Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  He kissed her then, their cold lips suddenly turning warm on contact with each other, and the heat building up the tighter he held her. Adele forgot that they were out on the marsh, forgot the cold, the wood in the cart and that her grandmother would be expecting her back. Nothing mattered at all but the glorious feeling welling up inside her.

  ‘Let’s go to the castle,’ he said, taking her hand and leading her back that way before she’d even answered. ‘We’ll be out of the wind in there.’

  There were sheep sheltering in the castle and Michael made Adele laugh by running at them to shoo them out. ‘That was mean,’ she said. ‘This is their house.’

  ‘It’s not, it’s ours,’ he said, taking her in his arms. ‘You brought me here the first day we met and I blabbed out all that stuff about my parents. Do you remember?’

  She nodded. She could still recall exactly how she felt that day, liking and trusting him, yet afraid to say too much about herself.

  She looked about her, feeling a surge of affection for this old castle where she’d spent so much time in the past. There was no whine of the wind inside its crumbling stone walls, and even if the sky above was as grey as the stones, there were leaf buds on the trees that had taken up residence within its shelter. It was a haven for many animals and birds, and now for her and Michael too.

  ‘You never did tell me your secrets,’ he said pointedly, taking her hand and leading her to a grassy bank to sit down. ‘Surely you can tell me them now that I’ve told you I love you?’

  Adele ignored the bit about the secrets, it was the loving part which bothered her. ‘You can’t mean it, Michael,’ she said, turning to him and taking his face between her two hands. ‘Have you thought what your parents would say about it?’

  ‘Yes, and I don’t care. I’ll be twenty-one this summer, I’ll be joining the RAF and I can do whatever I want with my life. I don’t owe them anything.’

  ‘You do, Michael,’ she insisted. ‘They are your parents, they kept you all through school and Oxford. If they cut you off you’d hate it.’

  ‘Would I?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Father doesn’t really care about me – he might throw money at me, but that’s just a way of controlling me. Mother loves me, but she never thinks about what I want or need, it’s all me, me, me with her. I’m supposed to support her, fight her corner and be shown off as her clever boy.’

  Adele felt he was being very realistic about both his parents as she couldn’t argue about anything he’d said. Yet how could a girl from the marshes move over into the kind of world he came from?

  He laid her back on the grass and kissed her with such passion that she forgot all her anxieties and found herself swept away to a magical place where nothing mattered but the moment.

  It was only when his hands slid under her old coat and touched her breasts that she came to her senses.

  A picture of Mr Makepeace shot into her mind. In the rapture of being kissed she’d forgotten that men would promise anything to get what they wanted.

  ‘I’ve got to get home,’ she said, pushing his hands away and sitting up. ‘The lunch will be ready. I’ve got to leave on the five o’clock bus, and I need to spend some time with Granny before I go.’

  He half sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked at her in puzzlement. ‘But I don’t know how long it will be before I can get down here again,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have to make time then,’ she said sharply, getting to her feet. ‘I can’t roll around on the grass whenever it suits you, I’ve got responsibilities.’

  ‘Why are you cross?’ he asked as he got up. ‘What did I do?’

  The confusion she remembered so well with Mr Makepeace came back. She had trusted him too, and then he had betrayed that trust. How could she tell if Michael was saying he loved her just to have his way with her, or if he really loved her and touching was just part of that?

  She knew perfectly well from her nurse friends that boyfriends did fondle breasts, squeeze and stroke bottoms, and often put their hands under skirts. The nurses often discussed how far they let men go before backing away. It seemed to be almost a game that was played, the girls gradually allowing more liberties with each date. Adele didn’t want to play games, she wanted to know exactly where she stood. Yet she couldn’t tell Michael any of that, she was much too embarrassed by the whole thing.

  He took her hand in his as they walked back to where she’d left the wood cart. He said nothing, and Adele glanced at him several times, wondering what he was thinking.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted out eventually, unable to bear the silence. ‘I was just a bit scared.’

  ‘Scared that I would rape you?’ he retorted, and when he turned towards her she saw his face was tense and angry. ‘I love you, Adele. I would never try to force you to do anything you didn’t want to do. I thought you would know that.’

  Adele felt both foolish and scared. She had believed that what Mr Makepeace did to her would never affect her again – after all, it was nearly seven years ago and he had rarely crossed her mind in the last four. She felt she ought to give Michael an explanation, she didn’t like to see him upset, yet a great part of her still felt indignant that he’d touched her breasts. She was struggling not to cry because she felt so confused.

  They reached the wood cart, and Michael moved to pull it, but to Adele the sight of him in his smart city clothes wheeling along a cart with old pram wheels was another reminder of how different their backgrounds were.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, grabbing the handle from him. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Can’t I even touch your cart now?’ he said sarcastically.

  She began to cry then, and half running, half walking, she pulled the cart behind her over the rough ground, shedding part of the load as she made her way back to Curlew Cottage.

  Michael bent and picked up some of the wood, baffled by why Adele was behaving so strangely. He had no intention of snatching the cart back from her, just the speed at which she was going suggested she might whack him with one of the sticks.

