Secrets

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘No, it’s not too tight,’ Honour said honestly. ‘You only think that because it’s so long since you dressed up. I should think Emily will be quite envious, it’s very pretty.’

  Honour privately thought her daughter looked a picture. Five years of war, shortages of food, lack of new clothes and permanent anxiety had made many women look dowdy and drained, but not Rose. Fresh air, exercise and little alcohol had done wonders. Her blonde hair shone as it did when she was a young girl, her skin glowed and her figure was taut and svelte. She’d gone to bed last night in curlers, and now her hair fell in luxuriant waves to her shoulders. Maybe the dress was a little dated – the utility clothes on sale now were very plain and sparing with material, whereas Rose’s old dress had embroidery on the bodice, and the skirt was cut on the cross so it clung seductively to her hips. But no woman on earth would not prefer it to the dull, cheaply made ones most had to wear.

  ‘Now, for goodness’ sake let’s go,’ Honour said irritably.

  Rose silently picked up her handbag, and the torch in case it was dark when they returned home. She didn’t want to go. The idea of having to sit across a table from Myles filled her with dread.

  She was very pleased that he and Emily had settled their differences. She had grown extremely fond of Emily and took pride in the fact that her present happiness was partly due to Rose helping her to pull herself together. But to be forced to spend an evening with Myles, whom she hadn’t spoken to for more than a couple of minutes since the day they came face to face at the front door when Michael was found, was frightening. He must be still very angry that she’d blackmailed him, just as she was still creased up with embarrassment about it. Then there was Honour and Emily blithely believing Michael and Adele would fall into each other’s arms the moment he returned. The four of them sitting round a table with so many secrets between them was just a recipe for disaster.

  They locked the front door and walked quickly up the lane. It was just before five, the sun still very warm, and the evening so peaceful. Until the previous day they’d been able to hear the constant rumble of heavy guns across the Channel. Honour had said it sounded the way it did twenty-eight years earlier in the Battle of the Somme.

  ‘What did you say she was cooking for us?’ she asked as they walked up the hill towards Winchelsea.

  Rose smiled. Her mother had been preoccupied with food for months now. She brought the subject round to it at every opportunity. Rose wondered how she’d survive if she lived in a city and had to manage purely on rations. She didn’t seem to appreciate how lucky they were having items like eggs, chicken and rabbit, and to her it was the end of the world when they ran out of sugar.

  ‘She said she’d managed to get some lamb,’ Rose said. ‘I just hope she’s followed my instructions on how to cook it.’

  Emily’s housekeeper had left some time ago, and she couldn’t find a replacement. She still had Mrs Thomas who came in to clean a couple of times a week, and Rose had given Emily cooking lessons. To everyone’s surprise she had picked it up quickly and enjoyed it. In fact she’d become a good housewife, taking pride in her home and garden. She often said that the day she heard Michael was alive had made her realize she had been blessed, and she became determined that by the time he came home, he’d have a mother he could be proud of.

  ‘These shoes are killing me,’ Honour said, pausing under the Landgate and looking down at her feet which were swelling over the shiny brown court shoes. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to you, and worn my old ones.’

  Rose sighed. A while ago she had persuaded Honour to make a new dress for herself with some fabric she’d had for years. Just this week she’d finished it, and it looked lovely, a button-through style with short sleeves in pale green cotton with small white daisies. She still had a good figure, and with her hair put up in a bun, for once she looked almost elegant. But getting her to put on stockings, and smart shoes too, had been a battle.

  ‘After a glass or two of your wine you’ll forget about your feet,’ Rose said. ‘You couldn’t have worn those old boots, what would Emily and Myles have thought of you?’

  ‘People have to take me as I am,’ Honour said tartly. ‘I’m too old to attempt being a fashion plate.’

  Honour did forget her shoes were too tight once she’d had a couple of glasses of wine. It was a real treat to be sitting at a table beautifully laid with polished silver, snowy napkins and sparkling glasses, to say nothing of the delicious lamb, slow-cooked until the meat fell off the bone, just the way she liked it. She hadn’t realized that she missed the sophistication of elegant dining until now. But then it had been well over thirty years ago, back in Tunbridge Wells, that she last ate this way.

