The Last Pier (3 page)

A drop of blood spreading like an evil spell on her frock. Rose swore again.

‘I’ll tell,’ Cecily had threatened.

‘Tell then!’

‘I shall. Unless you give me a penny!’

‘What a joke, you outrageous child!’

And then Rose’s laugh fading as suddenly as it began.

AFTER THE FUNERAL
was over, Selwyn and the policemen went away together in a car. There were two other men in the convoy of police cars. One of them was Robert Wilson in his trilby. He wouldn’t look at Cecily even though she had tried to say hello.

People called him by another name. It sounded like Finch.

The police had been to Palmyra Farm several times earlier that week and one of them had talked to Cecily in a voice that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be angry or sad. His voice had made Aunt Kitty very angry.

‘Did you hear him?’ she had shouted afterwards, glaring at Cecily. ‘Anybody would think they felt sorry for the little wretch.’

‘What is the point of shouting at her?’ Cecily’s mother had asked. ‘
She’s
not the one to blame.’

‘She might have kept her mouth shut!’ Aunt Kitty snarled.

Cecily had heard the policeman tell her mother there would be no bail.

After Selwyn had gone Agnes cried harder. So, tactful for once, Cecily didn’t ask why he needed to have a government meeting when they had just buried Rose. A small, invisible suitcase that no one knew existed as yet waited in Cecily’s bedroom. Afterwards she would go to live with her Aunty Kitty.

But first, people had to stand around for ages eating cucumber sandwiches. It struck Cecily as funny that this gathering was called Awake when she herself felt as though she was dreaming. A girl from the village pub handed out plates. Normally Cecily’s mother would have asked Cecily to be helpful but today wasn’t normally, so Cecily was banished to the kitchen instead. To help Cook and the girl from the pub cut ham-into-thin-slices. The
cook was slurring her speech. Ham-cut-into-thin-slices were what Cook was concentrating on.

No one talked about Rose. The absence of war was what they talked about. You would think it was the War that had died, the way they went on blaming it. The War, it seemed, was late like Cecily’s sister.

Two children whom she knew by sight came up to the kitchen door and stared at her and the Eavesdropper became Eavesdropped-on, the Spy the Spied-on.

‘There she is! That’s her. She was talking to
herself
in the church!’

‘The one who –’

‘Shhh!’

The War’s to blame, thought Cecily. Not me. And she went on cutting ham-into-thin-slices.

‘That’s enough, Cecily,’ Cook said in her stern-slurry voice.

Cook had been crying for days.

‘It’s a great big machine,’ Cecily heard someone else say. ‘A killing machine for people.’

‘Poor little mite,’ Cook said to no one in particular. ‘It were just a game that went wrong.’

‘Pretty stupid game, eh?’

‘They meant no harm and anyway it was the boy that started it!’

‘And ’im that finished it. Don’t forget the real culprit!’

Cecily heard that the boat Rose had used to row towards the Last Pier had probably sunk.

And still there was no Tom.

Or Carlo, or even Franca.

Only Bellamy, standing in the kitchen garden, by the black iron water pump scowling and refusing to come near the house. Cook took him out a cup of tea but he pushed her hand so the tea flew all over her and the cup smashed to the ground. The guests who were Awake stopped talking and looked outside.

‘Land’s sake!’ Cook said and she started to cry, again. ‘I can’t be doing with you.’

And now, twenty-nine years, three days, twelve hours later, standing in the room that had things-brushed-under-the-carpet, Cecily was back once more. A prodigal daughter returning to an empty home, with a suitcase full of smart clothes. With ringless fingers and a divorce certificate. Thin and officially middle-aged. At long last! The letter she had received years ago was in the suitcase, too. The handwriting was still readable, the content still unbelievable. The letter said that her father, Selwyn Maudsley, had passed away and that Cecily Maudsley, next of kin, was being notified. It expressed deep sympathy and some regret. After she had read it Cecily calmly put the letter back in its envelope. Her father had joined all the other late people in the world.

Standing in the room in the soft twilight, she felt the house had developed a sly, stubborn air. So many people had stored secrets in it over the years – letters, journals, farm accounts, locks of hair, shreds of silk, sentimental rubbish of all sorts – that she felt certain some further revelations from that terrible day could leap out at her. Anything was possible.

