Secrets (29 page)

Adele still said nothing, but got up to open her case. On top of the clothes and a couple of books there was an envelope.

‘It’s a reference,’ she gasped, once she saw what was inside. She read it quickly and smiled. ‘What on earth did you say to them to make them come round?’

‘Read it to me?’ Honour asked.

‘
To whom it may concern
’, Adele read.

Adele Talbot has been my housekeeper for the past sixteen months. She was honest, diligent and very hardworking. It was with deep regret that I had to let her go due to a change in my circumstances.

Yours sincerely
,

Emily Bailey

‘Well, would you believe it?’ exclaimed Adele. ‘What a turn-up! Did you force her to write it, Granny?’

‘Force her! Of course not,’ Honour said. ‘I did point out she ought to give you one. But from the tone of it she regrets losing you.’

‘I hope she’ll be all right,’ Adele sighed. ‘She really isn’t able to take care of herself.’

‘Now look here,’ Honour said gruffly, ‘you are not going to waste one more minute of thought on that woman. We all reap what we sow. I know her husband is a bully, but that doesn’t make her incapable of making a bed or cooking a meal. She’s her family’s concern, not yours.’

‘I don’t think any of them care but Michael,’ Adele said wearily.

‘Well, that’s her fault too,’ Honour said tartly.

‘Was it your fault then that Rose doesn’t care about you?’ Adele retorted.

Honour bristled. ‘I gave Rose all the love in the world,’ she said indignantly. ‘She was just a self-centred minx.’

‘Why haven’t you ever told me what went wrong between you?’ Adele asked.

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ Honour said defensively.

‘I think it has everything to do with me, Granny,’ Adele retorted, her tone a little sharp. ‘It affected how Rose was as a mother to me. So please tell me.’

Honour sighed. She had known for a very long time that she ought to talk to Adele about Rose, both the events in the past and more recent developments. Yet the right moment had never presented itself. But perhaps this was the right moment now. Adele was almost an adult, and she was mature enough to understand.

‘I’ve already told you that your grandfather came back from the war with shell-shock,’ she said carefully. ‘You can’t really adequately explain to anyone just what that is like, it’s something you have to witness to understand. Frank would sit all day just where you are now,’ she said, indicating the chair Adele liked best, in its place by the stove.

‘He would just stare silently into space. Now and then he would jerk his head in fright as if he’d heard a gun fired close by. His fingers were never still, he picked at his buttons, at loose threads in his trousers, and often at his face until he drew blood.’ She paused for a moment, not knowing if she should illustrate it more vividly, or play it down in order to leave Frank with some dignity.

‘It wasn’t fair,’ she said heatedly. ‘Frank had always laughed a great deal, had wild ideas, and could talk about any subject under the sun, but that man I loved was gone. In his place was this withdrawn, nervous, often frightening stranger who put such demands on my strength and patience that I sometimes felt I couldn’t cope.’

Adele nodded in understanding.

‘But that particular day, when all this came about with Rose,’ Honour went on, ‘I had at long last seen a slight improvement in him. It was 1918 then, the war still rumbling on in France, and it was late spring. We went for a brief walk together during the afternoon, and he hadn’t flung himself down on the ground as he had always done previously. He had managed to drink a cup of tea unaided, only spilling a few drops, and he had told me he loved me. That meant more than anything – you see, he rarely spoke at that time, and when he did it was just to rant about terrible things he had seen in the war. Mostly he didn’t even seem to know who I was.’

‘And where was Rose?’ Adele asked.

‘At her job in the hotel,’ Honour said. ‘But she was due home as soon as she’d turned down the beds for the night. I was looking forward to her coming in so I could tell her about the improvement in her father, and I decided I would mark the occasion by giving her the dress I’d been making in secret for her.’

Honour leaned back into the couch, half closing her eyes, and Adele could see that she was reliving the events as she continued with the story.

‘Daylight was beginning to fail as she came out of her bedroom wearing the dress,’ she said.

