by Roma Tearne
‘Don’t worry,’ Cook said and she gave one of the lamps to Partridge.
Going upstairs Cecily paused by the landing window. She could see the woods ahead.
One grown-up voice was talking to another outside in soft mumbly murmurs.
‘It’s been a happy day.’
‘But now it’s all over.’
‘We said it would never happen again but we were wrong!’
‘There’s still a slight chance.’
Cecily tip-toeing distracted, hearing other murmurs, soft rustlings inside the house itself, which, like an itch, needed investigating.
‘Give me a little hope… don’t you see?’
The voices were drifting away into the trees. In the distance a huge bird, an owl perhaps, hung suspended by an invisible thread. The moon was rising as the stars appeared one by one, like candles being lit.
Now, with the hindsight of twenty-three years, Cecily thought, but everything was different after that.
Now, her body was shaking.
‘You’ve been a long time,’ Tom told her when she got back.
But it was Bellamy, still standing stock-still, shocked, white-faced, staring at them all, that Cecily would remember in later years. His expression that night, reflecting so perfectly her own.
‘We’ll start making the blackout curtains tomorrow,’ Agnes was saying.
Were German planes really going to bother with them? Here in Suffolk?
‘Not Suffolk,’ Joe said and Franca looked and looked at him as if she wanted to learn his face off by heart.
Like a song.
Or the words of a new language.
‘Will you have to go back to Italy, Aunty Anna?’ Cecily asked, at last.
‘No, no of course not! We have been citizens here for too long. We work here. No one will send us back.’
‘Now,’ Tom hissed, pulling at Cecily’s arm, dragging her out of earshot of the adults.
‘So? Where is she?’ he asked, ‘In bed?’
But Cecily had forgotten to check.
‘You nincompoop,’ Tom said. ‘She could have been abducted by Pinky for all we know!’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Cecily said.
But even to her own ears the words rang hollow. Tom was looking intently at her.
‘Well, where is she, then?’
Cecily wasn’t sure. Tom made an exasperated sound.
‘He’s following her. He’s following all of you, even your mother. Even me. You have to see if she’s gone out!’ Tom said, angrily.
Cecily shook her head. She didn’t want to go back to the house. Tom shrugged. Because of a stupid girl their plans for tonight were ruined.
‘Would you like a smoke?’ he asked, abruptly.
‘No thank you.’
‘Please yourself,’ he said indifferently. ‘I’m going to have one.’
In the distance the Italians were still singing o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.
In the field small lights flickered like fireflies. It was as if the whole of Italy stood united in that field. Waiting for tomorrow. Then the sky was filled with an explosion of fiery flowers and everyone looked heavenwards and gasped.
‘We won’t be able to light up the fields like this any more.’
We Won’t Be Able To Any More surrounded them in an ever decreasing circle.
‘Tomorrow,’ Tom said, coming back, his good mood restored. ‘We will follow him. You will do as I say.’
Cecily was beginning to hate all Germans.
When her mother came to kiss her goodnight (and yes Rose was in bed), Cecily remembered something she had overheard Lucio say. She asked Agnes what it meant.
‘Cruelty is natural,’ he had said.
But Agnes would not answer Cecily’s question.
‘Think of something nice,’ she said, instead.
And then she blew out the lamp in order not to break the spell of the night.
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao.
The song was still playing in her head when Cecily woke a few hours later to see her sister’s hands disappearing through the window. Instantly wide awake, she listened. Someone was talking in a fierce whisper. Cecily frowned, trying to place the voice.
‘You don’t understand,’ Rose was saying, her voice agitated.
Bella ciao, ciao, ciao. The song went on and on in Cecily’s head. If she moved Rose might hear her. The window was wide open. There was the squeak of a bicycle and then Rose’s urgent voice.
‘Oh look! There he goes again.’
Who? thought Cecily. And then Rose again, puzzled, upset.
‘I don’t know.’
There was another silence below the window that went on for so long that Cecily almost dropped off to sleep again. But then there was the sound of someone struggling up the honeysuckle and a pair of hands appeared again.
‘Goodnight,’ Rose whispered, hoarsely, leaning back out.
She glanced quickly in the direction of Cecily and then, turning back to the window, blew a hasty kiss. Cecily lay rigid, thinking furiously. Something didn’t add up. Rose was taking her clothes off as quickly as she could. When she was completely naked she slipped under the covers and sighed. In the faint light from outside Cecily saw her sister’s face mysteriously watchful and filled with some secret, terrific pleasure. Was it possible, Cecily wondered, to be watchful and asleep?
The next morning they heard the news that Bellamy’s father had killed himself. Bellamy had found him with his boots unlaced. The buttons of his trousers were undone showing the thickness of congealed blood on his shirt where the shot had entered the groin. Bellamy’s father’s head hung stiffly on his chest. The note beside him stated he was the son of an Irish Republican and the thought of another war frightened him.
19.
NOW WITH A new dawn rising over Palmyra House Cecily awoke from another dream. An old dream in an old location, with the same cast of actors playing the same unfinished roles. Rose’s suitcase, lined with a honeysuckle print, had featured in it.
