Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  Adele tried to move but she was pressed up against the wall, and suddenly a violent blow from her mother’s knee caught her in the stomach. As Jim finally managed to restrain Rose, Adele fell to the floor doubled up with pain.

  ‘You messed up my life,’ she heard her mother screaming at her as if from a distance. ‘If it wasn’t for you I could have had a good life. Your father was a lying bastard, and I’ve had to live with your ugly face for twelve years, every day a reminder of him.’

  Jim was still trying to haul Rose away from Adele when the front door burst open and in came Stan Manning and Alf Patterson, his two neighbours.

  ‘She’s gone fucking mad,’ Jim shouted, trying to hold on to Rose who was bucking against him, spitting and yelling abuse. ‘She was going to kill the kid. Help me, then one of you get a doctor.’

  Chapter Three

  Alf Patterson stayed only long enough to help Jim and Stan restrain Rose. They forced her on to a chair, tied her wrists together behind her back with a scarf, and secured her to the chair with a leather strap. Then Alf ran up the street to the doctor’s.

  He was short and stocky, with a beer gut and thinning hair at thirty-three, but Alf was a happy man. He loved his job on the railway, he had a decent home and the best wife and kids any man could ask for.

  He and Annie had moved into number 47 as newly-weds, some eight years ago, and the Talbots took the top flat soon afterwards. The two couples had never been what Alf would call friends. The two men bought each other a drink if they saw one another in the pub, and Rose had the occasional cup of tea with Annie, but that was all – the only common ground between them was their kids. Alf’s eldest, Tommy, was just a year younger than Pamela, and Adele would take both children to school. She’d done this right from when they started at the infants’, when she was still at the juniors’ next door.

  Annie had always found Rose puzzling. She could be snooty or nasty one day, then as nice as pie the next, especially when she wanted something. If it hadn’t been for Adele, for whom she had a soft spot, she wouldn’t have bothered with her mother at all. But when Pamela was killed Annie’s best efforts to comfort and help were rebuffed. She worried about Rose’s drinking, she said she suspected Adele was being ill treated, and begged Alf to have a word with Jim. Alf thought his wife was over-reacting, and that it would all blow over. But in the light of what he’d just seen, Annie was right to be concerned. Rose Talbot was mad and dangerous.

  Reaching the corner of the street where Dr Biggs lived, Alf banged loudly on the door. It was opened a few seconds later by the doctor, ready for bed in his pyjamas and a red dressing-gown.

  He was a small, balding man, known as much for his jovial manner as his medical skills. ‘Sorry to disturb you, Doc,’ Alf panted out. ‘It’s Rose Talbot upstairs to me. She’s gone mad. She attacked Jim and then set about her kid with a knife. Me and Jim had to tie her up she was so crazy.’

  It took Dr Biggs a moment or two to place who Alf Patterson was talking about. Then he remembered the Talbots were the parents of the child who was run over a while back. ‘Hold on, I’ll be with you immediately,’ he said. ‘Just let me put some clothes on and get my bag.’

  ‘Any idea what set Mrs Talbot off?’ the doctor asked as they hurried back up the street just a few minutes later. He knew Alf and Annie Patterson well, as he had delivered all three of their children and before the younger two arrived, Annie used to clean his surgery for him.

  ‘Dunno,’ Alf said. ‘Of course, she’s been in a state since the little girl got run over. We’ve ’eard a lot of rows. But Jim ain’t said nothin’ else was up.’

  Dr Biggs barely knew the Talbots, but he had called on Rose just after the funeral to see how she was coping with the tragedy. Rose had kept him at the door and said she was fine. She didn’t look fine, she looked completely washed out with dark circles under her eyes. He said as much, and suggested she call in to see him at the surgery, but she never came. He could hardly make a nuisance of himself by calling again uninvited.

  Quite a crowd had gathered outside number 47, all of them looking up at the light in the top-floor window and listening to the shrieks coming from inside the room.

  ‘Go home, all of you,’ Dr Biggs said firmly. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘It’s what we ’eard which bothers us, Doc,’ one of the men retorted. ‘Sounds like she needs locking up.’

