The Last Pier Page 9

  When Selwyn’s mother died his father wrote asking him to come back to manage the farm. He ignored the requests. For the first time in his life, in an odd sort of way, he was having a good time. But he did nothing about Kitty and it was only when she, fed up with waiting, startled him by announcing her engagement to some other man, that he became aware of disappointment quickly suppressed. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the knowledge, gleaned from the punishment meted out during his troubled childhood, that self-control was the answer. He congratulated Kitty.

  Finding Agnes hadn’t been part of any plan.

  In the confusion of Kitty’s news, with his slender grasp on his own emotions, Selwyn proposed to Agnes. He hoped Kitty would simply fade from his consciousness.

  No one told him that marrying the younger sister was hardly the solution.

  No one told him Agnes would have needs of her own.

  Then his father died and Selwyn took Agnes back to the farm. Joe, born nine months later, was intended to be the cement needed in their marriage. Rose, following soon after, the reinforcement. Selwyn saw he ought to love his children but really, he wasn’t up to the job. Duty was all he could manage. It was good but not good enough.

  Thereafter a long gap followed when events settled uneasily on the topsoil of their lives. Kitty, living in Chicago with her new husband Danny, heard all her sister’s news. How handsome Joe was, how like his father, how happy the Maudsleys were to have little Rose. In return Kitty sent them a photograph of Danny whose huge moustache Selwyn instantly distrusted.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you,’ he told his startled wife, ‘a cad, if ever I saw one!’

  In the event Selwyn’s distrust was to be proved right although it was several years before anyone put two and two together about the bruises on Kitty’s face. And arms, and legs.

  And that was just the start of things. When Kitty related the story that she had been forced to have an abortion Agnes burst into tears. When she claimed the backroom botched job had left her unable to have another child, Agnes was heartbroken for her.

  The story prompted her to make her sister the godmother of her own third child.

  Cecily, the godchild of Aunt Kitty, who would have predicted that!

  Meanwhile Selwyn was making a discovery of his own. To his surprise he found that his feelings for his third child were altogether different from anything he had experienced before. It wasn’t a subject he dwelt on but whenever his eyes lighted on little Cecily’s dark head, hair straight like a Chinaman’s, he felt an overwhelming, unaccountable tenderness towards her. He began to take her out for long walks and, as she grew older, taught her to read and write. When, at the age of five, Cecily developed a passion for writing stories, it was Selwyn who encouraged her. Agnes saw what was happening and made no comment. Joe saw and wasn’t bothered, being so much older. Only Rose for some reason was furious and began to hate her father with a barely suppressed passion.

  Eventually Kitty left her husband. Cecily was eight at the time and, remembering how her father had told her to listen, did so fiercely, hoping to hear something interesting about the divorce. In those days, eavesdropping was far more exciting than now.

  ‘Perhaps Aunty Kitty has stopped loving him,’ she suggested to Rose, in the privacy of their bedroom.

  Rose shrugged. Her aunt’s lily-livered lifestyle held no interest for her. So Cecily continued to chip her way through the puzzle alone until Rose gave in.

  ‘No of course not, silly! She only married him to get her own back.’

  Her Own Back over what, remained undisclosed information. In school Cecily continued to go from strength to strength in English. She won two end-of-year prizes for her story about the girl who married a man she did not love.

  In the end she got her Own Man Back, she wrote.

  And when Agnes bumped into the teacher in Bly the woman took her hand eagerly.

  ‘Mrs Maudsley, your daughter has great imagination,’ she had smiled.

  Cecily’s eyes had sharpened. She had found a new daydream. It would last for many months and interfere with her ability to concentrate on the chores her mother gave her.

  ‘If she goes on in this way I think she might become a writer some day,’ the teacher enthused.

  ‘She certainly is a compulsive eavesdropper,’ Agnes said, exasperated.

  ‘It’s all part of the process, Mrs Maudsley,’ the teacher beamed.

  ‘Silly, earnest woman!’ Agnes told Selwyn later. ‘She was more or less giving Cecily permission to carry on poking her nose into other people’s affairs.’

