Secrets (3 page)

Yet if the parents were ill matched, there was an even greater disparity between how they felt about their two children. There were several photographs of Pamela on display on the sideboard, and one of her paintings pinned on the wall, but there was nothing of Adele. Mike had noticed that Pamela had been wearing a good warm coat, she had mittens on her hands, and she was prettily plump. Adele, in contrast, was very thin and pasty-faced and her coat was an old adult hand-me-down. The coat wasn’t necessarily hers, it could be that she had grabbed her mother’s to run out in. But he didn’t think so, for looking at Adele now under a bright light, she seemed malnourished. Her stringy, mousy hair had no shine to it, and her navy blue school gym slip, like the coat, was far too big for her.

Her appearance meant little in an area where there were hundreds of girls of a similar age even more shabbily dressed and ill fed. Yet Mike was pretty certain that all their mothers, even those who were drunken sluts, would be unable to ignore a child so obviously in need of a little comfort and tenderness.

The girl had just witnessed something even the most hardened policeman would want to weep over, so surely Rose, however traumatized, could manage to put her own emotions on hold long enough to reach out for her elder child?

Adele felt a sense of relief when her parents finally left with the policemen, ordering her to bed. But the moment she went into the icy-cold bedroom and saw the bed she had always shared with Pamela, she began to cry again. She was never again going to feel her sister’s warm little body snuggled up tight against her, gone were the whispered night-time conversations, the giggling and all the little confidences. She’d lost the only person she could always count on for affection.

She couldn’t really remember anything before Pamela was born. The farthest back her mind could stretch was to a pram, too big for her to push, and the cot, with a baby in it which she had thought much better than a doll. They had lived somewhere else then, a basement flat she thought, but she could remember moving into this place, because Pamela was just beginning to walk and she had to watch she didn’t try to go down the stairs.

Dozens of memories came flooding back as she lay scrunched up in a ball, shivering and crying. Of pushing Pamela on the swings, drawing pictures for her, telling her stories and teaching her to skip out on the road.

She had always known Mum and Dad liked Pamela more than her. They laughed when she said wrong words, they let her into bed with them, she got larger helpings of food. Pamela hardly ever got secondhand clothes and shoes, and Adele never had new.

Pamela’s piano lessons were the only thing Adele had ever felt jealous about. She’d accepted all the other unfairness because Pamela was the baby of the family, and she loved her too. But the piano was different – Pamela had never shown the slightest interest in playing any instrument. She said she wanted to dance, to ride a horse and swim, but didn’t care about music. Adele did, and although she’d never dared ask outright for lessons, she’d hinted about them hundreds of times.

Adele knew only too well that England was in the grip of something called a ‘Slump’. Every week the queues of men looking for work grew longer and longer. Adele had seen a soup kitchen open in King’s Cross, families down the street being turned out of their homes because they couldn’t pay the rent. Her father might still be in work, but she knew he too might lose his job at any time, so of course she didn’t really expect a luxury like piano lessons.

Then out of the blue her mother announced that Pamela was to go to Mrs Belling in Cartwright Gardens for lessons every Thursday afternoon.

Adele knew this was to spite her, for what other reason was there when Pamela didn’t want to go? Only a couple of weeks ago she’d told Adele she really hated the lessons and that Mrs Belling had said it was pointless teaching her when she didn’t have a piano at home to practise on. Now she was dead because of it.

Adele heard her parents come back later. She could hear their voices, if not what they were saying, and her mother’s alternated between a kind of sobbing sorrow and a whine of bitterness. Her father’s was more constant, an angry rasp, now and then punctuated by a thump on the table with his fist.

Adele guessed they were drinking, and that was even more worrying, for it usually made them argue. She wanted to get up and go to the lavatory, but she didn’t dare for it meant going through the living room.

She wondered if she would be expected to go to school in the morning. Most children she knew were kept home when there was a death in their family, but then her mother wasn’t like other girls’ mothers.

Sometimes Adele felt proud of the differences, for in many respects Rose Talbot was superior. She looked after her appearance, she didn’t shout or swear out in the street like so many of their neighbours. She kept the flat clean and tidy, and there was always a hot dinner every night, not bread and dripping like so many other children round here got.

