The Last Pier Page 4

  ‘Hello Cecily,’ he said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Good book?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘Robert Wilson is working on the agricultural survey for East Anglia,’ Agnes said. ‘He’s here to map all the farms across the county and to help plan farming efforts in case of a war.’

  The man looked at Cecily and nodded solemnly.

  ‘The ploughing-up campaign,’ he said. ‘Did you hear about it at school, Cecily? The government will give your parents £2 for every acre of unused land that’s put to good use. Should there be a war, I mean.’

  And then he handed her an enormous box of chocolates tied with a pink ribbon.

  ‘For both you girls,’ he said.

  ‘Pinky,’ Rose remarked later, when they were in their shared bedroom. ‘Everything about him is Pink!’

  Cecily giggled and Rose wrinkled her nose. Helping herself to two chocolates, she bit into one without smudging her lipstick.

  ‘He’s renting Eel cottage,’ Cecily said.

  Originally Eel cottage had been built for an eel-catcher who used to set traps in the river. These days there weren’t many eels. Now the cottage was mostly empty, rented occasionally to travelling salesmen. It sat on the edge of the Maudsleys’ land, behind the orchard, out of sight of the house and hidden behind some trees. It was possible to walk from here along a bridle path into the town of Bly, about two miles away, without being seen by anyone.

  ‘But he has to go all the way into the town to park his big car near the Martello,’ Cecily added.

  Rose yawned.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a ride in his car,’ she said.

  ‘He’s already taken Mummy,’ Cecily informed her, liking the idea of calling the man Pinky.

  Rose bit into another chocolate. The centre oozed, dark, bitter, and thick as the marshland mud in the creek.

  ‘How d’you know?’ she asked lazily. ‘I shall have to have a closer look at this Captain Pinky!’

  She was shaking with silent laughter and would not share the joke. Cecily stared at her. There was something exceptionally wild about Rose today, she felt. Their mother’s hope, that sharing a bedroom together would draw her girls closer together, hadn’t worked. Rose’s life, like her side of the room, remained a mystery, with its posters of John Gielgud playing Hamlet, and its starlet mirror decorated with lights which Cecily was forbidden to use. She had to brush her hair in the bathroom mirror, instead.

  Rose ate another chocolate. Afterwards her curiosity about Captain Pinky moved like a moth in search of a different flame and she forgot this conversation.

  The following day was Wednesday and Cecily woke to find time stretched like an old sock. She wondered why she felt so happy. The sun fell on her eyelids making them almost transparent as, with a hasty coltish movement, she leapt out of bed. Her long dark hair was all over her face and she pushed it back impatiently. The room was empty. Fearing she might be missing something interesting, she crashed downstairs where an argument was in full swing.

  ‘Plenty to do,’ Cook was saying in a loud belligerent voice.

  ‘Plenty to do!’ Rose was replying, throwing Cook’s annoyance back at her as though it were a dirty old dishcloth, laughter like liquid bursting out of her.

  ‘What?’ asked Cecily, rushing in, arms flailing.

  ‘You girls can help,’ Agnes told them both, firmly.

  She was recounting the strawberry punnets.

  ‘Rose can take twelve punnets to Molinello’s.’ Cook said.

  ‘Can she?’ asked Rose, looking around for herself.

  The Molinello ice-cream parlour was in the centre of Bly.

  ‘Rose,’ Agnes said in warning.

  She looked hot. Small beads of perspiration strung abacus-like across her forehead. There was so much to do before the dance. Traditionally this annual charity dance to help orphaned children in Suffolk was always held at Palmyra Farm. But although Agnes had inherited the event many years before when she had married into the Maudsley family, its occurrence still flustered her.

  ‘Cecily can help, can’t you darling?’

  ‘Can we go to the beach afterwards?’ Cecily asked, pushing her luck around the uneven kitchen floor.

  ‘If you deliver the strawberries, first,’ Agnes said.

  From Palmyra Farm it was two miles as the crow flies to the town of Bly, slightly longer by bicycle on the unmetalled road that cut across the fields.

