The Last Pier Page 3

  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.

  After severe bombing and shelling Warsaw has been forced too capitulate. It is the first epic event of the war.

  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 ask
ed 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.

  Steal the brooch when she leaves the room, added one.

  Wicked child, admonished the other.

  It was to be this way for years. No one noticed that Cecily was never lonely. She was always juggling many conversations in her head. Her quietness was not because she was shy or frightened – it was the only way to let the voices have their say.

  A long time afterwards, years and years later, when she had hacked at her hair, cropping it in a way that inadvertently showed off her extraordinarily fine collarbones and her delicate lobed ears, she had tried, in a half-hearted way, to get rid of the voices. But they refused to go, saying this was no way to treat old friends. Fair enough, thought Cecily, giving up. And after that she left them to their own devices.

  It was the way Greg, the man she was to marry, found her. Talking out loud to a night garden. He fell in love with her abstracted air. She was twenty-two by then. Older than Rose had been when she died.

  The war being over, Greg had decided to become a pacifist. Remembering her Aunt Kitty (she no longer lived with her) Cecily thought: shutting the door after the horse had bolted.

  Brava! cried the voices in her head, speaking Italian for the first time in years. Startling Cecily with the sound of it, for she had not yet made acquaintance with her addiction to Italian.

  Associating the word with Greg (foolish girl) she married him but then grew restless when they made love. Grew impatient when he placed one hand on her breast and looked into her eyes. His own were a watery grey like the Suffolk sea. They didn’t look a bit Italian. Why should they when he was English? Which was another disappointment. When he kissed her, it was a weak, socialist-without-passion kiss.

  Aspetta! said the twin voices, in a taunting kind of voice. Sei inglese! Sei un cretino!

  They were right.

  In that first autumn of their marriage, in that very first year itself, long before mad-about-her Greg could begin talking about babies, Cecily left. Silently. Packing the bag that Agnes had given her (she still had it) and buying a train ticket to the continent. Greg when he came home to the empty house was broken-hearted for only a moment before relief set in. He had always felt as though he was living with three women.

  As she crossed over to Europe Cecily noticed the voices were silent with approval, smirking at the way they had tricked her into getting rid of Greg. Shocking!

  But tonight, here in Palmyra House, staring at the twenty-nine-years-ago impossible-to-forget furniture, a little shabbier, a little darker, but mostly unchanged, memories spun like Catherine wheels around Cecily. Guilt played upon her like a pair of hands on a washboard. Shame was hiding in the cupboard under the stairs, listening out for her footsteps. The war had flowed past her like a strong dark river taking everyone she knew along with it. Outside the stranger who had followed her all the way to the front door stood silent as starlight, watching the lights go on. One by one.

  While in the pub in Bly one man talked to another over a pint of Adnams.

  ‘Did you see who’s returned?’

  ‘No. Who?’

  ‘It’s her, that one… Palmyra Farm. You remember what happened at the pier, don’t you?’

  One man in a pub talking to another could so easily be multiplied across the town in other places. The local chip shop for instance. Owned now by a locally born and bred family.

  ‘Must be getting on… what’s her name? I forget.’

  Mrs Moore, wrapping fish in Union Jack paper (anything fresher was still swimming in the sea) thought she had seen her too.

  ‘Cecily,’ she said. ‘That’s who it is. I could tell her a mile away. Same walk!’

  ‘Thin-muscled, like a bird!’

  ‘Getting on a bit, I’d say.’

  ‘Quite likely so. Spitting image of her sister Rose, she is, now.’

  ‘Fuss, was there?’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why ’e’s back too.’

  ‘Robert Wilson?’

  ‘No, not ’im. The other one!’

  ‘Anything else I can get you?’ Mrs Moore asked.

  ‘I’ll have another cod. Looks good.’

  Mrs Moore nodded.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’

  ‘No. I were a child too. Not much older, you know. Than Cecily. We were at school together.’

  ‘Friends was ye?’

  ‘No, no. They were from the big house. Outside Bly. Different from us.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘But I heard about it all right. There was more fuss made over it than the war itself. Blamed her, some kids did. Said she knew the truth of it. Which I swear she didn’t. Nice child, really. Dreamy, like. Head in a book. Too much imagination, some said. The other one, ’im’s the one that led her on. I’ll be blowed! Never liked ’im. Foreign ’e was.’

  ‘Left Suffolk, did she?’

  ‘Never came back to school. Sent away with you-know-who!’

  ‘And now she’s back. I wonder why?’

  ‘Who knows? People can’t keep running away forever. There comes a time when you have to face the past.’

