The Last Pier (22 page)

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.

A nightingale was singing somewhere in the woods.

Agnes heard it and was filled with sadness. My only son will
fight in this war, she thought. And Lucio, too. There is only pain ahead.

Cecily heard it and, forgetting about her foiled adventure, thought of something Carlo had said to her, instead.

Joe heard it and hoped Franca heard it too. From now on everything he did would be with Franca in mind.

By some fluke Franca heard the bird singing too. She was a little psychic, everyone said. She heard things others could not.

Rose heard nothing. She lay deep in a leaden sleep that helped her keep a secret disappointment at bay.

Selwyn may have heard it but if he did, he didn’t care. It was just a nightingale, for God’s sake. There were bigger things at stake!

And strangely it was Kitty who heard the nightingale and decided, if there were no war, she would turn over a new leaf. It was a promise made only to herself and if broken, nobody would be any the wiser.

While all the time the pale moon kept steady watch over Palmyra House.

In Germany, Lucio told Carlo, there were terrible atrocities being done to the Jews. Unheard of things, unspeakable acts.

‘The anti-Fascist movement is our only hope,’ Lucio said.

Carlo shivered. Like his uncle, Carlo had no doubt that war would come. Lucio had told him that war, like death, was nature’s way of pruning. Thousands were being killed in Poland already, millions more would go.

Somewhere in the interior of Palmyra House one door banged and then another, letting in the sea breeze and clearing the air.

The house had closed down on its secrets and fell into a final pre-war silence as Agnes hurried across the sodden garden one last time.

‘It’s over between them,’ Lucio would tell Carlo, later, with relief. ‘She will leave him when the war is declared.’

‘But uncle,’ Carlo said ‘what about your work? Does she know what you do?’

Lucio had shaken his head. Not yet.

‘Selwyn wants her back but thank God it’s too late. Selwyn is a fool.’

Carlo would remember his words.

In his worst moments Lucio peered down the road to the future and saw only shadows. Whichever way he went, they followed him.

‘I will remove it from your path,’ Agnes had promised. ‘I will make your life free of stones.’

But Lucio had less certainty than she did. He was frightened of the future. He had held Agnes tightly, kissing the fingers of her hands one by one. He had massaged her back by the light of the oil lamp. Then he turned her over and lay on top of her. Slender, fragile Agnes, in her last hours of beauty. The orchard was full of fruit. Eyes looked their last as with one hand on her small breast, Lucio saw again the deep dimple with its tendency to appear at the slightest provocation. During laughter, but also during tears.

He had pressed a flower from the white tobacco plant into her navel and held it down with his tongue until it was fixed on her skin. From now on, he told her, she would have the impression of a tobacco flower on her body.

Forever.

Even when she was old and close to death the impression of it would remain with her, he promised. Like a kiss. Or a wish. Or a vow of faithfulness.

After she had left him, and later that night in her sleep, Agnes smiled a smile she seldom used in her waking hours. Cecily could vouch for that. She had seen the smile when she crept into her parent’s room and stood staring down at her mother’s face and because of that stolen moment, remembering it many years later,
Cecily would understand, dreams were like that. They gave you chances that were impossible by day.

‘Lucio,’ Agnes murmured on that last happy night.

And yet something was not right, Lucio told his nephew. Selwyn was one problem, but the man Robert Wilson – he was something far more deadly. Wily as a stoat. He was something to do with the future and Lucio was afraid of him.

In their young girls’ beds the sisters, together for a short while longer, moved restlessly. At the first roll of thunder Cecily turned over.

‘I think we should tell the grown-ups about Pinky,’ she mumbled.

Rose slept the sleep of the newly disappointed while the lightning slashed its cold knife-like streaks across the room, revealing what should and should not be seen. Those things that would, and would not, be lost.

A counterpane with roses embroidered on it.

A countenance of great promise.

A childhood story.

A crumpled, fairy-tale dress.

A crimson flower.

A way of life that was vanishing.

There was no one to stand guard over what would be lost; those small things, those young things, those tender, fragile things with no name.

The noise of a door closing woke Cecily and quietly, she left the room, wanting to know more. Wanting-to-know was the itch she could not be rid of.

And now the whole world was flooded in wet, black ink. In her parent’s room Cecily tried to see into her own misty future but saw instead her mother, waiting at a crossroads for Lucio. Her mother’s Difficult Decision was nothing to do with Poland, or Germany, Cecily saw. But it was still, technically
speaking, a war. Was it possible to have two world wars going on simultaneously?

The skin of Agnes’ dream hadn’t quite peeled away. There were bits still sticking to her eyelids as she murmured Lucio’s name.

Again.