  ‘There are just seventeen days left before the tennis party,’ Agnes said, ‘and the Molinellos are very busy. If you don’t take the fruit over today there won’t be time for them to make the ice cream.’

  ‘Are they making water ices, too?’ asked Cecily.

  Aunt Kitty, down for one of her long weekends, filling a glass jug with clear water from the old brass tap, looked up and narrowed her eyes. Reflections from the sky crept into them. The walnut tree outside in the yard had hard, green nuts hanging off it. Kitty plunged the seven flowers lying on the kitchen table into the jug.

  Cecily frowned. Hadn’t she seen those flowers before?

  Kitty wiped her hands on her apron and a shutter clicked in Cecily’s head.

  Click-click.

  Slow speed,

  hand-held,

  depth of field, very deep.

  Seven for a secret never to be told.

  Cecily blinked, amassing memories. Why this moment and not another? Who could tell?

  ‘Let’s finish breakfast,’ their mother said peering down into the moment with her. ‘And then you girls can go.’

  Real time returned to the room.

  ‘Ginny said the fair’s here,’ Cecily told them, toying with the morning, dunking her voice in it. ‘Ginny’s going, can I?’

  ‘No you can’t,’ Agnes declared, unaware of stoking the desire burning in her younger daughter. ‘There’ll be gipsies there.’

  She carried a rack of toast into the dining room where Selwyn sat reading the paper and listening to the wireless. Cecily, following behind, digested her mother’s words in silence. Her desperation to visit the fair, taking wings, flapped dangerously around the room. She knew Rose had been the night before, slipping out in the usual way, through the open window. But what had happened there, or even what time Rose returned home was knowledge to which Cecily had no access.

  ‘You’re not old enough,’ Rose had said when pressed. ‘They wouldn’t let you into the Freak House.’

  ‘But what’s there?’ she had begged.

  ‘Freakish things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Never had her sister’s cruel indifference pierced Cecily’s heart as it did just then and in the end she had been forced to get her information in the old-fashioned way. By listening to Rose talking to Bellamy.

  It had been how she heard of the Headless Girl and the Torturer with the Hook. And the black roses that turned into a bird of prey.

  Cecily, leaning as far as she dared out of the window, had heard of the bearded woman who used her toes to knit, and the dog with the bird’s face and the bird with a human one.

  In this way fairy tales had crossed her path faster than gipsy silver. Magic spells now darted like swallows invading her mind. Rose’s laughter in the bushes, always a little strange, was lately so excited as to be only a shade removed from hysteria.

  It was all too much.

  Returning to the present she helped herself to another egg. Perhaps she would write a story about all of it, she thought.

  Selwyn, buttering his toast, let honey drip off his spoon onto his plate. Watching the golden stream, half in a dream, Cecily smiled. Kitty too, seated opposite, smiled for no reason. Time stood still.

  ‘I heard there was a man with a lobster claw for a hand who had sex with a five-legged cow,’ Cecily said, forgetting where she was.

  ‘What?’

  Both Agnes and Rose spoke sharply in unison. Too late Cecily wished she’d been more careful.

  The wireless was dronin
g on.

  In the event of war, the Registrar-General has announced, everyone in Britain will have their own National Registration number and an identity card.

  ‘You talk like a baby,’ sneered Rose.

  ‘Where did you get your information from, C?’ Selwyn asked, turning the volume down.

  The news had finished.

  ‘From one of the farmhands,’ Cecily lied.

  ‘Bellamy, of course!’ Agnes said. ‘Where else?’

  Triumph was Aunt Kitty making a noise like a grasshopper. Selwyn just turned the wireless back up. The Home Service was now playing light music.

  ‘We should send her to Summerfield in the autumn,’ Agnes said. ‘Before things…’

  ‘Maybe,’ Selwyn spoke too quickly.

  There was another silence into which the wireless played Music While You Work.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to such nonsense, Cecily,’ Aunt Kitty said.

  ‘I’d like to go to the fair, anyway,’ Cecily told her, correctly interpreting her aunt was on her side.

  Aunty Kitty didn’t look at Cecily’s mother but instead put her hand gently on Selwyn’s newspaper forcing him to look at her.