  Emily sparkled as brightly as the glasses, clearly thrilled she had managed to get everything just right. She looked pretty and girlish in a rose-pink chiffon dress, with her hair piled up in loose curls on the top of her head. She had said she had bought the dress back in 1929 when Michael was twelve, and hadn’t worn it since as the fashion had changed and skirts had become much longer.

  Myles was very attentive, and if he was a little anxious at finding himself the only man amongst three women, it didn’t show. Honour found herself warming to him considerably, for he wasn’t as stuffy and pompous as she had thought when she first met him. She thought that making the peace with Emily, and the work he was doing helping Jewish refugees settle in England, had brought a new dimension to his somewhat staid character.

  He also adored her gorse wine, ignoring the claret he had brought with him to drink it, and he kept saying that he could sell all she could make in London.

  Conversation flowed effortlessly, and they laughed a great deal as Rose told amusing stories about her tenants in London, and some of the problems she’d encountered since coming back to live on the marsh. Honour just sat back and listened, feeling proud that Rose could be so entertaining. Since she’d come here to live she’d completely lost that hard, rather common image she’d had previously, yet she had retained enough of the insight into the lower levels of society to give her a fascinating edge.

  ‘What are you planning to do when the war ends, Rose?’ Myles asked. ‘Will you stay here, or go back to London?’

  ‘I’d like to stay here and run a caravan site,’ she said.

  ‘A caravan site!’ Honour exclaimed. ‘Where on earth did you get that idea from?’

  ‘People will be desperate for holidays by the sea and if I could sell my house I could buy five or six caravans, and build a washing and toilet block,’ Rose replied, seemingly undaunted by her mother’s surprise.

  ‘Where were you thinking of putting these caravans?’ Honour asked indignantly. ‘I hope it’s not on our land!’

  ‘No, Mother,’ Rose laughed. ‘I know you wouldn’t want a horde of noisy holidaymakers on the doorstep. Mr Green has some land by his place, I suggested I rented it off him, and he could open a little shop. He was all for it.’

  Honour immediately realized it wasn’t such a crazy idea after all. Oswald Green owned a couple of acres between her place and Pett Level. It was rough, pebbly ground close to the sea, and not suitable for sheep to graze on. Oswald had some business interests in Hastings, and he had once told her that he was always on the lookout for schemes that would produce an income without him needing to oversee them. She also suspected he had a soft spot for Rose too as he was a lonely widower in his mid-fifties.

  ‘It might work,’ she said with pretended indifference. ‘If you were prepared to put your back into it.’

  ‘Sounds a good idea to me,’ Myles said, slurring his words just slightly for he’d drunk a lot tonight. ‘I personally couldn’t imagine anything worse than a holiday in a caravan, but I dare say it would appeal to people who can’t afford hotels. Honour could sell them her eggs and wine too.’

  ‘Maybe Adele could be persuaded to come back down here and help as well,’ Emily said brightly.

  At this remark Honour suddenly took Rose’s idea comple
tely seriously. She missed Adele so much, and she had often tried to think of something which would lure her away from London. ‘Now, that’s a smart idea,’ she said, beaming at Emily. ‘She loves an outdoor life, I can imagine her getting really excited by painting up caravans and putting in a few flower beds.’

  ‘And maybe she’d get back with Michael too,’ Emily said excitedly.

  Honour hadn’t had more than a couple of glasses of wine, and perhaps that was why she noticed both Rose and Myles stiffen at Emily’s remark. Assuming Myles still held some reservations about the suitability of her granddaughter and his son, she looked at Rose.

  ‘And what have you got against that?’ she asked.

  Rose blushed. ‘Oh, mother,’ she said a little brusquely. ‘Adele wouldn’t like us to match-make.’

  ‘She still loves him, as well you know,’ Honour said tartly. ‘And Emily tells me Michael asks after her in every single letter. Now, if Myles was to just get off his high horse and accept it, there would be nothing to hold them back.’