  Dr Biggs didn’t reply, but went on in, nodding briefly at Annie Patterson who was standing anxiously at the bottom of the stairs with another woman. The noise from the top flat was much louder inside the house, and along with the shouting was the sound of something being dragged or scraped over the floor.

  ‘You stay here with your wife,’ Biggs said to Alf. ‘I’ll call you if I need any further help.’

  The scene which met Dr Biggs’s eyes as he walked into the top flat was very alarming. Rose was bound by a leather strap to a chair, her eyes almost popping out of her head. She was rocking and scraping the chair on the floor, shrieking abuse at her husband as she struggled desperately to get free. Jim Talbot was trying vainly to pacify her, and he had blood pouring down his face.

  Another man the doctor didn’t know, but who presumably was another neighbour, was kneeling down beside the daughter, wiping blood from her face. The girl was wearing a nightdress, and at a glance the doctor could see it was wet with urine and splattered with blood. The whole living-room floor was littered with pots, pans and broken china.

  Dr Biggs knew immediately that this was not an ordinary domestic incident. Rose wasn’t going to calm down over a cup of tea and a chat. In fact he suspected both her husband and daughter would be at risk if she stayed here. The only course of action open to him was to sedate the woman immediately and get her admitted into a mental asylum before she could do any further damage to others, or herself.

  ‘Now, what’s all this about, Mrs Talbot?’ he asked soothingly as he approached her.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she screamed at him, baring her teeth like a savage dog and rocking the chair even more violently, despite her husband’s efforts to hold her still. ‘Get out of here, the lot of you!’

  A string of obscenities followed, her voice so shrill and deranged that the doctor winced.

  ‘Why’s she gone like this?’ Jim asked pitifully. ‘I never did anything to ’er.’

  ‘The death of your daughter appears to have brought on a nervous collapse,’ Dr Biggs said briskly, opening his bag and bringing out a phial of sedative and a hypodermic syringe. ‘Was she behaving oddly before tonight?’ he asked as he prepared it.

  Jim nodded. ‘She’s bin strange fer weeks now. Couldn’t say nothing right to ’er. She’s been drinking and carrying on.’

  If Jim had been intending to add anything further to this, Rose cut him short. ‘You fucking bastard, slimy no-good worm,’ she yelled at the top of her lungs. ‘I wouldn’t be like this if it wasn’t for you.’

  ‘Now, now, Mrs Talbot,’ Dr Biggs said calmly, the prepared syringe in his hand. ‘You are just overwrought, and I’m going to give you something to calm you down.’ He looked towards the neighbour who had got up from tending to the girl and was standing there looking horrified. ‘If you would help Jim to hold her steady.’

  Rose bucked and writhed in her chair with the strength of half a dozen men, but Jim and Stan managed to keep her still enough for the injection.

  ‘It will only be a few moments before it begins to take effect,’ the doctor said as he withdrew the needle from her arm. ‘I shall have to go out in a moment and make a quick phone call for a hospital place, but first I will see to the child.’

  ‘Bastard!’ Rose spat at him. ‘You’d better not be sending me to the madhouse! It’s her that made me like this!’

  Within less than a minute Rose stopped struggling, and her shrieks died down to mere croaks, and the doctor moved over to kneel by the girl to examine her. She was conscious, seemingly just too stunned to speak, and her face had been cut, presum
ably by the same knife used on her father. But it was not a deep cut, little more than a bad scratch. When he asked her if she had any other injuries, she put one hand on her belly.

  ‘Help me move her to the bedroom,’ he said to Jim, who was intently watching his wife as her head began to droop down on to her chest.

  ‘No point in doin’ that,’ he retorted. ‘She can’t stay ’ere if her mother’s going to a hospital.’

  ‘I need to examine her,’ Dr Biggs said curtly. He assumed Jim thought a child of her age couldn’t stay in the flat alone while he went to the hospital with his wife. ‘And there’ll be no need for you to accompany your wife. Provided your daughter’s injuries don’t require treatment, she can stay here with you.’

  ‘She ain’t my daughter,’ Jim said, his tone as cold as if he were talking about a stray dog. ‘And injured or not, I want ’er out of ’ere tonight.’

