Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  On a hot sunny day like today it wasn’t obvious, but back in the winter Adele had seen ragged, barefooted children begging along the High Street. Every week there were yet more men hanging around dolefully by the quay, hoping for a day or two’s work. Some families had sold every stick of their furniture, and old people died in the winter because they had no coal to burn.

  ‘Maybe I’ll have to go to London,’ Adele said gloomily. ‘I met Margaret Forster in town. She said she’d had a letter from Mavis Plant and she’s managed to find a job in an office there.’

  ‘You are too young to go to London,’ her grandmother said forcefully. ‘I don’t want you living in digs, at the mercy of unscrupulous people. And something will turn up here, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘The papers keep saying there’s work now for those who want it, but that’s rubbish,’ Adele said angrily. She was hot and tired and her feet hurt. It hadn’t helped that Margaret Forster had been crowing about her job in the Home and Colonial. She boasted about a new pink crêpe-de-chine dress, and she said she was going to the pictures that night with another girl from the shop. Adele had only been to the pictures twice in the last year.

  What made her really furious was that she was sure she was being turned down because she lived on the marsh. Interviews always went quite well until she was asked where she lived. She was intelligent, quite attractive, well-spoken and good-mannered. Why did they think she had a fatal flaw just because of where she lived?

  ‘We can manage perfectly well even if you don’t get a job for another year,’ her grandmother said calmly. ‘With all your help I’m producing twice as much as I did three years ago, and getting better prices.’

  ‘I can’t bear to see you work so hard,’ Adele blurted out. She had observed her grandmother even more closely since she left school, and noticed she hardly ever sat down during the day. Between the chickens and rabbits and making jam or wine, she never stopped. ‘I should be making things easier for you now, not making you have to work even harder.’

  ‘If I work harder now it’s because I choose to,’ Honour said crisply. ‘I like what I do, I’m not a martyr. Now, go and wash your face and hands, get yourself a drink and go and sit in the shade for half an hour. Tomorrow’s another day, and who knows what will appear?’

  ‘Nothing will appear,’ Adele muttered as she washed her hands in the scullery. The water suddenly trickled to a halt, and that was the last straw. They got drinking water from a pump in the garden, but rain water ran into a tank at the side of the cottage and that fed the tap in the scullery for washing. It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks and the tank was obviously empty.

  Everything in this cottage was such hard work. The stove had to be lit and fed with collected wood. A bath meant heating pails of water and filling up the tin bath, which then had to be emptied. The privy didn’t have a flush, every now and then they had to tip some lime down it, and it always smelled. There was no electricity, just candles and oil lamps. They didn’t even have a wireless.

  Since she left school Adele had become far more aware of the way some other people lived. It wasn’t that she was jealous exactly that so many of them had gas and electricity, wireless, gramophones, boilers to do the washing in and even electric irons, she just thought it was a little unfair that some had so much, and some so little. She had been top of the class at school, yet she couldn’t get a job, while Margaret Forster, who was the class dunce, landed one in the Home and Colonial. Most women of her grandmother’s age had time to sit in a chair with a book. Yet she had to eke out a meagre widow’s pension by skinning rabbits. And those rabbit skins were made into coats for women who did absolutely nothing all day.

  Snatching up a large enamel jug, Adele went out to the pump in the garden and pumped furiously until she’d filled it. Then she filled a bucket too. As she carried the water back inside, she wondered how on earth Granny would manage when she was a really old lady. When she wasn’t fit enough to pump water or collect wood.

  ‘I’ll take care of her,’ she said to herself. But that thought made her start to cry. How could she take care of someone else when she couldn’t even get a job?

  Honour came in and caught her crying. ‘What are you blubbing for?’ she said in her customary unsympathetic manner.

  ‘Because everything’s so bloody hard,’ Adele burst out.

  ‘Don’t you dare swear in my house,’ her grandmother retorted, ‘or I’ll scrub your mouth out with soap. And stop feeling sorry for yourself, there’s millions far worse off than you.’

  Adele ran into her room and slammed the door, flung herself down on her bed and cried even harder. She stayed there, even though she knew Honour was getting the tea ready, and when she wasn’t called for it, she cried harder still because it was obvious Granny didn’t care if she was upset or hungry.

  She knew she was being irrational and wallowing in self-pity, and it wasn’t the lack of modern conveniences here, or even the absence of a job which was causing it. She loved this place, and she didn’t really care if she had no money to go to the pictures. Even her anxiety that Granny worked too hard didn’t really wash, as she’d only stepped up her output of produce because she had Adele to help with it.

  Maybe she was grouchy because of Michael?

  She hadn’t really expected to see him again after that Easter holiday two years ago, but he did keep in touch by letter, and that July he’d come again to stay in Winchelsea with his grandfather.

  They had three glorious weeks during which they met every day. They swam, went on bike rides and took long walks. One day they’d taken the bus into Hastings and Adele got to eat fish and chips again for the first time since she left London. Michael won her a fluffy dog on the rifle range, they’d had candy floss, ice-creams, and winkles from a stall on the pier. That was the best day of her whole life, and she knew Michael thought so too.

