Secrets

  ‘Come on!’ the sergeant said reprovingly. ‘It wasn’t Adele’s fault, she wasn’t to know Pamela would try to cross the road alone. It was an accident. Don’t blame her, she’s only a child herself, and she’s in shock.’

  Adele remained standing by the door, too stunned and stricken even to find a seat. She felt she had no business to be there, like a neighbour who’d come in to borrow some sugar and wouldn’t leave.

  This feeling grew even stronger as the two policemen tried to comfort her parents, calling them Rose and Jim as if they had known them a long time. PC Mitchell made a pot of tea and poured it; the sergeant picked up a photo of Pamela from the mantelpiece and remarked what a pretty girl she was. Her father cuddled her mother to him and both policemen tutted in sympathy as they were told how clever Pamela was.

  But no one turned to Adele, not after the sergeant had given her a cup of tea. It was as though she’d become invisible to everyone.

  Maybe she only stood there for five or ten minutes, but it seemed like for ever. It felt as though she was watching a play and was hidden from the actors’ view by the spotlights. She could see, hear and feel their shock and grief, but they were completely oblivious to her pain.

  She so much wanted someone to hold her in their arms, to tell her it was not her fault and that Pamela had been told dozens of times that she was never to cross Euston Road alone.

  After a bit Adele sat down on a small stool by the door and put her head on her knees. The adults all had their backs to her, and even though she knew this was mostly because of how the chairs were arranged, it felt deliberate. While Adele could agree wholeheartedly with everything that was said about her sister, how she was liked by everyone, top of the class, a sunny little girl who had special qualities, it seemed to her that her parents were pointing out that her elder sister was just the opposite, and it was unjust that she should be the one they were left with.

  The talking and crying went on and on, round and round. Rose would get hysterical, then calm herself to relate yet another instance when Pamela was extra special, then Jim would butt in with his views. And in between her parents’ voices there were the two policemen’s calm, measured tones. Young and inexperienced as Adele was, she could sense their skill at dealing with grief, maintaining just the right amount of interest, care and sympathy, yet gradually trying to bring the couple to the point where they would accept their daughter was dead.

  While she was touched they had enough compassion to do this, a small part of her very much wished she dared point out to them that Jim Talbot’s favourite words to both his daughters had always been ‘Shut up, can’t you.’ That he was the one who was supposed to collect Pamela, and forgot. She also wondered if the policemen would be as sympathetic to Rose if they knew she was mostly too morose to get out of bed in the mornings. Adele had always given Pamela her breakfast and taken her to school.

  ‘Would you like us to take you to see Pamela?’ the sergeant asked some time later. Rose was still crying helplessly, but not in the hysterical way she had been earlier. ‘She has to be formally identified, and it might help you to see that she died instantly and that there are no visible injuries.’

  Adele had remained silently on her stool all this time, lost in her misery, but when she heard that question she came to with a jolt. ‘Can I come too?’ she asked impulsively.

  All four adult faces turned to her. Both policemen looked merely surprised, they had clearly forgotten she was still in the room. But her parents looked affronted at Adele’s request.

  ‘Why, you little ghoul,’ her mother exploded, getting up as if to strike her. ‘It isn’t a freak show. Our baby is dead because of you.’

  ‘Now, now, Rose,’ the sergeant said, moving between mother and daughter. ‘Adele didn’t mean it like that, I’m sure. She’s upset too.’

  Sergeant Mike Cotton wished he was anywhere but 47 Charlton Street. In twenty-odd years of police service he’d been called hundreds of times to inform next of kin of a death, and it was always a painful duty. Yet when it was a child’s death it was a hideous task, for there were no words that could soothe the pain, nothing that could justify a healthy child being cut down without warning. But this was one of the worst cases he’d known, for the moment Rose Talbot opened the door, and Adele didn’t rush into her arms, he knew there was something badly wrong within the family.

