The Last Pier (10 page)

‘The world is changing,’ Agnes said in a voice that gave nothing away.

This match would be the very last one at Palmyra Farm and though August was almost gone, September still seemed a long way off.

BUT SOMEONE WAS
making lists in high places. There were lists of Fascists and lists of anti-Fascists in Britain. Italian names, jumbled together, reading like a cast list for an opera.

Alessandro Anzi from London,

Carlo Campolonghi from Edinburgh,

Giovanni Oresfi from Clerkenwell,

Francesco Cesar from Eastbourne and

Mario Molinello from Bly.

Who knew which list each belonged to?

Someone, a clerk with neat handwriting, wrote the names into a book. Then a fat man with a cigar dropped ash all over them and someone else with nimble fingers came along and filed them away. So that one day a man wearing a trilby would find the list.

No one except Cecily saw Pinky Wilson sitting in the apple orchard reading a newspaper in another language.

‘It’s in Italian, silly,’ Rose said crossly when Cecily told her. ‘Why don’t you spy on someone else?’

The tennis party was on everyone’s lips.

Franca talked about it all the time with Rose, their faces alight with anticipation. The Molinellos, when the shop was closed, came over to the farm to compare notes with Joe endlessly as to who was the best tennis player.

‘Rose is,’ said Franca.

‘Yes,’ admitted Joe smiling wryly. ‘She is!’

‘Papi thinks
he
is,’ said Giorgio and Carlo laughed.

‘Papi’s hopeless,’ he said. ‘I’m the best in the family, you know.’

‘Oh, Lucio is pretty good too,’ Anna told them and at that, Agnes, who had just made her a cup of tea, looked up sharply.
Her deep dimple made a swift appearance. And disappeared again. There were just fourteen days left to the tennis match.

‘Please God it doesn’t rain,’ prayed Franca.

Agnes was making a canary yellow satin dress that Rose would wear to the dance. They were giggling together, good friends for once. Cecily, hurrying along the corridor, heard Rose whispering to her mother and stopped to listen.

‘But I
do
wish he wasn’t my father,’ Rose said.

Agnes spoke with her mouth full of pins so Cecily couldn’t make out what she said. And then Rose said something else, her voice different now. She spoke in the same cold flat voice she used when upset. Finally she made an impatient sound, a slight ‘oh’ as though she had turned away.

‘Keep still, darling,’ Agnes said.

‘Ah ha!’ Aunty Kitty said, pouncing on Cecily.

Laughing.

‘Caught you!’

And she propelled Cecily into the room with her.

‘Look who was hiding outside!’

Rose scowled.

‘Oh my! The Listening Queen! What a surprise!’

‘Why can’t I have a dress like Rose’s?’ demanded Cecily. ‘Why do I always have to have her cast-offs?’

‘Because you’re not old enough,’ Rose said.

‘It’s irreversibly damaging my character,’ Cecily said.

And she stuck her tongue out at her sister. Kitty burst out laughing.

‘I’m sorry, child,’ Rose said glaring at Aunty Kitty. ‘It’s simply a matter of birth order.’

‘Don’t pull faces, Rose,’ Aunt Kitty said, ready to start another argument.

Later Cecily learnt that birth order was an important kind of order, never spoken about but always present. Until you died.

‘When I’m twenty you’ll only be twenty-two,’ murmured Cecily.

‘You’re not twenty yet.’

‘But I will be!’

‘Wait until then.’

‘Oh for
goodness
’ sake,’ Agnes said, worn down like a step that had been walked on too often.

Like the step, she was becoming slippy and dangerous.

‘What’s the point?’ wailed Cecily. ‘There won’t be a tennis dance when I’m twenty. Not if the war comes.’

Rose laughed.

‘Wars don’t last six years,’ she said.

‘I hate you,’ Cecily said.

But she said it without heat. Carlo would be at the party and suddenly she hated him too. She had asked him again if he would dance with her and he had agreed. But he had answered in a way that made her feel she was begging.

Children aren’t supposed to have feelings,
she wrote in her diary.

Outside in the country lanes, along the cottage walls and in the tangled hedgerows, dog roses bloomed. Untended, wild, and beautiful. It was truly ferocious weather that made the scent of honeysuckles stronger than ever before. On the wireless the news was that Hitler had sent a personal message to Stalin. And life seemed hell-bent on passing Cecily by. Would the tennis party
never
come?

