by Roma Tearne
‘It’s too late for tears now,’ Aunt Kitty said, pulling at her hand as though it were a bridle.
Cecily turned back into a pony.
Obedient for once.
Obedient too late.
Late, in the mysterious way Rose had now become.
The Late Rose Maudsley who had never been late for anything in her life.
Late, even though she was right here with everyone.
Cecily wanted to shout at them all.
‘Shutting the door after the horse has bolted,’ Aunt Kitty sniffed.
Inside her coffin Rose laughed and laughed and ate an ice-cream cone with the teeth the dentist had identified. The ice cream came from Mario’s ice-cream parlour in the town, which now doubled as a funeral parlour because its owner, Mario, had vanished.
Too much ice cream killed her. Too much of a good thing killed her. On Rose’s tombstone it would soon say, To Our Darling Honeysuckle Rose. Rest In Peace.
(No mention of ice cream, then.)
‘Let us pray for peacetime,’ the vicar murmured in a low voice.
He made peacetime sound like teatime. There would of course be strawberry scones after the funeral. Aunt Kitty had been making them since the early morning.
August 14th, 1968.
Cecily was still on the bus when she noticed the fire. It appeared as a vivid streak reflected on the windowpane. A moment later the sky turned a violet-blue and there followed an enormous explosion. Sparks flew upwards like gunshots. The bus turned directly onto the coast road. Horrified, she saw the crowd. The women in their faded print dresses, the men, many of them in shirt-sleeves and braces, moving with quickening footsteps. The whole town had its face turned towards the blaze in a collective gesture of amazement.
Watch out! she wanted to cry. Oh be careful! Please!
The flames whipped by the sea breeze began to billow high against the night sky and when another explosion occurred the crowd gasped. This one was an iridescent green.
The flames spoke to her in tongues from another age, sounding like a poisonous woman. Bitter, too, like a woman spurned.
She wanted to scream. But instead, bending low in her seat she stuffed her fingers into her mouth and crushed them hard between her teeth.
No, she wanted to shout. No! Please. Help me!
She felt she would faint.
Someone had once said it was the arsenic in the paint that produced the greenish colour. Cecily couldn’t remember who; Aunt Kitty perhaps? No, not Aunt Kitty. Had they been talking about Dunkirk? No. They knew nothing of Dunkirk at the time. But after Dunkirk?
After Dunkirk there had been enough names to fill every side of the stone memorial, six, eight times over. Enough people to help forget one small death. You would have thought so anyway.
The bus was slowing down. Hers was the last stop, closest to the wild part of the sea marsh, furthest from the town centre, nearer to home.
‘Goodnight,’ the driver called but she didn’t hear him.
A pinprick of light reflected in her eyes when she looked up. Like a bird it was, he thought, the way it glimmered. A moment later she was gone, and the light with her.
There were no other passengers.
‘There isn’t anywhere else to go,’ muttered the driver.
Then he shrugged. This place had always attracted a certain type. The last he saw as he drove out of Bly in the direction of Eelburton, was Cecily’s silhouette turned towards what the locals called the Last Pier.
There was no fire.
Now that she was standing on the grass verge she saw her mistake and shook her head, puzzled. So had she imagined it?
As she found the footpath the scent of late-flowering limes, exquisite and unexpected, confused her.
At the top of the path she stopped to get her breath back. The river curved to her right and she saw with surprise it had shrunk to a trickle, no bigger than a stream. There was a noise in her head like the scratching of a gramophone needle at the end of a record. Speak Rose. Speak!
‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed,’ the boys used to say of Rose.
Only Cecily had known differently.
Somewhere here, she recalled vaguely, was the ford through which, when there were no adults in the car, Partridge their gardener used to drive the old Lancia with a fine splash dousing the windscreen and making her shriek.
She had been walking fast, running almost, until the sudden memory of Partridge’s face, full of suppressed mischief, stopped her. The footpath further confused her and after that she lost her bearings. Many days of rain on the high coarse grass had made the path a marshy, muddy, yellow mess. The street light cast a dim glow across the ground and she heard, as through a fog, a curlew crying in pain.
Twenty-nine years after the war began.
And yes, she was home.
Bly was just a coastal backwater. It had no pier, only a promenade with a few broken amusement arcade machines and a street of shops. Most of the houses were clustered together facing the sea but they soon petered out into farmland and marshes. Having lived elsewhere for so long and only recently stepped off a plane from an exotic location Cecily was surprised at how small Bly was. Turning eastwards away from the town and crossing the causeway to the spit of land they used to call ‘The Ness’, she walked towards the beach. The rain stopped abruptly and twilight settled in the sulphurous sky. While the path that wound down to the sea was a shocked white, unmarked as a spilt bolt of bridal silk. Cecily hesitated. The Ness had always been cut off by the tides at certain times during each day. Walking on it could be dangerous.
But when she reached the water’s edge, the sand was cool and the tide had clearly just left it. In the half-light she saw a flat, beaten world of shingle and broken shells. Ahead lay a darkly transparent sea and a sky filling up with fistfuls of stars.
Why had she imagined there had been a fire?