  Dr Biggs prided himself on being unshockable, but he was astounded by that remark. ‘We’ll talk about that later,’ he said curtly. ‘But meanwhile I have no intention of examining a child on a cold, hard floor. So I’d be grateful if you’d help me with her. Once I’ve done that I can phone for help for your wife.’

  Once he had the girl in her bedroom she told him her name and that her mother had gone for her with a knife and kicked her in the stomach. The doctor lifted her nightdress and saw a red mark which bore this out, and he also noticed several other old bruises on her body and legs which suggested she’d been beaten before. Although she was in shock, there were no bones broken and the facial scratch didn’t require stitching, so she didn’t need to go to hospital.

  ‘I’ve got to go and make a phone call about your mum,’ he explained as he helped her off with her wet nightdress and covered her up with a blanket. ‘But you just stay here and I’ll be back to see you in a little while.’

  Rose Talbot was so heavily sedated that she offered no resistance at all when the two ambulance men carried her down to their ambulance on a stretcher. Dr Biggs had only just got back to number 47 from making the telephone call when they arrived, so he’d had no time yet to dress Jim Talbot’s facial wound, or speak to either him or Adele again. Once the ambulance had driven away he went back into the house and saw Annie Patterson waiting in the hallway looking anxious.

  ‘Will she be all right?’ she asked. ‘Is there anything I can do to help Jim or Adele?’

  ‘Mrs Talbot will probably be in hospital for some little while,’ the doctor said cautiously. He knew Annie Patterson was a good woman, not given to idle gossip, but even so he couldn’t bring himself to tell her Rose Talbot was bound for the mental asylum. ‘However, there does seem to be a further problem upstairs, and it’s possible Adele won’t be able to stay there. Would you be prepared to put her up for the night if necessary?’

  ‘Of course,’ Annie said without any hesitation. ‘The poor love, a young girl like that shouldn’t have to see and hear such things. You bring her on down if you need to, it’ll only be on the couch, I’m afraid, and she’d better bring some blankets with her. But she’s more than welcome.’

  ‘You’re a good woman,’ Dr Biggs said with a smile. ‘She’ll be in need of a little mothering, I suspect she hasn’t had much of that lately.’

  Up in the top flat Jim was now alone, sitting at the kitchen table staring into space, seemingly oblivious to the pots and crockery on the floor. He didn’t even look up when Dr Biggs came in.

  ‘Right, let’s look at your injuries, Jim,’ the doctor said, keeping his tone jovial. He put some hot water from the kettle into a basin and taking some swabs from his bag, he cleaned up the man’s cheek. ‘Only a flesh wound, I’m glad to say, it doesn’t need stitches,’ he announced after a few minutes. He put a dressing on and used some sticking plaster to keep it in place, then sat down at the table and looked sternly at Jim.

  ‘Now, suppose you explain to me what’s been going on?’

  ‘Nothin’ much to tell,’ Jim said, his tone sullen. ‘Rose ain’t bin right since our Pammy was killed. It got worse every day, what wif the drinkin’ an’ all. You saw what she were like, gone right off ’er rocker.’

  ‘The death of a child is enough to send any mother off the rails,’ Dr Biggs said reproachfully. ‘You should’ve called me long before it got to this stage.’

  ‘I can’t afford doctors,’ Jim said. ‘I’ve ’ad to take a cut in wages. Besides, Rose wouldn’t ’ave let you near ’er.’

  ‘Why was she blaming Adele?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Well, she’s the one what done it. If she’d got a move on to pick our Pammy up, she wouldn’t ’ave been run over.’

  ‘You cannot blame a road accident on another child,’ Dr Biggs exclaimed in horror. ‘Adele will probably always feel it was her fault anyway, accidents do that to people, but the blame should not come from her mother and father.’

  ‘I told you, she ain’t my kid,’ Jim said petulantly. ‘Now mine’s dead thanks to her. And her mum’s gone barmy. You should’a heard what she were blaming me for! I can’t take any more of it. I done me best all these years fer Rose and the kid, and that’s all the thanks I get. So I don’t want nothin’ more to do with either of ’em. So you can get that kid out of ’ere right now.’