  All the time he was explaining how the accident happened, he had been very aware of Adele still standing by the door. He so much wanted to call her over, sit her on his knee and comfort her, but that should have been the father’s job. Just as it should have been him who went to collect his small daughter on a dark, cold January night. Euston Road was not the sort of area any young girl should be out in alone. Every kind of scum hung around there – beggars, prostitutes and their pimps, men looking for a woman, thieves watching out for anyone to rob.

  Mike had to admit that the Talbots were a slight cut above most of their neighbours in this street. He knew families of eight or ten crowded into one room, where survival depended on the mother being wily and strong enough to wrench some money for food from her husband’s hands before he spent his wages in the pub. He knew others that rooted about in filth like animals, and some where the mother turned the kids out into the streets at night while she earned money to feed them lying on her back.

  The Talbots’ flat might be shabby but it was clean and warm, and an evening meal was prepared. Jim Talbot was still in work too, despite the financial depression which was slowly strangling the country.

  Mike thought that Rose Talbot was almost certainly from middle-class stock: she spoke correct English even if it was peppered with London slang, and she had a refined manner. He had noted that despite his shocking news, she had still quickly removed her pinafore and run her fingers through her untidy hair, as if ashamed of being caught unprepared for visitors. Her skirt and jumper were clearly from a market stall, yet the subdued shade of blue enhanced her lovely eyes and gave her a surprisingly stylish air.

  Jim, in contrast, was from the bottom of the social scale. Although tall and slender, he had that give-away stoop and awkwardness which always seemed to go with products of London slums. His London accent had a kind of nasal whine to it, and with his bad teeth, thinning sandy hair and washed-out blue eyes, he looked prematurely middle-aged, even though he was just thirty-two. He wasn’t the brightest of men either, for when Mike had asked him how secure his job was, he didn’t appear to understand the question. Why would an attractive and well-bred woman like Rose marry a man like Jim?

  Yet if the parents were ill matched, there was an even greater disparity between how they felt about their two children. There were several photographs of Pamela on display on the sideboard, and one of her paintings pinned on the wall, but there was nothing of Adele. Mike had noticed that Pamela had been wearing a good warm coat, she had mittens on her hands, and she was prettily plump. Adele, in contrast, was very thin and pasty-faced and her coat was an old adult hand-me-down. The coat wasn’t necessarily hers, it could be that she had grabbed her mother’s to run out in. But he didn’t think so, for looking at Adele now under a bright light, she seemed malnourished. Her stringy, mousy hair had no shine to it, and her navy blue school gym slip, like the coat, was far too big for her.

  Her appearance meant little in an area where there were hundreds of girls of a similar age even more shabbily dressed and ill fed. Yet Mike was pretty certain that all their mothers, even those who were drunken sluts, would be unable to ignore a child so obviously in need of a little comfort and tenderness.

  The girl had just witnessed something even the most hardened policeman would want to weep over, so surely Rose, however traumatized, could manage to put her own emotions on hold long enough to reach out for her elder child?

  Adele felt a sense of relief when her parents finally left with the policemen, ordering her to bed. But the moment she went into the icy-cold bedroom and saw the bed she had always shared with Pamela, she bega
n to cry again. She was never again going to feel her sister’s warm little body snuggled up tight against her, gone were the whispered night-time conversations, the giggling and all the little confidences. She’d lost the only person she could always count on for affection.

  She couldn’t really remember anything before Pamela was born. The farthest back her mind could stretch was to a pram, too big for her to push, and the cot, with a baby in it which she had thought much better than a doll. They had lived somewhere else then, a basement flat she thought, but she could remember moving into this place, because Pamela was just beginning to walk and she had to watch she didn’t try to go down the stairs.

  Dozens of memories came flooding back as she lay scrunched up in a ball, shivering and crying. Of pushing Pamela on the swings, drawing pictures for her, telling her stories and teaching her to skip out on the road.

