The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  She looked up. The old wooden ladder led to the square aperture in the ceiling.

  “Noel?”

  A moment later he appeared, first long legs and then the rest of him, easing himself out of the loft and down the ladder.

  “What on earth are you doing up there?”

  He reached her side. There was fluff on his jacket and a bit of cobweb in his hair.

  “Couldn’t find the squash racket,” he told her. “Thought it might be in the loft.”

  “Of course it’s not in the loft. There’s nothing in the loft but a lot of old rubbish from Oakley Street.”

  He laughed, dusting himself down. “You can say that again.”

  “You can’t have looked properly.” She went into the cramped little bedroom, shifted some coats and a pair of cricket pads, and instantly found the squash racket hidden beneath them. “It’s here, you idiot. You were always hopeless at finding things.”

  “Oh, hell. Sorry. Thanks anyway.” He took it from her. She watched him, but there was nothing devious in his expression.

  She said, “Amabel is wearing my father’s coat. When did you lay your hands on that?”

  Even this did not throw him. “I nicked it during the big move. You never wore it, and it’s so splendidly grand.”

  “You should have asked me.”

  “I know. Do you want it back?”

  “Of course I don’t. You keep it.” She thought of Amabel, draped in its shabby luxury. Amabel and, doubtless, countless other girls. “I am sure you will put it to better use than I ever could.”

  They found Amabel fast asleep. Noel woke her, and she struggled to her feet, yawning and bug-eyed, and he helped her into the coat, and kissed his mother goodbye, and drove Amabel away. When they had gone, she went back indoors. She closed the door and stood in the kitchen, filled with unease. What had he hoped to find in the loft? He had known perfectly well that the squash racket was not there, so what had he been looking for?

  She went back to the sitting room, put a log on the fire. The Sunday Times lay where she had dropped it on the floor. She stooped and picked it up and read once more the Boothby’s advertisement. Then she went to her desk, found scissors, carefully clipped it out, and stowed it away in one of the small drawers of her bureau.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, she awoke with a dreadful start. A wind had risen; it was very dark, and it was raining again. Her windows rattled and raindrops dashed against the glass. “I went to Cornwall, but it rained all the time,” Amabel had said. Porthkerris. She remembered the rain, driven in from the Atlantic on clouts of wind. She remembered her bedroom at Carn Cottage, lying in the darkness as she lay now, with the sound of waves breaking on the beach far below and the curtains stirring at the open windows and the beams of the lighthouse swinging their way across the white-painted walls. She remembered the garden, scented with escallonia, and the lane that led up onto the moor, and the view from the top, the spread of the bay, the brilliant blue of the sea. The sea was one of the reasons she wanted so much to go back. Gloucestershire was beautiful, but it had no sea, and she had a hunger for the sea. The past is another country, but the journey could be made. There was nothing to stop her going. Alone or in company, it didn’t matter. Before it was too late, she would take the road west to that rugged claw of England where, once, she had lived, and loved and been young.

  6

  LAWRENCE

  She was nineteen. Between news bulletins, anxiously listened to, the radio played tunes like “Deep Purple” and “These Foolish Things,” and music from the last Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film. All summer the town had been packed with holiday-makers. Shops sprouted buckets and spades and beachballs, smelling rubbery in the hot sun, and smart ladies on holiday staying at the Castle Hotel shocked the locals by walking the streets in beach pyjamas, and sunbathing in daring two-piece bathing costumes. Most of the holiday-makers had gone now, but on the sands there were still a few about, and the tents and bathing boxes had not yet been dismantled and put away. Penelope, walking at the edge of the sea, saw the children, cared for by uniformed nannies who sat in deck-chairs and knitted, the while keeping an eye on small charges who dug sand-castles, or ran shrieking into the shallow waves.

  It was a warm and sunny Sunday morning, too good to be indoors. She had asked Sophie to come with her, but Sophie had chosen to stay in the kitchen to cook the lunch, and Penelope left her slicing vegetables for a chicken cassoulet. And Papa, after breakfast, had put on his old wide-brimmed hat and taken himself off to his studio. From there, Penelope would collect him. Together they would walk back up the hill, to Carn Cottage and the traditional midday meal that awaited them.

  “Don’t let him go into the pub, my darling. Not today. Bring him straight home.”

  She had promised. By the time they sat down to Sophie’s cassoulet, it would all be over. By then they would know.