But Adele would’ve preferred mess if it made her mother happy and affectionate, the way other mothers were. She rarely laughed, she didn’t even chatter, she never wanted to go out anywhere, not even to Regent’s Park in the summer. It was as though she chose to be miserable because it was a good way to spoil things for everyone else.

Eventually Adele knew she’d have to go to the lavatory, or she’d wet the bed. She opened the door very quietly, hoping against hope she could just slip out down the stairs without being noticed.

‘What do you want?’ Rose snapped at her.

Adele explained and went straight out of the front door before anything further could be said.

With just her nightdress and bare feet, it was freezing on the stairs. The lavatory smelled bad again and it made her heave. Mum was always moaning about Mrs Manning never taking a turn to clean it, in fact she thought she should do it twice as often as she had twice as many children. In the last row about it, Mrs Manning threatened to knock Mum’s block off. She said she was a stuck-up cow who thought her own shit didn’t stink.

As she got back into the flat again, Adele hesitated. Her parents were sitting either side of the fire in the armchairs, both with a drink in their hands, and they looked so sad she felt she had to say something.

‘I’m really sorry I couldn’t get up there quicker,’ she blurted out. ‘I did run all the way.’

Her father looked round first. ‘It couldn’t be ’elped,’ he said sadly.

For one brief second Adele thought they’d both come round, but she was badly mistaken. Without any warning an empty beer bottle came hurtling at her, catching her on the forehead, then falling to the floor and smashing on the lino. ‘Get out of my sight, you little bastard,’ her mother screamed. ‘I never wanted you, and now you’ve killed my baby.’

Chapter Two

‘I don’t want her at the funeral,’ Rose Talbot snapped at her husband.

Alarmed, Jim looked up from cleaning his shoes. He had anticipated Rose might start shouting at him for cleaning them on the table, so he’d put newspaper down first. But he hadn’t for one moment expected that with less than two hours to go to the funeral, she would find something further to be difficult about.

‘Why?’ Jim asked nervously. ‘Because she’s too young?’ Rose had been making him very nervous ever since Pamela’s death. Her grief he understood – most days he wished he could die too and be rid of this terrible ache inside him. Having to wait two weeks for a coroner’s report before the funeral had made it even worse, stringing out the misery, but he didn’t understand why she was being so savage to Adele.

‘If you want to tell everyone else it’s because she’s too young, do so,’ Rose retorted, flouncing away across the living room. ‘But it’s not the reason. I just don’t want her there.’

‘Now look here,’ Jim began, thinking he must be tough and stop all this before it got out of hand. ‘Pammy was her sister, she ought to be there. People will talk.’

Rose turned and gave him a long, cold stare. ‘Let them. I don’t care,’ she said defiantly.

Jim did what he always did when Rose was being difficult, let it go, and finished polishing his shoes till they shone like glass. Maybe he ought to be tougher, but he was very aware that Rose didn’t love him as he loved her, and he was afraid to go against her.

‘If that’s what you want,’ he said weakly after a couple of seconds’ thought.

Rose stormed off into their bedroom, afraid that if she stayed near Jim another minute she’d blurt out how she felt about him too. She pulled the curlers out of her hair angrily, and as she picked up her hair brush and moved to the mirror, what she saw made her feel even more angry.

Everything about her sagged, both her face and body. She supposed she was still attractive in most people’s eyes, but in her own she was like an overblown rose, the petals on the point of falling.

Putting her hands on either side of her face, she pulled the skin back tighter. Instantly her jaw was firmer and the lines around her mouth disappeared, evoking memories of how she had once looked. She had been a head-turner, with her perfect figure, pouting lips, beautiful blonde hair and skin like porcelain, and if she’d made a good marriage to a wealthy man, maybe she’d still look that way now.

But fate had conspired against her all the way down the line. All the suitable young men went off to war when she was just thirteen, and of the few that came back, most were spoken for, or else damaged the way her father was.

Thirty wasn’t so very old, but there was no way of changing her life now, any more than there was of arresting her fading beauty.

