Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  Adele had expected to feel embarrassed and even fearful when the moment came to take off their clothes. But somehow she went from fully dressed to naked between the sheets without even really being aware of anything but the heat of their kisses, and the thrill of his hands stroking her skin. It was wonderful to feel that naked chest she’d so often admired on the beach, pressed against her breasts. She gasped with wonder as his fingers delicately probed inside her.

  She could feel his nervousness, that he might frighten or hurt her, that he was doing it all wrong, and she found herself murmuring words of encouragement and moving against him deliberately to excite him still further. She knew the real test for herself was to touch his penis, for if anything was going to bring back the horrors of the past, it would be that. But it just happened in the same smooth way their clothes had come off, and the moan of pleasure from him dissolved the last of her anxiety.

  Some of the more worldly nurses at the hospital and even women patients discussed lovemaking occasionally, and their commonest complaint was about men who rushed to get inside them. But Michael didn’t even attempt it, seemingly more intent on pleasing her.

  They had turned off the light, but the fire was still on, turning the ceiling gold. Just enough light to see Michael’s tender expression, the redness of his lips, and the occasional glint of white teeth. But sight wasn’t necessary now, for his skin felt like satin beneath her fingertips and she could sense the places he wanted to be touched. She could hear and feel his breath on her face, hear the endearments and sense his love. She could smell his body, a warm, musky aroma of sweat, soap and the cigarettes he’d smoked earlier, and it was so lovely that she found herself licking and biting him, and tasting the saltiness of his skin.

  It was she who guided him to come inside her. She felt like she was on fire, and she had to have him. He fumbled a little as he drew the sheath on, and she averted her eyes momentarily for his penis suddenly looked so large and hard, and she braced herself for pain.

  But there was no real pain. There was a brief second when she felt kind of stretched too far, but it passed quickly, and the thrill of at last being possessed by him more than made up for it.

  ‘Is it good for you?’ he whispered, his mouth against her neck.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she murmured truthfully. ‘I love you, Michael.’

  ‘Oh my darling,’ he whispered as his breath came faster and faster. ‘It’s so good, so beautiful. I love you so much.’

  When he suddenly gasped out her name and stopped moving, Adele felt for a moment as though she had been left hanging on a precipice. But as she held his hot, quivering body in her arms, and realized he was crying against her shoulder, she understood what had happened.

  ‘Some of the chaps at the camp say flying is better than sex,’ he whispered. ‘But I’ve never had a flight as thrilling as that.’

  Adele laughed softly.

  ‘Was it good for you too?’ he asked anxiously, lifting his head to look at her.

  She could only nod, so full of emotion she could find no words, and pulled his face down to kiss him again.

  They got up later, washed and got dressed and went out to find something to eat and drink. It was now nine in the evening, too late to go to the pictures or see a show as they’d planned. Michael led her to a restaurant close by which one of his friends had told him about, and they ravenously ate a huge mixed grill, washed down with a bottle of red wine.

  ‘I wish we could get married right away,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’d give anything to be able to come home each night to you.’

  Adele put her hand over his on the table. ‘You know perfectly well that isn’t possible. I’d be out of a job as nurses can’t be married. And the RAF don’t like their young pilots married either.’

  ‘Yes, but that doesn’t stop me wishing it,’ he said wistfully. ‘I can’t even say when we’ll get another weekend together.’

  Adele knew from things Michael had told her that none of the young airmen at Biggin Hill took the thought of what war really meant seriously. Flying was their passion, and between training flights they played football, rugby and cricket, or piled into cars and went roaring off to the nearest pub where presumably they created mayhem. They played practical jokes on one another, had bizarre initiation rites for new recruits, and the reason marriage wasn’t encouraged was to foster close bonds between the men of the squadron.

  But even if life at Biggin Hill was mostly one long round of fun and jollity, where newspapers were rarely read and talking politics was taboo, she knew Michael was very aware of the reality of England’s precarious situation with Germany.