  But he followed her, intending to drop the wood he had picked up by the cottage and then be on his way. He was cold and hungry, his feet hurt, and he was very disappointed that after the delight of meeting up with Adele unexpectedly, it should end so badly.

  But as they drew closer to the cottage, Mrs Harris appeared in the doorway. Adele picked up even more speed, and because of the noise of the wind, Michael couldn’t hear what she was saying to her grandmother. She abandoned the cart outside the front door and darted indoors. Mrs Harris came walking purposefully towards him.

  ‘What have you done to make her cry?’ she asked, her expression stern and defensive.

  ‘I didn’t know she was,’ he said honestly, putting the wood down and brushing off his coat. ‘I was walking back from Rye Harbour and I ran into her. We went over to Camber Castle for a while, and suddenly she said she had to come home. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, you’d better ask her. Perhaps she’ll talk to you.’

  Honour gave him a sharp look. ‘She left here perfectly happy.’

  ‘Obviously telling her I loved her upset her then,’ he said curtly, and began to walk away.

  ‘Don’t walk away from me, Michael Bailey,’ she said in a voice like thunder. ‘Come back here.’

  Michael didn’t dare disobey her, and turned. ‘Look, Mrs Harris,’ he said, ‘I really don’t know what’s got into her. Tell her I’ll telephone her at the nurses’ home tonight. My car’s broken down so I can’t offer to drive her back to Hastings.’

  ‘You’ll be around tomorrow morning then?’ she asked.

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Come to see me then,’ she said. ‘I think it’s time we had a talk on our own.’

  Honour waved as the bus drove off. Adele had gone right to the back seat, and just the way she was slumped and her feeble wave told Honour that she would be crying all the way back to the nurses’ home.

  Honour stood there watching
the bus drive up to Winchelsea, its headlights illuminating the old Landgate. Sighing, she turned to go home. She had always hated January, the cold, the early darkness, and because it was the month Frank died. Today she felt even more forlorn than she usually did at this time of year. The postman had told her this morning that it had just been announced that all schoolchildren were going to be issued with gas masks, and she guessed Adele’s secret demons had come back to taunt her.

  But while it was terrible that the Government were seriously concerned that the Germans might attack British civilians with gas, her primary fear was for Adele. She hadn’t of course admitted what had happened today between her and Michael, but Honour could make an educated guess.

  Michael arrived at the cottage soon after nine the following morning. Honour asked him in and offered him a cup of tea. He looked apprehensive and she had no doubt he thought she was about to lay into him.

  ‘Did you speak to Adele on the telephone last night?’ she asked.

  ‘No, they said they got no reply from her room,’ he said.

  Honour thought about that for a moment. She knew Adele must have been there, but wouldn’t speak to him. ‘That’s a shame,’ she said eventually. ‘I had hoped you would have straightened out whatever was wrong.’

  ‘I tried,’ he said, and there was a note of anger in his voice. ‘But I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done to upset her.’

  ‘You said yesterday that you told her you loved her. Do you really mean that?’ Honour asked.

  ‘Of course, I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it,’ he said with some indignation. ‘But I don’t think she feels the same way.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  He looked down at his hands in his lap. ‘I can’t put it into words.’

  ‘Perhaps Adele can’t put her feelings into words either,’ Honour said, ‘I know I can’t. It’s easy to talk about how you feel about flowers, animals and things like that. But it’s much harder to discuss thoughts and emotions.’

  He said nothing and continued to look at his hands.

  ‘You’ve got to remember that when Adele went to work for your mother that put her on an entirely different level to you,’ Honour said, trying to be gentle and win his trust. ‘She was a servant, you were to all intents and purposes her master. She knows your parents will never accept her as your equal.’

  He looked up and there was hurt in his dark blue eyes. ‘I told her I don’t care about what they think. Adele is my equal in my eyes. Look at you, Mrs Harris. You may live here on the marsh, but you are more than my mother’s equal, and you know it.’

  ‘Yes, I am, but then I was a gently brought up schoolmaster’s daughter, and I married into a good family too. Such a background gives a girl confidence in her own worth, which doesn’t get broken even when personal circumstances change.

  ‘Adele doesn’t have that confidence. She was brought up amongst the working classes, and has experienced things which only serve to endorse her belief she is not worthy.’

  He looked startled. ‘Are you trying to tell me something about her past?’

  ‘It isn’t my place to tell you that,’ Honour said, suddenly aware that Adele would never forgive her if she divulged details without her permission. ‘But if you do love Adele, you will have to win her complete trust so she feels she can tell you herself.’

  Michael’s expression changed to one of suspicion. ‘There’s something about her mother, isn’t there?’ he said. ‘When I first met her she told me she came here to live because her mother was ill. But she’s never mentioned her since. Where is her mother? Why doesn’t Adele see her?’

  ‘We don’t know where her mother is,’ Honour said. ‘For my part I don’t care, she ran away from here when her father was desperately ill, without a thought for either of us. I didn’t even know I had a grandchild until Adele turned up at my door nearly seven years ago.’

  Michael’s eyes widened and his jaw dropped.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you anything more,’ Honour said firmly. ‘You have to get the whole story from Adele. All I ask is that you treat her gently, she has been hurt and bullied enough in the past.’