  But he had to return to Hampshire, and she had to find a job, and even though Michael continued to write, he admitted he didn’t know how he could swing it to come to Winchelsea again as his grandfather wasn’t too keen on visitors.

  During the Christmas holidays he came back again briefly. He and Ralph, his elder brother, had been sent to check on their grandfather. Michael called at Curlew Cottage, bringing Adele a present of a blue scarf and matching gloves, and a box of expensive chocolates for Granny, but he couldn’t stop because his brother was waiting for him back at their grandfather’s.

  Then, the following February, Mr Whitehouse died. Apparently his housekeeper had come back from her afternoon off and found him dead in his armchair. He’d had a heart attack.

  Adele felt very guilty that she was almost pleased because it would mean Michael would come back. He did come for the funeral, but it was arranged from Hampshire, and his family all drove up together for the service and went back the same day.

  He wrote afterwards and explained why he couldn’t call in, but he said he thought he’d be coming back to help clear the house out later on in the year. He said then that he kept thinking about her, and wished they lived closer so he could see her more often.

  His letters kept coming all through Easter and on to Adele’s fifteenth birthday in July when he sent her a pretty topaz necklace. He said it made him think of the gold in her hair the previous summer, and for the first time ever Adele began to think of him as a sweetheart rather than just a friend.

  All through the summer holidays Adele was almost holding her breath, hoping against hope that he would come and they could relive the fun they’d had the previous year. He finally turned up in late August, with his parents, and while they were sorting out his grandfather’s house, he managed to get away now and then to see her.

  Something had changed slightly. Not just that he’d shot up in height and his voice was deeper, it was more than that. They were so pleased to see each other, they wanted to repeat all the things they’d done before, but there was a strange kind of shyness between them, which led to long silences and awkwar
dness. Adele caught him looking at her too intently, then when she asked why, he’d blush and insist it was nothing. She found herself very aware of his maleness when he sat close to her, noticing his long eyelashes and the curve of his lips, and when he stripped off to his bathing trunks to swim, his chest and upper arms had lost the boyish skinniness of the previous year; now he had muscle and a manly shape.

  They didn’t have the previous year’s endless time together either. Michael had to be back in Winchelsea at set times. Yet they had a picnic on the beach one hot day, went to Camber Castle, and on his last day they walked into Rye where he took her to the tea shop up by the church and they had hot buttered crumpets and cakes.

  Adele loved wandering around Rye almost as much as the marshes. It was all so old and pretty, with narrow alleyways, steep cobbled streets and many beautiful ancient houses. Michael liked the gun garden below the Ypres Tower which was built as a prison during the Napoleonic war. He took a photograph of Adele sitting on one of the cannons, and joked that she looked like a pin-up girl.

  It was when they were walking back home that he held her hand for the first time, and just the touch of his skin against hers made her feel giggly and unbelievably happy.

  As they got to where the road forked off to Curlew Cottage, he said he would have to leave her there. Then he kissed her.

  The kiss wasn’t like the ones at the pictures where the heroine melted into the hero’s arms as the film ended. He sort of lunged at her, his lips grazing hers only momentarily.

  ‘I wish things could be different,’ he said, looking embarrassed and anxious. ‘But maybe they can be next year when I go up to Oxford. You will wait that long for me, won’t you?’

  At that moment Adele thought he merely meant he hoped she wouldn’t find another boyfriend. She said that of course she’d wait for him.

  It was only after they’d parted that she suddenly realized that he was trying to say far more than that. But he couldn’t without hurting her feelings.

  Adele knew that while they were just friends the fact that she came from the marshes and wore shabby clothes hardly mattered. But in thinking of her as a sweetheart he could see trouble looming ahead, not only with his parents but just about everyone he knew. She guessed that he was hoping that by the time he got to Oxford, she might well have transformed herself into the sort of girl his family and friends would accept. Maybe he even hoped she might come to Oxford to work, so they wouldn’t have the geographical problems either.

  Adele took a long hard look at herself in the mirror that night, and she could see so well what Michael’s set wouldn’t approve of. Constant exposure to wind and sun had given her an almost gypsy-like complexion. Her hands were rough and she bit her nails, her hair was natural, streaked blonde by the sun, while town girls wore hats and went in for permanent waves. Even her greenish-brown eyes seemed to suggest she was a wild creature. Her stare was too bold and she rarely blushed or giggled like her friends from school did.

  She wondered if going to a hairdresser and buying new clothes could transform her into one of those elegant young women she saw in films. Somehow she doubted it. Even if by some miracle she could find the money, that wouldn’t change the way she walked, her eyes, or even the way she was inside. She’d grown like that by living in a wild place; she had muscle from hard work, from running through fields and chopping wood. Nothing could turn her into a delicate hothouse flower.

  Michael didn’t write again for some two months, and by that time she had decided he’d thought better of daydreaming about such an unsuitable girl. This seemed to be confirmed when he finally wrote again and said he was learning to drive and his father was going to buy him a car if he did well in his exams. The letter had a stilted tone to it, almost as if he were writing to an aunt, not a girl he had kissed and said he hoped would wait for him.

