The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  “For God’s sake, of course it doesn’t shock me.”

  “You look shocked.”

  “Only because you actually married the man.”

  “I didn’t have to marry him.” It was important to reassure him, lest he was picturing Lawrence with a shotgun and Sophie in tears of recrimination. “Papa and Sophie were never like that. They were the original free souls. Ordinary social conventions meant nothing to them. I was on leave when I told them about the baby coming. Under normal circumstances, I might just have stayed at home and had Nancy, and Ambrose would have been none the wiser. But I was still in the Wrens. My leave finished and I had to go back to Portsmouth, and so of course I had to see Ambrose again. And I had to let him know about the baby. It was only fair. I told him that he didn’t have to marry me … but…” She hesitated, actually finding it impossible to remember exactly what had happened. “… once he’d got used to the idea, he seemed to think that we ought to get married. And I was rather touched because I hadn’t really expected him to do anything of the sort. Once we’d made up our minds, there was no time to be lost because Ambrose had finished his courses and was about to be sent to sea. So it was fixed, and that was it. Chelsea Registry Office on a fine May morning.”

  “Had your parents met him?”

  “No. And they couldn’t come to the wedding because Papa was ill with bronchitis. So they didn’t meet until months later, when he came down to Carn Cottage on a weekend leave. And the moment he walked into the house, I knew that it was all wrong. It was the most terrible, horrible mistake. He didn’t belong to us. He didn’t belong to me. And I was horrible to him. Enormously pregnant and bored and irritable. I didn’t even try to make it fun for him. That’s one of the things I’m ashamed of. And I’m ashamed because I always thought of myself as mature and intelligent, and at the end of the day all I did was to make the silliest decision any woman can.”

  “You mean getting married.”

  “Yes. Admit it, Richard, you would never have done anything so foolish.”

  “Don’t be too sure. I came very close to it three or four times, but at the last moment common sense always caused me to draw back.”

  “You mean that you knew you weren’t in love, that it wasn’t right for you?”

  “Partly that. And partly the fact that, for the past ten years, I’ve known that this war was coming. I’m thirty-two now. I was twenty-two when Hitler and the Nazi party first came on the scene. At University, I had a great friend, Claus von Reindorp. A Rhodes scholar and a brilliant student. He wasn’t a Jew, but a member of one of the old German families. We talked a lot about what was happening in his homeland. Even then, he was filled with foreboding. One summer, I went to Austria to climb in the Tyrol. I was able to feel the temperature for myself, see the writing on the wall. Your friends, the Cliffords, were not the only people to realize that there were terrible times ahead.”

  “What happened to your friend?”

  “I don’t know. He went back to Germany. For a little, he wrote to me and then the letters stopped. He simply disappeared out of my life. I can only hope that, by now, he is safely dead.”

  She said, “I hate this war. I hate it as much as anybody. I want it to end, for the killing and the bombing and the battles to stop. And yet I dread its ending, too. Papa is growing old. He can’t have much longer to live, and without him to take care of, and without a war, I shall have no reason not to go back to my husband. I see myself and Nancy living in some horrible little villa in Alverstoke or Keyham, and the prospect fills me with dread.”

  The admission was out. The words hung in a silence between them. She suspected disapproval and needed, more than anything, reassurance. In some distress she turned to him. “Do you hate me for being so selfish?”

  “No.” He leaned forward and laid his hand over her own where it lay, palm up, upon the striped blanket. “The very opposite.” Her hand was freezing cold but his touch was warm, and she closed her fingers around his wrist, needing his warmth, willing it to spread, to reach every part of her being. Instinctively, she lifted his hand and pressed it to her cheek. At precisely the same moment, they both spoke. “I love you.”

  She looked up and into his eyes. It was said. It was done. It could never be unsaid.

  “Oh, Richard.”

  “I love you,” he repeated. “I think I’ve been in love with you since the first moment I set eyes on you, standing with your father on the other side of the road, with your hair blowing in the wind, and you looking like some ravishing gypsy.”

