The Last Pier Page 6

  The Punch and Judy man, full of punch-drunk smiles, was waving his arms at them. His red-and-white booth looked as though it might collapse in the wind. Cecily wanted to stop but Rose wasn’t interested.

  ‘I got told off,’ Franca was saying. ‘For accepting the chocolates from that man.’

  ‘Which man?’ asked Cecily, her eye on the ball, ears flapping in the high sea breeze.

  ‘Pinky!’ Rose cried, carelessly, tossing her laugh in the air, watching it bounce around the peacetime sky. ‘Who cares about Pinky!’

  And she did a little dance.

  ‘Are we or are we not going for a swim?’ shouted Carlo.

  So that Cecily, bathing costume at the ready, young girl’s slim hips emerging unnoticed, chased after him.

  ‘Got you, you wriggly worm,’ cried a triumphant Carlo, wind-whipped arms around her.

  Lifting her off the ground, threatening to throw her into the sea, while the war, playing its own game of hide-and-seek, kept conveniently out of sight.

  ‘Look, there’s Daddy,’ Cecily cried, pointing further up the beach, in the direction of the Ness.

  But it couldn’t be because Selwyn was at the farm digging up a piece of unused land.

  ‘Will there be lots of people at the dance?’ Franca asked.

  Rose whispering secrets, for Franca’s ears alone, laughed again and again.

  ‘Joe will be there, certainly!’ she said.

  ‘Catch me if you can!’ shouted Carlo, letting go of Cecily and plunging into the warm-at-last North Sea.

  And Cecily, getting it wrong as usual, chased after him laughing, laughing, singing, ‘Breath of Heaven’.

  She would sing it again at the end of summer but on that occasion the sun would have a different bite to it.

  When they got home the black cat had been killed by the milk truck and Agnes their mother was crying, again. When questioned she told Cecily she’d burnt her hand taking the bread out of the oven but there were no signs of a burn. No one was saying anything, not even Selwyn who told them he’d been mending the digger all day. Which was how Cecily knew he had had a row with their mother.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Rose said, darkly. ‘There are other things besides a row that puts that man in a mood.’

  ‘I’m going to an ARP meeting tonight, don’t forget,’ Selwyn announced. ‘Don’t wait up for me. I’ll have a snack while I’m out.’

  ‘In the pub he means,’ muttered Rose.

  Aunt Kitty, whose long-weekend-visit had turned into a longer holiday, was nowhere in sight and Joe came home looking serious but then went out again almost immediately.

  There were many unanswered questions in Cecily’s head. So, in order to sort them out she made a Things-About-The-War list in her head.

  Will they drop bombs on us, if there is a war?

  How many people will be killed?

  Will the schools still remain closed after the summer is over?

  Will all the boys go to war?

  If so, from which railway station?

  Why do the grown-ups ask you questions but never answer yours?

  ‘There is a boy coming to stay with us in a few days,’ Agnes said.

  No one commented.

  ‘His name is Tom,’ Agnes added, speaking to the silence. ‘He’ll be here on Saturday and he’s the son of an old friend of your father.’

  Rose yawned rudely but it was Cecily who had the most to lose.

  ‘I’m not sharing anything,’ she muttered under her breath.

  Rose laughed and Agnes sighed.

  ‘Please don’t be difficult Cecily.’

  Their mother’s voice sounded weak.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ Rose told the room with another fake yawn that didn’t fool Cecily.

  That night after supper Agnes got out the special notebook she kept for Mass Observation. She liked the idea that one day all the things she wrote down about her life would be part of the social history of the time. She had become a volunteer for the MO research organisation after lovely King Edward VIII had abdicated.

  On the Home Service the news was that the German ambassador was willing to fly to Moscow in order to make a German-Russian settlement. But Cecily coming in was more interested in giving her mother a slow goodnight kiss, squeezing the delicate, chiselled face in her hands, trying and failing to make the deep dimple in her cheek appear. Her mother looked lonely. Why didn’t their father stay at home more often?