  No further letters came, only a Christmas card to both her and her grandmother, and so Adele was astounded when he turned up again in May, driving a blue sports car and wearing a very smart dark suit. He said he’d had to come to Rye to pick up some papers from his grandfather’s solicitors and he was driving back that night.

  Over a cup of tea, he talked of going up to Oxford in October, commiserated with Adele who was still without a permanent job, and asked Honour about her wine and preserves, but he seemed very formal and adult.

  Later he asked them both if they’d like a ride in his car to Hastings. Honour said she had too much to do, but urged Adele to go.

  It was only once they were in Hastings walking along the promenade that he seemed to revert to the old Michael, and suddenly blurted out that things were really bad at home.

  ‘It’s all over Harrington House,’ he said, referring to the house in Winchelsea. ‘Father wants to sell it, but it seems Grandfather made some sort of trust for Mother, and he can’t do anything with it without her permission. Mother won’t agree, and they fight all the time now. Every time I’m home from school I get dragged into it. It’s awful. I think I’m going to go away to Europe in the summer hols, I can’t face the thought of the whole summer being like being in the middle of a war.’

  They drove up to Fairlight Glen later and went for a walk, and he asked Adele if she thought he was doing the right thing.

  ‘Maybe you should give the car back to your father and get a job well away from them for the summer?’ she said a little sharply. ‘That way you’d be independent. As long as you take money from them they’ll expect you to be at their beck and call.’

  He laughed then and ruffled her hair. ‘Such a wise little girl,’ he said with more tenderness than mockery. ‘Not even sixteen yet telling me not to be a parasite.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she said heatedly. ‘I can hardly shout, I’m living off Granny! I just think that working would give you a much better excuse to distance yourself from them. Going travelling looks like running away.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it does,’ he said thoughtfully.

  He said nothing further about his problems and they slipped back to the old easy way they’d had when they first met. When he got her home he came in to say goodbye to Granny, and left later saying he would keep in touch.

  Adele reached out beside her bed for the letter he’d sent her a few days after that visit.

  ‘Dear Adele,’ she read.

  I just wanted to thank you for listening to my troubles. You are the best listener I know, but perhaps that’s because of the way you live with your grandmother, in touch with nature, at one with the seasons. I envy you that life, I’m surrounded by opinionated people with loud braying voices, who care for nothing but material things. I long for the stillness and serenity of the marshes. I will always treasure the good times we have shared and even if I don’t take your advice and still go travelling in Europe, a part of me will be there with you.

  You never did tell me your secrets, and I know you have them for how else would you have come to be so understanding of others? Maybe they are too painful to reveal? If that is the case you must feel that I am a little feeble with my constant moans about my home life.

  I hope you find work soon, I shall be thinking about you whatever I do this summer.

  My very best wishes.

  Michael

  Adele always found herself a little choked up when she read that letter, and today even more so because she felt lonely. She had done her best to try to lose her romantic thoughts about Michael. She knew quite well that they could never come to anything. But that still didn’t prevent her wishing.

  He hadn’t taken her advice, just as she’d known he wouldn’t. Three postcards with the briefest of messages had come from Paris, Rome and lastly from Nice. She doubted that after seeing those places he would ever want to come back to Romney Marshes.

  Harrington House looked forlorn. Adele rode up there on her bike every now and then to check if there were any new developments. It was an imposing red-brick double-fronted house over two hundred years old, but the windows were dusty
and the porch, which stood right on the pavement, was full of blown-in rubbish. It looked very much as if no one had been in the house since the last time Michael went there.

  ‘It’s no good thinking about him,’ she thought sadly. ‘If you can’t even find a job, what hope have you got of keeping him as a friend?’

  The following morning when Adele got up, she saw some blood on her nightdress. She knew immediately what it was, as Granny had explained about menstruation two years earlier. All her schoolfriends had started a couple of years ago, and she had begun to think there was something terribly wrong with her, so she was pleased to find she was normal after all.

  ‘Well, that explains your behaviour last night,’ Granny said dryly when Adele informed her. ‘I always got down in the dumps at that time when I was a girl, it’s a sign of the changing feelings that come with being a woman. You have had a bitter lesson in the past about what men can be like, so I’m sure I don’t have to warn you to be on your guard in future.’

  Adele blushed scarlet with embarrassment and rushed outside to let the rabbits out of their hutches.

  She knew of course that this was Granny’s blunt way of pointing out that she was now physically capable of having a baby, but she was shocked that she would use what happened at The Firs as a warning. In all this time she had never once referred to it, not even in the most oblique way.

  Adele had tried very hard to forget it ever happened, but the memories jumped out on her unexpectedly from time to time. Perhaps that was why her periods were so late. She was still nervous of men, especially when they looked too closely at her. Michael was the one exception, he never made her feel uncomfortable or threatened. She knew that if he was ever to kiss her again, she would welcome it. But she couldn’t imagine ever wanting things to go further than that. She’d be too afraid of evoking frightening memories of Mr Makepeace again.