The Last Pier (31 page)

‘My mother is incredible,’ Carlo said. ‘Her strength has carried us through these terrible years. She is the one who told me to look for you.’

‘Why now?’ Cecily found herself asking in almost a panic of tenderness.

The words came as a croak from her lips. She was unused to speaking. Carlo hesitated.

‘She heard Kitty is dead. She wanted to know how you were. She… we… love you.’

‘And Franca?’ whispered Cecily. ‘How is she these days?’

Again Carlo hesitated. Then he took Cecily’s cold hands in both his.

‘She had a son,’ he said. ‘I am an uncle. You are an aunt.’

Cecily was speechless.

Certain things were beyond words.

When Cecily had recovered, she wanted to know about Carlo’s eye.

‘An accident,’ he said, wiping the tears from his face, too.

He took off the glasses and she saw his glass eye next to his one good one.

‘I was on the beach in La Spezia with some boys. We were aimless, all of us. An ended war takes all aims along with it.’

They had found two metal rods and some round stones and decided to play golf. Carlo had stood behind one of the boys who swung the club. It had swung into Carlo’s face and shattered his sunglasses. Some of the glass had embedded itself into his right eye.

Later, after he had been rushed screaming to the
pronto soccorso,
they had told him he would have to lose the eye. He was just twenty-one.

HISTORY HAD ALWAYS
behaved as though it were a flippable coin. You flicked one side over and you found Warfare. Then you flipped it again and you found Life. Neither side made any sense, although there had been plenty of questions asked on that terrible night. It was Cecily’s turn to finish her own story.

‘What were you doing out?’ someone had asked Cecily, angrily.

‘How did you know Rose had gone to the old pier?’

‘What did you say to your father?’

‘If you knew she was meeting someone, why didn’t you tell me?’ this last from Agnes.

There was no sign of Tom. He had vanished as soon as the police came.

‘Daddy…’ Cecily had whispered. ‘I told him… she was being followed by…’

But then she had fallen silent for Robert Wilson was standing close by (before he drove off in his car to interview Cecily’s father).

Two policemen were taking notes and the firemen were still at The Scene Of The Crime.

‘You do realise what you’ve done, don’t you?’ someone, Cecily seemed to think it was Kitty, asked. ‘
You!
’

Questions and opinions whizzed backwards and forwards like tennis balls. One-love. Two-love. There weren’t any words to describe what happened that night. Although there were those who tried to find some.

‘A man constructs his own fate out of his sense of the world,’ the philosopher amongst them said.

‘What must it have been like for her?’ those of little imagination said.

‘Our hearts go out to the whole family,’ those who prided themselves on fairness said.

‘The fault lies with the wife and mother,’ those who played the blame card said.

And, ‘It could have been avoided,’ those with hindsight said.

Agnes was crying. She had to go to the hospital. Something about dental records. Did she have toothache then?

No one told Cecily
anything.

‘My life is ruined,’ Agnes again, finally, her voice bloated by tears.

Who had she been talking to?

‘You’ve killed your sister. You’re going to have to live with this forever.
Forever
.’

Cecily’s thoughts had floated above the cacophony of sounds. It was just her feet that were rooted to the ground.

He did it.

You did it.

He did it.

But where had Tom got to? How could he have vanished, leaving C to face the music?

‘Where’s Tom?’ she asked, in a whisper.

No one heard her.

‘We were trying to save her from Captain Pinky,’ she said.

No one heard her.

‘I heard Aunt Kitty telling Daddy that Pinky Wilson was a bad man,’ she said, her whisper getting smaller with each word.

‘I was feeding your father lines,’ Aunty Kitty snarled, her face close up and distorted, angry tongue trailing spit. ‘Oh how I wish you hadn’t been born!’

Spit from Aunt Kitty had collected on Cecily’s cheek but she dared not wipe it away. She decided in that moment she deserved
spit on her face. It was a decision she would never share with anyone.

Things had changed with the flick of a flippable coin.

Some time after, when she had written her own conclusions in stone, Agnes had tried to hug Cecily. Tried and failed. Cecily was no longer a huggable girl. She would grow into an unhuggable person.

Then, at the police station Selwyn would be exposed like a peeled banana before being informed of a few things.

What had happened to his daughter was murder.

The penalty for espionage was death.

He could be hanged.

Sixteen agents had just been hanged in Wandsworth Prison.

There would be a trial to determine Selwyn’s fate.

Being in love with your wife’s sister was bad enough. Believing what she told you was worse.

Even the German double agents could do better than that.

Thanks to Kitty, Robert Wilson had known about Selwyn for a very long time.

Like Selwyn, Robert Wilson had loved the wrong person. Although Selwyn was given most of the pieces of the puzzle, no one thought to give any to Cecily. Later on she worked out some things for herself. She didn’t always reach the correct conclusion. She apportioned blame in strange ways, taking most of it for herself.

She never visited her father, never saw him again after Rose’s funeral when she had felt that small solidarity towards him as he tried not to cry. Now she told Carlo, ‘My mother was obsessed with roses. Whenever she visited me she brought cushions and scraps of cloth, or cups and saucers. All with prints of roses on them.’

It was the first complete piece of information Cecily had given anyone. She gave it unasked, freely, and Carlo, understanding the effort it took, let her speak.

‘She was afraid… she thought I had forgotten Rose.’

Carlo waited.

