The Last Pier Page 10

  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.

  10.

  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 revi
ews.

  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.’

  11.

  IN THE OLD room with its scrapyard of dead insects piled in corners (a leg here, a wing there), on a mattress dampened as though with water from the seabed, Cecily lay pinned back by thoughts. It was a new August morning in a new peacetime decade but old thoughts held her like pins driven through the heart of a butterfly. A 1939 life existing in a 1989 August.

  The thoughts were so loud they almost excluded the voices that lived in her head. There were some good things about returning, then.

  Summer was ending with a few soft apologetic wet days and the leaves of the walnut tree, getting the message, were beginning to fall. There were black edges on everything and suffocation seemed imminent. Outside the long brushes of rain brought the ghost of Rose wandering in. She was eating an orange and looked well kissed.

  Perhaps I should not have come, thought Cecily, for the old home seemed to have forgotten her. She tried not to inhale the ghost of her sister clinging like spider’s breath to her bed. Instead she began stocktaking, starting with the room itself. She counted the hours and the days and months and the years since she had last been here. In its way it was still a cared-for room, she decided. True, the moisture in the air had buckled and softened the Snakes and Ladders box. And the jigsaw puzzle (Genuine Lumar No.47 The Estuary) had lost most of its pieces. And the dress that once had seemed like a river of silky splendour was faded and moth-papery. But everything else, even the shoes made for dancing, the books about the girls from St Trinian’s, the cut-out pictures from Picture Post, the stockings in their box, were still tidy in decay. The room was like a unit in an antique market where things were sold for a bob or two. Social history, Cecily imagined the stall-holders calling it.

  ‘It’s having quite a revival. Look how small their waists were, then!’

  Yes, that was what they would say. Where had she been when her life was dissolving into history? Walking on a beach near Portofino? On the edge of Lake Trasimeno?

  Taking herself across the decades that had passed, it must have been the late sixties by then, she remembered the man with a silk handkerchief who had approached her. He had breath that smelt of garlic but she had not minded. Nor had she minded when he had suggested they have dinner together. Candlelit, she remembered.

  ‘You have extraordinary bones,’ the man, she couldn’t remember his name now, had told her. ‘Do you know that?’

  And he had run his finger across her cheek.

  ‘Like a bird’s,’ he had said.

  The waiter poured wine. Outside, obscured by the darkness, was the sea, or the lake. Some kind of water, anyway. Cecily hadn’t cared which. She hadn’t cared when the man had confessed his wife was dying of Alzheimer’s.

  ‘I am dealing with a different person, now,’ he had said.

  His voice had been very low and Cecily wondered if perhaps he sang bass in a choir or whether it was simply the voice of seduction.

  ‘Every day,’ he said, heavily, ‘she forgets a little more.’

  Cecily had wondered where the unknown forgetful woman was?

  ‘I have a helper once a week. Tonight is my night off.’

  He had looked deep into her eyes.

  ‘If you like,’ Cecily said eventually, having savoured for a moment the power of silence.

  The shadows from the candles made soft little hollows under her cheeks. The voices in her head had gone to sleep just as though they were caged birds over whom
a black cloth had been thrown. Maybe, thought Cecily, this is the one. She knew she was behaving like a woman searching for a pebble on a pebbly beach.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her later in her hotel room. ‘Didn’t you?’

  He sounded like Geoff. Cecily saw he was transparently interested in himself. She doubted she would be his preferred woman had he any choice in the matter.

  ‘Don’t you like me?’ the man asked.

  Oh not again! groaned one of the voices.

  Cecily had a sudden glimpse of the beach at home. Floodlit by flames. And she saw, with awful clarity, Carlo Molinello laughing at a long-forgotten joke.

  ‘We used to have fantastic sex,’ the man told her a bit later on, trying again. ‘My wife and I. Before…’

  Cecily nodded quickly, hoping he couldn’t hear the twin voices giggling.

  Ask him if you can catch Alzheimer’s, one of them said.

  Useful for you if you could! said the other.

  Yes, thought Cecily, wiping her thighs in the bathroom, knowing it was all over. In a moment he would get angry and call her frigid.

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy any of it?’ he shouted on cue. ‘Are you Catholic?’

  Cecily was aware of the twins rolling around on the memory-strewn floor of her head, laughing.

  ‘A young girl like you,’ the man said. ‘How weird!’

  Cecily noticed how he checked to see if his shirt was creased.

  There was unease in his voice. Here it comes, thought Cecily.

  ‘Are you frigid? There are books, you know… you might consult a doctor…’

  Time to get rid of him, the voices had said in unison. Before it gets nasty.

  An hour after, with the water from the shower running in rivulets down her slim hips, she saw the hollows in her cheeks had deepened with the night. Outside through the open window, tangerine flowers scented the air. Her brief recall of Carlo Molinello had unnerved her. It was one of those moments when she might have thought of returning home but, as always happened, the thought was engulfed by an overwhelming desire for sleep. So that the next day and the day after that she would walk around as if drugged until the thought, expelled from her mind, would release its grip on her and she could let herself focus on the sunshine.