  Ordinary civilians could believe Neville Chamberlain had really secured ‘peace in our time’, but Michael had observed the Government’s recent massive rearmament, seen the recruitment campaigns, and the new Hurricanes and Spitfires arriving at Biggin Hill. He might rhapsodize that these machines flew in excess of 300 miles an hour, and pretend to go along with popular opinion that a pilot’s role in warfare was reconnaissance and dropping bombs, as it had been in the last war, but he knew better.

  They were being trained in dog-fights, they had to learn how to use guns, and they had to sit on a parachute, something which hadn’t been known in the previous war. Adele knew just as he did that airmen would be at the sharp end of any action, and that this war wouldn’t be fought in trenches, but in the air.

  All the young flyers were blasé about the danger they might be asked to face, but Adele sensed that their lovemaking had suddenly made Michael realize that it wasn’t the lack of parental approval that might separate them, but death.

  A chill ran down her spine. Recently at the hospital there had been a flurry of extra training in dealing with wounds and burns for all the student nurses. She knew medicines, bandages and other supplies and equipment were being stock-piled. But until now it had all seemed like fire drill, necessary in case of an emergency, but fairly unlikely. Suddenly she felt that everyone was foolish to be so unconcerned.

  ‘Then we’ll just have to make the most of any time we do get together then,’ she said, forcing herself to sound gay and untroubled. ‘We’ve got all night together and all day tomorrow. Let’s just think about that.’

  Rose came out of Temple Underground station and stood for a moment consulting a map. It was the first week in February and the snow that had fallen the previous day was still thick and white on the roofs of buildings and trees. On the streets and pavements it had turned to treacherous black ice, and it was bitterly cold.

  Rose had dressed for glamour, not warmth, and she was regretting it now, for her feet in their high heels had turned to blocks of ice, and she was in danger of slipping on the ice. Johnny had bought her the blue coat with a grey fox collar back in the autumn, and it had seemed very warm then. But in reality it was only suitable for mild weather as the wind blew right through it. If she hadn’t anchored the small pill-box hat on to her hair with a couple of hat pins, it would have blown off just in the draught of the Underground.

  She wished she had caught a taxi too, but she had less than ten shillings left for the rest of the week. Yet if everything went well today she might never have to catch a Tube again.

  Walking cautiously along, holding on to walls and railings, she finally came to the Inner Temple. It wasn’t a part of London she was familiar with, and it was something of a surprise to find it was like a rabbit warren of very old buildings, each one of them home to seemingly dozens of lawyers.

  She had seen the announcement of Adele and Michael Bailey’s engagement quite by accident. People left newspapers in the Soho restaurant where she worked all the time, and they put them in a heap in the storeroom for laying down on the kitchen floor after it had been washed.

  Rose had taken a bundle of the papers home last November to twist into firelighters, and as she was sitting at the table with them, she found herself reading snippets here and there. When she came upon the Births, Deaths and Marriages in a copy of The Time
s, it brought back a memory of her mother reading those announcements – she always said she liked to see if there was anyone in there she knew.

  Rose only scanned the names idly, but when she saw the name Bailey in the Engagements section, she looked at it more closely. To her shock and utter amazement it said Michael Bailey, son of Myles Bailey QC from Alton in Hampshire, was engaged to be married to Adele Talbot of Winchelsea, Sussex.

  For a moment she thought she was going to have a heart attack. She could hear her heart thumping like a steam-hammer, and sweat broke out on her forehead. She had to pour herself a glass of brandy to steady her.

  Rose had often thought about Myles Bailey after her trip with Johnny to Winchelsea in the summer, but once she got over the shock of him looming up in her life again quite by chance, mostly she thought about it all with wry humour. He hadn’t ever known exactly where she lived, she’d always been so vague about it. But when his wife went to live in the house in Winchelsea, he would have remembered that his young mistress had lived nearby. Maybe he was afraid she’d gone back there to live after he left her.

