Secrets Read Free Page B

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 began 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.