The Last Pier

by Roma Tearne

  Franca stared pointedly at Cecily’s pocket. Don’t forget my letter the look said.

  ‘I’ll bring the boys, those that are free,’ Lucio called. ‘To help Joe.’

  ‘Carlo, too?’ asked Cecily.

  ‘Yes, Carlo, too!’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Robert Wilson exclaimed, ‘that you were on such good terms with the family.’

  Agnes couldn’t stop her unruly smile.

  ‘Oh the children grew up together. They are a lovely family.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Bly wouldn’t be what it is without the Molinellos.’

  Pinky Wilson’s hands on the steering wheel were lit by the light of the dashboard. Tomorrow, he told Agnes, he would help Joe and the Italians. Even though there was hardly anything left to do.

  ‘The sooner you get the tennis court ploughed up and ready for planting, the better,’ he said. ‘World events are moving faster than you realise.’

  He spoke so softly that Cecily, staring out of the window, barely heard him. She must have been dreaming of something altogether more interesting. Her sister Rose, perhaps, or what was more likely, Carlo. They would be certain to be at the fair by now and Carlo would be buying candyfloss. Cecily loved candyfloss. And Rose was bound to have her fortune told by the parrot who picked out the cards of destiny. But she didn’t need to bother, thought Cecily, angrily. Her destiny was just marvellous.

  ‘I wonder if the evacuee’s arrived,’ Agnes said, her voice happier than it had sounded all day.

  Cecily, thinking of Rose in love with Carlo, spoke absent-mindedly.

  ‘Aunty Kitty loves Daddy,’ she said.

  What followed had been a stunned silence, so powerful that its echo remained with her, still.

  Travelling through eternity, its dark tones lived on in Shingle Street, and Palmyra House, and other places in other corners of the world.

  Still piercing Cecily’s heart. Still burning a hole in her.

  What on earth had made her say such a thing?

  The car moved forward as though it was trying to escape the words.

  ‘Cecily!’ Agnes said, managing to say everything she wanted with that one, single word.

  Cecily froze. Her words, arriving from nowhere, were now mixed with the stale taste of ginger beer, chocolate violets and undigested thoughts. Tangling with the evening, ruining it. Sorryness sticking to the roof of her mouth was what she tasted then, while desperation poked its vomity finger down her throat. Nothing came out.

  Pinky Wilson laughed easily.

  ‘Perhaps she’ll be a comedian,’ he said into the darkness, helping out, shifting gear so the car continued smoothly inland into the depths of the countryside and towards Palmyra House. But Agnes, looking over her shoulder at Cecily, spoke to her with Another Look that stated clearly, ‘You’re Old Enough To Know Better’ and ‘We’ll Talk About This Later’.

  Cecily, her voice torn into tissue-paper shreds, was silenced.

  ‘I’m sorry, mummy,’ she managed at last.

  The back of her mother’s head looked stiff and angry.

  In the darkened countryside the headlights picked out certain things and missed others.

  It shone its beam on a fox’s green eye. Very soon a chicken would die.

  The headlights moved on missing Bellamy, hands stained with blood, shirt torn from a back-room brawl in Bly from which Selwyn had rescued him.

  Cecily swallowed. She longed to be elsewhere, walking the dunes in bare feet. Most of all she wanted to throw her indiscretion far into the wide night sky.

  ‘You must be tired, Cecily,’ Pinky Wilson said, keeping his voice friendly, making Cecily hate him all the more. ‘It’s been a long evening for you.’

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Agnes agreed, mouth snapping like a crocodile.

  Some things come with their own punishment.

  Cecily, leaning out of the car window, tried and failed to get the vomit to dislodge.

  At the back of her mind was an image she half-remembered but couldn’t get hold of.

  Half-remembering was still the thing she was best at.

  How hot it had been in the car. She clamped her teeth together and closed her eyes while a scrap of moon, no bigger than a cut fingernail, floated past. The direction of the wind had brought a faint sound of fairground music and seawave sickness danced before her eyes. She felt cold and clammy.

  In the dimness of the car, Robert Wilson covered Cecily’s mother’s clenched fist.

