Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  Fruit cake was Adele’s favourite, and at home it had been a rare treat. ‘Did you make it yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘No, my cook made it,’ her grandmother retorted. Even though Adele’s mind seemed very fuddled she recognized the sarcasm. ‘Now, behave yourself while I’m gone. Don’t go poking around.’

  Adele could only stare stupidly at the woman, not understanding what she meant.

  Honour rode her bicycle to the shop in Winchelsea, glad to be away from the cottage and the girl for a while. She seemed so dim, hardly able to answer the simplest question. Halfway up the hill into Winchelsea she had to get off and walk because it was so steep, and by the time she got to the top she was perspiring heavily because the sun was so hot.

  It was only then that it occurred to her the girl might be suffering from sunstroke. She remembered she’d had it once after a day on the beach at Camber Sands with Frank and Rose. In fact she’d been poorly for days.

  All at once she felt ashamed she hadn’t considered this before – after all, the girl had been out in the sun for two whole days. If that was the case, no wonder she couldn’t eat the soup for lunch!

  Honour considered asking the chemist for some advice on how to treat sunburn, but when she looked in the shop there were several women queuing, and she didn’t want them to hear what she had to say. So she bought a pint of milk, put it in the basket on the handlebars, and rode home quickly.

  She had left her front door propped open for the breeze, and the first thing that she saw as she stepped inside was the girl’s legs sticking out from behind the couch.

  Rushing in, Honour found her face down in a pool of vomit. She lifted her away from it, turned her on her side and quickly checked her airway wasn’t obstructed. The girl was unconscious, her pulse weak, and when Honour touched her forehead she found it red-hot.

  Glancing round, Honour saw the empty tea cup, the half-eaten slice of cake on the small table beside the chair, and guessed it was that which had made her sick and she’d tried to make her way to the privy.

  For the first time in many years Honour felt scared. The girl had said she was in pain first thing this morning, but she’d taken no notice. She hadn’t even put her to bed. Now it was obvious she was seriously ill. A doctor was needed, but how could she go to find one and leave the child alone?

  It was terribly hot in the living room, so she picked the child up in her arms and carried her into her own bedroom and laid her down there. ‘Adele!’ she called, tapping the child’s cheek sharply. ‘Can you hear me?’

  There was no response. Adele was as floppy as a rag doll, burning up, and Honour felt sick herself with terror that she was going to die. How would she explain that away? People already talked about her, she knew they were suspicious about Rose disappearing. What if they thought she had killed this child, or just left her to die?

  ‘Cool water!’ she said aloud, trying to calm herself. ‘You’ve got to cool her down and get some fluid into her.’

  When she stripped the child naked and laid her on some towels Honour saw the tell-tale purple bruising of fingermarks on her skinny thighs. She began to cry then, mortified that she’d been so obsessed with getting Adele to tell her about her mother that she had ignored that plaintive explanation of why she’d run away from the children’s home.

  ‘He did dirty things to me.’ She should have picked up on that. But it hadn’t registered because she was only thinking of herself and trying to safeguard her peaceful, reclusive life.

  Adele’s eyelids began to flicker as Honour sponged her down with the cold water, and she paused to hold her head up and make her sip some water. ‘You must drink,’ she pleaded. ‘Just a few sips for now.’

  Honour had always prided herself on being capable. She had nursed Rose through scarlet fever, Frank through his mental trauma and the pneumonia which ultimately killed him. She could mend a bird’s broken wing, wring a chicken’s neck and skin a rabbit. If a tile came off the roof she climbed up there and fixed it. But she felt weak and helpless as she sponged Adele, made her drink, then held the bowl as she vomited it back up.

  On and on it went. She would get her cool enough to shiver, then cover her again, but within minutes her temperature shot up again and she was back to where she started.