  It had amused her to imagine him being afraid of running into her when he visited his wife, and she even considered writing to him at Harrington House, some kind of cryptic message so he would know she was keeping tabs on him. But she hadn’t done anything – it was all too long ago to want to make mischief for him.

  But she couldn’t find anything even vaguely amusing about the announcement in black and white in front of her. She couldn’t possibly ignore that Myles’s son was intending to marry her daughter. She had to stop them.

  They were brother and sister!

  Rose penned several letters to her mother explaining everything and asking her to put a stop to the marriage, but she tore them all up because she kept remembering the contemptuous way Honour had looked at her on the last visit. She would never believe Rose could be motivated by morality; she would just see it as some kind of dastardly attempt to spoil Adele’s chance of a good marriage.

  Rose couldn’t eat or sleep as she frantically tried to work out the best way of dealing with the problem, but as always when she was troubled, she drank more, and found herself unable to think clearly. Weeks and weeks slipped by in which she did nothing but go to work, then drink herself into oblivion each night. Johnny kept pestering her to try to find out what was wrong, and when she wouldn’t tell him he stopped coming round. Without Johnny’s company and his handouts of money and gifts, she felt even worse, and drank more. She fell behind with the rent, she was in real danger of losing her job, and even worse, she could feel herself sliding into the same black world she’d got into after Pamela’s death.

  Then at Christmas it came to her that she should go to Myles. He could deal with it, and if it caused him the kind of nightmares she’d been having, then it served him right. She went to the library and looked through Who’s Who, and found both his home address and that of his chambers in London.

  It was only once she saw him listed in that big leather-bound book that she fully appreciated that he was now a very successful and important man. And when she weighed that against all the suffering he’d put her through, pound signs began to pop up in her head and the question of morality began to take a nose-dive.

  She became focused once she’d decided on her plan. She stopped drinking in early January and worked extra shifts at the restaurant so she could pay off her back rent, get her hair done and buy some new clothes.

  Finally, she made an appointment to see Myles for today. That had been the most difficult part. She gave her name as Mrs Fitzsimmons, and a false address in Kensington. She told his secretary it was an extremely delicate matter concerning her father’s estate, and Mr Bailey had been recommended to her by a friend.

  Rose found the right chambers, and saw Myles’s name in gold lettering amongst others up on a board inside the porch. She was ten minutes early, and although she’d planned to get there at the exact time of her appointment to cut down on the possibility of anyone having time to ask her awkward questions, she was too cold to stay outside any longer.

  The great age of the building was even more apparent as she walked up the bare stone staircase. The steps had become concave and smooth from millions of feet over the years, and it had a musty smell of old books and papers. At the top a half-glassed door opened into an area where there were chairs, a desk and thankfully a warm fire.

  A middle-aged woman wearing glasses smiled welcomingly at Rose from behind the desk.

  ‘Mrs Fitzsimmons,’ Rose said. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Bailey at four.’

  ‘Do take a seat,’ the woman said, getting up. ‘I’ll inform Mr Bailey you are here.’

  Rose sat down, resisting the desire to slip off her shoes and warm her feet at the fire. She felt queasy with nerves and she’d kill for a drink, but she took her powder compact out of her handbag, powdered her nose and applied a little more lipstick.

  She thought she looked good. The fox collar and the hat enhanced her peachy complexion, and the tiny veil stopping at her eyebrows drew attention to her eyes. She wondered if Myles would recognize her instantly.

  She had only just put her compact away when she was taken by surprise by the receptionist telling her Mr Bailey would see her now. She got up, smoothed down her coat, and followed the woman along a narrow corridor past many small rooms in which people were working as quietly as if in a library.