  Selwyn laughed indulgently. He reminded Agnes how, long ago, he had been tied to a chair by his father, as part of the punishment for eavesdropping.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with C,’ he told his wife. ‘It’s all part of her vivid imagination, part of her creative spirit. We can’t blame her if we say unsuitable things in her presence.’

  Agnes was silent. It was useless to tell her husband that Cecily was hopelessly indulged, that her behaviour was immoral. Or that by refusing to punish her Selwyn was merely encouraging the child. Couldn’t he see Cecily was far too headstrong?

  ‘No wilder than Rose,’ Selwyn said.

  An edge had crept into his voice. Behind the door, still as a stork, Cecily was simply dying to scratch her leg.

  ‘What’s immoral about curiosity?’ Selwyn asked. ‘If we give her information she can use against us, that’s not her fault, for heaven’s sake! Don’t be so old-fashioned.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I’m going fishing,’ Selwyn said.

  Rose, on her way out on private business of her own, doubled up with laughter.

  Standing in the kitchen all these many years later, Cecily remembered with an acute blinding pain her father’s face. The love he had always had for her, the way he had encouraged her to write, to be curious. How had she forgotten these precious little things? There was a constriction in her chest. Memories were turning up like unwanted guests. Events from the past collided and buckled, making it hard for her to separate them out. She remembered the Ness and its dangerous tidal currents. And she recalled how she had always known that Rose had been there several times with Bellamy.

  Yet, try as she might, staring at the sky on those last peaceful August days of 1939, Cecily failed to see the War Clouds everyone was talking about.

  Perhaps they were hiding behind the Pole star?

  By August, with her divorce long over and her ex-husband in North Africa, Aunt Kitty closed up her flat in London and came to stay on the farm. She had meant to stay for just a weekend but, because she was feeling bored, the visit went on for far longer. While in the sultry, sweet, hay-scented heat, Pinky Wilson’s dark distorted shadow continued to survey the land belonging to Palmyra Farm. Aunt Kitty, meeting him for the first time on one of her walks along a country lane, told her sister she found him really rather nice. Especially when he gave her a bunch of lovely flowers.

  Everyone in the town of Bly knew it was because of the impending crisis and the need to feed the troops that Pinky Wilson had to visit all the local farms. But in spite of this, many people distrusted him.

  Bellamy was one, but for reasons that weren’t clear.

  Cook disliked him on principle. The man was a stranger to Suffolk, wasn’t he? Well then!

  And Anna Molinello disliked Pinky because he had not checked with her before giving chocolates to her daughter.

  Lucio kept his thoughts to himself.

  Selwyn remembered Robert Wilson as a nondescript man, now concerned only with national acreage.

  Rose of course couldn’t care less. She yawned rudely every time his name was mentioned. No one told her off because it would mean feeding her Attitude. Cecily wondered why, when there was only three years between them, it was her Attitude that needed feeding, whereas Rose’s never did.

  Every day they were saying it was the driest, hottest summer for fifty years. But some people, Partridge being one of t
hem, shook his head because he felt there was something wrong about the sequence of dead dry days.

  The tennis match and charity dance were to be held on Saturday September 2nd. Joe and Franca and Giorgio had been selling tickets for weeks and a lot of people were coming from Bly and Eelburton and even from Ipswich. Agnes grumbled that most of the locals were just coming out of curiosity but Selwyn didn’t think that mattered so long as all the tickets were sold. He had grown up being host to such events. Both events were to be held the same day but the harvest would have to come first. Rose was only interested in the dance. Joe, it transpired, was looking forward to both. And Cecily, rereading Wuthering Heights, thought that Bellamy was very like Heathcliff. He would love Rose forever, no matter what. So why couldn’t her sister be content with him? Rose is just greedy, decided Cecily, her anger rising like the bread Cook was baking.

  ‘I’m staying up all night,’ Rose said with a toss of her bright hair. ‘I’m almost seventeen.’