Turning, she retraced her steps back across the Ness following the smell of oilskins and rotting fish. She wasn’t looking for the pier but as she approached the creek she saw it. And there on the waterline, a boat floated. Once long ago Cecily’s older sister Rose, wearing a forget-me-not dress, had rowed across here at high tide on just such a boat.
Could it really be twenty-nine years and three days since Cecily had last walked this way?
Night hadn’t quite fallen. As she regained the footpath and headed for the house she felt a sharp stab of memory. She saw herself, small suitcase, handle wobbling and with a voice trying not to cry, being marched firmly towards the station.
‘I don’t want to go.’
Then as now, only silence answered her.
‘When can I come back?’
Still there had been no answer.
And it was then she had added, with something of the spirit of her sister Rose, something of the unresolved anger that had existed in Rose, ‘I hate Aunt Kitty!’
But her mother Agnes Maudsley, holding her elbow with the same firmness as the line of her mouth, said nothing. And it had been this terrible look that had propelled Cecily onto the train on that day.
Twenty-nine years, three days and twelve hours ago.
The farmhouse, when she finally reached it, was not quite as she remembered although at the edge of the horizon to her left, she saw the woods were still there, stretched in a sash of fading blue. Almost instantly she saw that it was now dwarfed by the garden, which had gone on living, like a fingernail on a corpse while the house itself had almost disappeared under it. In the clarity of the twilight the shadow of the walnut tree darkened the ground. The sight of the tree reined Cecily in, pulling her back into watchfulness. She had dreamt about her return for so long, thinking she would recognise its every look. Now she saw this was not so and the beloved place she had believed so familiar was withholding essential things.
Opening the front gate she stopped. The house had shrunk or she had grown. Neglect had altered them both. She stood as though checking the place against a photograph.
The cornerstone of the door where they had stood, all together.
Stilled on the threshold of the war.
Agnes and Kitty. Joe and Rose.
And Selwyn, of course. Her family!
Together again as though it were yesterday.
Six hundred years ago the house had begun its life as a farmhouse. Succeeding generations of occupants had added bits to it so that it was a jumble of gables and windows, with odd-shaped rooms, some no larger than walk-in cupboards. Now of course there was no farm; that was long gone. And the house had the air of existing in some other era. The front veranda was bare and the honeysuckle climber had been cut down. A cat flashed across the driveway and into the unkempt rhododendron bushes, its sprint reminding Cecily of the secretive behaviour of Rose’s friend Bellamy. His sudden entrances and exits, the many parts he used to play. Aside from this small sign of life, nothing stirred. But the key was left by the agent under the flowerpot by the front door as promised. And the name, Palmyra House, was still nailed to the gate. Cecily stared at it. She felt colder than moonlight.
Palmyra, she murmured.
Palmyra; a distant country, blown away across the sands of time.
Returning to her at last.
The words of a song sung long ago,
a lighted window through which her childhood had fled,
a hand caressing her,
a kiss.
Why had she come back?
Her Aunt Kitty was no longer alive. After the war, when Cecily’s mother Agnes had died, Aunt Kitty hadn’t wanted anything more to do with Cecily. Her duty, she had said, had been done. And the Tragedy, buried for years under layers of mysterious things, became Cecily’s responsibility, alone.
As she opened the front door on this August night, Cecily remembered certain things but not others. The ghost of her father Selwyn came out of the gloom, making her jump.
‘Strawberry blonde!’ his voice boomed.
‘Oh Selwyn Maudsley!’ Aunt Kitty had laughed.
There had been a field of strawberries on their fruit farm, Cecily remembered. But as much as she searched, she never found a blonde one.
‘Real life,’ her mother Agnes had remarked, ‘is persistently disappointing.’
Real life, then, was like a field of red strawberries.
This conversation had occurred just before war was declared. They had not really expected the war but after it was declared Cecily associated the moment with that field.
Other fragments of her childhood broke away from their anchor and floated effortlessly towards her. In the sullen light of her imagination she saw Bellamy, face closed and scowling, as he held the long grey prawn that he usually kept tucked in his trousers but was now sharing with Rose. She had wanted to ask Rose why it had got bigger and bigger but instinct had kept her silent. Rose would have been furious with her for spying on them.
Walking into the room they called the parlour, Cecily stopped. The silence that lived within it stirred and crawled under the door and the moth in her heart spread its wings. The room smelt just as before. Like an abandoned relic or a Christmas gift of crystallised fruit. Cecily gasped. Was that her brother Joe she was hearing? Whistling outside the window?
Ten bob a week, bugger all to eat, great big boots and blisters on your feet.
Another memory sprang out to startle her. It was Rose! In one of her bad moods of course, head bent, darning a stocking, swearing and sucking her finger.
A drop of blood spreading like an evil spell on her frock. Rose swore again.
‘I’ll tell,’ Cecily had threatened.
‘Tell then!’
‘I shall. Unless you give me a penny!’
‘What a joke, you outrageous child!’
And then Rose’s laugh fading as suddenly as it began.
2.
AFTER THE FUNERAL was over, Selwyn and the policemen went away together in a car. There were two other men in the convoy of police cars. One of them was Robert Wilson in his trilby. He wouldn’t look at Cecily even though she had tried to say hello.