  ‘Makes me shiver. How much is that?’

  ‘One pound twenty, thank you.’

  ‘Always eavesdropping wasn’t she?’

  ‘Seem to remember she was. One pound twenty, did you say?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  And all the thank yous over, it was time to talk about the street party, Cecily’s shadow receding a little.

  Inside Palmyra House Cecily was busy making sense of a silver-backed hairbrush and a cracked mirror. She was looking at a pair of pyjamas that she had outgrown before that summer had ended. And she was opening a box that had been shut for years. The landscape of her childhood was back, crying out to her. The soft rustle of the sea entered the house unnoticed and filled her ears and this, too, reminded her of that time. It was as if she had been swimming for years. She felt exhausted. Everything would remain, she thought. And perhaps another two thousand years would pass swiftly.

  You couldn’t see the Ness from the window anymore. Large chestnut trees that had once been only saplings blocked the view. Some of the stars had escaped from their bell jar and were now scattered across the sky. The night had become balmy, the wind had dropped its anchor as the man standing in the shadows lit another cigarette. Glancing out Cecily saw but didn’t recognise him. He was leaning on a stick and his hair was completely white. The voices living inside Cecily’s head stirred and yawned like sleepy birds. It had been a long journey.

  Why are you bringing us back here? they asked Cecily, sleepily. Perché?

  In answer to these insistent questions, which would be ceaseless now, Cecily knew she would have to go back to the beginning. To the summer when she was not yet fourteen, and Rose still sixteen. The summer when the last and only pier burnt down, and the sea was the colour of Agnes’ eyes, and Selwyn Maudsley wasn’t happy for reasons known only to him and Agnes, and Kitty.

  That’s why I’m here, she informed the voices in her head. To remember. To set you free. To get that time out of my blood.

  3.

  THIS WAS ALL very well, but recalling that summer, Cecily had the impression that its beginning had been hidden in seven sweet williams. She had brought a bunch of roses back with her now, being unable to bear the sight of sweet williams. As a welcome gift to the house, a thank you for having survived the neglect of years. Seven old-fashioned flowers, two families; gone in a flash.

  Finding a vase, she filled it with water and the scent from that long-ago-time returned, instantly.

  Tuesday August 15th 1939, and in London the evacuation was already under way. In the orchard at Palmyra Farm Cecily, sitting under an apple tree, closed her book. It was hot and the a
fternoon was filled with a tender, straw-coloured light. Cook had sent her there to pick some fruit but instead Cecily had spent the afternoon reading A Girl of the Limberlost. The love story had left her feeling drowsy and she was reluctant to break its spell by returning to the house. Guiltily, picking up her empty basket, she became aware of a rustling in the hedge.

  ‘Cecci!’

  ‘Carlo! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Why do you look so glum? Have you been punished?’

  Cecily blushed and tried to hide her book.

  ‘Let me guess. You were being a bookworm again? Am I right?’

  ‘Oh Carlo, you are!’

  ‘So now Cook will scold you. Shall I come and defend you?’

  Cecily smiled, uncertain. Was he serious?

  ‘What are you doing here, Carlo?’

  ‘I was looking for Rose. She told me to meet her in the top field but I couldn’t find her.’

  The book’s afterglow, the heroine’s triumphant love, faded slightly.

  ‘You are a dreamer, Cecci,’ Carlo was saying, smiling down at her.

  The sun was full on Cecily’s face but still she could see the way Carlo’s eyes crinkled when he smiled.

  ‘Tell Rose I was looking for her,’ he said. ‘And that I’ll see you both tomorrow.’

  And then he was gone, with a splash of cotton whites amongst the golden wheat and the trees. Glimpses of bare sunburnt arms, as he ran along the dusty dirt track, seen through the trees. Taking with him all the myriad, unresolved hues of the afternoon, shimmering into the distance.

  Turning towards home, Cecily saw a beetle-black Bentley parked smartly in the lane. She walked on. Cornflowers dotted the ground. A heavy fragrance of vanilla from some hidden blossom filled the air. Her mother, in a jaunty polka dot dress covered by a blue apron, was talking to a man in a hat.

  Agnes was holding a bunch of flowers and when she saw Cecily coming up she smiled.

  It was not a true smile.

  ‘This is my younger daughter,’ Cecily heard her say.

  The green of the flower stalks exactly matched Agnes’ eyes. Tendrils of unruly dark hair escaping from her French pleat. From the way she spoke Cecily suspected she was lying about something. The man lifted his trilby and put his hand out in a friendly way. Under the jacket of his suit he was wearing a pink shirt.