She lit the cigarette with shaking hands and drew deeply on it. All her life it had been the same, as if her mind didn’t work in tandem with her vocal chords. So many different men had called her a bitch because she’d blurted out something deeply hurtful under stress. Even when she was really trying to be kind or sympathetic, somehow she always managed to sound unfeeling.
The time she was most ashamed of was that night back when she was seventeen and her mother gave her the new blue dress she’d made.
The terrible things she said that night weren’t really about the dress, which was a sensible, serviceable one. But she was desperately in love with Myles, her whole being was crying out for romance, beauty and magic. The plain blue dress represented everything she despised about herself: being a waitress, living on the marsh, excluded from the glittering world she caught glimpses of at the hotel.
What she said that night to her mother and about her father was very nasty, but it was born out of frustration that she couldn’t improve her lot in life, and envy of those who had so much more than she did.
Afterwards, running away seemed to be the only thing she could do. She took whatever she could find of value in desperation, for she certainly wasn’t sure Myles would take her away with him, however much he wanted her. She had to tell him a pack of lies too, to make him agree. And she had to keep on lying even once she’d got to London with him.
Rose slumped down on the back steps and cried. She’d made such a mess of her life. All the way through it there had been crossroads, and at every single one she’d come to, she always took the route that looked easiest, the downhill way.
Two weeks passed before Rose went to the London Hospital to see Honour, leaving Towzer at home as she couldn’t take him into the hospital. She had telephoned the hospital daily, and felt relieved to hear from the Ward Sister that Honour was improving with each day. It was Sister who advised Rose not to visit, as Honour would only fret about her dog if Rose was to leave him on his own.
Rose was only too happy to take the Sister’s advice. She didn’t like hospitals and the thought of coming face to face with Adele was terrifying. She knew she was hostile or she would have left a message with a number and a time when she could be reached. On top of this there were the air raids. The daytime ones had stopped, but as soon as night fell there was a constant barrage of bombing. The BBC and the newspapers didn’t report on the extent of the damage and never mentioned the number of casualties, but everyone knew that the East End was devastated.
There had been enough bombs and incendiaries around Hammersmith for Rose to get the idea of what hell it must be in the East End. Each morning she saw new bomb damage close to her house, and as she queued to buy food she heard people talking about the worst-hit areas. It seemed that those who worked in the West End or the City often arrived at their office or shop to find the windows blown out or the roof caved in. They spoke of seeing huge holes in the street, piles of rubble, multicoloured telephone wires waving in the breeze, water and gas pipes fractured.
Rose was astounded that many people spent a sleepless night in a shelter, and then walked miles to work. And that many café and shop owners still opened for business, even when their windows had been blown out. She thought they were mad – neither the King nor the Government was going to reward anyone for being so dutiful. She just went home after tracking down some cigarettes and food. No one was going to press gang her into working on a tea stall or handing out clothes to those who’d been bombed out.
By the time two weeks had passed, Rose was sick and tired of staying home alone every night with Towzer. Her lodgers all went down to the public shelters and they seemed to have a real laugh there. So when she rang the hospital and the Sister said Honour was well enough to be moved out of London, Rose’s spirits lifted. She thought she might go up West once Towzer was gone, have a few drinks, and see if she could hook herself a new man. She was fed up with living like a nun, and by all accounts the West End was full of servicemen looking for a little fun.
As the Tube train sped along, Rose glanced disconsolately at her reflection in the train windows. Lack of sleep, anxiety and not eating properly had taken its toll, and though she’d taken great trouble with her appearance this morning, she looked her age. Yet looking around at her fellow passengers she was heartened to see they all looked far worse, grubby and shabby with gaunt faces.
‘Good morning, Mrs Talbot,’ Sister Jones said crisply as she came into the small waiting room Rose had been left in for over an hour.