People called him by another name. It sounded like Finch.
The police had been to Palmyra Farm several times earlier that week and one of them had talked to Cecily in a voice that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be angry or sad. His voice had made Aunt Kitty very angry.
‘Did you hear him?’ she had shouted afterwards, glaring at Cecily. ‘Anybody would think they felt sorry for the little wretch.’
‘What is the point of shouting at her?’ Cecily’s mother had asked. ‘She’s not the one to blame.’
‘She might have kept her mouth shut!’ Aunt Kitty snarled.
Cecily had heard the policeman tell her mother there would be no bail.
After Selwyn had gone Agnes cried harder. So, tactful for once, Cecily didn’t ask why he needed to have a government meeting when they had just buried Rose. A small, invisible suitcase that no one knew existed as yet waited in Cecily’s bedroom. Afterwards she would go to live with her Aunty Kitty.
But first, people had to stand around for ages eating cucumber sandwiches. It struck Cecily as funny that this gathering was called Awake when she herself felt as though she was dreaming. A girl from the village pub handed out plates. Normally Cecily’s mother would have asked Cecily to be helpful but today wasn’t normally, so Cecily was banished to the kitchen instead. To help Cook and the girl from the pub cut ham-into-thin-slices. The cook was slurring her speech. Ham-cut-into-thin-slices were what Cook was concentrating on.
No one talked about Rose. The absence of war was what they talked about. You would think it was the War that had died, the way they went on blaming it. The War, it seemed, was late like Cecily’s sister.
Two children whom she knew by sight came up to the kitchen door and stared at her and the Eavesdropper became Eavesdropped-on, the Spy the Spied-on.
‘There she is! That’s her. She was talking to herself in the church!’
‘The one who –’
‘Shhh!’
The War’s to blame, thought Cecily. Not me. And she went on cutting ham-into-thin-slices.
‘That’s enough, Cecily,’ Cook said in her stern-slurry voice.
Cook had been crying for days.
‘It’s a great big machine,’ Cecily heard someone else say. ‘A killing machine for people.’
‘Poor little mite,’ Cook said to no one in particular. ‘It were just a game that went wrong.’
‘Pretty stupid game, eh?’
‘They meant no harm and anyway it was the boy that started it!’
‘And ’im that finished it. Don’t forget the real culprit!’
Cecily heard that the boat Rose had used to row towards the Last Pier had probably sunk.
And still there was no Tom.
Or Carlo, or even Franca.
Only Bellamy, standing in the kitchen garden, by the black iron water pump scowling and refusing to come near the house. Cook took him out a cup of tea but he pushed her hand so the tea flew all over her and the cup smashed to the ground. The guests who were Awake stopped talking and looked outside.
‘Land’s sake!’ Cook said and she started to cry, again. ‘I can’t be doing with you.’
And now, twenty-nine years, three days, twelve hours later, standing in the room that had things-brushed-under-the-carpet, Cecily was back once more. A prodigal daughter returning to an empty home, with a suitcase full of smart clothes. With ringless fingers and a divorce certificate. Thin and officially middle-aged. At long last! The letter she had received years ago was in the suitcase, too. The handwriting was still readable, the content still unbelievable. The letter said that her father, Selwyn Maudsley, had passed away and that Cecily Maudsley, next of kin, was being notified. It expressed deep sympathy and some regret. After she had read it Cecily calmly put the letter back in its envelope. Her father had joined all the other late people in the world.
Stan
ding in the room in the soft twilight, she felt the house had developed a sly, stubborn air. So many people had stored secrets in it over the years – letters, journals, farm accounts, locks of hair, shreds of silk, sentimental rubbish of all sorts – that she felt certain some further revelations from that terrible day could leap out at her. Anything was possible.
A clock ticked.
She opened a window, let out a bee and saw the myrtle bush, grown from the cutting of some distant Maudsley bridal bouquet, still flourishing.
In the dining room a photograph hung damply over the mantelpiece like a holy picture in a disused chapel. She felt handcuffed to her childhood. So without turning on the electricity, she went upstairs hoping to unravel the golden questions that needed answering. The banister was wet. She could smell the dampness everywhere. It seemed to rise and follow her like an army of skeletons.
And because the moonlight flooded the house she failed to notice the silent figure moving with the wind across the road in full view of the window.
Upstairs her sister’s bed lay phosphorescent in the stillness. The room itself was heavy with sleep; a place kept just so, for a dead child who was never coming back. It was tidily made up, forever. Rose’s dresses, boxed up in the wardrobe, beautifully darned. Her name on a piece of paper pinned to one of them. The pin was rusty, the pierced paper discoloured. A loving hand had written the date on it.
Someone, somewhere in the centre of the town let off a firework, followed by another. One big bang followed by two others. One bright fountain of sherbet-coloured flowers followed by another rain of light. While all over Suffolk August funfairs were in full swing. The war had been dead for twenty-three years. Rose some time longer.
A week after Rose’s funeral Joe went off to fight for England and a band played loudly in Cecily’s head as he gave her a hug. Happy and Glorious, played the band.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Joe said.