That night too, Bellamy standing under a tree saw a light go on in Palmyra House and stood waiting. The bar of history might have decimated Poland but another tendril on the honeysuckle climber grew three more flowers. More would blossom for Rose in a week’s time.

And at the same moment the local dentist awoke with a headache caused by a feeling of foreboding.
He
noticed it had begun to rain.

And the undertaker in Dunsburgh, having quarrelled with his wife over a remark about job opportunities ahead, began to snore.

And Cecily, the inquisitive, listened.

List-ened.

As she would never listen again.

While in Whitehall, an army of workers, with sweaty not-altogether-white collars, poor people with marching feet, listened, too. For those laws that governed the land, deciding between what was a fact and what was not, had begun to turn their wheels.

A fact is true, the law said.

Fiction is a lie.

Propaganda is a derogatory word for a fact.

There can be no mistake.

Carelessness
did
costs lives.

And a true patriot lives in the country where he was born.

Armed with these flashcards the army of Whitehall War Workers set to work.

They opened unopened files and read the names on the lists made at least a year before, by one Robert Wilson: Alessandro
Anzi from London, Carlo Campolonghi from Edinburgh, Giovanni Oresfi from Clerkenwell, Francesco Cesar from Eastbourne and Mario Molinello from Bly were just some of the names on it.

‘Collar the lot!’ said the man with the big cigar. ‘Don’t take any chances.’

Through the slightly open window of Robert Wilson’s car, the fragrance of the parched earth rose in spite of the rain, reminding him of a love that would soon be lost. He had been hot. Now he shivered slightly. Tension drained out of him like water out of sand. What had started could not be stopped and all he could do was begin to do his job.

Ahead was the house he would remember forever. A place he had come to call home in spite of all he had uncovered, all he would have to implement.

Sunrise came. It was the first Sunday of September and the official end to the night’s blackout. Agnes woke and tried to recall her dream. Selwyn lay asleep beside her. She hadn’t woken when he had come in. She lay without moving for a few moments longer, thinking of the day ahead.

She longed for peace, no announcement by the Prime Minister, no war, no difficulty in leaving Selwyn. Pulling back the bed-covers, she went downstairs.

The newspaper boy had just delivered the paper and, pouring out her first cup of tea, Agnes read of the eye-witness accounts of Germany’s invasion of Poland. What good was it reading of bombed and burning villages? She could not help the civilians at the roadside or the fair-haired girl weeping beside her murdered siblings. She couldn’t even help herself. Here she was contemplating tearing her family apart, breaking what she had held together for so long, beginning again. Shuddering, she poured more tea and stared at the mist still lying heavily on the ground outside. The sun was up and warming the chill. It would, in the end, be a fine day.

There was a knock on the window and Robert Wilson’s face came into view. She had not known he was back.

‘Turn the wireless on,’ he said.

Chamberlain was going to speak to the nation at 11.15.

‘Good that it’s Sunday, at least,’ Agnes said.

They drank tea together.

‘Everyone asleep? Selwyn away?’

Robert Wilson, clipped like a well-kept hedge, distant as a cloud, would be leaving soon, he told her. The tennis court would be ploughed up this week and soon there would be crops. In spite of what all the others said, Agnes liked him. She wondered if he had a wife. Or a love of any sort.

‘No,’ she said, speaking of Selwyn. ‘He’s back. He’ll be down in a minute I expect.’

But in fact it was Cecily clattering downstairs, book in hand, some sort of complicated tall story to tell.

In the end they were all there. Tom and Robert, Selwyn and Joe and Rose (with Bellamy scowling in the doorway), Cook and The Help from the village, Partridge and three of the farmhands too.

The day was beautiful like all the days had been this whole long summer. But then, with a harsh cry a hurricane of crows rose from the hedgerows and a dandelion clock, detaching and then drifting on the slight breeze, entered the room.

Click, click, went the shutter in Cecily’s head. Chamberlain’s words and the dandelion joined up, like dots in the picture she was drawing. All together, around the wireless, they would stay joined up forever.

Tom was giving her meaningful looks. Tonight there would be no moon which meant they would have another chance to catch that rat, Captain Pinky. Perfect timing, Tom’s look said. Red-handed, wartime traitor. Caught! Cecily suppressed a giggle.

Rose, hovering at the back, was scowling.

Tom edged towards Cecily. Careless laughter gave games away.

But then Cook burst into tears, shocking them all.

Nobody spoke. Only the wood pigeons cooing outside, the smell of smoke from Partridge’s bonfire and Cook’s crying interrupted the silence. Kitty turned towards the back door as the speech about right prevailing, ended. She lit a cigarette and stared outside. Cecily saw her shrug her shoulders.