  “I didn’t know … I really didn’t know…”

  “And from the very beginning, I knew that you were married, and yet that made no difference at all. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. And looking back, I don’t think I even tried. And when you asked me to Carn Cottage, I told myself it was because of your father, because he enjoyed my company and his games of backgammon. So I came, and I came back … to see him, of course, but as well, because if I was with him, I knew that you would never be far away. Surrounded by children and endlessly occupied, but still there. That was all that mattered.”

  “That was all that mattered to me, too. I didn’t try to analyse it. I only knew that everything changed colour when you walked through the door. It felt as though I’d known you always. Like the best of everything, in the past and the future, all happening at once. But I didn’t dare to call it love.…”

  He was beside her now, no longer sitting a yard away, but beside her, his arms around her, holding her so close that she could feel the vital drum-beat of his heart. Her face was pressed to his shoulder, his fingers twined and tangled in her hair. “Oh, my darling, darling girl.” She drew away, her face turned up to his, and they kissed like lovers who have been parted for years. And it was like coming home, and hearing a door being shut, and knowing that you were safe; with the intrusive world shut out, and nothing and nobody to come between you and the only person in the world you wanted to be with.

  She lay on her back, her dark hair spilling out over the old faded cushions.

  “Oh, Richard…” It was a whisper, but she was not capable of more. “I never knew. I never even guessed that I could feel like this … that it could be like this.”

  He smiled. “It can be better than this.”

  She looked up into his face and knew what he was saying, and knew that she wanted nothing more. She began to laugh, and his mouth came down on her open, laughing mouth, and words, sweet as they had been, became all at once unnecessary and no longer enough.

  The old studio was no stranger to love. The pot-bellied stove, bravely burning, comforted with its warmth; the wind, streaming in through the half-open windows, had seen it all before. The blanketed divans, where once Lawrence and Sophie had shared their mutual joy, received this new love like kindly accomplices. And afterwards, in the deep peace of passion spent, all was tranquillity, and they lay quiet, entwined in each other’s arms, watching the clouds tumbling across the sky and listening to the timeless thunder of breakers pounding up onto the empty beach.

  * * *

  She said, “What will happen?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What will we do?”

  “Continue to love each other.”

  “I don’t want to go back. To things as they were before.”

  “We can never do that.”

  “But we have to. We can’t escape reality. And yet I want there to be tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and to know that on all those tomorrows I can spend every waking hour with you.”

  “I want that too.” He sounded sad. “But it’s not to be.”

  “This war. I hate it so much.”

  “Perhaps we should be grateful. That it brought us together.”

  “Oh, no. We would have met. Somehow. Somewhere. It was written in the stars. The day I was born, some celestial Civil Servant put a rubber stamp on you, with my name on it, in great big capital letters. This man is reserved for Penelope Stern.”
<
br />   “Except I wasn’t a man the day you were born. I was a prep-school boy, struggling with the inky miseries of my Latin grammar.”

  “It makes no difference. We still belong together. You were always there.”

  “Yes. I was always there.” He kissed her then, reluctantly, raised his wrist to look at his watch. “It’s nearly five o’clock.…”

  “I hate the war, and I hate clocks, too.”

  “Unfortunately, my darling, we can’t stay here forever.”

  “When shall I see you again?”

  “Not for a bit. I’ve got to go away.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three weeks. I shouldn’t be telling you, so you mustn’t breathe a word.”

  She was filled with alarm. “But where are you going?”

  “I can’t say.…”

  “What are you going to do? Is it dangerous?”

  He laughed. “No, you ninny, of course it’s not dangerous. A training exercise … part of my job. So no more questions.”

  “I’m frightened that something will happen to you.”

  “Nothing will happen to me.”

  “When will you be back?”

  “The middle of November?”

  “Nancy has a birthday at the end of November. She’ll be three.”

  “I’ll be back then.”