  She had always known Mum and Dad liked Pamela more than her. They laughed when she said wrong words, they let her into bed with them, she got larger helpings of food. Pamela hardly ever got secondhand clothes and shoes, and Adele never had new.

  Pamela’s piano lessons were the only thing Adele had ever felt jealous about. She’d accepted all the other unfairness because Pamela was the baby of the family, and she loved her too. But the piano was different – Pamela had never shown the slightest interest in playing any instrument. She said she wanted to dance, to ride a horse and swim, but didn’t care about music. Adele did, and although she’d never dared ask outright for lessons, she’d hinted about them hundreds of times.

  Adele knew only too well that England was in the grip of something called a ‘Slump’. Every week the queues of men looking for work grew longer and longer. Adele had seen a soup kitchen open in King’s Cross, families down the street being turned out of their homes because they couldn’t pay the rent. Her father might still be in work, but she knew he too might lose his job at any time, so of course she didn’t really expect a luxury like piano lessons.

  Then out of the blue her mother announced that Pamela was to go to Mrs Belling in Cartwright Gardens for lessons every Thursday afternoon.

  Adele knew this was to spite her, for what other reason was there when Pamela didn’t want to go? Only a couple of weeks ago she’d told Adele she really hated the lessons and that Mrs Belling had said it was pointless teaching her when she didn’t have a piano at home to practise on. Now she was dead because of it.

  Adele heard her parents come back later. She could hear their voices, if not what they were saying, and her mother’s alternated between a kind of sobbing sorrow and a whine of bitterness. Her father’s was more constant, an angry rasp, now and then punctuated by a thump on the table with his fist.

  Adele guessed they were drinking, and that was even more worrying, for it usually made them argue. She wanted to get up and go to the lavatory, but she didn’t dare for it meant going through the living room.

  She wondered if she would be expected to go to school in the morning. Most children she knew were kept home when there was a death in their family, but then her mother wasn’t like other girls’ mothers.

  Sometimes Adele felt proud of the differences, for in many respects Rose Talbot was superior. She looked after her appearance, she didn’t shout or swear out in the street like so many of their neighbours. She kept the flat clean and tidy, and there was always a hot dinner every night, not bread and dripping like so many other children round here got.

  But Adele would’ve preferred mess if it made her mother happy and affectionate, the way other mothers were. She rarely laughed, she didn’t even chatter, she never wanted to go out anywhere, not even to Regent’s Park in the summer. It was as though she chose to be miserable because it was a good way to spoil things for everyone else.

  Eventually Adele knew she’d have to go to the lavatory, or she’d wet the bed. She opened the door very quietly, hoping against hope she could just slip out down the stairs without being noticed.

  ‘What do you want?’ Rose snapped at her.

  Adele explained and went straight out of the front door before anything further could be said.

  With just her nightdress and bare feet, it was freezing on the stairs. The lavatory smelled bad again and it made her heave. Mum was always moaning about Mrs Manning never taking a turn to clean it, in fact she thought she should do it twice as often as she had twice as many children. In the last row about it, Mrs Manning threatened to knock Mum’s block off. She said she was a stuck-up cow who thought her own shit didn’t stink.

  As she got back into the flat again, Adele hesitated. Her parents were sitting either side of the fire in the armchairs, both with a drink in their hands, and they looked so sad she felt she had to say something.

  ‘I’m really sorry I couldn’t get up there quicker,’ she blurted out. ‘I did run all the way.’

  Her father looked round first. ‘It couldn’t be ’elped,’ he said sadly.

  For one brief second Adele thought they’d both come round, but she was badly mistaken. Without any warning an empty beer bottle came hurtling at her, catching her on the forehead, then falling to the floor and smashing on the lino. ‘Get out of my sight, you little bastard,’ her mother screamed. ‘I never wanted you, and now you’ve killed my baby.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘I don’t want her at the funeral,’ Rose Talbot snapped at her husband.