A clock ticked.

She opened a window, let out a bee and saw the myrtle bush, grown from the cutting of some distant Maudsley bridal bouquet, still flourishing.

In the dining room a photograph hung damply over the mantelpiece like a holy picture in a disused chapel. She felt handcuffed to her childhood. So without turning on the electricity, she went upstairs hoping to unravel the golden questions that needed answering. The banister was wet. She could smell the dampness everywhere. It seemed to rise and follow her like an army of skeletons.

And because the moonlight flooded the house she failed to notice the silent figure moving with the wind across the road in full view of the window.

Upstairs her sister’s bed lay phosphorescent in the stillness. The room itself was heavy with sleep; a place kept just so, for a dead child who was never coming back. It was tidily made up, forever. Rose’s dresses, boxed up in the wardrobe, beautifully darned. Her name on a piece of paper pinned to one of them. The pin was rusty, the pierced paper discoloured. A loving hand had written the date on it.

Someone, somewhere in the centre of the town let off a firework, followed by another. One big bang followed by two others. One bright fountain of sherbet-coloured flowers followed by another rain of light. While all over Suffolk August funfairs were in full swing. The war had been dead for twenty-three years. Rose some time longer.

A week after Rose’s funeral Joe went off to fight for England and a band played loudly in Cecily’s head as he gave her a hug. Happy and Glorious, played the band.

‘It’s not your fault,’ Joe said.

His words were light. As if he didn’t want to acknowledge the weight they carried. Cecily looked at him. She badly wanted to ask him where Franca was but his eyes were so sad that she didn’t dare. There was as yet no protective membrane stretched across her emotions, which Joe might, had he looked closely, seen. But that day Joe was in a hurry to catch his train and, giving his youngest sister a last hug, headed for the town of Bly instead. The band in Cecily’s head carried on playing as she watched him go. It would still be playing long after she stopped crying.

‘So you cry when your brother leaves but not when your sister dies,’ someone, she couldn’t remember who it was, said.

Cecily’s mother had looked up angrily.

‘There’s no rule,’ Agnes said sharply, ‘to say when you should and shouldn’t cry. Leave her alone!’

No one answered back. Cecily went up to her bedroom. She wanted her roommate back out of the ground but all she got
was herself staring at herself in the mirror. White face, black hair. The same Cecily, nothing changed. She vomited. Then she picked up the silver-backed hairbrush and flung it at her reflection. This was the girl who had killed her sister Rose. Not Cecily. The mirror cracked from side to side. A trickle of blood coursed down Cecily’s leg. The curse had come upon her at long last. She wanted to wreck the room but she did not, preferring to wreck the space in her head instead.

Good girl,
said an approving voice she had never heard before.

Her mother coming in just then saw the trickle of blood running down Cecily’s leg and went to fetch a towel.

Wicked, wicked child,
said the voice.

Cecily’s mother busied herself with this New Development, tears all gone for the moment. Concentrating hard.

‘It’s the shock,’ Agnes said answering a question Cecily wasn’t interested in asking.

However, soon after, Cecily felt a weakness had begun to follow Agnes around like a stray dog sniffing at her ankles. A weakness that would force Cecily’s distraught mother to buckle under the weight of public dislike of her entire family. Cecily listened carefully to every word that was being said.

‘What possessed her to play such a foolish game?’

‘That child has always had a strange kind of imagination!’

‘The truth would have come to light anyway.’

‘Yes, but she set the ball rolling, didn’t she?’

‘She can’t stay here, Agnes, are you mad?’

‘She should leave for her own sake, you
all
should.’

‘Agnes, you can’t cope with the child. Not now! Not after such a great loss. And this latest disgrace.’

So that, perhaps in a desire to satisfy the world in some way with a public gesture, Agnes agreed; Cecily ought to go. But before she let her daughter leave Palmyra House Agnes consulted an expert on child behaviour.

All the man had were a few rumours and no real understanding of what had happened.

‘Send her away to repent,’ he said and Agnes, frowning, asked him why he used the word repent.

‘So that God will forgive her,’ the doctor told her.

He was a Baptist lay preacher on the quiet, doing two jobs, multi-tasking badly.