  She thought about it. “Three weeks,” she sighed. “It seems for ever.…

  “Absence is the wind that blows out the little candle, but fans the embers of a fire to a great blaze.

  “Still, I could do without it.”

  “Will it help to remember how much I love you?”

  “Yes. A bit.”

  * * *

  The winter was upon them. Bitter east winds assaulted the countryside, and moaned down across the moor. The sea, turbulent and angry, turned the colour of lead. Houses, streets, the very sky appeared bleached with cold. At Carn Cottage, fires were lighted first thing in the morning and kept going all day, fuelled with small rations of coal and anything else that would burn. The days grew short, and with the black-out curtains drawn at tea-time, the nights very long. Penelope reverted to her poncho and her thick black stockings, and taking Nancy out for her afternoon walks involved much bundling of the child into woollen sweaters, leggings, bonnets, and gloves.

  Lawrence, his old bones chilled, warmed his hands at the fire and became restless and morose. He was bored.

  “Where’s Richard Lomax got to? Hasn’t been here for three weeks or more.”

  “Three weeks and four days, Papa.” She had started counting them.

  “Never stayed away so long before.”

  “He’ll be back for his backgammon.”

  “What’s he doing with himself?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Another week passed, and still there was no sign of him. Despite herself, Penelope began to worry. Perhaps he was never coming back. Perhaps some Admiral or General, sitting in state at Whitehall, had decided that Richard was destined for other things, and had posted him off to the North of Scotland, and she would never see him again. He hadn’t written, but perhaps he was forbidden to. Or perhaps … and this was almost unthinkable … with the Second Front looming in the future, he had been parachuted into Norway or Holland; an advance scout sent to pave the way for Allied troops … her anxious, overworked imagination turned and fled from the prospect.

  Nancy’s birthday was imminent, and this was a good thing, for it gave Penelope something else to think about. She and Doris were planning a small party. Invitations to tea were sent out to ten little female friends. Ration points were squandered on chocolate biscuits, and Penelope, with hoarded ounces of butter and margarine, made a cake.

  Nancy was now old enough to look forward to her special day, and for the first time in her short life realized what it was all about. It was about presents. After breakfast, she sat on the hearthrug by the sitting room fire and opened her parcels, watched, in some amusement, by her mother and her grandfather, and, adoringly, by Doris. She was not disappointed. Penelope gave her a new doll and Doris clothes for the doll, lovingly contrived from scraps of material and odds and ends of knitting wool. There were a sturdy wooden wheelbarrow from Ernie Penberth, and a jigsaw puzzle from Ronald and Clark. Lawrence, always on the lookout for signs of inherited talent, had bought his grandchild a box of coloured pencils; but Nancy’s best present of all came from her grandmother, Dolly Keeling. A large box to be opened, layers of tissue paper torn away; and finally, a new dress. A party dress. Layers of white organdie, trimmed with lace and smocked in pink silk. Nothing could have given Nancy more delight.

  Kicking aside her other gifts, “I want to put it on now,” she announced, and started then and there to struggle out of her dungarees.

  “No, it’s a party dress. You can put it on this afternoon, for your party. Look, here’s your doll, dress her up in her new clothes. Look at the party dress Doris has made for her. And it’s got a petticoat as well, with lace.…”

  Later in the morning, “You’ll have to move out of the sitting room, Papa,” Penelope told him. “We’ve got to have the party in here, and space to play games.” She heaved the table to the edge of the floor.

  “And where am I meant to take myself? The coal shed?”

  “No. Doris has lit the fire in the study. You can be quiet and peaceful in there. Nancy doesn’t want any males about the place. She’s made that very clear. Even Ronald and Clark have to stay out of the way. They’re going to have tea with Mrs. Penberth.”

  “Aren’t I allowed to come and eat birthday cake?”

  “Yes, of course you are. We mustn’t allow Nancy to become too dictatorial.”

