The Last Pier (26 page)

Exchanged; like people taking clothes back to the shop.

Please can I have my life back?

In a different colour?

This one doesn’t suit me.

A car drove past. And then another. Two cars on a side road were unusual in this part of the world. Cecily marvelled at the way her mind could hold so many thoughts. When a cock crowed in the distance, the sound separated into two parts, like a document clipped to another document.

In spite of the wetness, the man who had been watching the house was back standing patiently next to the lamp post. In spite of the gloom he was wearing dark glasses. He was eating chips and seemed to be waiting for an imaginary bus. Cecily both did, and did not, notice. The file in her head marked ‘irrelevant’ was only half-open. The man looked hard at the tall hollyhocks growing over the wall. As if he were studying rare flowering biennials.

Cecily ate two oat crackers with some cottage cheese. And then drank some tea. She picked up the two-part document that she had discarded in her flight and stared at it. Did it matter, after so long, who her mother really was? Was her real mother going to make her dresses? Kiss her? Comb her hair a hundred times a night for years and years? And did it matter if her aunt knitted her a cardigan instead? The questions puzzled her, as did the small shift in her upper chest, somewhere in the region where her heart was. It was not raining in the house, yet her face remained wet.

Agnes holding her tight, kissing her in that last moment, voice muffled, before Cecily boarded the train. It was only now that she saw the sweetness in the gesture. Agnes, the family dressmaker, making Rose’s made-to-dance-in dress. Agnes’ gentle hand on first Rose’s waist, and then Cecily’s, pinning a skirt, breathing down her neck, her calloused, nimble fingers caressing a leg as she measured it.

An aunt loving like a mother.

An aunt breathing like a mother.

It would have been easier to shatter the illusion, to refuse to care.

To ruin a small life.

To refuse to be party to a crime.

What Agnes did was much harder. Cecily saw. She didn’t deserve to be punished for her crime.

All it took was two clipped-together sheets of paper for years of good work to be undone.

SO WHO ELSE
had known these terrible secrets?

‘Oh Daddy!’ cried Cecily, switching on a light that had no bulb in it.

Identity was everything.

The house had darkened; rain clouds hid the sun. Lighting a candle, she poured herself a drink. Then she opened the book marked
Mass Observation.
It was as if she was determined to look for other shocks.

He does not need to tell me to protect
C
, Agnes had written in an angry scrawl.

When? When had she written it?

Agnes had taken in her niece Cecily out of love for her sister, knowing Selwyn was the father. Was it possible? She had wanted to save Kitty from ruin. But when she held the scrap of life (three days old and unwanted already) in her arms she had discovered love of a different kind.

After Rose was born Agnes had wanted another child but nothing happened. Selwyn was too busy sowing his oats elsewhere and Agnes, unaware of what was going on under her nose, blamed herself for her secondary childlessness. Kitty, wandering in and out of Palmyra House, breezing through the high wheat fields in unsuitable shoes, was no different from the restless girl she used to be. If Agnes had occasionally caught her husband looking at her sister with a deep oblique pulse of feeling, she had assumed it had been because they had once been close.

But one summer she was forced to admit what she had ignored. It was during one of Kitty’s brief visits to the farm,
which Rose so hated. Agnes, hurrying through her chores, collecting eggs before meeting the school bus, glanced up and saw her sister by the open window, looking out over the harvest fields. Kitty looked as though she had just woken from a nap. Her skin, even from this distance, was as oily as a pear hidden in a drawer for too long.

It was hot. The heat swept across the field carrying the faint sound of the tractor. In the shimmering waves of light Agnes saw her sister turn and look towards it. Presently the tractor drew towards the very edge of the field and Agnes saw that it wasn’t Bellamy but Selwyn who was driving. The reflection of the sun on Selwyn’s face was green and flame-like. There was a smear of oil where he had wiped his hand across his cheek.

As Agnes walked slowly back to the house with her basket of eggs, Kitty appeared in a white dress, hair fastened, wearing white flat-heeled shoes. She was walking towards the half-harvested field. It occurred to Agnes that the field held the last of what she considered to belong to her. And Kitty was walking towards it.

