Secrets (64 page)

It was only yesterday, the day before the funeral, that Adele finally broke through to her.

‘You’ve got to listen to me,’ she shouted at her angrily. ‘Mum wouldn’t have wanted this, and you know it. She’d be telling you to pull yourself together.’

Honour was kneading some dough on the table. They didn’t need any bread, Jim the postman had brought them a loaf the day before. But Honour had always made bread on Fridays, and Adele hadn’t tried to stop her, thinking it might help her out of her darkness naturally. But as she banged and kneaded, making the table judder on the floor, it began to get on Adele’s nerves, and that was when she shouted for her to stop and listen to her.

She got no response, so Adele snatched the dough away and slapped her grandmother’s face. ‘I’m talking to you, that bloody bread isn’t important. This is! Rose is going to be buried tomorrow. You’ve got to be there at the church with me and Myles. You can’t act like a madwoman, not even if your heart is broken.’

Still getting no response, Adele grew furious. ‘What about me?’ she screamed at her. ‘How do you think I feel? Rose was an appalling mother to me. All the worst things that ever happened to me were her fault, and you were all I had. Are you going to turn away from me now because she’s dead? Don’t I mean anything to you?’

Honour turned to her slowly. ‘No one can know how I feel,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘I’ve been through all this before. I can’t do it again.’

Adele had to assume she was referring to the time when Rose disappeared as a young girl. ‘She hasn’t left you because she wanted to,’ she shouted. ‘She’s dead, killed by a bomb. It can happen to anyone. It’s not right that she should go before you do, but she has, and there’s nothing that can change that.’

‘I was always on at her for something,’ Honour said, her voice still flat. ‘After that supper-party I said some very cruel things.’

Adele sighed. On the train ride back from London Myles had told her about what came out at the supper-party. It was astounding, almost unbelievable, but it had lost much of its impact coming on top of hearing her mother and Emily were both dead.

‘It doesn’t matter what you did or said to Rose in the past,’ she said tersely. ‘It was over before she and Emily went to London. And whatever came out at that supper-party, it was for the best. They became friends again. They died together in each other’s arms.’

‘It was me who suggested they had a day out together,’ Honour said brokenly.

‘So maybe you did, but that doesn’t make it your fault they died,’ Adele said in exasperation. ‘Blame Hitler. Blame the Government for not shooting down the rocket. Blame anyone you like. But not yourself. They were enjoying themselves when they died. They probably didn’t even know what happened. That’s a better way to go than most get.’

‘You don’t care, do you?’ Honour said, her voice suddenly returning to normal. ‘You still hated Rose!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Adele snapped. ‘Of course I care. I didn’t hate her. Maybe I wasn’t always capable of forgetting some of the nastier things she did to me. But I’d forgiven her. I liked her. I could even say I grew to love her. That’s what I bloody well wanted to talk to you about. Hasn’t it occurred to you that I might be feeling guilty? You haven’t got the monopoly on guilt, you know.’

She had stomped out of the cottage then, too angry to deal with anything more.

She did feel guilty, and very sorry that she hadn’t actually told Rose how glad she was that she’d come back into her life, and how much she had come to mean to her. She felt bitterly ashamed, too, that even as she was crying for Rose and Emily, she could barely contain her joy that Michael wasn’t her brother after all. What sort of a person was she that she could only think of herself at such a time?

For a couple of hours she walked and walked, crying most of the time. When she finally returned home, Honour was more like her old self. Sad, a little bewildered, but not mad or withdrawn.

Honour dressed herself this morning in the same black dress and cloche hat she’d worn for Frank’s funeral over twenty years earlier. Adele hadn’t known she still had them, for they’d been packed away in a box beneath her bed. Adele guessed, but didn’t dare ask for confirmation, that Honour had made the dress especially for Frank’s homecoming from France, for it had elaborate pin-tucks down the bodice and handmade lace collar and cuffs. It had been dyed black, but she guessed it was originally pale blue, and the miracle was that it still fitted her.

