Secrets (34 page)

Honour was astounded at her insolence. ‘Clear off,’ she said. ‘Go on, go. I don’t want you in here.’

‘I’ll go when I’m ready,’ Rose said, languidly exhaling smoke. ‘I have a perfect right to come and ask about my daughter.’

‘You don’t,’ Honour retorted. She wasn’t used to feeling afraid and she didn’t know how to deal with it. Even when desperate out-of-work men used to come to the door asking for something to eat, she had never lost her nerve. She sensed Rose had come to make mischief, for if her motive had been purely to see Adele, surely she would have used charm rather than menace.

She supposed that most people would consider Rose still very attractive, considering she was thirty-seven now. She was much heavier than she’d been at seventeen, but her figure was still good and her eyes very beautiful. But she looked so hard and brassy, her skin had a greyish tone, her teeth were dingy and even her blonde hair had lost its silky sheen.

‘You lost all rights to Adele when you were committed to an asylum,’ Honour said firmly. She wasn’t going to let herself be browbeaten. ‘If I’d only known you had ill-treated her before that, I would have come and taken her away. So don’t think for one moment you are going to walk back into her life and undo all the good I’ve done.’

‘Who said anything about walking back into her life? I only want to know about her,’ Rose shot back.

‘You escaped from the asylum. Where did you go?’ Honour asked.

Rose perched on the arm of the couch and crossed her legs, flicking her cigarette ash towards the stove and missing. ‘Back to London, where else?’ she said.

Honour snatched the cigarette from her fingers and put it in the stove. ‘How did you live?’

‘A bit of this, a bit of that,’ Rose said vaguely. ‘I got by.’

Honour’s hackles rose. That sounded very much as if she’d been selling herself on the streets, and to look at her that seemed very possible.

‘And your husband? Jim Talbot. Where is he?’

Rose shrugged. ‘How would I know? He scarpered when they put me away. Now, tell me about Adele. Have you got a photo of her?’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Honour snapped. ‘She’s training to be a nurse. She’s happy. So get on your way and don’t come back.’

‘Is she courting?’ Rose asked, as calmly as if she hadn’t heard what Honour said.

‘She has a young man, yes,’ Honour said starchily. ‘A very nice young man too. And I am not going to tell you where she is nursing, so don’t bother to ask. The last thing she would want is you turning up to see her.’

‘How do you know that?’ Rose sneered. ‘I bet you’ve smothered her, the way you did me. Girls don’t like that, you know.’

‘I did not smother you.’ Honour’s voice rose indignantly.

‘Yes you did. I had to eat what you said, do what you said, go where you said. I never got a choice about anything. You dragged me away from a nice school and home, to here!’ Rose’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘“We’re going to live in the country, and it will be such a big adventure,”’ she said, mimicking Honour speaking in a simpering way. ‘Country! It’s a bloody marsh, with the wind howling and not a soul for miles. Adventure! It was hell. What sort of a mother were you?’

‘You loved it when we came for holidays,’ Honour said defensively. ‘Maybe it didn’t turn out to be all your father and I hoped, but when we lost the shop we really had no other choice.’

‘Oh yes we did, we could have lived with Grandma,’ Rose retorted, and smirked as if she’d won a couple of points. ‘I was eleven then, remember, not a baby. I heard things, saw things, I knew what was going on. You and Father might have been happy without all our relatives and friends around us, but I wasn’t. Why didn’t Father get a job like anyone else?’

‘Do you really think you are in any position to criticize your father’s actions, in the light of what you did to Adele?’ Honour asked. ‘She was twelve when her sister was killed, and you blamed her for it. Later you tried to kill her. When she turned up at my door she was so sick I thought she was going to die. I thought she’d be scarred for life after what she’d been through. You did that to her and you’d known nothing but love from the moment you were born.’

Honour paused just long enough to catch her breath. ‘I know what your game is, Rose. You’re trying to suggest that your wilful neglect of Adele is somehow my fault, and that I owe you something now. Well, it won’t wash. You were the selfish little baggage that robbed your parents and ran away with a fancy man. I had to listen to your father crying for you when he was dying, and I can never forgive you for that.’

‘When did he die?’

‘January 1921,’ Honour spat at her. ‘He began to get his wits back after you’d gone, sometimes I wished he hadn’t because then he wouldn’t have known what you’d done. The war broke his spirit, but you broke his heart.’