  It grew dark, and she lit a lamp. She listened and soothed Adele when she became delirious, calling out for her little sister and someone called Mrs Patterson. Hot one minute, cold the next, vomiting until there was nothing further to come up but bile. And all the time Honour kept seeing those purple fingermarks on her thighs, and felt rage that a man could do that to a child.

  Midnight came and went, and Honour had already changed the bed sheets twice because they were soaked with sweat. She wanted to open the window to let in fresh air, but the moment she did so moths flew in, and the sound of them fluttering against the lamp was too distracting. Eventually she lay down beside the child, but although she was exhausted she was afraid to close her eyes even for a minute. Each time she looked at the girl’s face, swollen and red with sunburn, she felt a sense of outrage that both Rose and that man Makepeace had treated her so badly.

  It was four in the morning when Adele called out for a drink. Honour woke with a start and felt ashamed she had fallen asleep for a little while.

  She was off the bed in a trice, rushing round to the other side to lift the girl’s head and offer water. This time Adele drank half the glass before sinking back on the pillow. Honour sat by the bed waiting with the bowl, expecting her to vomit again, but the minutes crept by and this time she didn’t. Honour felt her forehead. It was still extremely hot, and she laid a wet cloth on it to cool it. Yet instinct told her the danger period was past.

  Honour blew out the lamp as the first light of dawn was beginning to creep into the room. Then, going over to the back window, she opened it to let some fresh air in. The sky was a pinkish grey, suggesting it would rain later, and that pleased her, not just because her vegetables needed rain, but because it would cool the air and help the child to get better.

  ‘Her name is Adele,’ she murmured to herself reprovingly.

  She leaned her elbows on the window-sill, staring out across the marsh, and wondered why Rose gave her that name. Could the father have been French?

  ‘Does it matter?’ she asked herself. ‘After all, you’ll be packing her off once she’s better.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘You’ll strain your eyes trying to read that book in this light,’ Honour said sharply. It was early evening but raining hard outside, which made the room dark.

  Adele put Little Women down reluctantly, wishing she dared ask if she could light the oil lamp. But she knew her grandmother never lit it until dusk, and that was a couple of hours away.

  She had said earlier in the day that it would be two weeks tomorrow since Adele arrived here. It didn’t seem that long to Adele, but then she’d been too ill to notice the passing days.

  It had been very strange to wake and find herself in her grandmother’s bed, with her beside her, and then to discover three whole days had passed without her being aware of anything. Her last clear memory was being given a piece of cake and a cup of tea and her grandmother going out. The tea didn’t taste right, and the cake seemed all dry and nasty, then suddenly she felt really awful and she tried to get out to the privy. That was all; what happened from then on was just a blank.

  She realized that she must have been very ill because of the way her grandmother was with her. She had to lift her out on to a chamber pot, wash her and comb her hair, and she fed her with a spoon like a baby.

  Once Adele stopped wanting to sleep all the time, her grandmother propped her up on pillows and let her read. That was a real surprise because her mother had always been really nasty when she was too ill to go to school. She would snatch any book or toy away, claiming if she was well enough for that she could get up and do something useful. Her mother had never ever made special food that was easy to eat either. Grandmoth
er made her something called junket. It was a bit like slippery blancmange and nice once she got used to it. Then there were soft-boiled eggs, rice pudding and lots of chicken soup.

  But it was books she appreciated most. She forgot that she felt so bad while she read Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm and What Katy Did. She didn’t even think about her mother, Pamela dying or what happened at The Firs. She didn’t really want to get better, it was lovely just to immerse herself in someone else’s life and adventures. She didn’t want to think about what would happen to her when she was well again.

  Now she was on the mend and allowed up to sit in a chair, Adele had come to see how her grandmother lived. The chickens and rabbits she vaguely remembered out in the garden were her income. She sold the eggs from the chickens and she killed the rabbits for their meat and their skins. Along with this she made all kinds of preserves, and grew fruit and vegetables.

