Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘Do you really think you are in any position to criticize your father’s actions, in the light of what you did to Adele?’ Honour asked. ‘She was twelve when her sister was killed, and you blamed her for it. Later you tried to kill her. When she turned up at my door she was so sick I thought she was going to die. I thought she’d be scarred for life after what she’d been through. You did that to her and you’d known nothing but love from the moment you were born.’

  Honour paused just long enough to catch her breath. ‘I know what your game is, Rose. You’re trying to suggest that your wilful neglect of Adele is somehow my fault, and that I owe you something now. Well, it won’t wash. You were the selfish little baggage that robbed your parents and ran away with a fancy man. I had to listen to your father crying for you when he was dying, and I can never forgive you for that.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘January 1921,’ Honour spat at her. ‘He began to get his wits back after you’d gone, sometimes I wished he hadn’t because then he wouldn’t have known what you’d done. The war broke his spirit, but you broke his heart.’

  It was only then that Rose dropped her defiant and insolent stance. ‘When I left I meant to send you money,’ she said. ‘But nothing worked out like I planned. You don’t know what I went through.’

  ‘Oh yes I do,’ Honour said. ‘You ran off with a rich man and you thought he’d marry you. But he skedaddled once he knew there was a baby on the way. You married Jim Talbot so you wouldn’t end up in the workhouse. Then you spent the whole of Adele’s childhood making her pay for your mistakes.’

  She knew by Rose’s expression that she was right.

  ‘You can do whatever you like in this world,’ Honour said. ‘But there’s one drawback. You have to deal with the consequences. You can’t blame anyone else for those.’

  ‘Just tell me how Adele is and I’ll go,’ Rose said sullenly. ‘That’s all I want, nothing more. Did she do well at school?’

  ‘Yes, she did, she’s a bright girl, just as you were.’ Honour said sternly. ‘It was hard when she left school, there wasn’t much work, but she got a job as a housekeeper and now she’s a year into her nurse’s training. She loves it, she was born to be a nurse.’

  ‘And what does she look like now?’

  ‘She’s tall, about five feet six, her hair’s light brown, and she’s lovely,’ Honour said with some pride. ‘Not a beauty in the way you were, but people take to her, she’s a kind, hardworking, happy girl. And if you want to do something right for her at last, stay away.’

  To her surprise Rose didn’t come back with any cheek. ‘I’ll go now,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

  Honour nodded and opened the door. She didn’t trust herself to speak, not even to ask how Rose was intending to get back to London.

  Rose left without another word, clip-clopping over the pebbles in her high-heeled shoes. After Honour had closed the front door, she went to the back door. Through the bushes she could see her daughter walking down the lane. She stooped momentarily to light a cigarette, then continued. It was only once she knew Rose had got to the end of the lane and the main road that she felt she could breathe again.

  Her legs felt weak and shaky, she was sweating and her heart was thumping. As she closed the back door and locked it, she began to cry. She had never felt so terribly alone, or so frightened.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the end of the lane, a black Ford was parked up by the river. Johnny Galloway had his arm leaning on the open window. Rose walked over to the car and got into the passenger seat.

  ‘Did you see ’er?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘I saw my mother,’ she replied grimly. ‘But not Adele. She was working.’

  Johnny Galloway was a spiv from South London. He had the look of a ferret, small and wiry, with oiled black hair slicked back from his face and a penchant for loud checked suits. He had the tenacious manner of a ferret too, holding on to Rose for dear life and pandering to her every whim.

  They had met some three months ago in The Grapes, a Soho pub close to the restaurant where Rose worked as a waitress. She had known Johnny was a villain, but then most of the men who drank in The Grapes were. He was also illiterate, but he was smart enough to hide his criminal activities behind the front of a couple of legal businesses in Rotherhithe. That first night he plied her with drink until closing time, kept telling her how beautiful she was, and later paid for her taxi home without insisting he came too. In Rose’s book that made him a prime prospect.

  Rose had never had any qualms about going to bed with a man if that was what it took to open his wallet. But she had realized after only a couple of drinks that Johnny was different to most men. He was the type who was at his most generous and attentive during the chase, so Rose had given him a good one. She arranged to meet him, then stood him up. She would kiss him passionately, then tell him she couldn’t go any further until she was quite sure of him. Sometimes on dates she barely said a word to him, on others she sparkled like a diamond.

  She knew she intrigued him; other men had remarked that she was a fascinating combination of lady and whore with her posh voice, good manners and sensuality. But for Johnny she’d added another dimension to her character, that of a good woman who had been wronged.

  By letting it slip that her husband had her committed to an asylum to get his hands on her money, she evoked Johnny’s sympathy. When she laughingly spoke of her subsequent escape she portrayed herself as wily and brave. Johnny chose to think her heavy drinking was due to her grief at one daughter dying and the other being taken into her mother’s care, and that was fine by her.

  What she hadn’t expected, though, was that Johnny had a soft heart. He got the idea that if Rose could be reunited with Adele the sadness of her past would be wiped out. She raised all the objections she could think of, including that her mother would have told Adele a great many lies to make her hate Rose. But Johnny insisted that if she were just to turn up on the doorstep, without any prior warning, Adele would see for herself what her grandmother had been doing.