She had married Jim in desperation because she was pregnant with Adele. She saw him as a temporary refuge, believing that after the baby was born something better would turn up. But instead she’d landed herself in a trap.

It was bitter irony that Pamela’s arrival four years later had changed her view of her marriage for a while. The last thing she’d wanted was to be burdened with another child. Yet she had loved her from the first moment she held her in her arms.

In one of those soppy romances she used to read so avidly as a girl, she ought to have come to love Jim truly too, but that didn’t happen. She just became resigned to being stuck with him. Yet while she could look at Pamela, so much like herself, she still had a trace of optimism there was something good around the next corner.

But without Pamela there would be nothing. She was back to where she’d started with Adele, the very cause of her blighted life, and Jim of course, a man she couldn’t love or even respect.

Adele was sitting on her bed trying to darn her only half-decent pair of socks when Rose came into the room.

Her immediate reaction was to say how nice her mother looked. But she bit it back, afraid it wasn’t appropriate to compliment anyone dressed for a funeral. But black suited her mother, and the way her blonde hair was curling round the little black netted hat was very pretty.

‘Is it time to go already?’ Adele asked instead. ‘I was just finishing darning this sock. I’ve only got to put it on.’

‘You needn’t bother, you aren’t going,’ her mother replied sharply. ‘Funerals are no place for children.’

Adele felt a surge of relief. In the two weeks since Pamela died she had thought of the funeral with absolute dread. Pamela had always been scared of graveyards, and Adele knew she’d feel spooked watching as her coffin was lowered into the ground.

‘Is there anything you’d like me to do while you and Daddy are gone?’ she asked. She knew there wasn’t to be any kind of tea afterwards, as neither her mother nor father had any relatives coming. But Adele thought it possible they might bring back a few neighbours.

A slap across her face startled more than hurt her. ‘What did I say?’ she asked in puzzlement.

‘You don’t bloody well care, do you?’ Rose shouted. ‘You little bitch!’

‘I do care. I loved her just as much as you,’ Adele retorted indignantly, and began to cry.

‘No one loved her like I did.’ Her mother pushed her face right up to Adele’s and her eyes were as icy as the weather outside. ‘No one! I wish to God it was you who was killed. You’ve been a thorn in my side since the moment you were born.’

Adele could only think her mother must have gone mad to say such a terrible thing. Yet however scared she felt, she couldn’t let it pass without fighting back. ‘So why have me then?’ she retorted.

‘God knows I tried hard enough to get rid of you,’ her mother snarled, her lips curling back like a dog’s about to bite. ‘I should’ve left you on someone’s doorstep.’

The door burst open and Jim came in. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Just a few home truths,’ Rose said as she flounced out of the room. Jim followed her.

Adele sat on her bed in deep shock for quite some time. She wanted to believe that her mother was just suffering from some kind of sickness through losing Pamela, and that she hadn’t really meant it. Yet people didn’t say things like that, even when they were hurting themselves, not unless it was true.

Adele was still sitting like a statue when she heard her parents leave for the funeral. They didn’t say goodbye, just left without a word as if she was nothing. Adele’s room was at the back of the house, so she couldn’t see the street. She waited until they’d gone down the stairs, then went into her parents’ bedroom, pulled the closed curtains back just a crack and saw the hearse waiting down below.

No one in Charlton Street had a car, so when one stopped in the street it was quite an event, and all the boys rushed to look at it. Adults would discuss who it might belong to and the purpose of the visit.

Hearses, however, created a different kind of reaction, and today’s was typical. The neighbours who were going to the funeral were gathered in a little group, looking almost unrecognizable in tidy black clothes.

Further down the street women watched from their doorsteps. Men passing by took off their hats. Any children not at school had either been taken indoors or if still outside were being made to stand still in respect.

While it was reassuring to think her sister was afforded the same degree of respect as an adult, it was unbearable for Adele to think of Pamela lying inside the shiny coffin. She had been such a show-off, so chatty and lively. There was hardly a house in the street that she hadn’t been into at some time – she was nosy, funny and so lovable that even the crustiest of old people were charmed by her.