The two girls with feet turned out like Jemima Puddleduck’s had moved into the small bedroom in the annexe at the back of the house. They were very thin and white.

‘Pasty, city girls,’ Partridge said, amused.

‘Streamlined like soda fountains,’ Selwyn agreed.

He seemed awfully jolly. Considering.

‘Do you mean pretty?’ Aunty Kitty asked with a trace of discord buried in her voice, annoyed at something no one else could see.

Selwyn grinned a young boyish grin, helplessly. Like a man carried along by sea currents.

‘Yes,’ agreed Joe, thinking of someone else, entirely. ‘Very pretty.’

The others were dubious. A discussion on prettiness ensued; light-heartedly, innocently blowing away the cobwebs of past irritations.

But Cecily knew there was no one more beautiful than Rose.

At the ice-cream parlour one of the Italian boys began to practise
Honeysuckle Rose
on the violin. One of them (it was Carlo) had told Rose he would play it at the dance. By the way he blushed whenever he mentioned her name, everyone knew what he was thinking. The Molinellos smiled good-naturedly and Mario whistled,
Ain’t Misbehavin’.
And when no one was around Lucio listened to the wireless to see how grim the news was getting.

By Friday the 18th the weather was scorching and there wasn’t even a thread of a breeze. The thermometer stood at eighty-seven. The grand clear-up had taken four whole days because the heat made everyone stop for too many rests. Rose wore a large hat to keep the sun off her face but it soon got knocked off her head. Butterflies danced around her. Joe paused, straightening
his
hat. He didn’t mind the sun on his face, he told Cecily when she arrived with the ice-cold lemonade. Bellamy, high on the tractor, glanced at Rose with heat-sapped, challenging eyes.

Rose looked away. Bellamy revved up the engine. He looks as hot as the devil himself, Cecily thought.

Across every field swallows flew low beneath the searing white clouds. The tractor, a lump of solidified oily heat, moved past Rose, leaving her with a curious air of being unsheltered
in the shadeless field, under a naked sky. Bellamy was staring straight at the shadow between her legs and her white skirt. Rose stood up and wandered towards the trees. Her voice drifted towards them.

‘This heat is something awful,’ she said. ‘If I sit too long in it I feel sick!’

‘We’ve almost finished,’ Joe called after her. ‘Can’t you get Bellamy to give us a bit more help?’

‘Ask him yourself,’ Rose said crossly over her shoulder.

The sweat was pouring down Bellamy’s face as he moved the tractor towards the trees. Then it stopped and Cecily saw him get down. He raised his hand in the direction of Rose’s head. She saw Rose turn her face towards him, her long white neck arching backwards. Then they both disappeared into the long grass and once again Cecily felt a ripple of some strange sensation rush across her own body. Carlo, who was walking towards them, must have seen it too because he stopped for a moment and looked towards the spot where Rose had stood. Feeling a sudden agony for him, Cecily ran across the field.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked a little out of breath.

Carlo turned towards her, startled. He frowned as though he didn’t quite recognise who she was. Then he murmured something and raised his hand. And touched her hair, adjusting the silk ribbon that was falling off.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, adding, ‘you look different today.’

But then he laughed with delight, waved his hand and went to join Joe.

Inside the dark cool kitchen, Agnes held an ice-cold jug in her hands as Lucio Molinello, having loaded the trays of greengages onto his truck, backed out of the drive. When he saw Cecily running across the field he waved. But he did not smile.

‘This war will change everything,’ Agnes said. ‘None of us will ever be the same.’

For once there was no one listening.

Cecily, sitting on the highest branch of the oak tree, was hugging herself.

AND NOW, ALL
these years later, back in Palmyra House, Cecily was daring to take out that summer from the drawer marked ‘Interrupted’ and place it in the one marked ‘Remember’.

The summer of more strawberries than you could eat.

The summer of war clouds gathering over the streets.

The summer the tennis court was ploughed up.

The summer of the Last Pier.

She saw again the meadow beyond the bridle path where the huge oak grew. There had been a family living in Bly who rented it for their pony. With the distance of time, with so much exotic travel behind her now, she saw what she had never seen before; how like an eternal Constable it had looked.