  She had to work very hard, never stopping from early morning until the light faded in the evening, and Adele felt she would be very glad when she could hand her over to someone else as she had more than enough to do without unwanted visitors.

  Adele hadn’t considered whether she would like to stay here for good or not. There was no point – she knew adults took no notice of what a child wanted. But she did think her grandmother was the most peculiar and baffling person she had ever met.

  As she’d looked after Adele when she was really ill, that was proof she did have a kind and gentle side. But she was brusque all the time now, and her posh way of speaking was at odds with her men’s clothes and the way she lived.

  She wasn’t very talkative, and when she did speak she fired questions. Mostly the answers to those seemed to make her cross. Adele wished she could think of something to say that would make her smile or even laugh.

  Then when her grandmother did something really kind and nice, she tried to pretend she’d done nothing.

  The second bedroom was one of those nice things. Adele hadn’t even known there was another room, not until her grandmother said she’d moved the mattress back in there, and Adele was to sleep in there in future.

  All the time she had been in her grandmother’s bed, Adele had kept the image in her mind of how the living room beyond the bedroom door had looked when she first arrived. She remembered so clearly how cluttered it was that it was a huge shock on the day her grandmother helped her into it for the first time to find it quite different.

  No boxes piled high, just an ordinary room. In fact ‘Ordinary’ wasn’t the right description as Adele had never before seen such extraordinary things as her grandmother owned, but at least they were arranged in an ordinary fashion. The bird in the glass case was sitting on the sideboard. The bear coat stand was by the front door, and the table and chairs in the middle of the space they’d all taken up, with a vase of wild flowers on the table. The walls were covered in vivid paintings, there were shelves of books and ornaments, and even a lovely rug on the floor, the kind rich people had in their homes.

  The mattress must have been hiding the door to the second bedroom. Adele fully expected it to be as bare and shabby as her room at The Firs had been, or why else would the door to it have been hidden? But to her absolute amazement, it was really pretty, with nice green and white wallpaper, curtains, a wooden bed with a carved headboard, even a dressing-table and a book-case full of books.

  It was all extremely baffling. Had her memory been playing tricks?

  She couldn’t ask. Her grandmother didn’t like being questioned, even though that was all she did. So she said nothing more than how nice the room was.

  It wasn’t until Adele heard the postman talking to her grandmother that the mystery was solved. He asked if she had got the wallpaper up all right and if she wanted any help moving anything. Suddenly Adele understood. That room hadn’t been used for years, perhaps since her own mother moved out of it. All the stuff in it had been moved into the living room for some reason. But her grandmother had done it up and moved everything back while Adele was ill.

  Why she had never said anything about it was another mystery, still unsolved.

  She was making a nightdress for Adele now. She’d dug out some flannelette and sewed it on her sewing machine. Even when she admitted what she was making she didn’t say it in a nice way, she just barked, ‘Well, you’ll trip up over that one of mine, it’s far too big.’

  Both the room and the nightdress might have given Adele the idea that her grandmother intended to let her stay, but Adele supposed she could hardly send her off to another children’s home without a nightdress of her own. She wished she dared ask when this was going to be. But like asking for the oil lamp to be lit early, she didn’t dare.

  Another very peculiar thing was the way her grandmother reacted to anything Adele said about Rose. She would suddenly get up and walk out into the garden before Adele had even finished. The only time she’d ever listened right through was when Adele told her the whole story about Pamela’s death and how much she missed her. Her grandmother gave one of her sniffs, and said that was how it should be.

  Adele fidgeted in her chair. It was boring just sitting doing nothing. She wished her grandmother had a wireless, then it wouldn’t seem so bad. For the last two days she had been allowed to sit out in the garden for a couple of hours in the afternoon. That was really nice, but seeing that old castle, the river and the hundreds of birds made her itch to go and explore. She was dying to see the sea too.

  ‘Shall I make us a cup of tea? Or is it time for me to go to bed?’ she blurted out. At least she could watch the sun go down from her bedroom window.