It was only then that Rose dropped her defiant and insolent stance. ‘When I left I meant to send you money,’ she said. ‘But nothing worked out like I planned. You don’t know what I went through.’

‘Oh yes I do,’ Honour said. ‘You ran off with a rich man and you thought he’d marry you. But he skedaddled once he knew there was a baby on the way. You married Jim Talbot so you wouldn’t end up in the workhouse. Then you spent the whole of Adele’s childhood making her pay for your mistakes.’

She knew by Rose’s expression that she was right.

‘You can do whatever you like in this world,’ Honour said. ‘But there’s one drawback. You have to deal with the consequences. You can’t blame anyone else for those.’

‘Just tell me how Adele is and I’ll go,’ Rose said sullenly. ‘That’s all I want, nothing more. Did she do well at school?’

‘Yes, she did, she’s a bright girl, just as you were.’ Honour said sternly. ‘It was hard when she left school, there wasn’t much work, but she got a job as a housekeeper and now she’s a year into her nurse’s training. She loves it, she was born to be a nurse.’

‘And what does she look like now?’

‘She’s tall, about five feet six, her hair’s light brown, and she’s lovely,’ Honour said with some pride. ‘Not a beauty in the way you were, but people take to her, she’s a kind, hardworking, happy girl. And if you want to do something right for her at last, stay away.’

To her surprise Rose didn’t come back with any cheek. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

Honour nodded and opened the door. She didn’t trust herself to speak, not even to ask how Rose was intending to get back to London.

Rose left without another word, clip-clopping over the pebbles in her high-heeled shoes. After Honour had closed the front door, she went to the back door. Through the bushes she could see her daughter walking down the lane. She stooped momentarily to light a cigarette, then continued. It was only once she knew Rose had got to the end of the lane and the main road that she felt she could breathe again.

Her legs felt weak and shaky, she was sweating and her heart was thumping. As she closed the back door and locked it, she began to cry. She had never felt so terribly alone, or so frightened.

Chapter Fifteen

At the end of the lane, a black Ford was parked up by the river. Johnny Galloway had his arm leaning on the open window. Rose walked over to the car and got into the passenger seat.

‘Did you see ’er?’ Johnny asked.

‘I saw my mother,’ she replied grimly. ‘But not Adele. She was working.’

Johnny Galloway was a spiv from South London. He had the look of a ferret, small and wiry, with oiled black hair slicked back from his face and a penchant for loud checked suits. He had the tenacious manner of a ferret too, holding on to Rose for dear life and pandering to her every whim.

They had met some three months ago in The Grapes, a Soho pub close to the restaurant where Rose worked as a waitress. She had known Johnny was a villain, but then most of the men who drank in The Grapes were. He was also illiterate, but he was smart enough to hide his criminal activities behind the front of a couple of legal businesses in Rotherhithe. That first night he plied her with drink until closing time, kept telling her how beautiful she was, and later paid for her taxi home without insisting he came too. In Rose’s book that made him a prime prospect.

Rose had never had any qualms about going to bed with a man if that was what it took to open his wallet. But she had realized after only a couple of drinks that Johnny was different to most men. He was the type who was at his most generous and attentive during the chase, so Rose had given him a good one. She arranged to meet him, then stood him up. She would kiss him passionately, then tell him she couldn’t go any further until she was quite sure of him. Sometimes on dates she barely said a word to him, on others she sparkled like a diamond.

She knew she intrigued him; other men had remarked that she was a fascinating combination of lady and whore with her posh voice, good manners and sensuality. But for Johnny she’d added another dimension to her character, that of a good woman who had been wronged.

By letting it slip that her husband had her committed to an asylum to get his hands on her money, she evoked Johnny’s sympathy. When she laughingly spoke of her subsequent escape she portrayed herself as wily and brave. Johnny chose to think her heavy drinking was due to her grief at one daughter dying and the other being taken into her mother’s care, and that was fine by her.

What she hadn’t expected, though, was that Johnny had a soft heart. He got the idea that if Rose could be reunited with Adele the sadness of her past would be wiped out. She raised all the objections she could think of, including that her mother would have told Adele a great many lies to make her hate Rose. But Johnny insisted that if she were just to turn up on the doorstep, without any prior warning, Adele would see for herself what her grandmother had been doing.

