The Last Pier Read online

  Outside Palmyra House, the rain stopped and Rose’s ghost disappeared. It was morning. There were seven jars of honey on the windowsill with seven drops of hardened beeswax beside them. Opening the window, Cecily saw how the honeysuckle creeper had tried and failed to grow across the wall. She would have to go into the town for food. Last night she hadn’t wanted anything, but looking at the grease-grimed shelves, the tacky dark walls, the crypt of old grief, she saw there wasn’t even a slip of soap to wash her hands with. There would be a shop, she supposed vaguely. And what was there to be anxious about? No one would remember her. There was no one left to do so.

  Grey clouds scudded across a sky that had lowered itself so far towards the ground that breathing itself was difficult. The front door would not open properly and the back door would not shut. Cecily observed the mildew in the bathroom and the crack across the frosted glass. There was a cut-throat razor blade and a blue bottle that had lost its stopper. There was a small transparent piece of alum stuck to the washbasin which itself was discoloured by water dripping from the leaking tap. And the floorboards were fretted with holes from a million termites.

  What a mess! cried the voices in dismay.

  Perhaps she should not have come.

  ‘Look!’ said the woman selling tampons to a customer at the chemist. ‘Look who’s just walked past.’

  The pharmacist took a whole bunch of prescriptions and dispensed pills into a bottle. Red pills, yellow sugar-coated capsules, white, precisely shaped ones with daggers moulded across them. The bottles held several lifetimes of pills in them. The pharmacist handed out prescriptions to the waiting sick with a little shake and a rattle, as if he were a priest at communion.

  ‘Take one three times a day,’ he murmured.

  Then he went to the back of the shop where he could get a better view. Word spread fast he knew and he had been the pharmacist in this town more or less forever. If anyone could spot a familiar face a mile away, it would be him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s her.’

  He sounded like a gamekeeper on safari who, having spotted the prey, was prepared to predict its movements to the crowd.

  ‘Turned out pretty. But for the hair, she could be Rose herself!’

  ‘They were a good-looking family,’ said the tampon-seller, remembering.

  ‘Hated her, the aunt did. God knows why. It weren’t her fault.’

  ‘Well I heard a different story…’

  ‘Oh look, she’s coming in here!’

  Cecily entered the shop like a corps de ballet dancer coming on stage, wanting to stay in line and blend in with the others. Without expecting any applause, knowing she’s just part of the whole. No one could see the elegant structure of her ribcage under her coat containing a heart fluttering like a bird. She skimmed around the edges of the shop floor now, thankfully, almost empty of noise. She picked up two bottles, shampoo and bubble bath, both green. And she walked over to the counter. It was then that all speech stopped and the pharmacist (grim-faced with the concentration of not being grim-faced) served her. Cecily’s hair was damp from the spitting rain. Her small, lovely mouth was stretched shut in a slender line. But it was her eyes that astonished them. No one had remembered how vividly violet her eyes were.

  ‘Well!’ said the pharmacist after the door had clanged shut and Cecily’s retreating figure hurried past. ‘Whatever next!’

  And he went back to his dispensing.

  ‘I knew the father,’ he added.

  And he shook his head. That sort of memory doesn’t go away in a hurry.

  The high street was quiet. Changed but vaguely familiar in ways that could only disturb. Cecily felt it holding on to its secrets, refusing to give her the clue she needed most. An answer to the question, Why?

  ‘It’s still early days,’ the voices told her, kindly. ‘Wait a little.’

  But the thick, sluggish weight in her head, the slate-grey pain had become terrible.

  It mingled with the sound of the sea, coming in from behind the houses.

  Day-old flags dragged their pointed ends to the ground. A small pearl button rolled into a drain with a death rattle. The woman who had dressed up as Bly’s answer to a Pearly Queen walked past.

  ‘My God! Cecily,’ she said.

  Cecily did not reply. The silence in her head was blistering and she hurried past the woman. The woman looked as though she’d seen a ghost. The war had been dead for twenty-three years. Why was Rose still alive, then?

