The Last Pier Part 35

Exchanged; like people taking clothes back to the shop.

Please can I have my life back?

In a different colour?

This one doesn't suit me.

A car drove past. And then another. Two cars on a side road were unusual in this part of the world. Cecily marvelled at the way her mind could hold so many thoughts. When a c.o.c.k crowed in the distance, the sound separated into two parts, like a doc.u.ment clipped to another doc.u.ment.

In spite of the wetness, the man who had been watching the house was back standing patiently next to the lamp post. In spite of the gloom he was wearing dark gla.s.ses. He was eating chips and seemed to be waiting for an imaginary bus. Cecily both did, and did not, notice. The file in her head marked 'irrelevant' was only half-open. The man looked hard at the tall hollyhocks growing over the wall. As if he were studying rare flowering biennials.

Cecily ate two oat crackers with some cottage cheese. And then drank some tea. She picked up the two-part doc.u.ment that she had discarded in her flight and stared at it. Did it matter, after so long, who her mother really was? Was her real mother going to make her dresses? Kiss her? Comb her hair a hundred times a night for years and years? And did it matter if her aunt knitted her a cardigan instead? The questions puzzled her, as did the small s.h.i.+ft in her upper chest, somewhere in the region where her heart was. It was not raining in the house, yet her face remained wet.

Agnes holding her tight, kissing her in that last moment, voice m.u.f.fled, before Cecily boarded the train. It was only now that she saw the sweetness in the gesture. Agnes, the family dressmaker, making Rose's made-to-dance-in dress. Agnes' gentle hand on first Rose's waist, and then Cecily's, pinning a skirt, breathing down her neck, her calloused, nimble fingers caressing a leg as she measured it.

An aunt loving like a mother.

An aunt breathing like a mother.

It would have been easier to shatter the illusion, to refuse to care.

To ruin a small life.

To refuse to be party to a crime.

What Agnes did was much harder. Cecily saw. She didn't deserve to be punished for her crime.

All it took was two clipped-together sheets of paper for years of good work to be undone.

SO WHO ELSE had known these terrible secrets?

'Oh Daddy!' cried Cecily, switching on a light that had no bulb in it.

Ident.i.ty was everything.

The house had darkened; rain clouds hid the sun. Lighting a candle, she poured herself a drink. Then she opened the book marked Ma.s.s Observation. It was as if she was determined to look for other shocks.

He does not need to tell me to protect C, Agnes had written in an angry scrawl.

When? When had she written it?

Agnes had taken in her niece Cecily out of love for her sister, knowing Selwyn was the father. Was it possible? She had wanted to save Kitty from ruin. But when she held the sc.r.a.p of life (three days old and unwanted already) in her arms she had discovered love of a different kind.

After Rose was born Agnes had wanted another child but nothing happened. Selwyn was too busy sowing his oats elsewhere and Agnes, unaware of what was going on under her nose, blamed herself for her secondary childlessness. Kitty, wandering in and out of Palmyra House, breezing through the high wheat fields in unsuitable shoes, was no different from the restless girl she used to be. If Agnes had occasionally caught her husband looking at her sister with a deep oblique pulse of feeling, she had a.s.sumed it had been because they had once been close.

But one summer she was forced to admit what she had ignored. It was during one of Kitty's brief visits to the farm, which Rose so hated. Agnes, hurrying through her ch.o.r.es, collecting eggs before meeting the school bus, glanced up and saw her sister by the open window, looking out over the harvest fields. Kitty looked as though she had just woken from a nap. Her skin, even from this distance, was as oily as a pear hidden in a drawer for too long.

It was hot. The heat swept across the field carrying the faint sound of the tractor. In the s.h.i.+mmering waves of light Agnes saw her sister turn and look towards it. Presently the tractor drew towards the very edge of the field and Agnes saw that it wasn't Bellamy but Selwyn who was driving. The reflection of the sun on Selwyn's face was green and flame-like. There was a smear of oil where he had wiped his hand across his cheek.

As Agnes walked slowly back to the house with her basket of eggs, Kitty appeared in a white dress, hair fastened, wearing white flat-heeled shoes. She was walking towards the half-harvested field. It occurred to Agnes that the field held the last of what she considered to belong to her. And Kitty was walking towards it.

Later when she went out with the can of tea, the tractor had moved away on a half-circuit and Kitty was nowhere in sight. There wasn't a sound except that of a yellow hammer bleating its song in a patch of burnt hedgerow. She walked past the burnt stubble where some corn had caught fire a few days before. Suddenly they emerged, Selwyn, head thrown back, laughing. To Agnes they were two parts of the same story and she was struck by how much was carelessly written across their faces.

July 3rd 1926, Cecily read.

I feel like a woman drowning, Agnes wrote.

She had, Cecily read, been handed to Agnes by a nun. Asleep. While her mother Kitty stood in a loose white cotton dress, hair scrubbed back, frightened eyes saying no to everything. No, she didn't want to see Selwyn, not now, not ever. What lies!

And after that, night after night, alone with only the scent of tobacco flowers coming in through the window, Agnes had watched over her two little girls. Alone.

June 28th 1927, read Cecily. She had only been a year old.

Rose suffers most, Agnes had written.

'She's not my sister,' Rose said.

'You will grow to love her,' Agnes told her.

'Rubbish,' Rose said.

She shook her head so hard her teeth almost rattled. No one had taken account of Rose in the plans.

'You spoilt little b.i.t.c.h!' Kitty said.