  Alarmed, Jim looked up from cleaning his shoes. He had anticipated Rose might start shouting at him for cleaning them on the table, so he’d put newspaper down first. But he hadn’t for one moment expected that with less than two hours to go to the funeral, she would find something further to be difficult about.

  ‘Why?’ Jim asked nervously. ‘Because she’s too young?’ Rose had been making him very nervous ever since Pamela’s death. Her grief he understood – most days he wished he could die too and be rid of this terrible ache inside him. Having to wait two weeks for a coroner’s report before the funeral had made it even worse, stringing out the misery, but he didn’t understand why she was being so savage to Adele.

  ‘If you want to tell everyone else it’s because she’s too young, do so,’ Rose retorted, flouncing away across the living room. ‘But it’s not the reason. I just don’t want her there.’

  ‘Now look here,’ Jim began, thinking he must be tough and stop all this before it got out of hand. ‘Pammy was her sister, she ought to be there. People will talk.’

  Rose turned and gave him a long, cold stare. ‘Let them. I don’t care,’ she said defiantly.

  Jim did what he always did when Rose was being difficult, let it go, and finished polishing his shoes till they shone like glass. Maybe he ought to be tougher, but he was very aware that Rose didn’t love him as he loved her, and he was afraid to go against her.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ he said weakly after a couple of seconds’ thought.

  Rose stormed off into their bedroom, afraid that if she stayed near Jim another minute she’d blurt out how she felt about him too. She pulled the curlers out of her hair angrily, and as she picked up her hair brush and moved to the mirror, what she saw made her feel even more angry.

  Everything about her sagged, both her face and body. She supposed she was still attractive in most people’s eyes, but in her own she was like an overblown rose, the petals on the point of falling.

  Putting her hands on either side of her face, she pulled the skin back tighter. Instantly her jaw was firmer and the lines around her mouth disappeared, evoking memories of how she had once looked. She had been a head-turner, with her perfect figure, pouting lips, beautiful blonde hair and skin like porcelain, and if she’d made a good marriage to a wealthy man, maybe she’d still look that way now.

  But fate had conspired against her all the way down the line. All the suitable young men went off to war when she was just thirteen, and of the few that came back, most were spoken for, or else damaged the way her father was.

  Thirty wasn’t so very old, but there was no
way of changing her life now, any more than there was of arresting her fading beauty.

  She had married Jim in desperation because she was pregnant with Adele. She saw him as a temporary refuge, believing that after the baby was born something better would turn up. But instead she’d landed herself in a trap.

  It was bitter irony that Pamela’s arrival four years later had changed her view of her marriage for a while. The last thing she’d wanted was to be burdened with another child. Yet she had loved her from the first moment she held her in her arms.

  In one of those soppy romances she used to read so avidly as a girl, she ought to have come to love Jim truly too, but that didn’t happen. She just became resigned to being stuck with him. Yet while she could look at Pamela, so much like herself, she still had a trace of optimism there was something good around the next corner.

  But without Pamela there would be nothing. She was back to where she’d started with Adele, the very cause of her blighted life, and Jim of course, a man she couldn’t love or even respect.

  Adele was sitting on her bed trying to darn her only half-decent pair of socks when Rose came into the room.

  Her immediate reaction was to say how nice her mother looked. But she bit it back, afraid it wasn’t appropriate to compliment anyone dressed for a funeral. But black suited her mother, and the way her blonde hair was curling round the little black netted hat was very pretty.

  ‘Is it time to go already?’ Adele asked instead. ‘I was just finishing darning this sock. I’ve only got to put it on.’

  ‘You needn’t bother, you aren’t going,’ her mother replied sharply. ‘Funerals are no place for children.’

  Adele felt a surge of relief. In the two weeks since Pamela died she had thought of the funeral with absolute dread. Pamela had always been scared of graveyards, and Adele knew she’d feel spooked watching as her coffin was lowered into the ground.