Myles had brought Adele down a dress and hat of Emily’s, for she had nothing suitable to wear. Ironically, she could remember admiring the dress when she once pressed it for Emily. It was the height of fashion at the time, linen with drawn thread-work details, mid-calf length, with padded shoulders, a boat neckline and a wide belt around the waist. The hat was small and veiled, and Emily had always worn it with an artificial rose pinned to one side.

‘Rose would have liked to have seen you wearing that,’ Honour said with a break in her voice as Adele came out of the bedroom wearing it. ‘She would’ve said you looked like a film star.’

Adele’s eyes prickled with tears, for she remembered only too well that Rose had always taken a great deal of interest in what film stars wore. Even moving to the marsh hadn’t entirely ended her love of glamour. It seemed appropriate then that she should be dressing the way her mother would have liked.

It was a beautiful, moving service, and the church was packed. To Adele’s surprise there were a great many more people there for Rose than there were for Emily. Honour had often said in her letters that Rose had become well liked, that when they went into Rye together they could hardly get up the High Street for people stopping to chat to her. Adele had always been cynical about it, imagining they were just gossips hoping to get some titbit of information, but like so many hard-held ideas she had about her mother, once again she was mistaken.

Several women had come up to Adele in the churchyard and spoken of Rose with affection, clearly genuinely upset that she was gone. Their little stories all had a similar tone, that she’d been a memorable woman, gay and lively, funny and warm. They said too how proud she’d been of Adele, and how excited she always was when she was coming home for a holiday.

Maybe if those friends and acquaintances had taken up Myles’s invitation to come back to Harrington House, Adele might have felt able to stay, but they’d obviously felt the class and social gulf when they saw Emily’s old friends and family flocking into the big house.

Adele certainly felt it. Emily’s closest friends would know that Rose had played an important role in her recent life, and might want to talk to Adele and her grandmother. But Ralph’s wife and his sister Diana had looked at her with contempt. To them she was just the girl from the marshes, an ex-servant who had got above herself.

Adele was weeping by the time she got down to the river. For Michael, who would soon get the letter telling him his mother was dead. For Myles, who’d finally found a friend in Emily, only to have her snatched away, and for Honour, who held herself responsible for everything and everyone.

But over and above the tears for those she cared about, she was crying for her mother. If only there had been more time!

Why didn’t she ever tell Rose that she’d become proud of her, that she looked forward to seeing her? That her letters made her laugh, that she felt warm inside knowing Granny was being taken care of, and that the past didn’t matter any more?

She felt ashamed of herself that she’d never prompted Rose to talk about her memories of Pamela, how she felt about Jim Talbot, or where she was during those missing years after she was sent to the asylum. Adele had always wanted to, not to lay blame or stand in judgement, but just so she could see the whole picture of her mother.

It would’ve helped Rose to know her daughter cared, and Adele had no doubt Rose would have told the more disturbing parts with her customary self-deprecating humour. That, Adele realized now, was one of the most attractive aspects of her mother’s character. She wasn’t afraid to admit her mistakes, and when she told a story she could paint the characters in such a vivid manner that they became as clear to the listener as they were to her. She had always claimed to be entirely self-centred, yet her understanding of her own and others’ failings suggested this wasn’t entirely true.

Maybe she was deeply flawed, no saint – that much was certain. But she had proved she was capable of honesty, kindness, loyalty and bravery. Adele just wished she’d been big enough herself to step back from her old grievances and see all the good in Rose. Before it was too late.

Letting herself into the cottage, she went into the bedroom. She had always thought of it as being her own room, but today she was very much aware that it had been Rose’s first, and last. She opened the wardrobe, and sniffed. It smelled of lavender, and she remembered that Granny had said Rose had always loved that smell right from a young girl when she would stuff little pillows with the dried heads of the flowers.

Adele ran her hands over the clothes. Most of them were pre-war ones, bright pinks, reds and emerald-green, confirmation that Rose had always liked to be noticed.

Granny had once said that she was exactly the same as a young woman, that she’d never liked conventions or rules. She had joked at the time that Adele’s father must have been quite a sober man, for Adele didn’t appear to have inherited Honour and Rose’s wild side.