And she slapped Rose before Agnes could stop her. Rose raised her hand and then let it fall but they saw the look she gave her aunt. After that Kitty was careful to keep her distance.

July 5th 1928, Cecily read.

Still, Kitty is unable to keep her hands off Selwyn, Agnes had written.

Blaming herself, for she had begged her sister to at least be an aunt to Cecily, Agnes understood that she had made her own bed. Her husband was disturbed to have them both under the same roof, occupying the bed with one sister while desiring the other.

Time pa.s.sed and Rose began taking life with a sprinkling of salt. Nothing was believable any more. Her father's cool hand on her head made her s.h.i.+ver. She never called Aunt Kitty 'Aunt', any more. And it pleased her that Selwyn was hurt by such coldness. Joe of course was at boarding school. He didn't care much.

And in the fairy tales Rose now began telling Cecily, Joe was always a bystander. The pair of boots that Puss wore, the servant at the Beast's palace, the footman who carried the gla.s.s slipper. That, Cecily remembered, was Joe's role.

A few pages were torn out here.

January 21st 1936, Cecily read.

The King died last night.

January 22nd 1936, Agnes had written.

The people in America are mourning, as if for their own King & the j.a.panese are in tears. We are only allowed official announcements on the BBC. If you turn the wireless on you only hear the ticking of a vast clock. The shops are all black.

September 12th 1938.

Ah! thought Cecily. Here it was.

I think Rose told Bellamy today that C is Kitty's daughter. He's been scowling at me. Perhaps that's why I dislike him so much. Poor, ugly Bellamy!

And then...

October 20th 1938.

Rose asked me, 'Is she my cousin?'

Cecily swallowed. She could imagine Rose's voice all right. Full of disdain.

'She's your half-sister.'

'Half?' Rose demanded, and she went out.

Bellamy must have caught her crying. He was in the top field unblocking the d.y.k.e. A corncrake flew across the bleached sky. Bellamy must have been twelve but already he was more than a head taller than Rose. He watched over her daily after that, never prying, teaching her, after a fas.h.i.+on, the ways of the countryside. It was because of him that Rose still loved Palmyra Farm. Inseparable for that brief moment in time.

Sometimes, when she thought no one was watching, Agnes wrote, she noticed Rose display a curious tenderness for this child with only half of everything and no knowledge of who her real mother was.

'Are you going to tell her?' she had asked once.

'One day, perhaps,' Agnes had replied. 'When she's your age.'

And then she asked the question Agnes had been dreading.

'Doesn't Kitty care?'

Reading, Cecily felt her eyes blur over the answer.

April 20th 1939.

Hitler's birthday. I hope he enjoyed himself!

May 5th 1939, Agnes had written.

I overheard someone say at the butcher's that Chamberlain looks like a turkey who's missed Christmas!

Cecily skipped a page.

June 3rd 1939.

In Picture Post they say we will be safe from war until perhaps after the harvest. This is what K believes too. I think K gets her information from elsewhere, though.

Kitty! Had Agnes ever understood how her own sister had betrayed Selwyn?

August 4th 1939.

I no longer care about what Selwyn does or doesn't do. The truth is he only loves C and K is jealous of this! News as bad as ever. I am sure there will be a war.

Cecily turned a few more pages.

August 27th 1939.

Robert Wilson says the Cabinet met this evening and our amba.s.sador flies back to report to Hitler. RW seems to always get the news before anyone else.

Lucio says this war will be different and will change everything. England will change irreversibly. People will die in their thousands. L said of course people will die but he means something else, entirely. I asked him what he meant and he looked at me with those deep eyes of his. Then he made a gesture with his hands and I thought how foreign the movement was. No one else could have said so much in a gesture. Then instead of answering me directly he told me he had wanted to sleep with me from the very beginning. I was silenced by his love.

Lucio saw the fruit hanging under the moon.

This entry was undated.

'A kind of innocence is about to vanish,' Lucio said. 'A sort of magic.'

'But I thought magic was just for children,' Agnes replied.

'No, no, that isn't what I mean,' he insisted. 'There's a kind of pagan enchantment in existence, here in England; still. Something untamed, left over from another era.'

It was going to be lost he had said, pointing upwards towards the sheltering sky. Fish-shaped spots of moonlight had swum in the darkness; a bat moved its cloak, about to perform a burlesque, making them both laugh.

'Perhaps,' Lucio had told Agnes, holding her close. 'I'm simply in love and talking nonsense!'

Further on, Agnes had written, August 30th 1939.

I am frightened for Cecily. And in an odd way, for the house, too. What the war might do to it. Palmyra House is grand in a way that is unusual for Suffolk. The architect who built it believed houses were created with their own personalities and took very little from those who owned them. Nature rather than nurture was the architect's theory. We could offer the house very little by way of addition to its character. Three generations have lived here already and barely skimmed the surface of its aloofness.

I brought Bach to its rooms but it was already too late to disprove the architect's views. There was moss on its roof, wisteria growing across its brow and honeysuckle climbing on its back. And I noticed the front door opened into the hallway so that if you stood by the door you could see from front to back. My mother told me that was bad luck, room for an ill wind to blow straight through.

The diary stopped. There were pages missing but a photograph was stuck to a page, it showed Cecily in Agnes' arms, waving her blurry hands. She had a baby expression on her face.

DRUNK NOW, CECILY closed Agnes' notebook knowing that while some things were a little clearer, others were still obscured. Shock had slowed her down but finding another piece of paper she wrote: Matters Outstanding.

Visit the grave. If I must.