  Rose’s first reaction on seeing Myles was surprise to find he was neither as tall, handsome or striking as the image locked in her head. He was tubby, flabby and ruddy-faced, no more than five feet eight, and the thick mane of floppy, rich brown hair had gone. He wasn’t bald, but his hair had receded so far back that he was almost so, and what was left was dark grey. Yet she felt she would have known him if they’d passed in the street by his eyes. They hadn’t changed, and the memory of them had stayed with her, for Adele’s were an identical greenyish-brown. She had been forced to live with that constant reminder of the man who had ruined her.

  ‘Mrs Fitzsimmons!’ he said heartily, holding out his hand to her without actually looking directly at her. ‘Do come in. You have some problem with your late father’s estate I believe?’

  Rose had expected he would recognize her immediately. She had anticipated him staggering back in shocked surprise and gasping out her name. When he did neither of these things, proving he had no memory of the face of the young girl he’d claimed he loved, it made her even more determined to hurt him.

  She shook his hand and smiled, then waited until the receptionist had gone, closing the door behind her. It was a warm and comfortable room, with a roaring fire with a club fender around it, leather buttoned-back armchairs and a mahogany desk, and the walls were lined with thick books. On the wall there was a large photograph of three children, obviously his, as the older boy looked very much like the young Myles she remembered. The younger boy in the front of the picture had to be Michael – he was around six, with very dark hair and an impish grin with missing front teeth.

  Myles sat down when she did, and leaned back in his chair with a smile on his plump, overfed face, perhaps delighted that his new client was blonde and attractive. ‘Now, how can I help you?’ he asked in an oily tone.

  ‘You can try to remember me,’ Rose said.

  ‘We’ve met before?’ he asked with a frown.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Would the name Rose ring a bell? Or do I have to remind you of The George Hotel in Rye?’

  His smile vanished, his eyes opened wide and he sat up straight.

  ‘Rose!’ he exclaimed, and coloured up still further. ‘My goodness me! What a surprise! How are you?’

  ‘Well enough,’ she said archly. ‘A great deal better now than I was twenty years ago when I waited in vain for you.’

  ‘I-I-I,’ he stammered. ‘It was the only thing I could do. Things were so difficult for me. And I left a letter.’

  ‘You were a deceitful coward,’ she snapped at him. �
�Didn’t I deserve better than just a letter? If you’d told me about your wife and children when we first met I’d never have got involved with you.’

  ‘You know why that was,’ he said, looking very flustered and not a little afraid.

  ‘I was little more than a child,’ she spat out.

  ‘Now look here,’ he said, rising from his chair. ‘You begged me to take you to London with me, if you remember I was completely against the idea. I only agreed because you said your father was violent towards you, and you were supposed to find a job which you never even attempted.’

  ‘I haven’t come here today to rake over all that,’ Rose said dismissively. ‘The hard facts are that you abandoned me when I was carrying your child.’

  ‘That was nigh on twenty years ago,’ he said incredulously. ‘In the light of all the other lies you told me at that time, there was no reason why I should have believed that either. So what has brought you here today, Rose? If not to rake over the past?’

  ‘Sometimes the past can jump up and slap you in the face,’ she said. ‘That’s what has prompted this visit. Our daughter, Adele, is planning to marry your son Michael, so I believe.’

  If she had thrown a bucket of cold water over him she couldn’t have hoped to give him a bigger shock. His mouth fell open, he blanched, and his eyes grew wide as he clutched at his head.

  ‘Adele is your daughter?’ he said in a strangled voice.

  ‘Our daughter,’ Rose corrected him. ‘You know only too well that I was pregnant!’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ he gasped. ‘It’s too extraordinary.’

  ‘Why is it? You don’t believe that a girl who has a grandmother living at Winchelsea Beach could meet up with your son who also had grandparents living in Winchelsea? It would’ve been extraordinary if they hadn’t met when there are probably less than two hundred people living in that whole area.’

  Rose paused for a moment, guessing he was racking his brain for something to shoot her story down with.