Later when she went out with the can of tea, the tractor had moved away on a half-circuit and Kitty was nowhere in sight. There wasn’t a sound except that of a yellow hammer bleating its song in a patch of burnt hedgerow. She walked past the burnt stubble where some corn had caught fire a few days before. Suddenly they emerged, Selwyn, head thrown back, laughing. To Agnes they were two parts of the same story and she was struck by how much was carelessly written across their faces.

She had, Cecily read, been handed to Agnes by a nun. Asleep. While her mother Kitty stood in a loose white cotton dress, hair scrubbed back, frightened eyes saying no to everything. No, she didn’t want to see Selwyn, not now, not ever. What lies!

And after that, night after night, alone with only the scent of tobacco flowers coming in through the window, Agnes had watched over her two little girls. Alone.

‘She’s not my sister,’ Rose said.

‘You will grow to love her,’ Agnes told her.

‘Rubbish,’ Rose said.

She shook her head so hard her teeth almost rattled. No one had taken account of Rose in the plans.

‘You spoilt little bitch!’ Kitty said.

And she slapped Rose before Agnes could stop her. Rose raised her hand and then let it fall but they saw the look she gave her aunt. After that Kitty was careful to keep her distance.

Blaming herself, for she had begged her sister to at least be an aunt to Cecily, Agnes understood that she had made her own bed. Her husband was disturbed to have them both under the same roof, occupying the bed with one sister while desiring the other.

Time passed and Rose began taking life with a sprinkling of salt. Nothing was believable any more. Her father’s cool hand on her head made her shiver. She never called Aunt Kitty ‘Aunt’, any more. And it pleased her that Selwyn was hurt by such coldness. Joe of course was at boarding school. He didn’t care much.

And in the fairy tales Rose now began telling Cecily, Joe was always a bystander. The pair of boots that Puss wore, the servant at the Beast’s palace, the footman who carried the glass slipper. That, Cecily remembered, was Joe’s role.

A few pages were torn out here.

Ah! thought Cecily. Here it was.

And then…

Cecily swallowed. She could imagine Rose’s voice all right. Full of disdain.

‘She’s your half-sister.’

‘Half?’ Rose demanded, and she went out.

Bellamy must have caught her crying. He was in the top field unblocking the dyke. A corncrake flew across the bleached sky. Bellamy must have been twelve but already he was more than a head taller than Rose. He watched over her daily after that, never prying, teaching her, after a fashion, the ways of the
countryside. It was because of him that Rose still loved Palmyra Farm. Inseparable for that brief moment in time.

Sometimes, when she thought no one was watching, Agnes wrote, she noticed Rose display a curious tenderness for this child with only half of everything and no knowledge of who her real mother was.

‘Are you going to tell her?’ she had asked once.

‘One day, perhaps,’ Agnes had replied. ‘When she’s your age.’

And then she asked the question Agnes had been dreading.

‘Doesn’t Kitty care?’

Reading, Cecily felt her eyes blur over the answer.

Cecily skipped a page.

Kitty! Had Agnes ever understood how her own sister had betrayed Selwyn?

Cecily turned a few more pages.

‘A kind of innocence is about to vanish,’ Lucio said. ‘A sort of magic.’

‘But I thought magic was just for children,’ Agnes replied.

‘No, no, that isn’t what I mean,’ he insisted. ‘There’s a kind of pagan enchantment in existence, here in England; still. Something untamed, left over from another era.’

It was going to be lost he had said, pointing upwards towards the sheltering sky. Fish-shaped spots of moonlight had swum in the darkness; a bat moved its cloak, about to perform a burlesque, making them both laugh.

‘Perhaps,’ Lucio had told Agnes, holding her close. ‘I’m simply in love and talking nonsense!’

Further on, Agnes had written,

The diary stopped. There were pages missing but a photograph was stuck to a page, it showed Cecily in Agnes’ arms, waving her blurry hands. She had a baby expression on her face.

DRUNK NOW, CECILY
closed Agnes’ notebook knowing that while some things were a little clearer, others were still obscured. Shock had slowed her down but finding another piece of paper she wrote:

Matters Outstanding.

Visit the grave. If I must.

Whose fault was it? Mine.

Would it have changed anything if we hadn’t met Daddy that night?