  ‘We should let her go,’ she said.

  A piece of jigsaw floated in the air above their heads and did a jig. If she could just catch it, Cecily thought, she might complete the puzzle.

  When after breakfast they went upstairs to clean their teeth she heard Agnes shouting at the other two.

  ‘See what you’ve done, you stupid child,’ Rose scolded, narrowing her eyes, as she painted her toenails. ‘You were eavesdropping as usual when I was talking to Bellamy. Go on. Admit it!’

  Two can play at the same game, decided Cecily, watching her sister wrap herself in her red fox pelt. The fur smelled rank.

  ‘Will you wear it to the tennis party?’ she asked.

  Rose ignored her. Hot air floated in through the window. One of the farmhands was whistling Run Rabbit Run. So, thought Cecily, going out again, tonight, are we?

  She had seen the red asterisk in Rose’s diary.

  ‘If you say anything about me…’ Rose said.

  Cecily stuck her tongue out. A spider’s web of threats hung between them. Then Rose snapped shut her jewellery box as if a snake lived in it. There was a pause. Both sisters glared at each other. Neither wanted to look away.

  ‘I’m coming with you, tonight,’ Cecily said.

  ‘No you’re not!’

  ‘I am! Carlo said I could!’

  ‘Carlo? What a joke, Carlo won’t want to play with a baby!’

  Outside the orchard shivered with bloom and the doorbell rang but no one answered it. While all around, mockingly, was the sweet reek of something unknowable approaching. They heard their mother’s voice, very clearly.

  ‘She’s just like you,’ Agnes said bitterly.

  ‘There are more important things to worry about,’ said Selwyn.

  4.

  BUT IN SPITE of the endless talk of war, the sky over Bly on this August Wednesday remained blue enough to patch a sailor’s trousers.

  The town had a beach that could be reached by a set of stone steps from its promenade. It had a main road, some shops, a school, a church, a railway station and most importantly of all, on Union Street, Molinello’s Hokey-Pokey Ice-Cream Parlour.

  On this fine morning, as the sea breeze ruffled the soft sand dunes, the summer fair remained asleep on the green close by, its coloured lights still switched off, its helter-skelter mats out of sight. Two jolly fishermen returning with the catch lifted their lobster pots from their boat and struggled up towards the fishmonger’s shop where a querulous seagull wrestled with a fish head discarded in the gutter.

  While back on Union Street Molinello’s was just opening its ice-cream coloured doors. For this was the Golden Era for all things Italian. And very foreign it looked too, with a blue and white striped awning flapping jauntily as Lucio Molinello began setting out the tables on the pavements. He was a tall, painfully thin man in his late thirties with black hair greying at the temples. The horn-rimmed spectacles he wore added to his serious, slightly melancholy air.

  Polishing a new carmine-red roll-top Morris eight, was his older, portly brother Mario, the actual owner of the ice-cream parlour. Mario was in a happy mood today, a ready smile creasing his face, making it look like a walnut. Together the brothers were the butt of jokes amongst the locals, privately being referred to as Laurel and Hardy.

  The reason for Mario’s exceptionally good mood was the Morris eight, sparkling in the sun, a present to himself from himself. To celebrate the opening of yet another ice-cream stall on the promenade.

  ‘Come on for God’s sake!’ Lucio grumbled. ‘Playtime is over, you puppy. Your customers are waiting.’

  ‘Let them wait,’ grinned Mario. ‘Where else can they get what I give them?’

  Sunlight washed the ground with a broad brush. Two customers, both of them regulars, stood at the stainless steel counter waiting for their brosca, a soft brioche filled with ice cream.

  It was a quarter to eight in the morning, too early for the English who frequented the shop, too early for the children from the neighbouring villages. Only the Neapolitan members of the community, the secretaries from the Italian Social Club, came on the early train from Ipswich at this hour. Tradition was tradition. Not even the threat of war could break the desire for brosca.

  The Hokey-Pokey was the oldest ice-cream parlour in Britain. It stood in a prime spot in the town centre, close to the memorial of the Great War and was a magnet for the many Italians living in the region. Customers came from as far away as Felixstowe docks, Lowestoft and even, in the summer months, Great Yarmouth. From June to September Mario Molinello’s ice cream sold almost as fast as it was made.