  Rose, like Selwyn, couldn’t stay in for long, either.

  ‘Are you going out again?’ Cecily asked when they were alone.

  ‘Shhh!’ Rose said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  Instantly Cecily was more awake than she had ever been in her life. The disappointing day looked set to develop into an interesting night.

  ‘Are you going into Bly?’

  Rose didn’t answer.

  ‘Mummy’s still awake,’ Cecily said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘You’re not… going to the Ness, by any chance?’

  And when there was still no reply, ‘It’s very, very dangerous there when the tide’s coming in.’

  The Ness was a narrow sea-thistle spit of land bordered by a bend in the River Ore on one side, and the sea on the other. When the tide was out it was possible to reach it by a short causeway. But both river and sea tides came in so fast that in the past several people had drowned crossing it. Although the Ness lay close to the boundary of Palmyra Farm, half a mile between the fields and the town of Bly, it did not, strictly speaking, belong to the Maudsleys. No one knew who owned it and no one cared much for its dank salty marshiness. Because of the silt it was impossible to cultivate and the tides made it a dangerous place to visit. During the Great War there had been a few coastguard huts put up. There was also an old landing structure the locals called the Last Pier, because the original pier on the seafront at Bly had been destroyed. Twice each day the river and sea tides collided to turn the Ness into an island. When that happened the Ness was entirely cut off.

  Nobody went there except Selwyn when, many years before, he needed a quiet place to grieve over his brother’s death.

  And more recently, Cecily was certain, her sister Rose.

  Cecily hated the place.

  ‘Oh do shut up,’ Rose said crossly. ‘And learn to mind your own business!’

  She rummaged in her special box of clothes handed down to her from Agnes, and brought out one wispy Liberty print after another. Soon her bed was a heap of summer-faded scraps. Watching her with sudden, sharp insight Cecily saw that really, whatever her sister wore made no difference. In the end, she would always look beautiful. Don’t-care Rose was humming to herself.

  ‘Physically, you have reached your peak,’ Cecily observed.

  ‘What?’ Rose asked, startled.

  Then she laughed.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘No one,’ Cecily said.

  She herself had outgrown her pyjamas so that the legs came halfway up to her calves. Rose, dabbing on the last of some stolen perfume, seemed not to hear.

  ‘Where did you get it?’ Cecily asked without hope of an answer.

  Her sister slipped on a satin skirt. Then she spent ages buttoning up her pink and white flowered blouse. The buttons were made of mother-of-pearl. Through the window a fresh green-scented night breeze blew in and stroked Cecily’s neck. It stirred Rose’s hair, making her frown. On the seafront the breeze would be much stronger.

  ‘Why are you wearing that?’

  ‘Sshh!’

  ‘What if Daddy sees you coming back from the ARP?’

  ‘He won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because!’

  ‘Why, because?’

  ‘Shut up, C!’

  The clouds parted and in the moonlight the cast-up shimmer of the satin softened Rose’s customary expression of irritation until it too vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. And Cecily was aware her sister’s excitement had become more acute. When sh
e next spoke Rose sounded less cross.

  ‘When you’re older,’ she said, quite kindly, ‘you’ll go out too.’

  It was the first time she had referred to Cecily ever doing similar things and Cecily felt an upsurge of warmth, an almost pyrotechnic explosion of love for Rose. They were both silent. And then it occurred to Cecily in another moment’s clarity that her sister’s interests would have moved on to something else entirely by the time she, Cecily, had reason to shimmy down the drainpipe.

  ‘But what if there’s a war, in the end?’ she asked, suddenly.

  Until she said the words she had not realised that she feared a war. There was a clicking sound in her head. Now all her eavesdropping came together and added up to a total.

  Like a grocery bill or the pocket money owed to her.

  There was going to be a war.

  Joe was going to be in it.

  She saw that her sister was young and free and angry about many things and that the war, and the waiting for it to happen, frightened her as much as it did the grown-ups. She understood that no one could see how it was that she, Cecily, wanted to be young, not young in the way she was now, which was just an extension of being a baby, but older-young, like Rose. To be old enough for Carlo to smile the smile for her that he reserved just for Rose.