She shook her head.

The pyrotechnics of that night, the high-wire acts of heartbreaking daring were far worse than any detonated bomb. Worse than a war brought on by an enemy.

When the news of a fire on the pier and the discovery of the charred remains of a female who could well be her daughter reached her, Agnes’ first confused thought was that Cecily had gone to the seafront in the middle of the night. But then she saw, on her mad dash up to the girls’ bedroom (which someone had locked from the inside) that neither of them were there. It was at this point she broke down. It was how Robert Wilson found her. Robert Wilson on his way
back
to Palmyra House, following a police car that carried Selwyn Maudsley. Robert Wilson grim-faced, but still not in full possession of all the terrible facts, colliding with a soaking wet and white-faced Cecily. Other feet would soon follow, traipsing over the house, turning on lights, forgetting about the blackouts in their eagerness to be distracted by something more immediate than this wretched war with its darkness and its unknown dangers.

While over by the pier the fire was lighting up the sky. It didn’t seem to care about Mr Hitler, the Prime Minister or the rules of the Home Office. The fire had its own rules.

Imagine the scene.

September 3rd. At midnight (or thereabouts) Rose left. Tom, waving a jar of glow-worms, and Cecily hell-bent on saving her sister from Captain Pinky the traitor, had followed soon after.

Children copying adult games.

Tom had caught twenty-seven glow-worms, he would tell Agnes afterwards.

Outside a star crossed the sky like a useless wish. Cecily caught its flight with the corner of her eye but failed to make one. A shock like cold electricity darted up her arm and into her heart for Selwyn was standing on the spot where the star had fallen. He had just lit a cigar.

‘Well, well,’ he said, but he didn’t sound all that angry. ‘So what are you two up to?’

In the town a little earlier, the Molinellos had eaten their evening meal in silence. All day the ice-cream parlour had filled up with worried Italians desperate to listen to talk about news bulletins so that Mario decided to close the shop. He did not wish to be seen as being frivolous and besides, his daughter Franca was inconsolable at Joe’s departure.

There was also another issue on Mario’s mind, one a little difficult to discuss with Anna. He ate his excellent
risotto ai funghi
in silent abstraction, slurping a little for the food was hot and he was hungry. Anna watched him. It was in this unusually subdued atmosphere that, in the end, Lucio raised the subject.

‘Mussolini is going to cause trouble for us,’ he said.

‘Rubbish!’ Mario said quickly, his mouth full of food.

He wished Anna would stop staring at him.

‘It’s true,’ Lucio said.

Mario looked hard at his brother who pushed his plate of almost untouched risotto away.

‘I’ve already told you,’ Lucio told him.

‘What’s wrong with the risotto?’ Anna asked. ‘Why is no one eating?’

No one answered.

‘Just because war’s been announced,’ Anna said with exceptional forcefulness, ‘it doesn’t mean we don’t need to eat.’

She was looking at Franca’s bent head.

‘I’m not hungry,’ Lucio said. ‘And I’ve got to go out soon.’

‘I am!’ Carlo said, helping himself.

‘Perhaps we should leave the social club,’ Giorgio suggested.

‘Good idea,’ Carlo said.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Anna told him, switching to Italian.

‘That’s a ridiculous idea. Why should we leave the club? It’s for Italians. We are Italians.’

‘It’s a good idea,’ Lucio said. ‘I mean, because of the rumours.’

Instantly everyone jumped on him.

‘What rumours?’

‘Is there something you know that we don’t, Lucio?’

‘You’d better tell us.’

Lucio looked at his brother. Tell them, his look said.

‘It’s all nonsense,’ Mario cried. ‘It’s only that old fear about the Fascists.’

‘Ah!’ Anna said, triumph in her eyes. ‘I knew it!’

She looked like someone who had been digging for a splinter in a piece of flesh and had finally found it. Mario tried another tactic.

‘It’s a stupid rumour. And it doesn’t affect us.’

‘So why are you worried?’ Anna asked.

In answer her husband reached for the carafe and poured himself more wine.

‘I’m not. I’m just concerned about supplies now that the war is definite. You know our stock of wine will diminish.’