  ‘Don’t altogether trust them, Agnes,’ he said.

  What had he meant?

  It was how they arrived home. Aunt Kitty sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea, looked up with interest.

  She was always the first to smell a rat, Rose used to say.

  ‘Tea, anyone?’ Kitty said, her voice golden as syrup.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Robert Wilson. ‘I have an early start tomorrow.’

  ‘Are you going back up to London?’ Agnes asked, the shine all gone from her face.

  ‘’fraid so.’

  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ Aunt Kitty asked, still digging for information with her invisible spade.

  ‘It was a nice evening,’ Robert Wilson said.

  ‘Very nice,’ agreed Agnes.

  Niceness spread itself across the kitchen table.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Cecily had said.

  Agnes wasn’t interested. She simply wanted Cecily out of the way so she could prepare for the arguments yet to come.

  ‘When’s Daddy back?’

  But Selwyn was with the ARP.

  As usual.

  ‘There are some jokes that are too rude to be made,’ Agnes continued gravely after Pinky Wilson had gone.

  Cecily opened her mouth to say she hadn’t been joking but then closed it shut. For what was the point?

  Surprisingly, her mother showed no signs of putting any restrictions on the next day. So why did Cecily feel so desolate?

  ‘There’s quite enough to think of with the war looming without having to deal with you as well,’ said Agnes, clearly waiting for Cecily to go upstairs.

  And then she turned her back and closed the kitchen door, her footsteps receding, tap, tap.

  But, it was still a night of great beauty. That hadn’t changed.

  Tawny as the wings of a hunting owl in a forsaken corner of an English field.

  With a trough of water from a tiny spring filled up with moonlight.

  Meadowsweet clots of mist making the air ache with scent.

  And Lucio, kneeling on a slab of stone, bathing hands and arms and then face in the delicious cool water.

  All around lay the moon’s lustrous sheen. It haunted Lucio terribly. Things had never looked so full of wonder. He watched the figure hurrying towards him, her breath against his skin even before she reached him. Threads of music from earlier that day followed behind. Scarves of phosphorescent light touched her hair. Lucio covered the distance between them but then stopped. They both hesitated for a moment longer before the last inevitable leap towards each other.

  Neither heard the squeak of a bicycle for the night was full of many small noises, too numerous to bother with.

  He saw her framed against the meadowsweet and she saw the distant lights of the town behind him. He was afraid to kiss her, so Agnes touched him first.

  A piece of Italy in a forgotten corner of an English field. And a pair of Irish eyes.

  They failed to see the figure of Cecily cycling furiously away.

  Having waited awhile, Cecily had left the house. There were shadows in the folds of every object, imperceptible tremors in every glass of water. Something unnameable moved with the wind. So, after the house had settled and the footsteps belonging to her mother had hurried away past the walnut tree and the garden light had gone off, unable to wait any longer, Cecily sat up. If Rose could climb down the honeysuckle creeper why on earth couldn’t she? The torch beside her sister’s bed had gone so she would have to feel her way in the
dark. Her bicycle was in the shed.

  ‘I shall,’ she muttered. ‘I can do what I like.’

  Carlo didn’t belong to Rose no matter what she might think. She was positively bad for him. In A Girl of the Limberlost the heroine had fought for her love. Goose pimples of defiance played a wicked tune across Cecily’s arms as she prepared to be a siren for the night and lure Carlo away from her sister.

  With her sister’s fishnet scarf around her hair, knees a little scratched from the climb, she sped towards the sea. On the way she saw the silhouette of her mother standing by a tree. It did not surprise her for she knew her mother had a different life by night. The breeze sang in the telegraph wires in a way it never would again. Faint fairground noise burst on the air as she approached. The ice-cream stall was still open and Cecily could see a girl she didn’t recognise wiping down the counter. Behind the girl a small crowd was watching a man eating fire. Cecily stared. She leaned her bicycle against a fence. Away from the house the air was cooler and she felt it was easier to breathe. But now she was actually here she didn’t know what to do next.