Rose found herself in a tricky situation. She was scared stiff of seeing her mother, and she had no real desire to see Adele, apart from natural curiosity about how she’d turned out. But she knew that if she didn’t do what Johnny suggested, he would find it strange, perhaps even suspect she’d been lying to him. She didn’t want to lose him, he bought her nice presents and gave her a good time. So this morning when he’d suggested a drive down to Rye, she felt unable to back away.

Once she got to the cottage she could of course have turned away and told Johnny there was no one in, but for some reason she didn’t understand, she felt compelled to go through with it. Whether that was out of curiosity or just faint hope her mother would be overjoyed to see her, she couldn’t say.

‘Was yer mum all right with you?’ Johnny asked, lighting two cigarettes and giving one to her.

‘No, she was a right cow,’ Rose retorted, inhaling deeply on the cigarette because she was still trembling from the ordeal. ‘She was always as mad as hell that my father left me his money and not her. I don’t think she really believed that Jim made off with it after he’d got me committed either. Now she wants to keep my Adele from me out of spite. She seems to forget I’ve had to live in a slum and work my fingers to the bone just to send money for them.’

Johnny put his arm around her shoulder, his narrow face wreathed in sympathy. ‘Don’t get upset about it, luv,’ he said. ‘At least you tried. When yer daughter gets ’ome and ’ears you bin there, she’ll be pleased as punch.’

‘I don’t expect the old bag will even tell her,’ Rose said dourly. ‘I knew it was a stupid thing to do. I shouldn’t have listened to you.’

‘Don’t you go giving up just yet,’ he said. ‘You caught ’er on the ’op. My old lady used to chew me ear off every time I went ’ome, blamed me for every bloody thing that went wrong in ’er life, but she’d sleep on it, and the next day she’d be as nice as ninepence. Now, if we was to stay down ’ere tonight you could go back in the morning when she’s ’ad time to think it over. I betcha she’ll be okay then.’

Rose put her head on Johnny’s shoulder and forced herself to cry because she wanted his sympathy for the hostility she’d got from her mother. She had of course expected it, and if nothing else it bore out her long-held conviction that the woman was totally heartless.

But she hadn’t expected to feel confused.

Everything had been so cut and dried in her mind before going through that door. She wanted confirmation that her childhood home was a hovel; that the child she’d never loved was unlovable. That her life would have been very much worse if she’d never run away from home.

But the cottage wasn’t a hovel. Primitive certainly, not one modern amenity, yet it was clean and bright with a rustic charm, flowers on the table, a smell of polish and soap in the air. It brought back so many memories she didn’t want. And her mother must have found something to love in Adele, because why else would she have been so fiercely protective of her?

‘There, there,’ Johnny said comfortingly. ‘Why don’t we go into ’Astings and find a guest house for the night? We could go on the pier and ’ave a good time. ’Astings is a good place, I used to go there when I was a nipper.’

Rose didn’t want a night of forced gaiety with Johnny in Hastings, and she certainly didn’t want to have to share a bed with him. But if she insisted on going back to London tonight, he’d be disappointed and suspicious. It seemed better to pretend she was weighing up the possibility of going back to see her mother tomorrow, even though she had no intention of doing such a thing.

She sniffed and dried her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t know if I’m brave enough to try again,’ she said. ‘But maybe I’ll feel differently in the morning.’

Johnny’s face lit up. ‘That’s my girl! So it’s off to the bright lights of ’Astings then?’

‘Why not just go to Winchelsea?’ she said, pointing it out up on the hill. ‘I expect we could get a room at the pub there. We’ll have to say we’re Mr and Mrs Galloway though!’

He beamed, his little shoe-button black eyes almost disappearing. ‘That’ll be a pleasure, sweetheart,’ he said.

In less than half an hour, Rose and Johnny were sitting in the bar of The Bridge Inn, Johnny with a pint of beer and Rose with a large rum and black. She didn’t really know why she’d suggested staying here, perhaps it was a touch of nostalgia because she had often sat outside here with her father when she was small, him with a pint and her with a glass of lemonade. But the room was luxurious by her standards, all pink chintz with a big soft bed. All she needed now was to get some drink down her so she could show some enthusiasm for sharing it with Johnny, so she merely put on more makeup, brushed her hair and made for the bar.