  She made another pot of tea, and as she busied herself she kept an eye on Michael. He was deep in thought, probably even more puzzled now than when he first came in.

  Last night she would have raged at him, warned him that if he ever laid a hand on Adele again, he’d have her to reckon with. But in the early hours it had come to her that that wasn’t a wise course. She didn’t want to frighten him away, and in any case a gut feeling told her that her granddaughter had probably overreacted to what was nothing more than an attempted fumble. He was a sensitive, highly intelligent young man, and if anyone could reach and heal that damaged part of Adele, it would be him.

  ‘Now, what’s all this I hear about you intending to join the RAF?’ she asked brightly as she put the fresh tea on the table.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Don’t do that, it’s horrible,’ Adele exclaimed, grabbing Michael’s hand in which he held a blade of grass. They were lying in the spring sunshine, up on Beachy Head near Eastbourne. When she had dropped off to sleep for a moment Michael had run the blade of grass around her nostril.

  ‘Well, wake up then,’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘I want to talk.’

  It was now Easter, some three months since their tiff at New Year. Michael had made a special overnight trip down to see Adele again a few days later to make things up with her. She was very tearful and apologetic, saying she didn’t know why she’d been so funny with him that day. Michael took her out to dinner and once she seemed relaxed again, he persuaded her to tell him about her mother and her childhood in London.

  It was shocking to hear what she’d been through, and it saddened him to realize she couldn’t trust him completely if she’d held so much important detail of her life back from him. But as she spilled out all the hurt and sadness of the past, he could almost see her relief at finally sharing it, and it made sense of many of the things he’d been puzzled about in the past.

  Michael had been very reluctant to leave Adele that night as she was in an emotional state, and he couldn’t even say for sure when he’d see her next. He wrote to her when he got back to the camp, telling her how much he loved her, and how happy he was that there were no further secrets between them. When he telephoned her a couple of days later, she was more like her old bright and bouncy self, telling him not to worry about her because she really was fine, just sorry she’d been so moody and odd at New Year. They hadn’t been able to see each other again till now, but when they’d talked on the telephone it was as if nothing had ever happened.

  ‘So what do you want to talk about?’ she asked, turning from her back on to her stomach and leaning up on her elbows. ‘Oh, I know, about how handsome you’ll look in your uniform.’

  Michael laughed. ‘No, I already know that, and that I’ll be the best pilot the world has ever seen.’

  ‘That doesn’t leave much to talk about then,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to hear about bedbaths, temperature charts or the patients in my ward.’

  Michael was staying with his mother for the entire Easter holiday, supposedly swotting up for his Finals when he returned to Oxford in a few days’ time. Adele had managed to get three days off to spend with him, but tomorrow she would be starting in the Gynaecology ward.

  They had been lucky with the weather, it was unusually warm and sunny for April, and Michael, who had just been accepted into the RAF, was very excited and could talk of little else.

  ‘I thought you might tell me more about The Firs,’ he said, bending down to kiss her forehead. ‘It seems to me that something pretty drastic must have happened there to make you walk all the way to Rye.’

  Michael found that one of the most frustrating things about conducting much of their love affair on the telephone, or by letters, was the inability to discuss anything serious. They told each other about day-to-day
things, work, friends, bits of gossip, but scarcely anything else. Michael was still eager to know more details about Adele’s childhood, and as he mulled over parts of what she’d previously told him, he realized she had said virtually nothing about the place she called The Firs, that she ran away from. Obviously it must have been a ghastly place or she wouldn’t have felt the need to run to a complete stranger. Michael thought that most people would elaborate on what was so bad about it, if only to justify themselves. Unless, of course, whatever had happened there was so bad they felt unable to talk about it.

  The cryptic comments Mrs Harris had made about Adele’s past that time when she ordered him to come and see her kept coming back to him. He had fully expected a roasting that day, to be told he would not be allowed to go out alone with Adele in future. Surely that was what most girls’ parents or guardians would do if they suspected a young man of ‘trying it on’?

  Yet Mrs Harris was calm, and didn’t accuse him of anything. It was almost as if she was fishing to discover what Adele had told him about her past.

  When Adele eventually admitted that her mother had been put in an asylum, Michael thought that was her guilty secret. It was only much later that doubts set in. Why should she be afraid to reveal that? He had an equally crazy mother, so he wasn’t likely to be horrified. There had to be something more, and he became determined to find out what it was.

  Michael wasn’t very keen to spend the whole of the Easter holidays with his mother – it was always an ordeal staying with her for longer than a couple of days. But he could hardly arrange to stay for just the three days Adele was free, and disappear each day. So he had to grit his teeth, take his mother shopping and to visit old friends in the hope that when he did start going out alone she wouldn’t kick up a fuss. Fortunately she didn’t seem suspicious about his need to go to Brighton to buy a special book, going out to lunch with a friend from Oxford in the vicinity, or his excuse for today which was just a long walk on the Downs. Maybe she was as bored with his company as he was with hers. He just hoped no one would report back that he’d been seen with Adele, for that was guaranteed to bring on one of her turns.