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ asked yesterday’s pearly queen.

  Cecily shook her head. Everything, she wanted to say, was distorted. But her mouth would not open. Time had closed it up like a damp pocket book.

  ‘You were such a little girl,’ the woman persisted. ‘I went with your mother to get your train ticket. Remember?’

  Cecily’s memory refused to be kick-started into action.

  ‘Ah well! You’re back, that’s the main thing. Staying up at the house, are you?’

  In the absence of anyone coming to her rescue, Cecily nodded. Where were the twins when she needed them?

  ‘If you need anyone to clean for you…?’

  Concentrating hard, Cecily was forced to stare at the woman’s face. Something moved in the locked room in her head.

  ‘Are you Cook?’ she asked.

  Her voice, unused for so long, appeared reluctant to be squeezed out. There wasn’t much of it in the tube.

  ‘Oh no love. I worked at the pub. The one that was over there. It’s gone now. We’ve only got the White Hart left but,’ she hesitated.

  Cecily had a blank look that frightened the woman. Perhaps she had gone too far but she’d started so she’d finish, she told her husband later.

  ‘It used to be called The Golden Eagle. Remember it? I used to work there. I was quite young. Your sister’s age.’

  She stopped. Surely she had gone too far?

  Cecily shook her head and moved on with a small, barely-heard murmur and a pair of delicate shoulders bent helplessly against the wind. The coat she was wearing was marsh-green, foreign-looking and fitted her like an old glove. Someone long ago had worn it once before.

  She had wanted to ask the woman where the ice-cream parlour was but she couldn’t remember its name. (In Italy she had stayed for a while in a village called Molinello simply because she had liked its name.) Perhaps her memory was finally going.

  Nonsense, said her voices.

  Glancing at a shop window, she caught sight of herself and jumped. What was her mother doing following her around? The thought of her mother living secretly inside her skin was scary. Cecily walked over to the window for a closer look. There were the high cheekbones, the dimple when she tightened her face. Only her eyes remained her own. Incontestably beautiful. Huge. Lustrous. A different colour from her mother’s or her aunt’s. Irish eyes, Geoff had said, in the heat of his passion. Smiling even when they weren’t meant to. Seasick-making eyes, he had shouted at her, after the fires in him had been put out.

  ‘Can I help you?’ asked a youngish man, coming out of the shop.

  It wasn’t the shop it had once been, but an estate agent’s now and the man hoped Cecily wanted to buy a house. Something about the man’s face seemed familiar. She searched it for clues. In his hair, which was black and sprung straight up, perhaps? In the shape of his teeth? The man wore flared trousers and a thin shirt. When he smiled there was a puzzle in his smile that matched hers. Both of them shook their head.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Cecily said hurriedly and moved on.

  Having come outside to sell a property, the youngish man felt thwarted. Disappointed, too. Who was this beautiful woman?

  Cecily walked on. She was nearing the end of the high street before she remembered the name of the ice-cream parlour. There had been a chestnut village in Italy where she had lingered for a moment. Carlo’s teasing voice had chased her through the dappled sunlit trees. Her bones had felt like small twigs snapping underfoot for Carlo too ha
d deserted her.

  ‘Molinello,’ she murmured, now.

  And she walked back up the High Street and turned left into Shingle Street.

  12.

  BY AUGUST 1968 there had been so many changes in Shingle Street that it had unravelled like a woollen mitten. It had been reassembled after the war by a madman with little respect for history. The Molinellos’ ice creams no longer existed of course and the house where the Italian family had lived was gone, replaced by lock-up garages and a warehouse. An old people’s home with benches facing a melancholy sea occupied the space where Bunter’s sweet shop once was.

  Small traces of an elusive past confused Cecily, who pulled her coat closer. A beam of sealight dazzled her eyes and because of this she failed to see the silent figure on the street corner. Eyes hidden behind dark glasses, features shadowed by unknowable thoughts, sadness too ingrained to be discounted, statue-still the figure stood. Watching her.