  Time was passing as swiftly as a swallow and everyone kept talking about changes ahead. But no one had stopped to think about what it would be like for her to grow up in this war. All of this Cecily saw in a single, clear moment. And then, like the gleam of moonlight in her sister’s eyes, it was gone and she was just the youngest in the family again.

  Rose pulled on some stockings.

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘No, you fool.’

  Cecily felt the urge to ask another question.

  ‘Are you meeting someone?’

  Silence. An owl hooted.

  ‘When will you be back?’

  Rose put on her shoes. Cecily caught another whiff of perfume. Or it might have been the honeysuckle growing under the window.

  ‘Why can’t I come?’

  Again silence. Her sister’s shape moved swiftly across the room. Cecily sighed. And closed her eyes. Danger was perhaps Rose’s element. She thrived on it. Outside, the garden and the woods and the marshes beyond, all of it, seemed to merge together under the almost full moon. Nothing stirred. But what if their mother had been right, thought Cecily, and curiosity had killed the cat that morning? What of Rose?

  She must have dropped off to sleep for she remembered nothing more and when she did wake it wasn’t so much because she’d heard anything as such but rather it was the quality of the silence that woke her.

  She climbed out of bed. There was just enough light to see the dew-damp grass. Their bedroom was at the back of the house, away from their parents, facing the apple orchard. Something was rustling beneath the honeysuckle creeper out of sight. Cecily saw a pair of arms, bare to the elbow, a satin sleeve, a foot in a sandal. Her sister’s bent head came into view and there was a pause before it disappeared again. Cecily heard a slithering sound.

  ‘Rose!’

  A dark bird flew slowly across the horizon. For a second Cecily had a fleeting memory of the dead cat. Flattened into a perfect cat-shaped flatness.

  Eyes closed,

  whiskers intact,

  tail curled,

  dead.

  ‘Rose!’

  Cecily leaned so far out of the window that she nearly toppled over and had to grab the honeysuckle to steady herself. There was no sign of her sister but glancing up, she saw a figure between the trees. She blinked and then there was nothing. Instead the thin faint sound of the wind chimes in the vegetable garden drifted across. Then nothing. She stared into the distance, frowning, puzzled, wondering if she should creep downstairs, knowing that the creaking floorboards might wake everyone if she did. Her father was back she saw, his bicycle leaning against the shed. There it was again, that sound. And was that her aunt’s skirt she had just glimpsed? Her Aunt Kitty, thought Cecily in astonishment. But then, in the bluish air, caught in the beam of a torch switched on and then off, was a man with the stub of his cigarette glowing and his trilby covering his eyes. Pinky Wilson, thought Cecily, distracted further. The darkness obscured some of the physical details but she recognised the way he stood with one hand in his trouser pocket, the tilt of his hat, the slowness of him. And she understood that he was watching her watching him. But then, moments later she saw it wasn’t her but Rose he was stalking. Like the cat had stalked its prey. Before something bigger had finished it off, as Selwyn had said. This was how Robert Wilson, aka Pinky, was looking at Rose. Quietly, biding his time. And her sister, coming back into view, sandals off, skirt hitched up, climbing the honeysuckle wall with steady concentration, her back to the man, noticing nothing.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Cecily demanded, suddenly afraid.

  She felt in one swift and bewildering transition that she was the older one. Rose must have thought so too because she laughed, softly.

  ‘Never you mind, my girl.’

  Her face was flushed and beautiful, and happy. There was a crumpled, held-close look that gave itself away in small tendrils of hair growing in different directions. It made Cecily feel excluded and sad.

  ‘You should be asleep.’

  ‘I woke, there was a noise…’

  But when she glanced over towards the trees there was no one there. Mist from the river filled the ancient spaces. The trees were thick with leaves.

  ‘Were you followed?’

