The Last Pier Part 18

'I'm not really sure. It's all top secret, of course.'

'Of course.'

They both ignored the bitterness in Agnes' voice. Only Cecily, listening for all she was worth, heard it quite clearly.

'I wish it would come if it's going to.'

'The war?'

'Yes. I can't stand the tension. I wake up tense. I go to sleep tense. It's impossible to settle.'

There was a pause. In the background they could hear kitchen clatter; water being poured down the sink, bottles being sealed, footsteps. The war was a snake. Waiting, was what it was about. And air raids, of course.

'The British people don't want to be moles,' Agnes sighed. 'They don't want to go to ground.'

'You shouldn't worry. The air raids, if they happen, will only happen at night,' Robert said easily.

He hesitated.

'Oh by the way, I've got you that ticket I promised for the Wigmore Hall.'

Agnes smiled. Her hair had begun to curl slightly in the humidity. It framed her face, softening it, making her look younger than she was. In the bleached light, her eyes were startling. Their expression exactly like that of her younger daughter.

'What a kind man you are,' she said, solemnly.

Robert lit his cigarette. Agnes was a beautiful woman, he thought.

'So you'll go?'

Agnes laughed.

'There's a lot to be done to get this place ready for the dance.'

She didn't say she would get no help from Selwyn who was busy with more and more defence work of late.

'Might as well take advantage and go up when you can,' Robert said, encouragingly.

His eyes were very blue. She wondered if he were married.

'Once the blackouts start... well, it'll be hopeless.'

He smiled. There was something about him that reminded her of a coiled spring that seemed at odds with his deep blue eyes.

'Are you trying to get rid of me?' she laughed. 'As soon as I turn my back on them G.o.d knows what those girls will get up to!'

'They'll be fine,' Robert said easily. 'Go. Do you good to get away for a bit. Stay in your sister's flat. Come back in the morning.'

Inside the kitchen, looking out of the window, Cook sniffed and behind the scullery door, Cecily was still trying not to sneeze.

'Thank you,' said Agnes, faintly.

'How does he know about the flat?' Cook asked, puzzled, frowning, standing still for a brief moment.

'Maybe she told him?' The Help said.

Cook sniffed. Poking his nose about. Even the children disliked him.

'It'll end in tears, I'll be bound,' she said.

'What will?' asked The Help.

'Oh get on with it,' said Cook, cross about something invisible.

Having reached the safety of the house, Cecily poured herself a gla.s.s of water with shaking hands and swallowed her pill.

For it was Rose darning her stocking that she saw.

Now.

Clearly, as though it were yesterday.

'Why do you want to wear stockings in this heat?' Cecily asked.

'It isn't about the wearing,' Rose replied. 'It's about the taking off, as you will find out one day.'

'I'm having a discussion with Tom about Einstein,' Cecily said.

Rose raised one eyebrow.

'You two are mighty thick,' was all she said.

'Amami di Pi,' sang Cecily and Rose laughed.

'Who taught you that? Carlo?'

Cecily had felt it was time to take stock of all her sister's unanswered questions.

'They embarked on a euthanasia programme in Germany and Austria,' she told her. 'That's why Tom's family left.'

'I shouldn't take too much notice of that one,' Rose said. 'He's trying too hard to impress.'

'Why?'

Rose put down her stocking and looked solemnly at Cecily.

'There are some things we don't ask Out Of Politeness To Others,' she said.

Then she began examining her long, sunburnt legs.

Tom had a cough and Out Of Politeness Cecily didn't like to ask if euthanasia was a cough medicine. There were several things she felt she couldn't ask. But she had been making a list of things both polite and impolite.

Why did their mother look suddenly happy?

Why was Captain Pinky buying her a ticket to a concert? ('Is he?' asked Rose, her expression thunderous. 'Where did you hear that, you pesky eavesdropper? I hope she's not following in the footsteps of that floozy, Kitty.') How had Rose torn her dress?

Had she been with Carlo when it happened?

What had Captain Pinky been doing at the pier that night when he had told them he was having An Early Night?

Did Daddy really love Aunt Kitty?

There were many more questions but she couldn't remember them all.

The tennis racquets had been found and repaired. In her narrow bed that night, waiting for the party, Cecily thought that Rose was no fun any more. And the summer, she saw with a painful awareness never present before, was slipping away. She had spent it eavesdropping while all the while her sister Rose was becoming another person altogether. I'll never change, Cecily vowed. Never. It is part of the const.i.tution of my character.

Afterwards she would remember that night as though it had been a dog-eared corner in a diary. The full moon pouring softly down somewhere above the roof of the house, washing away all the confusion of the day, leaving only a perfect stillness. Her mother's voice floating up from the garden through the open window, and Rose fast asleep for once, in a too-many-late-nights, exhausted sleep. Cecily had stretched under her thin covers thinking all these things. (She had heard somewhere that if you stretched a little bit every day you would grow taller). Thinking of Tom in his room over the stables, sleeping. And Joe across the landing, sleeping also. Soon he would be leaving them. Cecily had seen him standing in front of the mirror gazing at himself in the greatcoat his uncle had worn during the First World War. Cecily had watched through a crack in the door and seen that Joe's face was full of concentration as he did his b.u.t.tons up and then blank again as he gazed at himself. Was he thinking of Franca? Cecily hoped so. She badly wanted him to marry Franca.

Selwyn was still at some meeting looking after National Security. He could not sleep very much because of this. As for Aunt Kitty, Cecily forgot to mention Kitty in her prayers that moonless summer night before finally dropping off to sleep.