Rose was in a state of shock at the scenes she’d witnessed since arriving at the hospital. Hundreds of people with every kind of gruesome injury took up every seat or floor area. One man still had shards of glass sticking out through his jacket, blood dripping on to the floor as he moved. A woman had been brought in on a stretcher, her features hidden by thick flourlike dust, and her leg partially severed. The sights were more than enough to turn Rose’s stomach, but the noise was even worse – crying, screaming, shouting and wailing. She might have turned tail and run if a nurse hadn’t ushered her into the relative quiet of this small room, but even that she was sharing with six other people in varying stages of distress.
‘Mrs Harris has recovered enough to be moved now, and of course we desperately need her bed,’ Sister said hurriedly without any preamble. ‘She wants to go home, but she’ll need someone to nurse her.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Rose said indignantly. ‘I’ve got a boarding house to run.’
‘Nurse Talbot expected that would be your response,’ Sister retorted crisply. ‘She is of course more than willing to nurse her grandmother, but I need her here, we are desperately short of nurses.’
‘Where is she?’ Rose asked. She didn’t like the woman’s snooty tone one bit.
‘With a patient at present, but she knows you are here and will come to see you presently.’
‘I can’t wait here all day,’ Rose said belligerently. She knew she was being unpleasant, but she couldn’t help herself. Part of it was because she was scared stiff at the prospect of coming face to face with Adele.
The Sister gave her a searing look. ‘Some of the injured out there have already waited eight hours or more,’ she said with a wave of her hand towards the large waiting room beyond the small room. ‘They are in pain, desperate for news of their relatives, and most have lost their homes too. I suggest you start counting your blessings.’
She turned and swept out of the room without another word, leaving Rose feeling as if she’d had her face slapped.
It was well over an hour before another nurse came into the room. She was tall, slender and very attractive, even if her apron was splattered with blood. Rose jumped out of her seat. ‘I’ve been waiting to see Nurse Talbot for ever,’ she blurted out. ‘Can you do something to hurry her up?’
‘I am Nurse Talbot,’ the young woman replied coldly. ‘Hello, Mother! It’s been a long time but I had expected that you’d recognize your own daughter.’
Rose was thrown into confusion and embarrassment as everyone in the waiting room was looking at her. She really couldn’t believe that this very lovely young nurse with shiny hair the colour of autumn leaves and perfect teeth was Adele. She had built up a picture in her mind of a very plain, skinny young woman with a pasty face and dull brown hair. ‘I-I-I,’ she stuttered.
‘You didn’t anticipate I might have changed a little in nine years?’ Adele said.
Rose sat down with a bump. ‘You are so pretty,’ she said weakly. ‘I didn’t expect that.’
‘We haven’t got time now for discussions on how we look,’ Adele said with just a touch of acid. ‘We have to make a decision about Granny. She wants to go home, and it’s my opinion she’d recover quicker there, but I can only have a couple of days off to settle her. Will you stay with her?’
Rose was thrown. The Adele she remembered would never have dared to be so direct.
‘I can’t, I’ve got my lodgers,’ she said quickly.
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br /> ‘Surely you could leave them to fend for themselves?’
‘But there’s the rent to collect, the stairs and bathroom to clean.’
‘There’s a war on, Mother,’ Adele said sharply. ‘People are dying in air raids. Does a bit of dirt on the stairs matter? You can get someone else to collect the rent. Besides, you’d be safer in Sussex too.’
Rose thought quickly. Much as she hated the idea of taking care of her mother, she knew if she refused she would be cut off for ever. Then there was Curlew Cottage itself. It would be very nice to sleep in peace, to have a bit of a holiday.
‘How much nursing is Mother going to need?’ she asked cautiously.
‘Not a huge amount. She can walk a few steps with crutches. She’ll need help with dressing, washing and things. Then there’s cooking and cleaning.’
‘I suppose I could give it a try,’ Rose said weakly.