  There were fine particles of a darker sand clinging to Rose’s leg. In a flash Cecily understood that Rose had actually been walking on the Ness and not the town beach two miles further on. But with whom? Turning to her sister, she was about to ask the question again but Rose, huddled under the covers, was fast asleep.

  After Rose died Cecily grew beautiful. After Rose died Agnes had the honeysuckle cut down. After she died the man they had called Pinky disappeared and was never referred to again and the orchard where he had once stood was sold off. No one would need orchards like theirs ever again. After Rose died the leaves stayed on the trees for a long time and the war got bloodier and more brutal and Cecily became someone that people stared at from time to time. But then, after Rose died, that time passed too, and things got forgotten and lost and also altered in the way that things do. And Carlo’s special smile and even his voice as he chased her on the beach became not a clear picture but an impression that blurred and receded. And afterwards something inexplicably precious was lost. Like a wellloved object stowed somewhere safe but not there when you looked for it again. That was how things changed after Rose died. Aunty Kitty went from being Aunty Kitty, best beloved aunty, pretty friend and prettier sister, someone who might once have had the world but now never would, to simply Kitty. That too was the way things changed.

  Later, other, smaller changes occurred but Cecily noticed them without interest. The typeface on hoardings changed. The street signs changed. Women wore different clothes. The fifties came. And then the sixties. Bomb sites were covered over, Andersen shelters removed, wallpaper changed in design. And the Beatles brought sex Out-Into-The-Open in a way that had not been possible before. These changes though had no power to change Cecily. For the stillness that had always been in her, the watchfulness and the silence, had grown and blossomed into a large flowering tree since Rose’s death. In her head, buried somewhere out of reach, a bell tolled, pulled by the twin voices, unalterable and here to stay. The bell never, ever stopped. Cecily had no idea what it was announcing, only that she had become sleepless.

  As Cecily grew Aunt Kitty shrank and the figure of Rose grew even larger. Once Cecily’s mother visited them in London. Cecily must have been about fifteen at the time. A full two years had passed since that summer. The delicate face was haggard, the deep dimple nowhere in sight. Her mother looked both achingly familiar and distant. The ribbon had been cut between them.


  She’s old, now, one voice said to the other.

  Practically grey-haired at thirty-eight!

  Cecily was surprised at how small her mother was. Now there seemed even less of her.

  ‘Together,’ Cecily heard her say to Aunt Kitty, ‘we have destroyed something. Her world, perhaps. Mine, certainly. I miss her.’

  There was a pause. I miss Rose too, thought Cecily.

  ‘You are worn out,’ Kitty was saying. ‘The shock… I thought it would kill you. That’s why I took… her. How could I let you go on, alone? In any case…’

  Another silence followed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She would have had to bear the brunt at school… can you imagine? The taunting… it wouldn’t have been fair.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know I’m to blame too,’ Kitty said.

  She sounded kinder than Cecily ever remembered her being. And then a moment later, ‘I’m sorry I let you carry the burden of it. You are a much better person than me.’

  Then she said something else that Cecily, straining her ears to the point of bursting a blood vessel, could not make out. There was a silence.

  What’s that? the twin voices asked together.

  ‘She’s getting to look like her,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Yes.’

  More silence followed. Pretending she had wings, Cecily glided towards the open door.

  ‘Do you find that difficult?’ Kitty was asking.

  Her voice was silky but underneath, something nasty was feeling its way to the surface.

  ‘Not surprising.’

  ‘Don’t!’ Cecily’s mother burst out.

  She sounded like a tap being turned on with too much force. There would be water everywhere, now, Cecily thought.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you take her away. But… I didn’t know… I had no idea how much I would miss her. None of you saw. I lost two children.’

  Agnes was weeping. Now the sound reminded Cecily of the hot-water pipes when air got into them. It sounded as if a small trickle of water had got much larger and was out of control, it sounded like the sea that Cecily could no longer live by and the Last Pier that was no longer part of her life. It sounded like her lost sister who would be twenty-two by now. It sounded as if the whole world was crying for something unspeakably sad. And the thought of the years ahead, of being the same age as Rose when she died, was intolerable and terrible.