She remembered laughter coming from behind the hedge. That had been Joe and Franca. And she remembered how, when Rose was nowhere in sight, Carlo had told her she was pretty. And how, sitting on a branch of the oak tree she had swung her legs in delight while the wind cooled her flushed face and Carlo’s words went round and round her head until all the joy in the world came towards her. Carlo had spoken to her in the same voice he used for Rose.

Why were the days moving so slowly? It was still only August the 18th. Carlo had been marking out the tennis court with white paint and Cecily went over to talk to him. Twice in one day.

‘I don’t have a new dress like Rose,’ she said. ‘Mummy says I’m not old enough.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carlo told her. ‘You must be patient.’

His head was bent in concentration. One false move and the line would come out wobbly.

‘There might be a war,’ she said.

‘A war won’t change anything, Cecci,’ Carlo said. ‘It won’t stop you growing up. You’ll do that anyway.’

She said nothing, staring down at his crouching figure, her body alight with the heat of the afternoon sun, trembling with an unaccountable desire to touch the back of his head. Knowing that, unlike last summer, she could not do so. Maybe I never will again, she thought sadly, remembering how she used to hang on to his curls as he gave her a piggy-back when she had been younger. All that, she dimly saw, was over. Carlo’s upturned face was browner than the wheat itself.

‘Rose will look beautiful,’ she said, wanting but not knowing how to express what she felt.

The sun lay white on the ground. She could smell the sweet light fragrance of dry grass and late flowering limes. Carlo stopped what he was doing and straightened up. White paint dripped onto the ground. He looked sideways at Cecily. Then he smiled.

‘You will too,’ he said, adding as Cecily shook her head, ‘but you
will,
Cecci. You look exactly like Rosa. Don’t you know?’

His voice was so kind that for a moment she felt tears spring to her eyes.

‘And you are going to be so tall and elegant. I can tell.’

Cecily stared at him, thinking how much older he was. She would never catch up with him, any more than she would with Rose. He must have sensed something of what she felt because he laughed and hugged her and she smelt the grass and the hot air and the dog roses spinning through the air. He went on hugging her and a moment later she saw her sister coming towards them. Rose was combing her fingers through her straw-laced hair and smoothening her dress. Bellamy was somewhere behind. Cecily saw him throw his head back and laugh, his usually sullen face relaxed.

‘Why
does
she like him so much?’ Carlo murmured, staring at the horizon where a line of heat pulsated under the deep blue
sky. He shook his head, puzzled. They both stood watching as Rose walked away from the field, towards a patch of bright yellow buttercups. And as her sister disappeared through the white islands of rising clover, heading probably towards the river, Cecily saw Bellamy climb back onto the tractor. In the heat it appeared glowing like a huge ball of fire as he started it noisily up again.

In the annexe in Palmyra House, in the late afternoon, the dancers took their make-up bags and went away to be photographed. They had been rehearsing all morning and were exhausted.

‘Glissade, plié, glissés, one, two, three. Rond de Jambe,’ Madam shouted, banging her stick. ‘And now the other side, please.’

When Cecily went back into Bly with the Molinello children she could hear them in the rehearsal studios next door.

‘And one and two and three,’ cried Madam.

Cecily heard a stick being banged in time with the music.

‘All day,’ said Anna Molinello, rolling her eyes heavenwards, ‘those poor girls! What is she doing to them? They look as if they’ll fade away.’

‘Invite them in for an ice cream,’ Mario said. ‘Give them one on the house!’

Lucio shook his head at his brother’s carefree attitude.

‘Work is the answer,’ he said.

He sounded bitter. Somewhere through an open window, music was playing on the wireless.

One day Cecily would see a photograph with his words on it and wonder why they appeared vaguely familiar.

In Whitehall no one had a clue about what might happen next. But, just in case, it was decided wise to continue making the list. Thereafter a smart alec took the matter a little further, deciding the lists needed to be colour coded. That was how the Black List
came into being. When it became difficult to decipher the names on the other lists, the clerk in charge (he was a different fellow from the last List-Maker) stole from another list. Any old list, from any old file filled with the names of foreigners.
Forestieri
– that was the Italian word for foreigners. A nice-sounding word for a-not-so-nice meaning. The Black List had 1,500 Italians of ‘dangerous character’ on it.

Making lists was the new preoccupation all over Europe. Italy was no exception. In Italy, coincidentally, the word
forestiere
was being stamped on documents. Mostly these were secret documents kept by crazy Mussolini supporters. Meanwhile in Milan, at La Scala, Tito Gobi playing Leporello sang ‘La Lista’ from
Don Giovanni
to rave reviews.

