Secrets (26 page)

Michael watched his mother pacing the drawing room and he was pale with fright. ‘What am I going to do?’ he whispered to Adele. ‘Perhaps I should send the guests away when they come, she’s going to be awful, I just know it.’

‘You can’t do that on Christmas Eve,’ Adele said. ‘I’m sure she’ll start behaving once they get here.’

At first it looked as if Adele was right. Mrs Bailey greeted her old friends with warmth and charm, introduced Michael to them all, like a perfect mother, and even told them all that Adele was her treasure, as she handed round the food.

There were five couples in all, two of whom Adele knew by sight as they lived in Winchelsea, and it seemed to her that everyone was there to show that their sympathies lay with Mrs Bailey and they would support her now she was living alone. Michael began to relax, the fire was blazing, the drawing room looked lovely and so did his mother. She had a drink in her hand but she didn’t appear to be drinking it. Every time Adele looked at her she was engrossed in animated conversation, and she looked really happy for once.

About nine o’clock Adele was just coming back from the kitchen with more hot sausage rolls when she heard the crash from the drawing room. She rushed back in to find Mrs Bailey lying on the floor, with her dress right up showing her stocking tops. She had presumably fallen over the side table for it was overturned, and the glasses on it were all spilt on the carpet.

The other guests were looking down at her in astonishment.

Adele ran to help her up, but Michael got there first. ‘It’s those shoes again,’ he said. ‘You said you were going to get rid of them because the heels are wobbly.’

Adele gave him ten out of ten for making up such a plausible excuse so quickly. It was clear to her that Mrs Bailey had been drinking after all, and constantly refilling her glass. There was nothing wrong with the shoes.

‘She made me wear them,’ Mrs Bailey said, slurring her words and pointing none too steadily at Adele. ‘She does everything she can to embarrass me, but then she’s in the pay of my husband.’

Everyone looked at Adele, and she was so shaken she let the tray of sausage rolls slip a little and to add to her distress they began to slide off on to the floor.

‘You see what I mean?’ Mrs Bailey said triumphantly. ‘But what can you expect from a girl from the marshes?’

Adele fled to the kitchen and burst into tears. She had done her very best to make the house welcoming, she’d spent hours cooking and arranging everything, and she so much wanted Michael to have a happy evening and to stop worrying about his mother. It hadn’t worked and she would get no thanks for trying.

The guests all left very soon afterwards. Adele heard Michael apologizing to them in the hall as he helped them into their coats. She thought he was apologizing for her and that made her cry even harder.

She heard him go back into the drawing room, and it was then she got her coat to leave for good. But as she came out of the kitchen with it on, he was coming towards her across the hall, the tray of sausage rolls in his hands.

‘I’m so sorry, Adele,’ he said, his lips quivering. ‘That was awful for you. She’s drunk of course, out cold in a chair. Goodness knows what her old friends thought, it will be all over the county by tomorrow.’

He made Adele go back into the kitchen and sat her down at the table. His face was white and strained but he wiped her tears away with a handkerchief and kissed her on the forehead.

‘I shouldn’t have subjected you to this,’ he said. ‘Has she been like this to you before?’

It was only because Michael looked so troubled that Adele didn’t tell him the truth. He didn’t deserve to hear what his mother was really like, not on Christmas Eve.

‘She has her nasty moments,’ was all she said, and took her coat off because she knew she couldn’t leave him alone to deal with his mother.

‘But that was last year,’ Adele murmured to herself as she picked up the empty box of decorations to put away. ‘It won’t be like that this time.’

So much had happened on the world stage this year that even self-obsessed Mrs Bailey had been forced to see she wasn’t the only person with problems. In January King George died, and the whole country was plunged into mourning. That was hardly out of the way when the newspapers began printing stories about King Edward’s love affair with the married American woman Wallis Simpson. Civil war broke out in Spain in July, Mussolini seemed to be trying to take on the world, and sinister rumblings in Germany were getting louder and louder. Two hundred men marched from Jarrow in County Durham to London, with a petition about the 75 per cent unemployment in their town. Then finally, just a couple of weeks ago, King Edward decided to abdicate from the throne so he could marry Wallis Simpson, and the whole of the country was thrown into turmoil and heated debate.