  She wondered, as the tide was out, if she would at least walk down to the beach. It was cowardly not to and the whole escapade seemed a little pointless. There was no sign of Carlo and the constriction in her throat increased. Rose was like the tide. There was no stopping her. If she wanted Carlo then she would have him. Horrified by her treacherous thoughts, Cecily wondered if perhaps she should go back. Turning her bicycle around she was about to set off again when something made her look over her shoulder. Standing in the shadow, close by the ice-cream stall, facing the sea, was a trilby she recognised. Pinky Wilson lighting a cigarette, hand cupped over the flame, head bent in concentration. Cecily frowned. Instinct made her move into the shadows. Suddenly a gust of wind lifted the trilby and sent it spinning along the pier with Pinky in pursuit. And as she stood, groping for information she knew of but had mislaid, she saw her Aunt Kitty.

  Yes, thought Cecily, twenty-nine years too late the memory rang alarm bells.

  Idiot! cried the voice in her head. Why didn’t you think about it, then? And didn’t you think it odd to see Lucio kissing your mother?

  ‘I was too busy with other things,’ Cecily mumbled, staring at the scraps of sea peeping out between two houses.

  Why didn’t you see the clues?

  Cecily shook her head. She hadn’t a clue.

  The figure in the doorway fixed the adult Cecily with a long and thoughtful stare but she was busy with the seamlessly returning past.

  Ah Mario! she thought, now.

  She must have spoken aloud or else the slight breeze carried her voice towards the watching figure who straightened up, sharply.

  ‘Mario!’

  Cecily remembered how, when he had finished helping the girl, Mario had left. The girl had taken the broom and swept the floor. There had been no sign of either Franca or Rose. Perhaps Cecily had made a mistake and Rose had in fact been asleep in the Molinellos’ house?

  The night returned to her across the years.

  Kitty moving in time to the music from the carousel, cigarette in hand. Cecily had never seen her aunt smoke before. Then, as she stood uncertainly, Cecily saw her aunt shrug her shoulders and throw her cigarette away before walking onto the darkened beach. Mounting her bicycle, Cecily rode off but in her haste she missed Pinky Wilson, hat back firmly on his head, coming up the steps from the beach. Had she looked back she would have seen him, lighting another cigarette. And watching her.

  The moon vanished behind a cloud and as she cycled home Cecily remembered two things. She remembered that the evacuee must have arrived and now be asleep in Palmyra House. And she remembered that Pinky Wilson had told her mother he needed an early night because he was going to London in the morning.

  And then, as she put her bicycle back in the shed (noticing with relief her father’s was still absent) and began to climb up the honeysuckle creeper, she saw also that Pinky Wilson’s car was parked in the driveway. Her window was just as she had left it, slightly ajar. The hump of clothes in the bed, left in case her mother walked in, looked suitably convincing and undisturbed. Taking off her sister’s scarf, making sure she put it safely back in the hatbox, she realised she needed the bathroom. She opened the door and listened. Then, putting on the expression of a sleepwalker, she went towards the lavatory.

  A floorboard creaked but she kept walking.

  There was a small shuffling sound. Cecily kept going until she was back in her room. She shivered and shut the window. Pulling the covers over her shoulder, she closed her eyes. Tomorrow she would get up early to deal with the evacuee. Tomorrow she would be extra specially nice to her mother.

  Somewhere in the distance the church clock in Shingle Street struck two and as she fell softly into sleep, the last thought Cecily had was that the sound she had heard on the landing was of someone crying.

  By August 1968 the war memorial in Shingle Street had many more names dedicated to the fallen. It surprised Cecily her name wasn’t on it.

  Concentrate, admonished the voices in her head. You’ve come back to remember, remember!

  The day after the ballet was a Sunday. August the 20th. By the time the morning penetrated her dream the sun was pouring its coins on the floor. The programme from the night before rested on her sister’s bed. The house’s faraway noises went on below with the wireless playing Hitler’s silly voice over and over again. In the distance was the faint sound of the tractor. Leaping out of bed, Cecily dressed hastily and rushed downstairs.