  Rose found herself in a tricky situation. She was scared stiff of seeing her mother, and she had no real desire to see Adele, apart from natural curiosity about how she’d turned out. But she knew that if she didn’t do what Johnny suggested, he would find it strange, perhaps even suspect she’d been lying to him. She didn’t want to lose him, he bought her nice presents and gave her a good time. So this morning when he’d suggested a drive down to Rye, she felt unable to back away.

  Once she got to the cottage she could of course have turned away and told Johnny there was no one in, but for some reason she didn’t understand, she felt compelled to go through with it. Whether that was out of curiosity or just faint hope her mother would be overjoyed to see her, she couldn’t say.

  ‘Was yer mum all right with you?’ Johnny asked, lighting two cigarettes and giving one to her.

  ‘No, she was a right cow,’ Rose retorted, inhaling deeply on the cigarette because she was still trembling from the ordeal. ‘She was always as mad as hell that my father left me his money and not her. I don’t think she really believed that Jim made off with it after he’d got me committed either. Now she wants to keep my Adele from me out of spite. She seems to forget I’ve had to live in a slum and work my fingers to the bone just to send money for them.’

  Johnny put his arm around her shoulder, his narrow face wreathed in sympathy. ‘Don’t get upset about it, luv,’ he said. ‘At least you tried. When yer daughter gets ’ome and ’ears you bin there, she’ll be pleased as punch.’

  ‘I don’t expect the old bag will even tell her,’ Rose said dourly. ‘I knew it was a stupid thing to do. I shouldn’t have listened to you.’

  ‘Don’t you go giving up just yet,’ he said. ‘You caught ’er on the ’op. My old lady used to chew me ear off every time I went ’ome, blamed me for every bloody thing that went wrong in ’er life, but she’d sleep on it, and the next day sh
e’d be as nice as ninepence. Now, if we was to stay down ’ere tonight you could go back in the morning when she’s ’ad time to think it over. I betcha she’ll be okay then.’

  Rose put her head on Johnny’s shoulder and forced herself to cry because she wanted his sympathy for the hostility she’d got from her mother. She had of course expected it, and if nothing else it bore out her long-held conviction that the woman was totally heartless.

  But she hadn’t expected to feel confused.

  Everything had been so cut and dried in her mind before going through that door. She wanted confirmation that her childhood home was a hovel; that the child she’d never loved was unlovable. That her life would have been very much worse if she’d never run away from home.

  But the cottage wasn’t a hovel. Primitive certainly, not one modern amenity, yet it was clean and bright with a rustic charm, flowers on the table, a smell of polish and soap in the air. It brought back so many memories she didn’t want. And her mother must have found something to love in Adele, because why else would she have been so fiercely protective of her?

  ‘There, there,’ Johnny said comfortingly. ‘Why don’t we go into ’Astings and find a guest house for the night? We could go on the pier and ’ave a good time. ’Astings is a good place, I used to go there when I was a nipper.’

  Rose didn’t want a night of forced gaiety with Johnny in Hastings, and she certainly didn’t want to have to share a bed with him. But if she insisted on going back to London tonight, he’d be disappointed and suspicious. It seemed better to pretend she was weighing up the possibility of going back to see her mother tomorrow, even though she had no intention of doing such a thing.

  She sniffed and dried her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t know if I’m brave enough to try again,’ she said. ‘But maybe I’ll feel differently in the morning.’

  Johnny’s face lit up. ‘That’s my girl! So it’s off to the bright lights of ’Astings then?’

  ‘Why not just go to Winchelsea?’ she said, pointing it out up on the hill. ‘I expect we could get a room at the pub there. We’ll have to say we’re Mr and Mrs Galloway though!’

  He beamed, his little shoe-button black eyes almost disappearing. ‘That’ll be a pleasure, sweetheart,’ he said.

  In less than half an hour, Rose and Johnny were sitting in the bar of The Bridge Inn, Johnny with a pint of beer and Rose with a large rum and black. She didn’t really know why she’d suggested staying here, perhaps it was a touch of nostalgia because she had often sat outside here with her father when she was small, him with a pint and her with a glass of lemonade. But the room was luxurious by her standards, all pink chintz with a big soft bed. All she needed now was to get some drink down her so she could show some enthusiasm for sharing it with Johnny, so she merely put on more makeup, brushed her hair and made for the bar.

  ‘Don’t you go letting it slip I’m local,’ she warned him in a whisper as they sat down with their drinks. ‘I don’t want it to get back to my Adele that I was staying here with a man.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, though he looked a little puzzled. ‘But what if someone recognizes you?’

  ‘That’s not likely,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t much more than a kid when I left here. But should anyone start talking to us, just go along with whatever I say.’

  But no one did speak to them, not even the fat girl who waddled over to collect their dirty glasses.

  ‘We should’ve gone to Hastings,’ Johnny said after his fourth pint. The pub was as quiet as a church, the old men sitting in companionable silence, the only sounds that of the snap of dominoes on a table, the odd cough or a subdued welcome to a newcomer. Even the few dogs lying at their masters’ feet were passive. ‘We could’ve got fish and chips and gone on the pier. I don’t reckon much on this place at all.’