Adele doubted that Mrs Bailey was really concerned about her country or those less fortunate than herself, but she had calmed down considerably. Her tantrums, screaming fits and heavy drinking bouts were all less frequent. She even appeared to have reconciled herself to being an estranged wife because she got the drawing and dining rooms redecorated to her taste. Adele didn’t much care for the dark red striped wallpaper in the dining room, it was too gloomy by day, but the pinks and greens in the drawing room were beautiful. Mrs Bailey had also been doing some voluntary charity work with a couple of other women, and had gone to France for a week back in the spring with an old girlfriend.

There were still times when she took to her bed and wouldn’t get up. She still showed little regard for all the hard work Adele did. But on Adele’s seventeenth birthday in July she had given her a little silver locket on a chain. She didn’t say anything other than ‘Happy birthday’, but Adele thought maybe she was like Granny and just couldn’t put her feelings into words.

Now Michael had somehow managed to persuade his brother Ralph, his wife and children, and Mr Bailey to come for Christmas. They would be arriving tomorrow, Christmas Eve, and Adele fervently hoped the family could patch up their differences.

*

‘I didn’t expect to see you today!’ Honour exclaimed in surprise as Adele walked into the cottage the following afternoon.

Adele took off her coat and shook the rain off it before closing the door. ‘I just needed to see you,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’ her grandmother asked, getting out of her chair.

‘Nothing at all,’ Adele said, and lifting a basket up on to the table she took out a brightly wrapped present, a small pudding in a china basin, a bag of tangerines and a tin. ‘I just wanted you to have these for the morning,’ she said.

‘Don’t tell me you aren’t coming home tomorrow?’ her grandmother said, and the catch in her voice told Adele her instinct had been right, and she was feeling very alone.

‘Of course I’m still coming in the afternoon,’ Adele said, and reached out to pat Honour’s cheek affectionately. ‘I wouldn’t leave you alone on Christmas Day even if Wallis Simpson was calling in to give me a few of her old dresses.’

Honour thought Wallis was a she-devil, sent directly from hell to overthrow the monarchy. Yet despite her loathing of the woman, she often remarked that her clothes were sensational.

‘What’s in the tin?’ she asked, getting up to look.

‘A Christmas cake,’ Adele said with a smile. ‘Made and iced by my own fair hands.’

Adele watched as her grandmother lifted the lid, but instead of the expected questions, or even a little sarcasm that the icing wasn’t too smooth, she saw a tear trickle down Honour’s cheek.

‘I didn’t take the ingredients,’ Adele said hastily. ‘I bought them, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with putting two cakes in the oven at the same time.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ her grandmother said, her voice soft and low. She wiped away the tear and smiled. ‘You’ve gone a long way from that little waif I took in five years ago. That was the best day’s work I ever did.’

A tingle went down Adele’s spine at hearing the love in her grandmother’s voice.

‘A pudding too!’ Honour exclaimed. ‘So mind you don’t stuff yourself up at the house and have no room for your dinner here!’

‘I’ll have to go back now,’ Adele said. ‘Open the present in the morning.’

Her grandmother shook her head. ‘No, I’ll wait for you to come. So don’t let them keep you there too late.’

As Adele walked back through the driving rain to Winchelsea she offered up a little prayer that by the end of Christmas Mrs Bailey would tell her she was going back to her husband in Hampshire.

She didn’t want to be a servant any longer, she knew what it really meant now. A couple of years ago she had thought that it was purely earning money by taking care of someone richer. To her it had been no different to a bricklayer building a house for someone else, or a butcher selling his meat to his customers.

But it wasn’t like that at all. The reality of a servant’s place in society had been driven home today when Michael and his family arrived. His father had stuck his hat and coat in her arms and walked into the drawing room, and the others had followed suit, even the two children. As though she was a coat stand.

Michael sort of shrugged and gave her a tight-lipped smile. He at least hung his coat up himself, but he went on in after the rest of them and closed the door behind him.

