading birds that lived in the many ditches and swampier ground. They could hear the sea washing over shingle, and the wind rustling the gorse bushes.

It was the happiest time, so much joy and laughter as they learned to cook on an open fire and mend the shingles on the cottage walls, and attempted to make a garden on ground which was barren and pebbly. On hot days they would strip off Rose’s clothes and let her play in a tub of water, while Frank painted and Honour sat in the sun reading.

The following summer they bought two bicycles, and Frank made a little saddle for Rose on his crossbar. They would ride down through Rye and on to Camber Sands, sometimes even going as far as Lydd, where they would buy an ice-cream before returning home.

Later, after the collapse of the business, Honour often reproached herself. If she had pitched in and helped Frank in the shop, rather than encouraging him to go off to Rye any time he looked fed up, it might not have happened. Yet Frank insisted the blame was all his.

He claimed the shop had prospered in his father’s hands because Cedric Harris loved it. He had the business acumen and the right obsequious mentality to butter up the gentry around Tunbridge Wells to keep their custom. Frank wasn’t made that way, he couldn’t fawn over people just so they would give him a weekly order. He didn’t take pride in having twenty different kinds of biscuits, or ten varieties of tea. It irritated him that the customers felt they owned him.

Frank admitted just before he died that perhaps he let things slide purposely, because he had a horror of them ending up like their parents, sober and narrow-minded people who went to church every Sunday and followed the strict etiquette of their class. He said he wanted passion, danger, to know he was really alive.

Honour had smiled about the passion – that was one thing that even hardship didn’t stop. Frank experienced danger too in the war, and she supposed they did truly know they were alive, when they were so cold they had to wear their coats inside the cottage, and had periods of near-starvation. But had she known how things would turn out, she wouldn’t have been so eager to follow Frank’s lead.

Cedric Harris died suddenly in 1904, and much to his widow and two sons’ shocked surprise, he hadn’t amassed a fortune as they’d supposed. After debts had been cleared there was only a couple of hundred pounds and the family home remaining. This he had left to Charles, the younger brother, on the understanding he was to take care of his mother, because he had already given the shop to Frank.

Antagonism between the two brothers began to erupt almost immediately. Charles worried that Frank seemed set on letting their father’s business run into the ground. Frank’s way of dealing with anything unpleasant was to avoid it. He didn’t like to see his younger brother’s irritation with him, so he took Honour and Rose off to the cottage even more often. During that time the elderly owner offered to sell it to them for a nominal sum, so Frank bought it and became even keener to go there more often.

The more he was away, the more the business sank. One by one, the wealthiest people in the town stopped coming in, and without a quick turnover of perishable goods there was a great deal of waste. But Frank and Honour weren’t really aware of this until it was too late. They were totally immersed in their carefree way of life down on the marshes.

Rose was eleven when the shop finally collapsed. Frank went in one morning to find a couple of angry suppliers waiting for him. They hadn’t been paid for months, and they wanted their money immediately. Frank paid them, but he couldn’t persuade them to give him any further goods on credit.

The shop had survived eight years of Frank’s neglect, but once the word got around it was in difficulties, it took only a few weeks to fail completely.

Even now, nineteen years later, Honour could still picture the way Frank looked when he came upstairs to her after locking the shop door for good. He was thirty-five then, but still as slender and boyish as the day they married. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, his face breaking into a wide grin. ‘We’ll sell the building and go and live in Curlew Cottage for ever.’