  ‘Honour’s quite right, Myles,’ Emily said, reaching out to pat her husband’s hand affectionately. ‘We all know Adele dropped Michael because of our disapproval, and we were very wrong to think that way. Adele is a wonderful girl, we’ve all been thrown together in adversity and found we really like one another, so let’s all drink to Michael and Adele’s possible future together.’

  Emily held up her glass, and Honour followed, but she noticed that Rose and Myles were looking at each other in a stricken manner and had not picked up their glasses.

  ‘What is it? Honour asked, looking from one face to another. ‘Do you know something I don’t? Myles! Is there something wrong with Michael that you haven’t revealed?’

  Emily giggled. ‘Oh, he’s just being silly. Michael’s fine, even if he does have a limp now. He can get a job in aviation when he comes home, the world will be his oyster.’

  ‘Adele doesn’t want to marry Michael.’

  At that firm statement from Myles Honour looked at him sharply. She sensed hurt in his voice and something akin to panic in his eyes. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

  ‘Because she told me,’ he replied.

  ‘When, darling?’ Emily asked. She was tipsy but clearly trying to act as if she were entirely sober.

  Myles looked very embarrassed. ‘I took her out to lunch in London,’ he said. ‘I wanted to apologize for treating her so badly when she was working here.’

  Honour immediately realized that something fishy was going on. Adele would’ve told her if she’d been asked out to lunch by Myles, unless of course the pair of them had something to hide.

  ‘Let it be, mother,’ Rose piped up, and she had a curiously hard expression in her eyes. ‘You and Emily are clinging on to a foolish dream. Myles is right, as far as Adele is concerned Michael is just a family friend.’

  Honour looked from Myles’s face to her daughter’s, and saw the same fear in both their eyes. They shared a secret, that much was obvious, and then she remembered how reluctant Rose had been to come this evening.

  ‘You two hatched up something to split them up, didn’t you?’ she said wildly. ‘What did you do? What did you say to them?’

  ‘Did you, Myles?’ Emily asked, her voice taking on a shrill edge. ‘But how could you plot it with Rose? She didn’t even live here then.’

  Honour realized this was so, but she had come for that visit ages before, and Honour had told her Adele had a young man. But why would she want to split them up? It didn’t make sense.

  Yet when she thought back, Adele’s hostility to her mother was above and beyond what Honour would have expected. She had despaired of them ever making it up. And Adele was such a forgiving person normally.

  ‘You will tell me what you two did,’ Honour said harshly. She got up from her chair and looked menacingly at them. ‘I want the truth, the whole truth. Right now!’

  There was complete silence. Myles and Rose were looking furtively at each other, Emily was staring at Honour open-mouthed.

  ‘I may be getting old but I am not senile yet,’ Honour thundered, and waggled a warning finger at Myles. ‘I am certain you and Rose hatched up a plan together to make Adele drop Michael and run away to London, and if you won’t tell me what that was, I can find out.’ She paused for a moment to give her words more impact. ‘The Matron at the Buchanan Hospital will tell me. She knows, for it was she who told me that Adele had moved to the London Hospital. She wouldn’t have arranged that move without good reason. So have I got to go and ask her? Or are you going to tell me?’

  There was deathly silence, both Myles and Rose looking as if they wanted to run from the room.

  Myles broke the silence. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said in a small voice. ‘I promised Adele I wouldn’t, but I can see now that I must.’ He paused, shot a look at Rose who was grimacing at him, and then cleared his throat. ‘The truth is that Adele is my daughter.’

  Honour thought it was a weak joke, at least for a second or two. She looked at Emily and saw her mouth was gaping open in shock. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Myles,’ she said in a shrill little voice. ‘How can she be?’

  ‘I had an affair with Rose,’ he said.

  Honour was just about to ask him to repeat that, assuming she’d misheard, but he was hanging his head and Rose clapped her hands over her face.

  ‘It was when I was sent down here to wind up an estate during the last war,’ he went on after a brief pause. ‘I stayed at The George in Rye, and Rose worked there. But when Adele worked here, I didn’t know that she was Rose’s daughter. I didn’t know until Rose came to see me at my chambers after she’d seen the engagement notice in The Times.’