  ‘So shall I,’ cried Cecily.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Agnes said cunning and quick. ‘If you are all so grown up you should be helping your brother by collecting up the cut grass around the tennis court. He’s been working there for days with very little help.’

  Although Selwyn could not remember him, Robert Wilson remembered Selwyn well enough. He remembered the name Palmyra Farm and when the posting to Suffolk had come up he decided to look him up. He found they had an empty cottage on their land and curiosity made him rent it.

  ‘Was it true,’ he asked Agnes, ‘Kitty used to work as Selwyn’s personal assistant?’

  Agnes laughed, nodding. It had all been so long ago.

  ‘But our paths never crossed until now,’ he told Agnes.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Rose, when Cecily conveyed this interesting information to her. ‘Is Kitty McNulty after him now?’

  Luckily Agnes didn’t hear her say that.

  Was he going to be Aunt Kitty’s lover, Cecily wondered?

  ‘How on earth do I know?’ Rose asked crossly.

  And she went out, again. The only thing that interested Rose these days was the dance after the tennis match.

  Cecily could see her walking with Bellamy in the direction of the top field. It was one of the many stories she was following with some curiosity this summer. For research purposes. Rose and her friend Bellamy.

  Cecily wondered if Bellamy would get his prawn out, again.

  After the tennis party the court would be ploughed up, thanks to the wretched Pinky Wilson. Cecily thought of all the games Joe, and Carlo too, had played with her here when she had been small. How they had pushed her around the court in the old pram, while she screamed with delight. And she thought of the wind in her hair and Carlo’s happy face and how he used to hug her in the way he no longer did. And thinking too how the court had been present her entire life and was now disappearing forever made her want to cry.

  ‘The world is changing,’ Agnes said in a voice that gave nothing away.

  This match would be the very last one at Palmyra Farm and though August was almost gone, September still seemed a long way off.

  9.

  BUT SOMEONE WAS making lists in high places. There were lists of Fascists and lists of anti-Fascists in Britain. Italian names, jumbled together, reading like a cast list for an opera.

  Alessandro Anzi from London,

  Carlo Campolonghi from Edinburgh,

  Giovanni Oresfi from Clerkenwell,

  Francesco Cesar from Eastbourne and

  Mario Molinello from Bly.

  Who knew which list each belonged to?

  Someone, a clerk with neat handwriting, wrote the names into a book. Then a fat man with a cigar dropped ash all over them and someone else with nimble fingers came along and filed them away. So that one day a man wearing a trilby would find the list.

  No one except Cecily saw Pinky Wilson sitting in the apple orchard reading a newspaper in another language.

  ‘It’s in Italian, silly,’ Rose said crossly when Cecily told her. ‘Why don’t you spy on someone else?’

  The tennis party was on everyone’s lips.

  Franca talked about it all the time with Rose, their faces alight with anticipation. The Molinellos, when the shop was closed, came over to the farm to compare notes with Joe endlessly as to who was the best tennis player.

  ‘Rose is,’ said Franca.

  ‘Yes,’ admitted Joe smiling wryly. ‘She is!’

  ‘Papi thinks he is,’ said Giorgio and Carlo laughed.

  ‘Papi’s hopeless,’ he said. ‘I’m the best in the family, you know.’

  ‘Oh, Lucio is pretty good too,’ Anna told them and at that, Agnes, who had just made her a cup of tea, looked up sharply. Her deep dimple made a swift appearance. And disappeared again. There were just fourteen days left to the tennis match.

  ‘Please God it doesn’t rain,’ prayed Franca.

  Agnes was making a canary yellow satin dress that Rose would wear to the dance. They were giggling together, good friends for once. Cecily, hurrying along the corridor, heard Rose whispering to her mother and stopped to listen.

  ‘But I do wish he wasn’t my father,’ Rose said.

  Agnes spoke with her mouth full of pins so Cecily couldn’t make out what she said. And then Rose said something else, her voice different now. She spoke in the same cold flat voice she used when upset. Finally she made an impatient sound, a slight ‘oh’ as though she had turned away.