  Honour glanced over at the child, and thought how much better she looked now. She had looked fearful all the time she was really sick; the skin on her face had come off in great flakes, giving her a piebald look, her hair was like dirty straw, and those odd, greenish-brown eyes seemed far too large for such a thin face. But good food, rest, a couple of afternoons sitting outside in the sun and a good hair-washing had done wonders. There were golden lights in her hair now, a faint blush to her cheeks, and her eyes were rather beautiful on closer inspection. She realized that the child was bored, and that was a further indication she really was on the mend. ‘I’ll make us some cocoa soon,’ she said, removing a few pins from the sleeve of the nightdress.

  She had got Adele to talk about her life in London over the last few days, and the child’s descriptive ability was quite remarkable. With seemingly no effort she portrayed her home, family and neighbours so clearly that Honour felt as if she were there. Not that she wanted to see it that clearly. It stung to see Rose as a drunken harridan, married to a coarse, uneducated man and living in what sounded like a slum. Honour couldn’t understand why, when Adele was clearly very intelligent, she showed no real anger or bitterness that her mother had treated her with such contempt.

  But perhaps a child brought up without any love had no real conception of what that was?

  After piecing together all the scraps of information about Rose, Honour thought it most likely that Adele’s father was a married man and that she’d met him while working at The George in Rye.

  Rose had resented having to leave Tunbridge Wells and all the friends she had there. She was sulky and difficult for some time, but she appeared to adjust eventually. It wasn’t until four years later, when she was fifteen and got the job at the hotel, that she showed the first signs of being ashamed of where and how she had to live.

  The George Hotel was for wealthy people, and Rose was suddenly talking of nothing else but what the guests wore, what they ate and how they looked. When Frank was brought home from France, Rose often stayed the night at the hotel when they had a special dinner or party there. Honour didn’t question this or even ask if she was getting extra wages for working longer hours, because she was mostly too exhausted with nursing Frank to think about anything else. Yet she did remember wondering now and then if Rose was sweet on someone, for she seemed distracted, jumpy and overly concerned about her app
earance.

  Had that someone been a single and ordinary sort of man, she would surely have spoken about him, or even asked to bring him home.

  Honour doubted she would ever learn the truth about what happened to Rose after she ran away. Perhaps it was better not to know why she ended up in a slum with a man she had nothing in common with. But whatever the reasons, Honour couldn’t understand why they would prevent her loving her child. Women everywhere married men they didn’t love, for money, status and many other reasons, yet they loved their children fiercely. And Rose, by all accounts, did love Pamela, Jim’s child.

  Since listening to Adele forlornly relating the events which led up to her mother being taken away, Honour had found it no longer mattered what Rose had done to her and Frank. It paled into insignificance after what she had done to Adele. Not only failing to love, care and protect her daughter, she had heaped a huge burden of guilt for Pamela’s death on to her young shoulders.

  Honour knew she must try to lift that burden from Adele, but how? Honour wasn’t, and never had been, a talker; she could get everything straight in her head, knew what needed to be said, but somehow the words never came out right. Even when young she had often been accused of being brusque, unfeeling and even callous. She didn’t think she really was that way, it was just that she couldn’t show her true feelings. The older she got and the more time she spent alone, the worse she became. And she wished this wasn’t so.

  Frank was the only person who knew she hid her soft centre behind a shell to protect herself. But they had been so close they could almost read each other’s minds, and one word often sufficed where other people would have used dozens. If Frank was here now he’d know exactly how to help Adele. He had the patience to wait for the right moment, the insight into people’s minds, and a very special gift of being able to draw confidences from almost anyone.

  But Frank wasn’t here, and Honour knew that she had to deal with this herself. While it was very tempting to do what she always did with anything which troubled her or got in the way, namely, pack it away like that surplus bedding and china, she couldn’t do that this time.