  The little guests arrived at four o’clock, urged through the front door by mothers or grannies, and for a gruelling hour and a half Doris and Penelope were in sole charge. The party followed the usual pattern. All had brought small gifts for Nancy, which had to be opened. One child wept and said she wanted to go home, and another, a bossy little madam with ringlets, asked if there was going to be a conjuror. Penelope told her briskly that there wasn’t.

  Games were played. “I sent a letter to my love and on the way I dropped it,” they all piped in unison, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the sitting room floor. One little guest, perhaps overexcited, wet her knickers and had to be taken upstairs and lent a dry pair.

  The farmer’s in his den

  The farmer’s in his den

  Heigh-ho, my daddy-o,

  The farmer’s in his den.

  Penelope, already exhausted, looked at the clock and could scarcely believe that it was only half past four. There was still an hour to be survived before mothers and grannies would reappear to claim their little darlings and take them away.

  They played “Pass the Parcel.” All went well until the bossy child in ringlets said that Nancy had snatched the parcel and it was her turn to undo the paper. Nancy objected and got a clout over the ear from the ringleted one, whereupon she promptly hit back. Penelope made soothing noises and tactfully separated them. Doris appeared at the door and said that tea was ready. No announcement had ever been more welcome.

  Games were thankfully abandoned and they all trooped into the dining room, where Lawrence was already seated in his carver chair at the head of the table. The curtains were drawn, the fire lighted, and all was festive. For a moment, the children were silenced, either by the awe-inspiring sight of the old man, sitting there like a patriarch, or else by the prospect of food. They gazed at the starched white cloth, the bright mugs and plates, the straws for sucking lemonade and the crackers. The feast included jellies and sandwiches, iced biscuits and jam tarts, and, of course, the cake. They took their places at the table, and for a little while all was silent, save for the sound of munching. There were accidents, of course: sandwiches dropped on the carpet and a mug of lemonade upset, soaking the table-cloth, but this was all routine and speedily dealt with. Then crackers were pulled, paper hats unfolded and placed
on heads, and garish brooches and trinkets pinned to dresses. Finally, Penelope lit the three candles on the cake, and Doris turned off the overhead light. The dark room became a stage set, a magic place, the candle flames reflected in the wide eyes of the children who sat around the table.

  Nancy, in the place of honour beside her grandfather, stood up on her chair and he helped her to cut the cake.

  “Happy birthday to you …

  Happy birthday to you.

  Happy birthday, dear Nancy…”

  The door opened and Richard walked in.

  * * *

  “I couldn’t believe it. When you appeared, I thought I was seeing things. I couldn’t believe it was true.” He seemed thinner, older, grey with fatigue. He needed a shave, and his battledress was creased and soiled. “Where have you been?”

  “The back of beyond.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “You look exhausted.”

  “I am,” he admitted. “But I said I’d be here for Nancy’s party.”

  “You stupid man, that didn’t matter. You should be in bed.”

  They were alone. Nancy’s little visitors had all departed, each one with a balloon and a lollipop. Doris had taken Nancy upstairs to give her a bath. Lawrence had suggested a glass of whisky, and had gone in search of a bottle. The sitting room was still in disorder, with all the furniture out of place, but they sat, unconcerned, in the midst of it all, Richard prone in an armchair, and Penelope on the hearthrug at his feet.

  He said, “The whole exercise took longer … was more complicated … than we’d anticipated. I couldn’t even write you a letter.”

  “I guessed that.”

  A silence fell. In the warmth of the fire, his eyelids drooped. Fighting sleep, he sat up, rubbed his eyes, ran a hand over his stubbly chin. “I must look a total wreck. I haven’t shaved, and I haven’t slept for three nights. Now I’m incapable. Which is sad, because I’d planned to take you out and have you to myself for the rest of the evening, and hopefully the rest of the night as well; but somehow I don’t think I can make it. I’d be no use. Fall asleep in the soup. Do you mind? Can you wait?”