  Rose didn’t reckon much on the pub either, even if it was quaint, yet as a child she had thought Winchelsea was wonderful. It consisted of little more than one street, a pub and a couple of shops, but the old houses and cottages were all so different, the gardens so pretty and the people could be relied on to speak to her.

  She could remember coming up here on a message, and being excited by the post office which was packed with goods from floor to ceiling. It was very dark, but sold everything from knitting wool, mops and buckets to sweets. She could be in there for over an hour contemplating the many glass sweet jars with their delectable contents, before she finally decided what to spend her penny on.

  She used to dream of it being her shop, weighing up the sweets on the big brass scale and putting them in the little paper cones.

  But then she’d always wished they lived here too. To be able to swing on a garden gate and chat to people who walked by. Her mother had a friend here whom they used to visit sometimes, and that house had always reminded her of her grandmother’s in Tunbridge Wells. Rose couldn’t remember much about it now, except there was a big piano and a lovely garden. She wondered if she’d be able to recognize it if she walked along the road.

  Both she and Johnny got a bit drunk, and before Rose knew it they were ringing the bell for closing time. As they went upstairs to their room Rose considered pretending to pass out so she didn’t have to have sex with Johnny.

  Fortunately Johnny became so excited the minute she got into bed beside him that he came before even getting inside her. He fell asleep immediately afterwards and Rose sighed with relief.

  She was tired and drunk, but even though the bed was very comfortable, she couldn’t drop off. It was too quiet, the only sound was the soft rustling of the curtains moving slightly in the breeze through the open window, reminding her sharply of summer nights as a child. She remembered how her father always crept into her bedroom before he and her mother turned in. He would tuck the covers round her more firmly, kiss her forehead, and close the window if it was windy or raining.

  Rose had guessed her father was dead when they brought the guardianship papers to her in the asylum, as only Honour’s name was on them. She hadn’t reacted at all then, for she could only think of him as he was when she last saw him, a pathetic wretch who could do nothing for himself. She was just glad he was out of his misery.

  But now, perhaps because of the memories this place evoked, and her mother’s angry words earlier, she suddenly felt a pang of remorse. She could picture him now as he was when she and her mother saw him off at the station when he went to France. He was leaning out of the train window, smiling and blowing them kisses. He had never been distant or stern like other girls’ fathers. He’d always been so warm, vibrant and loving. An intelligent, kindly man who saw life as something to be enjoyed to the full. ‘My two best girls,’ he used to say as he hugged them. It was sad that he’d spent the last couple of years of his life not knowing where she was.

  ‘Wotcha wanna do today?’ Johnny said over breakfast the following morning.

  The landlady had laid up a table in the bar, and the sunshine was streaming through the open windows. Johnny looked pleased with himself – if he’d had a tail he’d have been wagging it. There had of course been more sex that morning, and Rose was too sleepy to find an excuse. Yet to her surprise she had enjoyed it, he’d taken her mind right off the past, and the prospect of spending the whole weekend with him was looking far more attractive than she’d expected.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by going back to my mother’s,’ she said as she scraped up the last of the egg yolk with a piece of toast. ‘I’ll try writing to her instead. Let’s go to Hastings, it’s another lovely day and we should make the most of it.’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Johnny said with a broad grin. ‘I’ll show you what a crack shot I am on the rifle range.’

  ‘I think I’d like to take a little walk first,’ Rose said thoughtfully. ‘You know, just look at the place again, see what’s changed.’

  ‘You go on yer own then,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay here, pay the bill and sit in the sun till you come back. That is, unless you w
ant me along?’

  ‘No, I’d rather be alone,’ she said. One thing she had always liked about Johnny was that he always sensed when she wanted to be alone. He hadn’t insisted on coming into her mother’s like some men would do. Rose often thought that if all men understood that need in her, she might have kept relationships going longer.

  She was transported back in time as she walked along the main street. The roses around the cottage doors, cats basking in the sun on window-sills, the mellow red of old pantiles, and front doors propped open to let in fresh air – everything the same as it was all those years ago when she was a small child. Rye had always seemed such a wide-awake place, full of people, bustle and sounds. Winchelsea was its sleepy neighbour, and even now on a Saturday morning there were only a few people about: a couple of women with shopping baskets making for the shop, an old man with a walking stick taking the air. She could hear a wireless through one open window, and the sounds of children playing in a garden, but it was so quiet she could also hear the birds singing and the buzz of insects.

  She recognized the house she used to go to with her mother immediately, and the faded painted sign of Harrington House reminded her of other things. The lady there often gave her mother her own daughter’s outgrown clothes. Rose could remember a blue velvet dress that she had adored. But she rarely got a chance to wear it, not living down on the marsh.

  The only thing that was different about the little town was cars. She supposed there must have been some when she was a child, but she didn’t remember any. There were several now, including a sleek black one right outside Harrington House.

  She remembered then that the lady there had been called Mrs Whitehouse. She had always jokingly called her Mrs Red House, to her mother at least, because the bricks on the lady’s house were red.