‘Oh Papi, this war isn’t going to last that long!’ Beppe told him. ‘We couldn’t possibly drink our cellar dry before it finishes!’

Carlo laughed, uneasily.

‘What is it, Papi?’ Franca asked.

Mario drained his glass and turned to his daughter.

‘
Cara,
you must not worry about Joe,’ he told her, softly. ‘He will be safe. But… Lucio is right, this rumour is a different matter.’

They heard a seagull’s plaintive cry. Mario looked around the table. Everyone he loved was in this room.

‘It is about the arrest of some Jewish people I know,’ he said, heavily and at last.

The silence lengthened.

‘In Germany?’

‘No.’

‘Where then?’

‘In London,’ Mario said, reluctantly.

‘One of the tribunals that decide the fate of aliens,’ Lucio told them, taking up the story, ‘has interned a group of Jews. Guido Murucchi is one of them. He’s one of our suppliers.’

‘How d’you mean, interned? Where?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lucio said.

Without looking at his wife, Mario lit a cigarette. Normally Anna did not allow smoking at the dinner table but now she said nothing. If they could intern Jews…

‘Exactly,’ Lucio told her.

‘Does it mean they’re prisoners, Papi?’ Franca asked.

‘Yes. It’s a prison camp.’

‘It can’t be true,’ Beppe said.

Disbelief spread on the tablecloth, staining it with fear. The smoke from Mario’s cigarette rose above their heads like incense. Anna wouldn’t look at him. She desperately wanted to go to her grotto and light a candle. The last of the
sugo
lay congealed in its dish.

‘Oh my God,’ Franca murmured.

Her eyes were magnified by unshed tears. She stared at her uncle. He had not talked to her but Anna had told her that Lucio loved Joe’s mother. Their families were intertwined like trees in an orchard. Suddenly Franca was desperately afraid.

‘We have to be careful,’ Lucio told them. ‘We must get out of the social club, immediately.’

‘But
Zio,
we are not Jews.’

‘We are Italian,’ Lucio told his nephews sternly. ‘We are not English. I told your father this a year ago. The social club is not a good thing.’

A chill went around the warm, homely room.

‘Rubbish,’ Mario bellowed, galvanised, outraged, ready for a fight.

He began speaking in dialect.

‘That would amount to closing the door to our home. What about our relatives in Bratto? What about our passports? What if we
can’t
get our passports renewed? What then?’

‘Papi, I don’t want to go back to Italy,’ Franca cried.

Lucio drained his wine.

‘Mussolini is Mr Hitler’s friend.’

‘Italy is neutral.’

Anna rose from the table. There was no use in any further speculation. She indicated to Franca to help clear the table. Her daughter needed to keep busy. Joe would be back in a fortnight. As if on cue the telephone rang and everyone looked weakly at it. It was Joe.

But later, after the rosary, after her prayers, when they were alone in bed, Anna asked Mario what was really going on.

‘Nothing’s going on. Britain is at war, that’s all.’

‘So what has the social club got to do with that?’

‘We’re Italian.’

‘So you keep saying.’

He was in two minds, uncertain how to go on.

‘But we might not always be neutral. Have you heard people talk of the fifth column, at the club?’

Of course she had heard the expression. But why would it affect them?

‘Fascists. The British are worried about enemy aliens.’

Anna was puzzled. Mario was talking in a strange way as though he was repeating something he had heard.

‘Who is saying this?’

Again he hesitated.

‘Lucio found out. But you must not repeat a word of this. Understand?’

She nodded in the darkness. But how did Lucio know?

‘
Senti
,
Anna, listen to me. Lucio is involved in certain dangerous things, things he can’t talk about. He knows that sooner or later all foreigners in England will be in danger. That includes Italians.’

Still she didn’t understand.

‘There is a feeling amongst some people in the British government, that the fifth column is growing. That Mussolini has Italian spies here. We are Italian. Now do you understand?’

‘But how does he know all this?’

Mario hesitated.

‘I don’t know. Obviously he is involved in certain – how shall I say – certain kinds of
work.
And… he’s been tailing that Wilson man… for some time. He’s uncovered something.’

Mario paused.

‘Is Selwyn Maudsley involved in this, too? Are all the English people suspicious of us?’ Anna asked, alarmed.