Michael had sat drinking ginger beer in her granny’s kitchen, he’d helped skin rabbits, and collected wood, like one of the family. Yet although Adele cleaned up his mother’s vomit, coaxed her into eating, washed and ironed her clothes and slept in her house to make sure she didn’t burn it down, she couldn’t talk to Michael in front of his family. She could say ‘Merry Christmas’, or ‘Shall I take your hat, sir?’ But not ‘How are you getting on at Oxford? Do tell me all about it!’

To them she belonged in the kitchen with the pots and pans. If she was working elsewhere in the house she was supposed to be quiet and invisible, without any rights, personality or feelings. Right now they were probably sitting in the drawing room enjoying the warm fire and the decorated Christmas tree, anticipating tomorrow’s roast goose and plum pudding. Yet she knew they wouldn’t stop to think how it got to their table, or of the planning and preparation that went into making their Christmas a merry one.

‘It’s time you moved on,’ she murmured to herself as she approached Harrington House. ‘It was only ever meant to be a temporary job.’

As Adele opened the front door, Mr Bailey came out into the hall. She had always imagined him looking like Michael, tall, slender and dark-haired, but in fact he was almost the exact opposite. He was no more than five feet seven, portly, and what was left of his hair was grey.

She knew him to be in his fifties, and fond of overeating and drinking, judging by his fat belly and high colour. He was short on charm and tolerance too – he had barked orders at her several times when she was serving luncheon.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said sharply as she wiped her wet feet on the doormat. ‘I rang the bell and there was no reply.’

‘I have a couple of hours off in the afternoon,’ Adele said. ‘Didn’t Mrs Bailey tell you?’

‘She’s having a nap,’ he said. ‘But we expected you to be on call while there are visitors.’

Adele felt a surge of irritation but she forced herself to smile. ‘I’ll just go and take my coat off, then I’ll come and see what you want,’ she said.

‘We want tea for the children,’ he snapped at her, his colour rising. ‘And they can stay in the kitchen with you until their bedtime.’

Adele might have been tempted to say she wasn’t a child-minder, and that expecting her to prepare the supper with two excited children under her feet wasn’t fair or right. But she knew if she did Mr Bailey was likely to take it out on his wife or Michael.

As it turned out, Anna and James, Ralph and Laura Bailey’s children, were no trouble. In fact Adele suspected they’d spent most of their young lives in the company of servants as they looked far more relaxed and happy in the kitchen than they had earlier in the dining room. Anna was six, James four, two small attractive replicas of their blonde, blue-eyed mother. Ralph took after his father: although he was a little taller and had a fine head of dark hair, he was already developing the same high colour and a paunch.

After a tea of sandwiches, scones and cake, Adele gave the children a large jar of buttons to play with. She’d found them in one of the kitchen cupboards when she first started here.

‘You could sort them into colours, or make pictures with them,’ she suggested, tipping them out on to a tray. She arranged a few into a flower shape to give them the idea and gave each of them a tray to stop the buttons falling on the floor.

Once the children were occupied, Adele laid the table in the dining room for supper. Mrs Bailey had requested soup, followed by cold meat and pickles, and as the soup was ready, requiring nothing more than heating up, Adele thought she had plenty of time to make the stuffing for tomorrow’s goose, then whisk the children upstairs and get them into bed at half past six, ready to serve the supper at seven.

She thought it was odd that Laura Bailey didn’t come upstairs while she was getting her children into their nightclothes, but then she’d already noticed that the pretty blonde came from the same mould as her mother-in-law, and didn’t do anything much for herself.

‘Will you read to us, Adele?’ Anna asked once she was tucked up in bed with her brother.

‘I can’t, I’ve got to get the supper,’ Adele replied. ‘And you’ve got to go to sleep otherwise Santa Claus won’t be filling your stockings.’

The stockings, two large red linen ones embroidered with the children’s names, were hanging on the bed posts. She and Pamela had only ever had a pair of their father’s socks, and the contents had been meagre compared with what these two children would get.

‘Please read us a story,’ Anna pleaded. ‘We promise we’ll go to sleep straight afterwards.’

She looked so adorable with her blonde hair tumbling down over the shoulders of her pink nightdress that Adele hadn’t got the heart to refuse. ‘Just a quick one then,’ she agreed.