‘She was far too old to be playing that sort of game,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s something evil about such an imagination.’

‘Evil?’

‘Yes, evil. An innocent girl died, didn’t she?’

Cecily’s mother hesitated. She was too confused, too upset. Her world had been turned upside down. She made her decision on the advice given. Wondering, through a haze of grief and betrayal, if she were making another mistake. But perhaps Cecily
would
be better off away from Bly. For a while?

Out in the countryside the war, phoney though it was, kept everyone busy. The wireless was full of unimaginable news: dark fragments drifting through the September air.

Meanwhile overhead the planes were testing out a loose formation. Practice runs, the papers called it. The noise climbed higher and then vanished above the barrage balloons.

‘Just listen to our boys!’

‘Prepared to sacrifice their lives for us.’

Ten thousand ready to die with more to come. Very soon.

‘All right,’ Aunt Kitty said grimly. ‘It’s my turn, I can see. I’ll take the little wretch. She’s been nothing but a nuisance since she was born!’

Aunt Kitty too would do her duty.

On the day Cecily was due to leave the heavens opened. She awoke to find a pair of voices locked in the room inside her head. They had arrived too late for Rose’s funeral, they told her.

‘I’m sorry I ignored you,’ Cecily told them.

The voices grunted. They were here to stay, they said. And they demanded Cecily give them some sort of brief to follow. Cecily was still sleepy and confused, all she could think of was breakfast.

‘Do whatever you like,’ she told them.

‘Good!’ Agnes said, hearing her voice and coming in. ‘Now that you’re awake, can you help me pack your suitcase?’

Agnes spoke as if there were concrete slabs strapped to her chest. The voices in Cecily’s head were clamouring for names. How about Coming and Going, thought Cecily, not really caring. And she smiled, startling her mother with the beauty of her violet eyes.

Agnes opened the suitcase. She began to pack up a childhood that was fast disappearing into the past.

‘Come on, C,’ she said. ‘Help me. It won’t hurt to go away for a bit.’

Cecily said nothing. There was something stuck in her throat.

‘All this wretched gossip about what’s happened,’ her mother said. ‘And what you did. Let it die down.’

Like the fire, thought Cecily.

‘You can come back soon enough. After it’s forgotten… after the war. Perhaps.’

Cecily was silent.

‘It’s for the best, you know. You’ll get talked about unfairly at school. Best to start again. And you’ve always liked Aunt Kitty, haven’t you?’ her mother pleaded. ‘Good to get to know her a little?’

Together the two of them packed some clothes for the winter.

‘You’ll be back in the spring,’ her mother said turning her lovely, gentle face up towards Cecily’s closed one. ‘No point taking too many things.’

Cecily nodded.

They packed her notebook.

‘You can write a story about the things you see, C.’

They packed a book of prayers.

‘Don’t forget to say them,’ her mother said.

She never told Cecily to ask for forgiveness, she gave her a hug instead. Cecily loved her mother with a look.

They packed some envelopes and two ballpoint pens (one leaked), a rubber and a map of England. Cecily wondered if she should rub out Suffolk. If it would be better if it didn’t exist any more?

‘Promise me you will write?’ Agnes asked, her green eyes like fields under water. ‘You are going to be a writer, remember.’

But there were things you couldn’t do, like write to parts of yourself. How do you write to your arm, or your leg, for instance? Or your heart? And what could you tell your heart that it didn’t already know?

‘Anything. Nothing. Just write. Tell me you are well.’

Cecily nodded. Might she be told when her father was coming home? Agnes shook her head, ready to cry again. She looked like a thundery cloud.

Better not ask,
one of the voices in Cecily’s head advised.

Cecily shook her head.

‘Why are you shaking your head?’ her mother asked. ‘Does it hurt?’

And it was then, in that moment, that the miracle happened and her mother did the thing Cecily had been waiting for, for days and days.

She
kissed
her.

A small knot in Cecily’s heart loosened. She tried to ignore the wanting-to-cry feeling.

‘Can I take my tin?’ she asked when she could breathe again. Really what she wanted was Rose’s butterfly brooch.

‘Of course,’ Agnes said too eagerly, and packed it.

Good, good,
said the voices in unison.