Adele fixed her with a fierce look and Rose was reminded of the many times she’d claimed her daughter’s greenish-brown eyes were strange. There was nothing strange about them now, they were in fact very beautiful and framed by thick dark lashes. ‘You could try and be a bit more enthusiastic when you see Granny,’ she reproached her mother. ‘You were the one who brought her to London, and now it’s your chance to prove to her that you really meant what you said in that letter.’
Her tone was gentle, and there was a sweetness in her words that touched Rose. ‘Of course I meant it,’ she retorted. ‘I’m just a bit harassed right now, what with the bombing every night and everything being so upside down.’
‘Well, we’ll go and see her now then,’ Adele said. ‘I’m sure she’ll be very relieved and happy that you want to take care of her.’
The following afternoon as Rose packed a suitcase to take with her to Rye, she was a bag of nerves. A bomb had dropped just a street away during the night, and that and all the terrifying scenes she’d seen the previous day, not just in the hospital, but in the bombed houses all around it, had convinced her it was right to go. Mrs Arbroath, her next-door neighbour, had agreed to take care of the house, let rooms if necessary and collect the rents for her for a small consideration. She knew the woman could be trusted implicitly as she was very religious, so she wasn’t frightened about what she might find on her return.
But she was frightened of Adele.
There was no trace left of the little girl who had accepted indifference and sometimes cruelty. The adult Adele was calm and very pleasant, she had said nothing to suggest she was harbouring a grudge, yet Rose had a sense of foreboding.
There was no reason for it. Everything Adele had said was rational, even kindly, and she was very practical. It transpired she had sent a telegram to the postman in Rye as soon as Honour was injured, and asked him to feed the rabbits and chickens. She had now sent another one to inform him they would be arriving sometime after midday tomorrow. She had organized someone to collect Rose and Towzer at nine in the morning, then to pick up herself and Honour and drive on down to Rye. In fact the way she spoke of the three of them being together almost sounded as if she relished them becoming a real family.
Maybe it was only a guilty conscience that made Rose feel so uneasy, for she couldn’t quite rid herself of the idea that Adele was intending to extract her pound of flesh at some time.
Honour wasn’t going to be a pushover either. Her broken leg might be in plaster, some of her wounds a long way from being healed, but there was no brain damage and she was as sharp as ever. She’d told Rose in no uncertain terms that she could forget packing ‘glad rags’ for she’d have no need of them, but to bring stout shoes and warm clothes. She reminded her about her ration book and to bring any stores of tinned food she had. She even ghoulishly asked if she could remember how to wring a chicken’s neck.
Last night, as bombs dropped yet again, Rose had thought about the lack of bathroom and electricity at Curlew Cottage, and how far it was to the nearest shop. She regretted agreeing to go, and knew she’d hate being a slave to her mother, even if she would be pleased to get away from the bombs. But she couldn’t wriggle out of it now – perhaps after a week she could invent some plausible reason for returning to London.
Chapter Twenty-three
‘We’ll go and collect some wood when you’ve finished that,’ Adele said as Rose dried up the dinner plates in the scullery. ‘I noticed this morning there’s a couple of trees come down in the storm. We can hack off a few logs if we take the axe with us.’
Rose sighed. It was her second day at the cottage, and from the moment they’d arrived Adele had kept her busy; that was understandable as there were so many things to put straight, but Rose had hoped she could have a rest this afternoon.
They had been brought down here in a van, Honour in the back on a mattress, with Adele and Towzer beside her. Rose sat up in the front with the driver, an old, slightly deaf man who was prone to shouting questions as if it was they who were hard of hearing. All the way out through South London they had seen more terrible bomb damage. On two occasions the road had been impassable and they’d had to take a detour to get back on the main road.
Yet once they were out of London Rose’s spirits rose at the autumn colours of the trees. Everywhere looked so sparkly and clean in the weak sunshine, even the nip in the air was invigorating, and as they passed through one serene and picturesque village after another, the Blitz began to seem like no more than a bad dream.