  She had come to the end of the beach—to the rocks, and the diving board. She climbed the flight of concrete steps and came out in a narrow cobbled lane, winding downhill between the irregular, whitewashed houses. There were a lot of cats about, scavenging for fish scraps in the gutters, and sea-gulls soared overhead, or settled on roof-tops and chimneys to survey the world with cold yellow eyes and scream defiance at nothing in particular.

  At the bottom of the hill stood the church. The bells were ringing for Morning Service, and a great many more people than usual were congregating to tread heavily up the gravel pathway and disappear into the darkness beyond the great oaken doors. Dark-suited, piously hatted, with serious faces and a solemn gait, they came from all over the town. There weren’t many smiles, and nobody said good morning.

  It was five to eleven. In the harbour the tide was at half ebb, and fishing boats, tied up to the wall, leaned, propped on wooden stanchions. It was all strangely deserted. Only a group of children playing with an old pilchard box, and, on the other side of the harbour, a man working on his boat. The sound of hammer-blows rang across the deserted sands.

  The church clock began to strike the hour, and the gulls, perched on the tower-top, rose in a cloud of white wings, their voices raised in a clamour of fury at being disturbed by the reverberant bell. She went on, walking slowly, her hands in the pockets of her cardigan; sudden small gusts of breeze blowing her long dark hair in strands across her cheeks. All at once, she became aware of her solitude. No other person was about, and as she turned from the harbour and began to climb a steep street, she heard, through open windows, the final chimes of Big Ben. She heard the voice begin to speak. Imagined families indoors, gathered around their radios, staying close, getting comfort from one another.

  Now, she was truly in Downalong, in the old part of the town, making her way through the baffling maze of cobbled lanes and unexpected squares towards the open shores of the North Beach. She could hear the sound of breakers crashing on the shore, and felt the wind. It plucked at the skirt of her cotton dress and blew her hair into disorder. She turned the corner and saw the beach. She saw Mrs. Thomas’s little shop, open for an hour for the sale of newspapers. The racks outside its door were stacked with these, headlines tall and grave as tombstones. She had a few coppers in her pocket, and her stomach, knocking with apprehension, felt empty, so she went inside and bought herself, for twopence, a bar of Cadbury’s peppermint chocolate.

  “Out for a walk, are you, my love?” Mrs. Thomas asked her.

  “Yes. I’m going to fetch Papa. He’s at the studio.”

  “Best place to be on such a morning. Out of doors.”

  “Yes.”

  “Balloon’s gone up, then.” She handed the bar of chocolate across the counter. “We’re at war with those dratted Germans Mr. Chamberlain says.” Mrs. Thomas was sixty. She had already lived through one devastating war, as had Penelope’s father and millions of other innocent people all over Europe. Mrs. Thomas’s husband had been killed in 1916, and her son Stephen had already been called up as a private soldier
in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. “Had to happen, I suppose. Couldn’t go on doing nothing. Not with those poor Poles dying like flies.”

  “No.” Penelope took her chocolate.

  “Love to your father then, my dear. Keeping well, is he?”

  “Yes, he’s well.”

  “Goodbye, then.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Out in the street again, she felt cold. The wind was stronger now and her thin dress and cardigan felt inadequate. She unwrapped the chocolate and began to eat it. War. She looked up at the sky, half expecting hordes of bombers to appear then and there, like the formations she had seen on the newsreels, wave after wave of them, devastating Poland. But there were only clouds, blown before the wind.

  War. It was a strange word. Like Dead. The more you said it, the more you thought about it, the more incomprehensible it became. Munching chocolate, she went on, down the narrow cobbled lane that led to Lawrence Stern’s studio, to find him and tell him that it was time for lunch, and that he wasn’t to drop in at the pub for a beer, and that the war, finally, had started.

  His studio was an old net loft, high-ceilinged and draughty, with a great north window facing out over the beach and the sea. Long ago, he had put in a large pot-bellied stove, with a pipe chimney that rose to the roof-top, but even when this was roaring, the place was never warm.

  It was not warm now.

  Lawrence Stern had not worked for more than ten years, but the tools of his trade were all about, as though, at any moment, he might take them up and start to paint again. The easels and canvases, the half-used tubes of colour, the palettes encrusted with dried paint. The model’s chair stood on the draped dais, and a rickety table held the plaster cast of a man’s head and a pile of back numbers of The Studio. The smell was deeply nostalgic, of oil paint and turpentine mingled up with the salty wind that poured in through the open window.