The roof of Cecily’s mouth felt dry. The returning past, rising like floodwater, threatened to drown her. Terrified, she saw that what she had finally started could not be stopped. When she went downstairs to the kitchen she found the back door open, letting in the day. Perhaps she had forgotten to shut it the night before. She made herself a pot of tea. And finding a piece of paper, drew two columns on it. Just like long-ago Tom.
She would write down everything she could remember. Every little thing.
When the police found Rose’s suitcase on the night of September the 4th the war was only one day old.
The case was singed but still intact.
Full of future memories.
Full of things a young girl might pack when planning an elopement.
Full of dreams, hopes and other nonsense.
For instance there were two pearly-buttoned cardigans, needed for a cold climate in a neutral country. Ice-cream colours, strawberry pink and minty green from a lazy, hazy summertime. Two dresses, one of soft autumn colours and another one for the winter ahead. Gloves, of course. Kid-soft and belonging to Agnes.
Stolen well in advance. (Now that the war was upon them gloves were bound to be hard to come by.)
One small yellow suitcase; packed. Carried boldly out through the back door of Palmyra House.
One yellow suitcase leaving home with Rose. Under the circumstances she needed no suitcase where she was going.
There had been flames of happiness in her heart as she rode off down the country road towards freedom. Love being in the air meant she could have managed without a torch. There had been nothing tentative about her exit. Nothing she regretted leaving behind. But I did nothing, thought Cecily dully, her tea going cold in her hands. I knew and I didn’t stop her.
‘Oh Rose, don’t rock the boat!’ Agnes had said.
When had she said that?
‘Don’t hate your father. There’s a war coming. Everything w
ill change and what happened long ago will not matter as it once did.’
Why had she said that?
Rose shouting,
‘I won’t be like you! Your life is never going to be my future. I won’t have a sham of a marriage. I must have love! I won’t stay at home working on the farm when there is a war on. I won’t, I won’t!’
Cecily shook her head, defeated. The threads refused to knit.
That September night the spectacle of fireworks rising in fountains of light marked the last of the Last Pier. Later Cecily would hear how all kinds of things were thrown up.
An arm, raised in surprise, fingers young and ringless.
A shoe. Flung towards a moored boat.
A scrap of cloth that later would be identified as part of a summer dress.
Inappropriately worn, for the cold was already beginning to drift inland from the North Sea.
Cecily had run in. Dropping the jar of dying glow-worms, forgetting about Tom. Searching for Rose. Just in case, just in case. Coming to an abrupt halt when she saw Agnes, hands folded motionless in her lap like a dove’s wings, waiting for news of the whereabouts of her eldest daughter. All around were reflections of Cecily’s worst fears dancing to a macabre tune. As slowly, like a cast taking a bow, Selwyn and Kitty and Cook and Partridge and the Chief of Police and finally Robert Wilson himself, came in. To stand, heads bowed, silent amidst their horrific discovery.
‘Get out of my life,’ Agnes had screamed.
Crazed by grief. Demented by it.
And Selwyn?
‘Fetch the child,’ he had whispered, his bullying powers all gone, the enormity of his own terrible crime unfolding.
‘What have I done?’ cried Selwyn.
‘Get out, get out, all of you!’ Agnes screamed, unstoppable. ‘I want my daughter back!’
And Robert Wilson, too, as if in a trance, walked over to the window to check the blackout blinds were secured. For there was, in spite of everything, a war going on outside.
Robert Wilson, unaware of the white and stricken face of the young girl they called C standing in the doorway listening to adult sobs.
Cecily.
Cecci.
Coming in, un-fetched, of her own accord. Handing herself over. Looking suddenly exactly like her dead sister.
Saying,
‘It’s All My Fault.’
Even though no one was blaming her,
‘My Fault! My Fault!’ she would go on saying, forever.
‘How many were guilty that night?’ cried the adult Cecily, now.
At last, arms wrapped around her own waist, rocking herself. But on that night, as the house emptied and Selwyn was led away by the police, in the shocked silence, Robert Wilson watched as Agnes held on to Cecily, trying and failing to stop herself from shaking. For most of all, the thing that made Agnes weep bewildered tears, and Cecily stare unblinkingly, was a small spotted purse. Escaping the explosion somehow. With fifty pounds and three photographs. Intact. Like Rose’s teeth.
Cecily was not going anywhere.
Not yet. Not ever, not in her head.
And after that, as if it wasn’t enough, the all-clear had sounded its flute-like note (no one had heard the siren in the first place but of course there was a war on), and Cook turned her back on everyone and went off to make a pot of tea.
‘I will always love you,’ Agnes had whispered. Cecily had wondered who she was talking to. Her? Or Rose?
For once Aunt Kitty had nothing to say. Numb. Oh yes, they were all numb.
Meet your new sister Numb, Cecily. She will empty you of life.
Looking back across the years Cecily saw how, at the time when it had happened there had been only disconnection. Incoherent things, too terrible to examine. Things that gave up their heartache only slowly and with time’s magic.
Perfumes.
Body scents.
Room scents.
Love.