  ‘Keep still, darling,’ Agnes said.

  ‘Ah ha!’ Aunty Kitty said, pouncing on Cecily.

  Laughing.

  ‘Caught you!’

  And she propelled Cecily into the room with her.

  ‘Look who was hiding outside!’

  Rose scowled.

  ‘Oh my! The Listening Queen! What a surprise!’

  ‘Why can’t I have a dress like Rose’s?’ demanded Cecily. ‘Why do I always have to have her cast-offs?’

  ‘Because you’re not old enough,’ Rose said.

  ‘It’s irreversibly damaging my character,’ Cecily said.

  And she stuck her tongue out at her sister. Kitty burst out laughing.

  ‘I’m sorry, child,’ Rose said glaring at Aunty Kitty. ‘It’s simply a matter of birth order.’

  ‘Don’t pull faces, Rose,’ Aunt Kitty said, ready to start another argument.

  Later Cecily learnt that birth order was an important kind of order, never spoken about but always present. Until you died.

  ‘When I’m twenty you’ll only be twenty-two,’ murmured Cecily.

  ‘You’re not twenty yet.’

  ‘But I will be!’

  ‘Wait until then.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Agnes said, worn down like a step that had been walked on too often.

  Like the step, she was becoming slippy and dangerous.

  ‘What’s the point?’ wailed Cecily. ‘There won’t be a tennis dance when I’m twenty. Not if the war comes.’

  Rose laughed.

  ‘Wars don’t last six years,’ she said.

  ‘I hate you,’ Cecily said.

  But she said it without heat. Carlo would be at the party and suddenly she hated him too. She had asked him again if he would dance with her and he had agreed. But he had answered in a way that made her feel she was begging.

  Children aren’t supposed to have feelings, she wrote in her diary.

  Outside in the country lanes, along the cottage walls and in the tangled hedgerows, dog roses bloomed. Untended, wild, and beautiful. It was truly ferocious weather that made the scent of honeysuckles stronger than ever before. On the wireless the news was that Hitler had sent a personal message to Stalin. And life seemed hell-bent on passing Cecily by. Would the tennis party never come?

  The two girls with feet turned out like Jemima Puddleduck’s had moved into the small bedroom in the annexe at the back of the house. They were very thin and white.

  ‘Pasty, city girls,’ Partridge said, am
used.

  ‘Streamlined like soda fountains,’ Selwyn agreed.

  He seemed awfully jolly. Considering.

  ‘Do you mean pretty?’ Aunty Kitty asked with a trace of discord buried in her voice, annoyed at something no one else could see.

  Selwyn grinned a young boyish grin, helplessly. Like a man carried along by sea currents.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Joe, thinking of someone else, entirely. ‘Very pretty.’

  The others were dubious. A discussion on prettiness ensued; light-heartedly, innocently blowing away the cobwebs of past irritations.

  But Cecily knew there was no one more beautiful than Rose.

  At the ice-cream parlour one of the Italian boys began to practise Honeysuckle Rose on the violin. One of them (it was Carlo) had told Rose he would play it at the dance. By the way he blushed whenever he mentioned her name, everyone knew what he was thinking. The Molinellos smiled good-naturedly and Mario whistled, Ain’t Misbehavin’. And when no one was around Lucio listened to the wireless to see how grim the news was getting.

  By Friday the 18th the weather was scorching and there wasn’t even a thread of a breeze. The thermometer stood at eighty-seven. The grand clear-up had taken four whole days because the heat made everyone stop for too many rests. Rose wore a large hat to keep the sun off her face but it soon got knocked off her head. Butterflies danced around her. Joe paused, straightening his hat. He didn’t mind the sun on his face, he told Cecily when she arrived with the ice-cold lemonade. Bellamy, high on the tractor, glanced at Rose with heat-sapped, challenging eyes.

  Rose looked away. Bellamy revved up the engine. He looks as hot as the devil himself, Cecily thought.