Honour could see it all as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The table was laid for supper, Frank was in his chair by the stove, and she was lighting the oil lamp as Rose came out of her bedroom. She turned, fully expecting Rose to be striking a pose in the doorway, with giggles to follow as she twirled around the room to show off the dress.

With her blonde hair, pretty face and curvy figure, Rose looked good in anything, but that evening as Honour looked round at her, she looked simply stunning, for the blue of the dress matched her eyes perfectly. She felt an immediate flush of pride and satisfaction that the long hours she had spent making the dress had turned out to be so well spent.

But Rose wasn’t striking a pose, there were no twirls or giggles. She was scowling.

‘It’s horrible,’ she said, holding out the long skirt distastefully as if it was made of dirty sacking. ‘How can you expect me to wear it? It’s like something a schoolmistress would wear.’

Honour was shocked speechless. Since Frank had been brought home they had been struggling to survive on Rose’s wages. The only way Honour had been able to buy the material for the dress was by selling her pearl brooch. It would have been far more sensible to have used that money to buy food, or even pay the doctor’s bills, but she knew how hard it was for a young girl to wear the same old worn dress day in, day out.

Maybe the blue dress with its high neck and little pin-tucks on the bodice wasn’t the height of fashion, but it was wartime and clothes had to be practical when you lived out in the country – surely Rose could see that?

‘It was the best I could do,’ Honour said eventually, sorry now that she’d parted with the brooch which had been a wedding-day gift from her parents, and the only thing she had left of them. ‘I think you should count your blessings, Rose, there are plenty of girls around here who would give anything for a new dress,’ she added sharply.

Perhaps Frank picked up on the friction in the room for he began jerking his head, dribbling and making alarming noises in his throat.

Honour moved over to soothe him, but Rose merely looked disgusted and scornful. ‘It’s humiliating enough being so poor that I’ve got to wear a rag like this,’ she spat out. ‘But it’s even worse to have a father who’s like the village idiot.’

Adele gasped, for the way her grandmother had related the story had brought sharp images of her mother’s cruel remarks back into her mind. ‘What on earth did you do?’ she asked.

‘At the time I was so appalled by her callousness, I didn’t say or do anything,’ Honour said sadly. ‘Later I wished I’d slapped her, or even forced her into a chair so I could pass on some of the horror stories Frank had spilled out in his more lucid moments. Perhaps then Rose might have appreciated the enormous sacrifice men like him made when they enlisted to fight for King and Country.’

‘So what happened then?’ Adele asked.

‘She was gone by morning,’ Honour said with ice in her voice. ‘Slunk out like a thief in the night with our money and the few small valuables we had left. She left us to starve.’

Adele couldn’t speak for a moment. She had never credited her mother with a kind heart, sensitivity or any other redeeming qualities, but it was a shock to hear that even as young as seventeen she’d been that callous.

‘I see,’ she said eventually. ‘Of course, you could’ve told me this years ago.’

Honour winced at the reproach. ‘If I have kept information from you, I had good reason,’ she said haltingly. ‘When you first came here you were very sick, you’d experienced terrible things, and the only way I knew how to heal you was by instinct. I had been deeply hurt by your mother too, and I dealt with it by casting her out of my mind. I suppose I tried to make you do that as well.’

‘But it doesn’t work like that,’ Adele said. ‘Secrets make things much worse. I understand now why you were bitter about Rose, I sympathize too, but it doesn’t explain why she was so nasty to me. Does it?’

‘No, Adele, it doesn’t,’ Honour agreed. ‘I can only make assumptions about that.’

‘And they are?’

‘Well, Rose couldn’t have been carrying you then, the dates are all wrong. So either she left here with a man, or she went to London looking for fun and adventure and met your father there. Either way, the man must have abandoned her, and it would have been very hard for any woman having a baby outside of marriage.’

‘So she chose to marry Jim Talbot as an alternative to the workhouse or coming home, tail between legs?’ Adele said.

Honour grimaced. ‘I doubt she even considered coming home. She must have known what her disappearance did to us. I dare say she thought we could never forgive her.’

‘Would you have?’