‘Selwyn, no. Why? He’s just a farmer.’

‘Why hasn’t Lucio said anything, before… about the Wilson man?’

‘He has. We’ve talked about it. But there was no point in worrying you before the war was announced.’

Night-time sea-light rode into the room on the back of a pale moon.

‘There are more than twenty thousand Italians in Great Britain. There is a file with names in it in Whitehall. Lucio’s got copies of it.’

‘How?’

‘He stole them,’ Mario said, abruptly. ‘Don’t ask me who from, but he knows what he’s talking about.’

Anna was silent. She did not dare ask if the Molinellos were in this file too.

‘So?’ Selwyn asked, them. ‘What were your plans?’

Cecily thought he was laughing. Tom held up the jar of worms.

‘Collecting glow-worms, Tom?’

‘No,’ Cecily said firmly, deciding. ‘We’re going to go and warn Rose.’

‘Warn her? Of what? And more to the point, where is she?’

There was a silence. Now they were all in trouble.

‘Not in her bed, obviously,’ murmured Selwyn.

Later, when she was much older, rerunning the moment, Cecily would think her father had sounded abstracted. Or perhaps it was simply disinterest on his part. They had been caught climbing out of the window when they should have been asleep and he had felt it was his duty to reprimand them. It was Cecily who had been too quick, too ready with information.

‘We want to warn her,’ she said again, stalling for time.

‘
Warn
her? That she will be in trouble if mother finds out? I should think so. Where’s she gone?’

‘She’s in danger,’ Tom told Selwyn.

Cecily nodded.

‘She’s being followed.’

‘We know this for a fact,’ Tom told him. ‘Captain Pinky’s following her.’

Cecily pushed him.

‘Ssh! He means Robert Wilson,’ she told her father.

‘What’s that you say? Captain Pinky!’

Cecily thought her father sounded more interested now.

‘We’re not supposed to call him that, Mummy said, but he’s been following Rose. So we wanted to warn her.’

Where’s Rose gone?’

Cecily was silent. Should she tell him?

‘Come on, C, where’s your sister gone?’

Still Cecily hesitated. Her father’s voice had changed and become the way it sometimes got when he spoke to Agnes.

‘She’s…’

‘Why on earth should she want to go out at this hour?’

It was Tom who spilled the last of the beans.

‘She’s gone to the Ness,’ he said.

Selwyn turned to look at him. To Cecily, her father seemed suddenly to have got taller. He towered above them both as he took Cecily by the shoulders and shook her.

‘
Are you sure
?’

Dumbly Cecily nodded.

‘Why? Answer me! It’s important.’

‘I don’t know…’

‘Because…’ Tom said

‘
What
? Because what? Tell me.’

‘Because… she’s meeting Captain Pinky… He’s a spy, Daddy. And we think he’s trying to capture her.’

Her voice fading, Cecily watched as her father turned and walked abruptly towards his bicycle leaning against the wall by the rambling rose.

‘Go back inside the house,’ he said softly over his shoulder, ‘the scullery door is open. Go on. I’ll talk to you later.’

They stood motionless but he stopped, waiting until they went reluctantly back. Only then did he cycle away.

Inside the scullery all they could see was Tom’s jar of glow-worms.

‘I think we should follow him,’ Tom said.

Cecily was uneasy. She had no idea why it was, but her sense of foreboding had increased.

‘I think your father might be in danger too,’ Tom was saying. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

But they would never catch Selwyn up.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Tom said. ‘Come on, we’re wasting time. Your sister’s out there too. I think Captain Pinky is a dangerous man. Spies usually are. He might have a gun.’

Somewhere in the back of her mind Cecily registered the fact that Tom was enjoying the excitement but her sense of dismay at having told on her sister sat like sour milk in her stomach. Perhaps though, Tom was right, and if they found Rose quickly then she could explain everything.

They ran over to the shed and collected the two bicycles. Then, with Tom balancing the jar of glowing worms on his handlebar, they cycled the half a mile in an unsteady line toward the river end of the Ness. In front of them a large black car on silent wheels moved with a soft purr. When they slowed down to take in the bend in the road, it gathered speed and disappeared. Chilled to the bone, Cecily cycled on.