  Memories fell like rain on Cecily’s thin frame. A billboard, advertising the ballet Le Spectre de la Rose, was one. A voice, so clearly heard, another.

  ‘How on earth did you get tickets Papi?’ Franca had asked.

  ‘Your father,’ Anna said, ‘could get hold of Hitler’s wallet, if he wanted to! Take Rose and Cecci with you. And give the other one to Agnes.’

  ‘Or the aunt,’ Mario added but Anna had shaken her head.

  ‘No, Agnes.’

  Even they had felt Agnes’ aloneness.

  ‘I’ll take them over,’ Lucio, off to pick up the morning’s delivery, offered.

  But his voice wasn’t quite right.

  ‘And what about your fidanzato?’ Mario teased his daughter, his voice a happy echo on the now-deserted street.

  ‘He’s not my fiancé!’ Franca replied crossly, eyes shining her denial. ‘And anyway he doesn’t like ballet.’

  What was the past but a scrap of music, played on a piano? Cecily paused in mid-flight across the road and listened.

  It was the very same tune that had long ago bothered Lucio, when, driving up to the back of Palmyra House, delivering ice cream to the Maudsleys, he had heard it for the first time.

  Saturday August the 19th. Ah yes!

  A waltz, floating effortlessly through the drawing-room window, as though it were a woman on a man’s arm, was difficult to resist.

  How many times had Agnes played that piece of music?

  When the waltz came to an end on that day, he climbed down from the truck. His legs felt heavy.

  Cecily watched with interest. Sometimes she thought her mother the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. This was one of those times.

  The ballet tickets were in Lucio’s pocket and Agnes, her face a flushed vibrato, shy as a nightingale caught singing, came to the door. She had no idea why it should be so, but the sight of Lucio always made her tongue-tied.

  When she smiled the summer light shone straight into the green of her eyes and Lucio, staring at the dimple that came and went in her cheek, forgot what he was about to say.

  ‘Won’t you come in?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘What were you playing just then?’ he asked, bending low under the beam of the door.

  ‘The waltz from Le Spectre,’ she told him, her slender hands making a gesture so lovely that he wanted to take them in his own large ones and hold them tightly and dance across the room into eternity. Wanted to hold her face close to his so that her dimple appeared once more.

  ‘Will you play it at the dance?’ he said instead with a smile not seen for many years.

  Who was this man, Agnes wondered? The ache in her throat was choking her. Her face stung as if it had been slapped. She felt bewitched but where had the charm been hidden? Had the gipsy who had tried to sell her the bunch of rosemary done this?

  ‘Not unless,’ she said breathlessly, ‘someone can find a piano.’

  Lucio smiled. It shall be done, his smile promised. Why had he seldom heard her play, his eyes asked, again.

  Because, well… because, you’ve never been here when I have, hers answered him.

  But, oh dear, they were already saying far too much and hastily she retreated behind the ice cream and the ballet tickets.

  ‘I’ll pick the girls up afterwards,’ he said while his eyes told her something altogether less mundane.

  His voice cradled the day. It was warm and slow and full of promise. What could she do but nod?

  Afterwards she stood in the cool, dark hall listening to the sound of his truck driving off, the tickets crushed in her hands; listening to the wild beating of her own heart.

  Kitty coming in from the field, flushed from some private exertion of her own, heard the sound of the old out-of-tune piano, and frowned.

  Cecily, letting out a breath in a mighty whoosh from behind the pantry door, listened, too. Lucio, she thought, looked so like Carlo.

  Time stood still. So that now, when it was picked up again, here in desolate Shingle Street, with the seagulls’ cries piercing her heart, Cecily remembered, they had been waiting for the evacuee that day. I hope he never comes, she had thought.

  Her father had gone off to an ARP meeting. Again.

  ‘But I’ll be home in time for supper, to welcome the little chap,’ he had said.