  At the entrance was a notice.

  Gelato Artigianale di Produzione Propria (Ice cream handmade by the proprietor)

  Mario finished polishing his car and spat on it. Then he gave it one last furious rub and went inside, calling to his children. There were five of them.

  ‘Giorgio, Luigi, Beppe, Franca, Carlo, venite qui!’ he bellowed.

  Two Italian farmworkers entering the shop laughed. Most people in the town of Bly could not tell any of the Molinello children apart.

  There was a movement of the beaded curtain and Mario’s wife Anna emerged.

  ‘We are not in Italy now, Mario,’ she said. ‘There is no need to shout. You will not get instant servizio here!’

  Mario grinned.

  ‘Mama!’ said Franca.

  Franca was a younger, thinner, nineteen-year-old version of her dark-haired, buxom mother. Franca, precious only daughter in a family of boys, good-natured like her mother, soft-hearted like her father but still inclined to fight with her youngest brother.

  ‘Can you tell that cretino Carlo to leave my box of chocolates alone? They were my present, not his.’

  ‘You see,’ Anna told her husband. ‘You are the one who has taught them to shout. Your daughter does not behave like a lady!’

  ‘Franca!’ cried Mario, feigning anger. ‘Please, cara, mind your voice and your language! What will the British think of us?’

  He finished serving his customer who grinned and left. Everyone knew Mario could deny his daughter nothing.

  ‘Cara,’ Anna said, ‘let’s not make a fuss. Your father does not like his British customers to see real life going on in this place.’

  ‘He gave them to me!’ cried Franca.

  ‘Who?’ asked Beppe, the middle child, coming in to enjoy the quarrel.

  ‘Her boyfriend, Joe Maudsley, you idiot,’ said Giorgio the eldest. At twenty-two he was a larger version of his brother Luigi.

  ‘What’s the crisis, Papi? Is it war, already!’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ shouted Franca.

  ‘It wasn’t Joe,’ said Lucio coming in, unamused.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Anna asked. ‘Who is giving my daughter presents?’
/>
  ‘Robert Wilson,’ said Lucio.

  Everyone turned to look at Franca.

  ‘He’s the man from the Ministry,’ Lucio told them. ‘He’s renting Eel cottage at Palmyra Farm.’

  ‘Oh him!’ Mario threw his hands up in the air, losing interest. ‘He wanted to speak to me, too. The Government has decided to look for any unused land around here. But as we don’t have any…’ he shrugged.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ Lucio said.

  There was a small silence.

  ‘I know about this,’ Anna said. ‘Agnes told me. She said this man wanted them to plough up the tennis court.’

  ‘To get rid of it?’

  Beppe was shocked.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Where will we play tennis, then?’

  ‘There may be a war coming,’ Lucio told them. ‘If that happens there won’t be time for tennis.’

  Again the uneasy silence. Mario glanced at his younger brother.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘It won’t come to that.’

  But he sounded uncertain.

  ‘It probably will,’ Lucio said flatly.

  He was cleaning out the freezer and didn’t look at anyone.

  ‘What has this got to do with a present being given to my daughter,’ Anna asked, ‘from a man we don’t know?’

  She spoke half-jokingly for her daughter’s face had gone suddenly white.

  ‘He was looking for Papi and Uncle Lucio. And he gave me the present. He’s given one to Rose, too. I’m sorry, Mama.’

  ‘In that case,’ Anna said, smoothly, ‘it’s fine. But you must share it with the others. Now, get Carlo because I too have some news.’

  ‘What?’ asked Carlo coming in, hoping the trouble had blown over.

  Carlo was not yet seventeen, the youngest of the Molinello children. He had the same thick curly hair, the same dark eyes and the same easy-going manner that characterised the whole family. When he saw his mother he smiled sweetly and Mario groaned. Carlo was Anna’s favourite and, in Mario’s opinion, over-indulged. But then, Carlo was everyone’s favourite, capable of getting away with most things.