  Honour sat down with a thump, completely winded by the news. ‘But that makes Michael her half-brother,’ she said weakly.

  Emily jumped off her chair, rounding on Rose. ‘You had an affair with Myles? How could you? I thought you were my friend.’

  Honour’s head was reeling from the shock. She wished she’d never forced this out, but however shattering the news was, it made sense of many things which had hitherto puzzled her.

  ‘Sit down and shut up, Emily,’ she said firmly. ‘Let them explain first.’

  It was Myles who did most of the explaining, and considering his extreme embarrassment and Emily’s frequent gasps of outrage, he did it well.

  Honour felt every kind of emotion as the story unfolded. First and foremost there was tremendous anger that Adele’s happiness had been destroyed by her own mother’s actions, and that she’d been forced to cope with such a bombshell, alone.

  She didn’t know whether it was rage or sympathy she felt for Rose and Myles, it seemed to be a mixture of both, for whatever the rights and wrongs were of them having an affair, they could never have known that it would have such far-reaching results.

  As for Emily, for her she had profound pity. She’d managed to pull herself together in the past year, and this looked certain to make her fall apart again.

  Rose only found her voice when Myles began to falter as he described how he went to the hospital in Hastings to break the news to Adele.

  ‘Maybe I should have come to you and asked your advice about how to deal with this, rather than let Myles go to Adele,’ she said plaintively to Honour, her eyes filling with tears. ‘But I didn’t know what reception I’d get from you.’ She paused to wipe her eyes and then looked at Emily. ‘I had never met you until the night I pulled you from the river. When I discovered who you were I couldn’t believe that fate could take such an ironic twist. And I haven’t been faking my friendship with you. It’s entirely genuine, though I doubt you can believe that now.’

  Emily wanted to know exactly when the affair took place, how long it lasted, and whether Rose knew Myles had three children. Myles hung his head as he told her, then told them all about his meetings with Adele in London. ‘I’ve come to love her,’ he said simply. ‘She urged me never to divulge any of this, she had always been afra
id of it hurting Emily, Michael and my other children.’ He turned to Emily then and tentatively took her hand. ‘I’ve always been tempted to tell you. It might have seemed kinder to everyone else involved to keep it under my hat, but it never seemed right to do so.’

  ‘What have you got to say Emily?’ Honour asked gently, for she was now leaning her elbows on the table, her hands covering her face and her slim shoulders heaving as she sobbed.

  ‘Nothing.’ Emily uncovered her face and sniffed back her tears. ‘I’m as much to blame for this as Myles. I was awful to him at the time it happened. Just as I continued to be awful right up till we split up and I came here.’

  ‘That’s a very honest and generous attitude to take,’ Honour said, and she moved her chair nearer to Emily and put her arm around her. ‘Perhaps we should think now whether Michael should be told the truth.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emily said. ‘What do you all think?’

  ‘It would stop him believing there was hope for him and Adele,’ Myles said.

  ‘But maybe that hope is keeping him going right now,’ Rose said.

  Emily suddenly slumped forward on to the table, knocking a glass of wine over on the tablecloth. ‘Emily!’ Honour exclaimed. ‘Are you all right? Would you rather Rose and I left now to let you and Myles sort things out between yourselves?’

  She lifted Emily up and cradled her head against her breast, for the woman was sobbing again and seemed distraught. ‘This must have been a terrible shock to you,’ Honour said soothingly, stroking her hair. ‘We both were guilty of dreaming dreams of a wedding and our two families becoming one. We can’t have that of course, not now, but maybe we can reconcile ourselves to a deeper friendship based on true understanding.’

  Rose got up from her chair and came nearer to Emily, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘I wish I could turn the clock back,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘Do you know, Emily, that you are the only true friend I’ve ever had? I can’t bear that I’ve hurt you so much. Please forgive me!’

  ‘And me too,’ Myles said. ‘I should have understood that your nervous problems were related to the birth of Michael, and got you help. I became so hard on you. I’m so sorry.’