No one heard the owl hoot.

No one heard the sea washing the pebbles.

No one heard the clock strike the hour or the squeak of a bicycle brake or the small breeze stirring a curtain.

From this distance no one could hear the music on the pier or the sound of tables being folded and put away at Molinellos'.

No one saw Lucio walk swiftly towards the river.

Not even me, thought Cecily, now, looking at her cold ringless hands in the light of a sixties day.

Nor had Cecily known that, after her mother had finished playing the 'Moonlight Sonata', with the soft pedal down so as not to wake the children, Agnes had closed the lid of the piano and sighed. She was sorry if she had been a little harsh with Cecily after the ballet. She was sorry about so many things that she had lost count of them. Creeping upstairs, she had looked in on them. Her girls.

Cecily and Rose.

Rose and Cecily.

She kissed them both. Equally, for they were equal in her mind.

She went into her room and turned down the covers of the large double bed. She would be sleeping in it alone later on for Selwyn was somewhere in London, she knew. She stood surveying the room for a moment longer. Then, taking a thin shawl out of a drawer, she slipped out of the sleeping house. Making for the river.

And when the owl that lived closest to the house had waited longer than usual he saw a small movement in the gra.s.s below. It wasn't an apple falling. So in one swift, graceful movement the bird spread his wings and swooped down. There was no sound. The animal was captured and airborne. Death came under the cover of a great wing.

White, silent, and instant.

TO WAKE IN her old bed after so long was bad enough, but what was worse were the old scents that lay in wait in the hidden corners of the house. Cecily splashed the remnants of the awful night out of her eyes with cold water and went out again. Walking across to the Ness at low tide it shocked her to see the skeletal appearance of the burnt pier.

Death had left its footprints everywhere, corroding its posts and innards so that what remained was bent and buckled like rotten teeth in sea saliva. Neglect had grown its barnacles on the blackened planks while sightless carbuncles of mud from previous flooding had stuck to the rotten walls of its pavilion. There was nothing here for her except unresolved stories. What had made her love this place so much? What had drawn Rose to it? A curlew, wings outstretched, glided with strange slowness beyond all earthly anxieties. Once Cecily used to believe a water devil made its home in these marshy waters. The past was inscrutable and the story of the burnt-away pier remained an old, unsolvable story.

A white b.u.t.terfly with black markings alighted on a stone at her feet, appearing to dry itself in the pale sunlight. When it didn't move she touched it but it remained motionless and she realised it was dead. Its wings were covered in ethereal dust. It rested like a shrouded corpse. Sorrow at its pa.s.sing overcame Cecily in such a wave that turning, she set off towards Bly's seafront. Everything she had tried to love had gone.

But the seafront, when she reached it by the old route, the one taken long ago by Lucio and Agnes, had shifted and changed just as Shingle Street had altered. The wooden shacks were all gone. No Punch-and-Judy man, no helter-skelter and naturally, no ice-cream parlour awaited her. Instead there was the noise of a fast food cafe and a few fruit machines over whose flickering coloured light the unemployed dreamt. A puddle had grown in the road from the previous night's storm and a public toilet, abandoned years before, stood with a hole in its roof. Only the sea, impenetrable and unchanged, remained.

You see, said the voices in Cecily's head, All Things Pa.s.s. No use crying. Okay?

Was she meant to take comfort in this?

Had she asked the fishermen gathering their empty nets, some would have told Cecily how, on stormy nights there arose the sound of wailing from the ship called The Arandora Star. They would have told her of the bodies that had washed up on these sh.o.r.es. The fishermen would have, with some hesitation, told her that after a particularly bad storm there was still the chance of another corpse being spotted. It was not beyond the realm of possibility, they would have said. And then, had she pressed further, they might have told her it was always the gulls who picked them out first, pa.s.sing on the news, hovering over the water like a great choir singing the dead to rest. But Cecily didn't ask and the fishermen were uncertain if it was really Cecily Maudsley, daughter of Selwyn Maudsley, younger sister of Rose Maudsley (and therefore tainted like all the Maudsleys in spite of their big house), who had finally returned.

On this warm day-after-the-street-party day, Bellamy Samuel Darby, seeing Cecily silhouetted against the light, paused in his work to take out his pipe. His hands were gnarled with over-knotting nylon netting. They were the same hands that once had twisted the necks of small rabbits. But Bellamy was a different sort of man.

Now.

'Time for a break,' he told his boatswain. 'Swift half down the pub?'

'Ever ready,' laughed the boatswain, puzzled by the figure too.

Then he remembered. Of course!

'I'm going to talk to her,' Bellamy said, chin pushed forward, determined.

The sun was in everyone's eyes and the pebbly beach wasn't easy to walk up but he went.

'Are you,' he asked, 'Cecily?'

Because there was water in the sky a rainbow formed. Somewhere over it was blueness but Cecily couldn't see it. Bellamy began to whistle the tune he used to whistle to her and then she remembered.

'I was thirteen, going on fourteen,' she said, without a trace of a smile.

It was the first real acknowledgement of past times and it rang clear as a bell within her. The sea shifted slightly but the tide remained out.

'You thought I had a prawn in my trouser pocket,' Bellamy said and he bent double with an old man's laughter.

Cecily stood very still; a b.u.t.terfly, knowing the net will soon be pulled over its wings.

'We all thought you had gone for good,' Bellamy said, when he had done with laughing.

'No,' Cecily said. 'I'm here.'

'So I see.'