‘I would have loved to have been a little wilder,’ she murmured wistfully to herself. It had never been possible, for poverty, the Depression and then the war had moulded her into a cautious, sober role. ‘When the war ends, then I’ll cut loose,’ she promised herself. She didn’t dare voice the hope that she and Michael might be reunited, for even though there was no real obstacle any more, she might have hurt him so badly that his love had died.

*

In the late afternoon of 8 May 1945, Adele stood at the window of Men’s Surgical, gazing thoughtfully out on to Whitechapel Road. Last night they had been told the news on the wireless that this would be a public holiday to mark the end of the war in Europe, yet the news had been met with surprisingly little excitement. Adele supposed this was because everyone had been virtually holding their breath since the news broke on the 2nd that Hitler had been found dead in his bunker.

But at midnight, every single ship in the docks and on the river let off their sirens, and church bells began to ring joyously. In the nurses’ home, all the girls had clambered out on to the roof, to see fireworks being let off all over London. It was so thrilling – from the same spot they’d seen the fires of the Blitz, the doodlebugs and V2s, but now the noise and light were all for peace.

Permission had not yet been given for blackout curtains to be removed, but many people weren’t prepared to wait for it. From the roof the girls could hear people shrieking with delight as they stripped their windows of the hated black fabric and light flooded into the streets again.

But Adele woke this morning to a thunderstorm, and as she and the other nurses took over from the night shift, the mood seemed very subdued. The heavy rain stopped, and there were longer queues than ever outside the bakers and fish shops, but people were wandering aimlessly, as if they were waiting for a signal to begin to celebrate.

It wasn’t until three o’clock, when Winston Churchill’s promised speech was broadcast from Downing Street to the nation on the wireless, officially announcing that the war in Europe was now over, that people suddenly began to look as if they truly believed it.

Now, at five, Whitechapel Road was filled with people waving flags, blowing on hooters, and many of them sporting paper hats in red, white and blue. Bunting had appeared as if by magic in the last couple of hours, festooned across every shop, from lamp-post to lamp-post. Adele expected that many women were at home busy preparing for street parties, perhaps finally deciding that this was the day to get out any currants, sugar and other foodstuffs they had managed to hoard away. She could see men hurrying along the road with crates of beer, and she guessed that by midnight most adults would be as drunk as lords.

She turned away from the window and smiled at the number of empty beds in the ward, for the promise that the war was soon to end had had a remarkably rejuvenating effect on patients. Those who hadn’t been thought to be fit to go home a few days ago had suddenly taken a turn for the better and been discharged. Others expected in for operations had cancelled, and even the men left were in a highly excitable state – she and Joan had both been asked for kisses, cigarettes and beer today. If Sister was to hear such requests she’d have a blue fit.

Yet even more pleasing than the joyful evening ahead was the knowledge that next week she was going home for two whole weeks. The past eight months since Rose’s death had seemed interminable. She was worried about her grandmother being alone, afraid she might retreat into herself again, or fall in the garden and lie there for hours before she was found. Was she eating properly? Was she warm enough at nights? What if she ran out of wood, or oil for her lamps? And Myles worried her too, for although she could telephone him, both at home and at his chambers, he wasn’t likely to admit to her that he was unhappy or troubled.

It had been a long, bitterly cold winter, and for some of the old people around here living in bomb-damaged houses, open to the elements, on a meagre diet, it had proved fatal. Coal was rationed and hard to come by – each day children were brought in with injuries sustained as they tried to collect wood to burn from bomb sites. The we-can-take-it spirit which had been so remarkable during the Blitz had disappeared. People were bone-weary of hardship, they looked gaunt and grey-faced, and as if the doodlebugs hadn’t been enough of a menace, then along came the V2s, which were even more deadly.

The destruction they caused was unbelievable. Huge craters appeared in the ground, and clouds of sooty black smoke, plaster and brick dust left rescuers choking. There had been one at Smithfield Market before Christmas, killing and maiming over a hundred people, then in January one struck a block of flats just across the road from the hospital in Valence Road, and demolished the one next to it. Adele had seen sights that day which for the first time in her nursing career had made her want to strip off her apron and cap and run. The dead and injured were mainly women and children, as the bomb had struck in the morning after most of the men had left for work.