  She saw the wooden summer surf-boards, stacked in a corner, and a striped bathing towel, tossed, forgotten, across a chair. She wondered if there would be another summer; if they would ever be used again.

  The door, caught by the draught, slammed shut behind her. He turned his head. He sat sideways on the window-seat, long legs crossed, an elbow propped on the sill. He had been watching the sea-birds, the clouds, the turquoise-and-azure sea, the endlessly breaking rollers.

  “Papa.”

  He was seventy-four. Tall and distinguished, with a deeply lined, deeply tanned face and a pair of brilliant, unfaded blue eyes. His clothes were both dashing and youthful. Faded sail-red canvas trousers, an old green corduroy jacket, and, in lieu of a necktie, a spotted handkerchief knotted at his throat. Only his hair betrayed his age, snow-white and worn unfashionably long. His hair and his hands, twisted and crippled by the arthritis which, so tragically, had put an end to his career.

  “Papa.”

  His gaze was sombre, as though he did not recognize her, as though she were a stranger, a messenger bearing dreaded news, which, in fact, she was. Then, abruptly, he smiled, and raised an arm in a familiar gesture of loving welcome.

  “My darling.”

  She went to his side. Beneath her feet the uneven wooden floor scrunched with blown sand, as though someone had spilled a bag of sugar. He drew her close.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Chocolate peppermint.”

  “You’ll ruin your appetite.”

  “You always say that.” She drew away from him. “Do you want a piece?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She put the remains of the bar in her cardigan pocket. She said, “The war’s started.”

  He nodded.

  “Mrs. Thomas told me.”

  “I know. I knew.”

  “Sophie’s making a cassoulet. She said I wasn’t to let you go to The Sliding Tackle for a drink. She said I was to bring you straight home.”

  “In that case, we’d better go.”

  But he did not move. She closed the windows and latched them shut. When this was done the sound of the breakers was not nearly so loud. His hat was lying on the floor. She picked it up and gave it to him, and he put it on and got to his feet. She took his arm and they started out on the long walk home.

  Carn Cottage stood high on the hill above the town, a small, square white house set in a garden surrounded by high walls. Going in through the gate in the wall and shutting it behind you was like going into a secret place where nothing could reach you—not even the wind. Now, at the end of the summer, the grass was still very green, and Sophie’s borders ablaze with Michaelmas daisies and snapdragons and dahlias. Up the face of the house climbed pink ivy-leaved geraniums and a clematis which each May produced a riot of pale lilac-coloured flowers. There were, as well, a vegetable plot, hidden away behind an escallonia hedge, and, at the back of the house, a small field, with a puddle of a pond, where Sophie kept her hens and ducks.

  She was in the garden, watching for them, while she picked an armful of dahlias. When she heard the gate shut, she straightened up and came to meet them, looking like a little boy in her trousers and espadrilles and her blue-and-white-striped pullover. Her dark hair was cut very short, accentuating the slender tanned neck and the neat shape of her head. Her eyes were dark, large, and lustrous. Everyone said they were her best feature until she smiled, and after that they weren’t too sure.

  She was Lawrence’s wife and Penelope’s mother. She was French. Her father, Philippe Charlroux, and Lawrence had been contemporaries, sharing a Paris studio in the old carefree days before the 1914 war, and Lawrence had first known Sophie as a very small child, playing in the gardens of the Tuileries and sometimes accompanying her father and his friends to the cafés where they gathered to drink and harmlessly roister with the pretty girls of the city. They had all been very close, not imagining that this pleasant existence need ever cease, but the war had come, tearing not only them and their families apart, but their countries, the whole of Europe, their world.

  They lost each other. By 1918 Lawrence was over fifty. Too old to be a soldier, he had spent the four terrible years driving an ambulance in France. Finally he had been wounded in the leg and invalided home. But he was alive. Others were not so lucky. Philippe, he knew, was dead. But he did not know what had become of his wife and child. When it was all over, he returned to Paris to look for them, but it was hopeless. And Paris was sad, cold, and hungry. Every other person, it seemed, wore the black of mourning, and the streets of the city, which had never failed to fill him with delight, seemed to have lost their spell. He returned to London, to the old family house in Oakley Street. By now his parents were dead and the house was his, but far too large and rambling for a single man. He solved this by occupying only the basement and the ground floor, and letting the upper rooms to any soul who needed a home and was able to pay him some rent. In the big garden at the back of his house was his studio. He opened it up, cleared out some of the accumulated rubbish, and, putting memories of war resolutely behind him, he picked up his brushes, and with them, the threads of his life.