Invisible feelings that didn’t mean anything after that moment.
You need a code-breaker to break the hidden patterns, the voices in her head told her quietly.
They sounded shocked.
But who had caused the fire? Tell us!
Nor was it possible to explain how, throughout the lonely years of the war, while Cecily fought her own war and Agnes discovered the Drink, and Kitty lost those things she had never truly had, still, certain fragments remained. Preserved in amber.
How, on that September night, Agnes had sat, refusing to move.
How nothing Robert Wilson said, on that night, or any other occasion, made the least bit of difference to anyone.
How, on that night, even when Robert Wilson took hold of Agnes’ cold hand she did not look up, did not recognise him.
How her voice calling out for her newly discovered love would reverberate down the years. Echoing terribly in Cecily’s mind.
And how Agnes, just one day after war had been declared, broken without any help from Mister Hitler, sitting in the very same room, being advised by experts, could only utter the words, ‘Where’s Lucio?’
Lucio?
And then came the chorus of voices Cecily remembered so well.
‘Send her away!’
Who had they meant?
‘Find Lucio!’
‘She can’t stay here, Agnes, are you mad?’
Why not? The whole world had gone mad, why couldn’t she?
‘Lucio,’ cried Agnes in a waterfall of grief.
And thereafter began the rigmarole of lists of a different sort. Socks. Uniform shirts Shoes (One pair because you’ll be home soon.) School bag. (This war won’t go on for much longer.) Ration Book.
On and on.
Don’t forget to clean your teeth every night. Don’t forget to wash your hands before you eat. Don’t forget to look before you cross the road. Don’t forget that even though I forgot to say the words, they exist in the ether. I love you.
‘Don’t forget, C.’
‘I won’t,’ Cecily had said, even though she had no idea what it was she shouldn’t forget.
Her new school uniform had added to her confusion, although it would not be long before she found other distractions to help her pass the time from waking to sleeping. From one year to the next. Then as now, she saw the diminutive pile of clothes that had been laid out, waiting to be packed into a suitcase with Rose’s name on it. A suitcase lying in state, in this very house to which Cecily had now returned in order to understand the true heritage of her violet eyes.
Violet, like the violets Agnes had once worn.
Violets like those Selwyn had sent Cecily on her twenty-first birthday.
From prison.
We’ll gather violets in the spring again, he had written on the card.
‘I still have it,’ she told the voices in her head, scribbling across the columns on her piece of paper. ‘It’s here with me, with all his letters.’
20.
BELLAMY’S FATHER HAD been only the first to die that summer, Cecily thought. Taking down another photograph from the wall, wiping the dust off, the adult Cecily gazed intently at it.
‘How odd,’ she murmured. ‘It’s Robert Wilson standing on the steps of Broadcasting House.’
She remembered something her father had said in one of his scantily read letters.
Saturday September 2nd 1939 and the bar of history had finally been reached.
Some felt the violent storm that burst over England was Nature’s way of putting the finishing touches to the whole affair.
‘God reminding us that our little wars are nothing in the scheme of things!’ the Prime Minister said.
They had been drinking cold beer; the humidity had demanded it. The final decision, the agreement to go to war, had required some sort of closure, some ceremony, after all these months of waiting.
Walking back to his car, rain pelted down on Robert, soaking him.
‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’ he asked, seeing Lord Halifax behind him.
‘Thank you, no. I think I’ll walk.’
Robert nodded.
‘Let’s hope I live to see the end of it. Good luck, by the way.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Robert said, raising his hand.
The city was in darkness. He turned his car around and headed back to Suffolk. Fragments of conversation floated across his tired mind.
‘It must be war, “Chips” old boy.’
‘There’s no other way out.’
‘Nerves are getting frayed.’
The violence of the storm meant he had to drive more slowly. The tempest appeared to seal the whole ghastly situation, while all over England, in market towns and quiet country lanes, people slept the last sleep of innocence. As he turned towards the east he wondered what would now happen to the beautiful Maudsley women. Agnes, Rose, the child. What future was there for them in this sorry mess? He shook his head. Something was rotten at the very core of the apple, he thought. A melancholy darkness seemed to cloak the fields speeding past. No one talked of the beauty of darkness, Robert thought as with a heavy heart he drove towards the old Ipswich Road. Lightning tore at the sky. Sleep was what he craved most of all. Sleep and a forgetting of all that lay ahead. A line of poetry, learnt long ago, in his university days, came back to him.
Many deaths lay ahead. How sleep the brave, he thought. Suddenly he wanted to weep.
‘The real work is about to begin,’ the Prime Minister had told them. And as the meeting ended every man around the table had been left wondering if they would be alive at the end of it. Will I, wondered Robert? He was not afraid. Fear was too definite, too dramatic. No, it was sadness he felt. Unaccountable, helpless, elusive, sadness at what he had done. At what he had yet to do.
The rain hadn’t quite reached Palmyra House and a watery moon still shone.
Tomorrow I shall leave for Salisbury, thought Joe, turning in his last peacetime bed. His bags were packed. Tomorrow he would listen to Chamberlain’s speech at Franca’s house. They were going to spend the day together.