While, unseen by any audience, Fear entered the arena. Underneath its cloak it wore the red and black stripes of Terror and its smile revealed a mouth of jagged glass. But
still
no one was taking much notice.

And now, to counteract this secret business, this gathering together of mutterings and rumours, a frantic happiness filled the cities and small towns of England’s green and fragile land.

Artists hadn’t started designing their classic posters yet. Patriotism hadn’t quite grown into big business. And waiting-for-it-to-happen hadn’t become a National Obsession. Not yet. So laughter and champers and ice cream with fresh strawberries were still possible. The weather, happily glorious, helped with the deception.

Most nights Rose climbed down the honeysuckle backwards, landing with a barely audible thump on the flowerbed. Agnes, complaining of stray cats flattening the plants under her daughter’s window, wondered why no one ever caught them. No one ever saw Pinky Wilson standing with one hand in his pocket looking up at their window again. Perhaps Cecily had imagined it after all. Once down, Rose ran to the shed behind the tennis court and wheeled her bike away. Then in the darkness, keeping
the sound of the sea beside her at all times, she headed for the funfair. Bright lights awaited her. And candyfloss. And someone, probably Carlo, took a photograph that still stands in its silver frame on the mantelpiece in the old house. Agnes must have found it among Rose’s belongings and put it there as a reminder of the Secret Life of her Rose.

It was the same photograph Cecily would stare at on her return to the old home these twenty-nine years later, seeing it the moment she walked into the drawing room, her coat hanging limply from her shoulders. Rose, her sister, staring up at the lights, laughing, head thrown back with the distant horns of summer imprinted on her face.

Cecily remembered it as though it were yesterday.

There was the darn on the left shoulder of her sister’s dress, the rip where the small posy of lily-of-the-valley had been pinned. There were Rose’s pearly white teeth that the dentist knew about. Without those teeth there would have been no lovely smile, no pretty mouth, no body to bury underneath Rose’s headstone. Agnes had had plenty to think of when she looked at those teeth made with the calcium from her own bones. Those teeth had outlived Rose and when Cecily returned they smiled at her from within their silver frame with a long-ago, life-is-full-of-promise smile.

The ballet people weren’t the only visitors in Bly that August. A gipsy coming to the door told Cecily there was a circus there, too. It had camped just outside on the hill, with a proper magician’s tent and a collapsible big top and a crow that was able to turn white when it saw that someone was going to die. But Agnes coming to see who Cecily was talking to, tried to shut the door. She feared the gipsy’s sun-darkened skin and the bunches of rosemary they sold. So she banged the front door in their faces. Ignoring their curses.

‘Yea’ll be opening this door all right,’ one of the women cried, before turning away. ‘Yea’ll be opening it for a coffin, yea’ll see!’

And she grinned a toothless grin at Cecily so that Agnes, pulling the edges of
her
mouth together as though it were a purse string, pulled her daughter away.

‘It was only a penny,’ Aunty Kitty said.

She had been standing in the shadows, bare feet on uneven flagstones, unnoticed.

‘You should have bought some rather than…’

Cecily’s Aunt Kitty had the scent of flowers on her. As if she had been rolling in a field of them. Her clothes were crumpled and kissed by pollen.

‘You had better wash your dress,’ Agnes said, sharply.

Then she saw Cecily standing in the doorway, still listening, and got into a different kind of fury. Less understandable, more allowable, unrestrainable and all-of-a-sudden.

‘Why
do
you keep eavesdropping, Cecily? Wherever I turn you’re there. Haven’t you got anything to do?’

‘Let’s go pod the peas,’ Aunty Kitty said soothingly, pea-shooting looks at her sister. ‘Let’s do them together.’ And then, when Cecily ran on ahead into the kitchen, ‘Don’t be so hard on her Agnes. Don’t take it out on her.’

But Cecily, who loved her mother with a can’t-get-close-enough-to-give-you-a-hug sort of love, didn’t like the tone of Aunty Kitty’s voice on this occasion.

‘Do they hate each other?’ she asked Rose that night.

Rose was doing her nails. She was clearly going out again tonight.

‘No,’ she said, her head bent in concentration. ‘It’s just that Daddy’s in love with Aunt Kitty. That’s all.’