‘She didn’t know… the awful place I was living in, like a dark well… It was impossible to think of anything but Rose. If it hadn’t been for that stupid game… I went along with Tom. Don’t you see?’ she asked, when Carlo said nothing, ‘I felt…
responsible
…’

Carlo nodded. Yes, he understood how she felt. He saw the well she had been down, he smelt the dark, dankness of it. He too had been close to the ground. Buried alive with Guilt.

‘How many times,’ whispered Cecily, ‘how many times do you think I re-ran that night…and Tom…’

What had happened to Tom?

Cecily shrugged.

‘He was sent home, afterwards.’

‘Agnes told my mother that Selwyn had been watched for a long time,’ Carlo said. ‘Kitty was the one,’ Cecily said suddenly. ‘She watched your family. She worked for Robert Wilson.’

The clouds in her head parted with force. She heard Kitty’s voice clearly. Kitty, her birth mother. Talking about her own sister.

‘That Italian is having an affair with my sister,’ she had told Robert Wilson.

It had been long ago but the words were clear.

‘
She
told him,’ Cecily told Carlo with the certainty of her library-listening years.

Looking back was dangerous. Hadn’t ancient myths advised against it? They were both stunned. The shock rocked them on their feet and threw them towards each other.

‘I thought I loved your sister,’ Carlo said, slowly. Carefully.

Cecily nodded. Careful too.

‘I saw you together,’ she said. ‘By the lilac bush. At the tennis match.’

Carlo smiled. The smile was as Cecily remembered it, only now there was infinite sadness in the mix.

‘You don’t know how I regretted you seeing us like that,’ he said, adding as she said nothing, ‘I thought that was why you vomited!’ And then he said, ‘It was Bellamy who loved her more. Mine was just a fantasy to compete with him.’

Cecily was remembering.

But whom had Rose loved? Was it Robert Wilson? Or Bellamy? No one really knew. Rose was Rose. She wanted everyone’s love.

‘My mother knew,’ Carlo said. ‘She knew how you felt. Wait until she grows up, was what she said.’

Cecily blushed.

‘I was jealous,’ she admitted.

‘Don’t be,’ Carlo was smiling again. ‘You can’t be, not looking as you do.’

She had become so used to expecting nothing sincere that a simple compliment pierced her.

Outside, in the disappointing summer light, the day was ending. Tomorrow would be a different sort of day. The flippable coin of history had disappeared for the moment.

There would be photographs published of the people who, once upon a time, had been called
aliens.
Soon someone would decide to build a wing in a museum to commemorate what had happened. People would put history behind glass. Objects like hair, and shoes and spectacles that would end up in museums. Thousands and thousands of them. Millions. Six million, in actual fact.

In a few decades, their stories would be part of all the classic stories about wicked witches and monsters. Stories for after dark. But what could be done about the aliens who had lost their suitcases out at sea? In the middle of the Atlantic?

‘No one knows about that,’ Carlo said.

Cecily looked at him. She felt she would never be able to stop looking at him.

She felt as if she had fallen through time and into the lives of others.

She felt as though she had been kept on ice and was only now being thawed.

Some things took years to understand. That was why childhood needed to be so long.

‘Mine was cut short,’ Cecily said.

Then slowly, while holding her breath, she took Carlo’s dark glasses off. He didn’t object. He had no need of them now that the light was dying. His good eye looked out at her brightly. His glass eye reflected the sunset.

‘I never saw Daddy again,’ Cecily whispered. ‘There was no question of it while I was living with Kitty. And afterwards I couldn’t face it. So I never understood what he was protecting me from.’

Carlo nodded.

It was a Suffolk day with only small particles of colour present.

A touch of blue.

A little rose-pink.

Watercolour skies that threatened rain.

A wind that swept the curlew’s cry into the west.

Traces of sea-dissolved air.

The reproachful scent of honeysuckle.

A summer rose in a clear glass.

A day so lovely that it felt as though it could turn absence into something more solid.

What happened next had no connection with anything that had happened earlier or at any other time. It wasn’t anything that could be easily explained. Words were useless under such circumstances. Carlo saw Cecily with his one good eye and she saw him with both of hers. Three eyes considered the situation and discovered that they wanted something that would have been impossible to have ownership of, before.

What happened then was neither expected nor un-expected, just completely right.

Like two spoons that fitted together.

Or a pod with two peas in it.

Or a ring slipped onto a slender finger.

The thing that happened next was not a fairy story. Neither Cecily nor Carlo believed in them any more.

And how could it be called love when they were both convinced there was no such thing?

But although there was no one in that sad old rose-strewn room in Palmyra House to disagree,

to Carlo, Cecily had grown into a beautiful, tender woman,

while to her, he was all those things she had once believed would last forever.

What happened did so only partly out of necessity.

And what they felt was not simply loss, unspeakable and terrible.

No.

So what harm was there in what happened next?

Twenty-nine years and some days after Cecily returned.

I would like to thank Maria Serena Balestracci for her book
Arandora Star, Dall’oblio alla memoria (From Oblivion to Memory)
(2008), which I used extensively in my research into the tragedy of the Arandora Star. During the writing of the novel I also used material from Mass Observation collected during the run up to the war.

Thanks are also due to Caterina Rapetti for her help in introducing me to some of the relatives of the Italian victims of this wartime accident and I owe a considerable debt to Gillian Stern who was the first to read the text of
The Last Pier
and offer suggestions. Right from the start Gillian cared passionately about the novel.

Support also came from other sources – Professor Rosy Colombo, with her wit and insight and John Martin for his delightfully unexpected help. No one has been more behind this project, however, than my editor at Hesperus, Sorcha McDonagh, without whom publication would never have been possible.