She even felt an unexpected surge of nostalgia and excitement at seeing the marshes again. The grass was so lush and green, bulrushes in the ditches waved in the wind, and the Old Man’s Beard on the hedges glistened with dew-sprinkled cobwebs just the way Rose remembered as a child.
Jim the postman had been in to light the stove. There was a basket of eggs on the table, a quart of milk in a jug, an apple and blackberry pie, presumably made by Jim’s wife, and a bunch of wild flowers in a vase to welcome Honour home. Rose laughed as Towzer ran around sniffing everything joyfully, for she felt just as gleeful as she used to when her parents brought her here for weekends and holidays all those years ago.
But the glee wore off very quickly when the sky darkened and it began to rain heavily and she had to run out to the lavatory to empty Honour’s commode. To be fair to her mother, she had indignantly argued with Adele about the need for a commode, and would have braved the rain on crutches, but Adele wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted that the crutches could only be used indoors, the ground outside was far too uneven and slippery. Rose heard her making Honour promise that she wouldn’t backslide the moment she’d gone back to London. She even added darkly, ‘However much Rose encourages you to believe it’s safe.’
While Rose hated the thought of emptying commodes and dressing wounds for her mother, she didn’t mind cooking and housekeeping for her so much. There was something very soothing about being back in her old home, with all the memories of her childhood, well away from the nightly terror in London. She even felt touched by seeing her indomitable mother so helpless.
Honour had always had such good posture. She had stood straight-backed, chest out and chin up, and she had been so strong and muscular. Rose remembered how as a child she’d watched her mother heave great buckets of stones around, dig the garden like a man and shin up on the roof with the agility of a monkey. She had never been one to give in to fatigue – she rose with the lark and worked till dusk.
Even when she’d arrived in Hammersmith it was clear she still had the same vigour. Her hair might be grey, and there were a few wrinkles on her face, but one sensed she would never bow to old age.
Yet she looked sixty now as she sat with her broken leg supported on a stool, and that huge dressing on her head. Her skin was yellow with bruising, noticeably crêpey and wrinkled. She had lost weight, and her eyes were rheumy – even her voice had lost its commanding note. Adele had put a colourful knitted blanket round her shoulders, and with her reading glasses resting low on her nose she was suddenly a picture-book frail grandmother.
The rain turned to a real storm later on, and they could barely hear the wireless for the howling wind and the rain drumming on the roof. But Rose found it infinitely preferable to bombs; the minute her head touched the pillow, she was asleep.
Adele slept on the couch in the living room. Rose suggested she share her bed, but Adele wouldn’t hear of it. She laughingly said that she hadn’t had more than three hours’ sleep a night for over a fortnight, and if she slept in a comfortable bed she might never wake up again. But Rose had a feeling that her daughter just couldn’t bear to be that close to her.
While she knew she couldn’t expect Adele to clasp her long-lost mother to her bosom and forgive the past entirely, Rose wished she would say something that would give her hope for the future. She couldn’t help but secretly marvel that Adele had turned out so well, not only beautiful, but clever, self-assured and very capable. She was the kind of daughter any mother would be extremely proud of, but it gave Rose a real pang of remorse to see she’d got that way despite her mother, not because of her.
Instinct told her Adele was not prepared to forgive or forget. She was watchful, her smiles were forced, and almost everything she said directly to Rose was thinly disguised sarcasm.
This morning, as she showed her mother how to change the dressings on Honour’s head wound and a nasty one on her arm, Rose knew she was being scrutinized. Later, as they fed the rabbits and chickens, Adele didn’t speak at all. It was as if she was boiling up for something, keeping a lid on her anger until the right time came to let it loose.
‘The tree’s down here,’ Adele said as she marched on ahead with the old pram towards the Winchelsea road. She turned off at a gate, opened it and hauled the pram through. Two trees were lying on the ground, torn up by the roots.
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