  Agnes was out. A strange boy with long grey socks sat at the kitchen table eating a boiled egg. There was no one else in sight. The boy looked up and stared hard at Cecily while chewing steadily. Then he nodded.

  ‘Ah!’ Aunt Kitty said, coming in. ‘So you’re up! I was beginning to think it was the Sleeping Beauty you saw last night.’

  She looked normal.

  The boy guffawed. He appeared perfectly at home in the kitchen.

  ‘Is he the evacuee?’ Cecily asked her aunt, ignoring him.

  ‘Cecily this is Tom. Tom, meet Cecily. I think C is slightly older than you.’

  Tom nodded and went back to his egg.

  ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She’s in the top field talking to your father and Partridge. Would you like an egg, Cecily?’

  ‘Is Rose back?’

  Aunt Kitty frowned. Then she switched off the wireless. The temperature on the thermometer was still at eighty-seven. Would it never get cooler?

  ‘Not yet,’ Kitty said. ‘She and Franca and Partridge are going to help Joe with sorting out the barn now. Now do you want an egg? You can take Tom around the orchard after breakfast if you like.’

  ‘I can go by myself, if you don’t want to,’ Tom said.

  ‘You’ll get lost,’ said Cecily.

  ‘No I won’t. I have a compass.’

  No one spoke. Tom finished his egg and reached for some toast.

  Tom.

  Why, after so long, was the sight of him buttering toast suddenly so clear?

  ‘I think,’ Aunt Kitty said, ‘it would be good if Cecily takes you in this first instance.’

  There was a flat tone to her voice but she was looking at Cecily and smiling. Cecily thought she looked exhausted.

  ‘Now, C, for the last time. Egg or no egg?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Can I have another one?’ Tom asked. ‘My mother said there would be plenty of eggs on a farm.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Aunt Kitty said.

  Again Cecily heard the flat tone. It rang a clear warning. The boy didn’t seem to notice and when he next spoke he simply said,

  ‘Thank you.’

  After Kitty left and they finished breakfast, Tom took two sugar lumps and put them in his pocket.

  ‘That’s stealing,’ Cecily said in her best voice.

  ‘No it’s not. I’m going to give it to the horses.

  Cecily was sile
nt.

  ‘C’mon then, let’s go,’ Tom said

  ‘I have to go upstairs first.’

  Instantly the boy was interested.

  ‘Where’s your room? Is it here in the main house?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He pulled a face.

  ‘I’m in the annexe next door,’ he said. ‘Next door to those girls! It’s awfully hot in there.’

  ‘They’re dancers,’ Cecily told him. ‘They’ll be gone next week, although Pinky says they might come back as Land Girls.’

  ‘Who’s Pinky?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Her voice was beginning to sound a bit like Aunt Kitty’s and her head felt confused and strange. Last night came back to her in fragments. Had she really gone to the beach or had she dreamt it?

  ‘You’ve got a very funny look on your face,’ Tom observed.

  And he laughed, showing slightly crooked front teeth. For some reason this made Cecily like him a bit more.

  ‘How many people are there in your family?’

  ‘Rose and Joe,’ said Cecily.

  ‘So why can’t I stay here in the main house?’

  ‘Because there isn’t room. We’ve got to keep the back bedroom free for Aunt Kitty for when she comes to stay.’

  The boy digested this.

  ‘Is Joe going to fight in the war?’

  ‘There’s not going to be a war.’

  ‘Oh yes there is!’

  ‘There might not be,’ Cecily said, uncertainly. ‘Aunt Kitty says if there is it will only last until October 25th.’

  The boy laughed again. His laugh was older than the rest of him. It was remote and superior as though it was meant to put Cecily in her place.

  ‘Is Kitty your aunt on your mother’s side or your dad’s?’

  She was taken aback by his nosiness but Tom didn’t seem to notice. ‘She’s pretty,’ he added.

  ‘You haven’t seen Rose, yet,’ Cecily said.

  She wanted her sister back as reinforcement.

  ‘She’s still at the ice-cream parlour.’

  ‘Ice cream,’ Tom said, his face lighting up. ‘Oh I say! I haven’t had any for a year at least.’