  Biggs was appalled by the man’s callous attitude towards Adele, but at the same time he guessed Rose must have been taunting Jim, perhaps ever since his own child was killed. The man was in shock, by tomorrow he might see things differently, and as Adele was in the next room, possibly listening to all this, the best solution was to take up Annie Patterson’s offer for tonight.

  ‘I will take Adele away for now,’ Dr Biggs said pointedly. ‘Not because of your feelings, Mr Talbot, but because she is suffering from shock and needs some tender care. I shall be back to talk to you tomorrow. I hope by then you will have calmed down and remembered that by marrying Rose, you have a legal and moral responsibility for her child.’

  ‘I’ve got to go to work tomorrow,’ Jim said.

  ‘Then I’ll come at seven in the evening,’ Dr Biggs said sharply. ‘I suggest before then, you spend some time thinking about the child’s needs, rather than your own.’

  Annie Patterson showed all the compassion for Adele that Jim Talbot lacked when the doctor took her downstairs. ‘You poor dear,’ she said, giving the girl a hug. ‘I’m sorry we haven’t got a proper spare bed, but a little thing like you should be all right on the couch.’

  The only clean nightdress Dr Biggs had been able to find had clearly belonged to the dead sister. It barely reached Adele’s knees and with a blanket around her shoulders and strapping on her face she looked pitiful.

  ‘This is very kind of you, Annie,’ he said, putting down a blanket and pillow. ‘It is only a temporary measure. I’ll talk to Mr Talbot tomorrow evening when he’s calmer.’

  Adele hadn’t said a word, not to ask about her mother, or herself. Biggs hoped this was because she hadn’t really taken in what had happened upstairs.

  But that hope was dashed as he was about to leave, when suddenly Adele became agitated. ‘I can’t stay with Dad, ever again,’ she blurted out. ‘He doesn’t like me. Neither does Mum.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ Annie Patterson said briskly. ‘Your mum’s ill and your dad doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.’

  Adele looked from the neighbour to the doctor helplessly. She couldn’t really believe that her mother had tried to kill her. Or that she’d really said all those terrible things.

  Yet young as she was, she knew she’d come face to face with her mother’s real feelings for her tonight. It was something like spilling a bottle of milk, you could mop it up, but you couldn’t put it back in the bottle.

  She knew now with complete certainty that the many slaps, nastiness and cruel words in the past were all symptoms of her mother’s simmering hatred for her. Tonight it had just boiled over.

  She didn’t see how she could have spoiled her mother’s life by just being born, but she doubted
there was anything she could do or say that would ever make her mother feel differently about her. Likewise, she sensed that neither the doctor nor Mrs Patterson was in the mood for any further discussion tonight. So there was nothing for it but to do what they wanted, to lie down on the couch and go to sleep. To do or say anything further would only set them against her too.

  ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance,’ she said weakly, looking from one adult to the other. ‘I’ll do whatever you say.’

  ‘There’s a good girl.’ Mrs Patterson smiled and smoothed her cheek affectionately. ‘Everything will look differently in the morning, you’ll see. And you can have a lie-in as it’s Saturday.’

  An hour later Adele was still awake, despite the cocoa Mrs Patterson had made her, and the hot water bottle on her sore stomach. There was moonlight coming in through the window by the sink and glinting down on to the backs of the chairs at the table. The couch she was lying on was more of a padded bench really, covered in brown, cracked imitation leather and very hard. It was behind the table and used as extra seating.

  The Pattersons’ flat was the biggest in the house but a bit dark. The kitchen and the front bedroom where Mr and Mrs Patterson and their one-year-old baby Lily slept had big double doors between them. Then there was a passageway from the kitchen down to the room four-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Tommy shared, and a further door to the back yard.

  What was going to become of her now? She’d heard what her father said to the doctor, and she was pretty certain he meant it. As far as she knew, orphanages were for young children and babies, she’d never heard of anyone of twelve being put in one. But she couldn’t get a job and keep herself until she was fourteen.

  She must have gone to sleep eventually for she woke with a start to hear Mrs Patterson putting the kettle on.

  ‘Sorry to wake you, lovey,’ she said cheerily. ‘Did you sleep all right?’ She came over to the couch and smoothed Adele’s hair back from her forehead.