  And the rest of them had gone, Cecily remembered, on that Saturday night, to the ballet. Agnes, wearing the emerald dress that had once, for a brief moment in the past, excited Selwyn, but later would barely raise an absent-minded smile from him.

  ‘Go to the lavatory before it starts,’ Agnes said.

  Rose, with the cross look back on her face, was keeping an eye open for Franca.

  ‘Go with her please, Rose,’ Agnes said.

  ‘I can go by myself,’ Cecily muttered.

  And she had made a dash for it down the stairs, an escapee from Home Rule, treading carefully on the red, plush carpet. In the ladies’ powder room her face looked pretty after all, she thought, startled.

  The lights in the auditorium were rose-coloured. So perhaps she had simply made a mistake and the mirror had lied. But her hair did shine and she appeared to have cheekbones rather like Rose’s.

  ‘Cecci,’ Franca hissed, behind her in the queue. ‘Can you give this letter to Joe, tonight?’

  And then she vanished.

  ‘Hello Cecily,’ Robert Wilson had said as she went back to her seat. ‘What’s that you’ve got? A letter? From an admirer!’

  Ah yes! Robert Wilson.

  That name.

  Again.

  Playing another sort of game.

  What had Pinky Wilson been doing at the ballet?

  He liked the ballet very much, Pinky said, taking a seat just behind Rose. Cecily read the programme.

  Triple Bill. Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpman, Fredrick Ashton.

  Agnes’ pearls glowing against her skin. And Pinky Wilson leaning forward, handing them another box of chocolates. But having left the opera glasses in the ladies’ lavatory, Cecily arose with a long coltish movement, hair slipping out of its blue ribbon.

  ‘Oh Cecily!’ cried Agnes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Robert Wilson said. ‘I’ll go with her.’

  Cecily, taking no notice, rushed off.

  ‘The child’s a bloody nuisance,’ Rose said, loudly.

  She must have been bored.

  ‘Really, Rose!’ their mother said.

  ‘There you are,’ Robert Wilson cried, catching up.

  He had smiled in his friendly way. So why hadn’t she liked him one little bit?

  Robert Wilson said something else as they returned to their seats. It sounded like, ‘your secret’s safe with me’ but everyone was applauding the conductor.

  Standing in Shingle Street, clutching her brown paper bag of shop-bought greengages, remembering how once their orchard had yielded heaps of them, Cecily worried over which moments had been significant and which not. She put her hand to her throat in a sweet, unconscious gesture that made the watcher watching, think first of her mother, and
, when she bit her lip, of her sister Rose. As if it were too much for him, the watcher slunk deep into a doorway.

  Cecily couldn’t see she was the past.

  Suddenly the light changed, draining to sepia.

  Here we go, said one of the voices in her head.

  She’ll be like this for days, now, said the other.

  Guarda là! Look over there!

  But as usual Cecily was searching for what was no longer visible.

  By the time the ballet was over Cecily wished she hadn’t eaten so many chocolate violets. Or perhaps it was the fizzy ginger beer that was the problem. Clapping the loudest, she began to look for night-expedition-clues in Rose. Earlier her sister had folded a pair of stockings into her bag and she had stolen their mother’s ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume. Why would you wear perfume when all you were going to do was sleep at Franca’s house?

  Robert Wilson planned to drive home in his motor car but first Agnes needed to hand the older girls over to Lucio.

  ‘How long have you known the family?’ Robert Wilson asked.

  ‘Forever,’ Agnes told him and old Pinky was taken aback by the radiance of her smile. But it was Lucio, waiting for them outside, who had been delighted by the sound of Agnes’ laugh, travelling like a shooting star towards him. Cecily saw her mother bend her slender neck in greeting as she walked.

  ‘Lucio!’ Cecily cried, not to be outdone.

  ‘Ci vediamo presto,’ he said solemnly, talking to Cecily but looking at Agnes.

  See you soon.

  Agnes had been in danger from her own smile.

  ‘See you girls tomorrow,’ she called.

  ‘Si, si. Don’t worry, I’ll deliver them to you in time!’