Honour sighed. ‘I really don’t know. I was furious with her, Frank was completely dependent on me, and we had barely enough money to feed us. Yet maybe if she’d turned up at the door with you in her arms I might have softened. I can’t honestly say. Could you forgive her if she turned up here tomorrow?’

Adele thought about it for a few seconds. ‘I doubt it,’ she said eventually. ‘But then she’s not going to come back here, is she? Not knowing there are two of us against her. I take it she was told I was here?’

‘Yes, when she signed the paper that made me your legal guardian,’ Honour said.

Adele thought about this for a moment, remembering that her grandmother wrote and received many letters at that time.

‘But that was years ago. Was she still in an asylum then?’

‘Yes. In a place called Friern Barnet, in North London,’ Honour replied. She’d had enough of questions for one day, but she sensed Adele wasn’t going to stop until she knew everything.

‘Is she still there?’

Honour hesitated.

‘Well?’ Adele prompted. ‘Either she’s still there or she isn’t. If she isn’t, she must be well again.’

‘No. She’s not there any more,’ Honour finally admitted. ‘She escaped.’

Adele gasped. ‘And you kept it secret,’ she said reproachfully. ‘How and when did she escape?’

‘Not long after she’d signed the papers about you. About nine months after you came here,’ Honour said, hanging her head. ‘It seems she got herself into a position of trust so she was allowed out into the grounds now and then. She may have hidden in a delivery van, no one really knows.’

‘If she could do that she must have got better,’ Adele said thoughtfully.

‘Possibly,’ Honour said. ‘I hope so. I did think at the time it was the signing of the papers that made her escape and that she’d come here.’

‘But she didn’t.’ Adele gave a long-drawn-out breath.

Honour couldn’t swallow for the lump in her throat. She could feel Adele’s hurt, and she had no idea what she could say to make it go away.

‘No, she didn’t. But maybe she felt you would be happier without her.’

Adele shrugged dismissively. ‘If I was to believe she cared anything for my happiness I might start believing in fairies too,’ she said sarcastically. ‘But now we’ve got started on this unlocking of secrets, what happened to Mr Makepeace?’

A cold shiver ran down Honour’s back. How could she tell Adele that she met disbelief in the police station when she reported that wicked man? Would it make Adele feel any better to know she wrote many letters to the charity which ran The Firs, yet they didn’t remove the man from his position or even investigate her claims?

The only victory Honour had won in that first year Adele was with her, was to become her granddaughter’s legal guardian. But even that wasn’t much of a victory when it transpired the authorities were relieved to be spared the task of keeping her themselves.

‘I reported him,’ she said truthfully. ‘Both to the police and to the charity. I was never told what happened to him.’

To Honour’s relief, Adele didn’t ask any further questions. Maybe that was because she was naive enough to believe that reporting him automatically meant he’d be punished. She got up from her chair, picked up her suitcase and walked over to her bedroom to unpack it. When she got to the door she turned. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever see Michael again now,’ she said sadly. ‘So it’s just you and me again, Granny.’

Honour’s eyes prickled with tears. She glanced at Frank’s painting on the wall which had always been her favourite for it was of Camber Castle with the river in the foreground. He’d painted it in a spot where they often had picnics. He had always been so good at expressing his feelings, both verbally and through his painting, and she knew he would say this was the perfect time for telling their granddaughter how much she was loved and valued.

‘I love you, Adele,’ she blurted out. ‘You transformed my life by coming here. I wish I could do something to make everything right with Michael. I wish I could tell you something about your mother that would make you happier about her too. But I can’t do anything more than tell you that you mean everything to me.’

Adele looked at her in astonishment for a few seconds and then began to laugh.

‘Oh, Granny,’ she said, tears coming with the laughter, ‘I’m not so sure I like you getting soppy. It’s not you.’

Honour couldn’t help but smile. ‘You know what’s wrong with you, girl?’ she asked.

Adele shook her head. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘You are far too much like me for your own good.’

Chapter Thirteen

1938

‘Nurse Talbot! Mrs Drew’s dressing needs changing!’ Sister MacDonald called out as she passed the sluice room where Adele was about to empty and wash a bedpan.