  He found it hard going. One day, as he struggled with a devilishly difficult composition, one of his lodgers came to tell him that he had a visitor. Lawrence was furious, for not only was he in a rage of frustration but he hated to be disturbed in his work. With an expression of disgust he flung down his brushes, wiped his hands on a bit of rag, and went to see who it could be, marching into his kitchen through the garden door. A young girl stood there, by the stove, with her hands outstretched to its warmth as though she were bone-cold. He did not recognize her.

  “What do you want?”

  She was intensely thin, with dark hair bundled into a homely knot at the back of her hair, and wearing an old threadbare coat, beneath which the hem of her skirt hung uneven. Her shoes were broken and she resembled nothing so much as a little waif, a down-and-out.

  She said, “Lawrence.”

  Something in her voice tugged at his memory. He went to her side, took her chin
in his hand, and turned her face towards the window and the light.

  “Sophie.”

  He could scarcely believe it, but, “Yes, it’s me,” she said.

  She had come to England to find him. She was alone. He had been her father’s best friend. “If anything happens to me,” Philippe had told her, “find Lawrence Stern and go to him. He’ll help you.” And now Philippe was dead, and her mother was dead, too, swept away in the influenza epidemic that had raged through Europe in the aftermath of war.

  “I came to Paris to look for you,” Lawrence told her. “Where were you?”

  “In Lyons, living with my mother’s sister.”

  “Why didn’t you stay with her?”

  “Because I wanted to find you.”

  She stayed. She had arrived, he had to admit, at a fortuitous time, when he was between mistresses, for he was a sensuous and very attractive man, and ever since his first student days in Paris, a series of beautiful women had passed into and through and out of his life like a well-ordered bread queue. But Sophie was different. A child. As well, she kept house with the efficiency of any well-brought-up French girl, cooking and shopping and mending and washing curtains and scrubbing floors. He had never been so well cared for. For her part, she soon lost her waiflike appearance, and although she never put on an ounce of weight, a colour bloomed in her cheeks, her hair took on a chestnut shine, and soon he was using her as his model. She brought him luck. He was painting well, and selling too. He gave her some money to buy herself something to wear, and she came back preening and proud in the cheap little dress. She was beautiful, and it was then that he stopped thinking of her as a child. She was a woman, and it was as a woman that she came to him one night, and climbed composedly into the bed beside him. She had a charming body and he did not turn her away, for he was, perhaps for the first time in his life, in love. She became his mistress. Within weeks, she was pregnant. In high delight, Lawrence married her.

  It was during her pregnancy that they first travelled to Cornwall. They ended up in Porthkerris, which had already been discovered by painters from all over the country, and where many of Lawrence’s contemporaries had settled. The first thing they did was to rent the net loft that was to become his studio, and here, for two long winter months, they lived, camping in fearful discomfort and total happiness. Then Carn Cottage came on the market, and Lawrence, with a good commission under his belt, put in an offer and bought the place. Penelope was born at Carn Cottage and they spent every summer there, but when the gales of the autumn equinox began to blow, they either closed Carn Cottage, or rented it to winter tenants, and returned to London, to the basement of the warm, friendly, crowded old house in Oakley Street. These journeys were always made by car, for by now Lawrence was the proud possessor of a massive 4½-litre Bentley tourer, with a canvas hood that folded down and huge Lucas headlamps. It had a running board, which was good for picnics, and great leather straps to buckle down the bonnet. Some years, in the spring, they would gather up Lawrence’s sister Ethel, along with a number of bags and boxes, and take the ferry to France, and then drive down to the mimosa trees and red rocks and blue seas of the Mediterranean to stay with Charles and Chantal Rainier, old friends from the pre-war days in Paris, who owned a faded, shuttered villa with a garden full of cicadas and lizards. On these occasions, they spoke only French, including Aunt Ethel, who always became immensely Gallic the moment they hit Calais, sporting a Basque beret, worn at a rakish angle, and smoking innumerable Gauloise cigarettes. Everywhere the grown-ups went, Penelope went too, the child of a mother young as a sister, and a father old enough to be her grandparent.