The Last Pier Part 39

'It's where Daddy kept his radio equipment,' Cecily said, interrupting. 'I know now. All his doc.u.ments were inside. It came out in the papers at the time but I've only just read about it.'

Carlo nodded.

'He thought he was finished if Robert Wilson went there.'

Again Carlo nodded, letting her speak, knowing intuitively it was the first time she had voiced these things.

'And he panicked, I suppose,' Cecily said.

She sounded infinitely sad.

That night the roar of the North Sea had been deafening, Carlo told her, now. Then something had caught his attention, some slight movement.

'I hid in the shadows and watched. It was quite hard to see but I was sure that near the Martello tower, on the road across the marshes, was a tiny light.'

The hated Robert Wilson was looking through a pair of binoculars.

'He had gone there to meet Rose,' Cecily said.

Carlo hesitated.

'Rose was in love with him, you know,' Cecily continued.

She wanted to say more but the constriction in her throat stopped her.

'We thought Robert Wilson was a spy,' she said instead. 'We thought he might kidnap her and take her to Germany!'

'Oh Cecci,' Carlo said. 'You were such a little girl.'

They were both silent.

'Some years later,' Carlo continued, 'long after the war was over, my mother told me she had seen Rose that night.'

Rose on her bike, riding past her old school, pa.s.sing the florist and the little cafe with its blacked out windows where the photograph of the King was displayed on the blind. Past the timbered meeting house, the bookshop, the butcher, the baker. Riding fast, past the ice-cream parlour.

'She must have been making for the pier,' Carlo said.

That final landmark of the town of Bly.

An object more absent than present.

And it was to this wretched place that beautiful, reckless Rose went. Determined to make her own future, change it from that of her mother's, but unaware that the future had plans of its own for her.

Fragile clouds had scudded across the inky sky. a.s.sa.s.sins lurked in the shadows. Half an hour earlier Rose had set her shoulder to the job in hand and rowed steadily across to the Ness. The tide was in. When she'd reached the old pavilion with its witch's hat for a roof, she scrambled onto dry land, dragging the boat up to be hidden behind the shed. The door opened with a push.

Inside the pavilion a chill crept up through the floorboards. Selwyn thinking nothing of it, thinking his daughter was at the Martello tower, poured his kerosene around the base of the building.

Fear kept father and daughter silent.

Guilt flared its match.

Rose had stolen all the money in her father's study cupboard. It had been the last thing she had done.

At his trial (so Carlo heard years later) Selwyn Maudsley admitted to starting the fire. At his trial he took responsibility for her death.

The Molinellos were not present at his trial. Before it took place they had had trials of their own to deal with.

It was not the funeral, Carlo told Cecily, that he remembered, but the station platform. Men in uniform, knapsacks on the ground, women weeping through their goodbyes. Embroidered handkerchiefs fluttering in the fresh sea breeze.

Goodbye.

G.o.d bless.

Write when you can.

So long, cheerio.

All promises are made in order to be broken, he had thought, his mind numbed by lack of sleep.

Cecily hadn't seen him. Agnes, steering her by her elbow with one hand, a bag that looked as though it might break in the other, had been too busy crying to notice him. But Carlo had observed both her and an Agnes changed beyond all recognition. Was it possible she might have gone grey overnight?

And Cecily, Carlo had thought, bewildered by it all, where were they sending her? He remembered shock. Cecily was innocent.

Now as they reached Palmyra House, Cecily opened the door and memories rushed out with outstretched arms. The past exploding like firecrackers in their faces. Carlo saw peeling wall-paper. The patches of plaster showing underneath had combined with damp and rot to give the appearance of a gigantic bruise. Cook, long dead, waved at him from behind the old range.

Would you children like some apple turnover?

Carlo had loved her cooking. Rose used to laugh at the way he wolfed down everything Cook gave him.

'She loves you!' Rose used to say.

Cook had died many years before Agnes. Had she lived she would not have let the house get into the state it did. The walnut tree, struck by lightning four years before, still had a branch that gave a harvest large enough to fill a sack. The original one that Agnes had dragged towards the door before she died had rotted away and been eaten by mice but even now, each summer, walnuts fell to the ground. A smaller leaf shoot was growing up from one of the cracks in the earth. Carlo stared.

Inside the pantry he saw dimly a stack of empty ice-cream boxes with blurry labels. They had been brought over for the tennis match and never taken back. Moving closer, seeing his father's handwriting faintly on the box was very nearly Carlo's undoing. He placed his white stick against the door and sat on the chair Cecily found for him. Sea damp had laid siege to the house. The questions clamouring in his head were stilled by the things he darkly saw. Time travelled past him swiftly. Rose, was what he saw. All complete. Much quieter. A little older. But Rose, nevertheless.

She handed him a mug of tea. He accepted, confused. The last time he had seen Cecily she hadn't been able to make tea. Then Cecily brought her face closer to his and he saw his mistake.

She was lovely to him. Her slender neck. Her hair. Her small-boned face. Her long fingers, the sadness of her smile.

It was Cecci, not Rose!

We had the experience, Cecily was thinking, wondering where she had read these words, but we misunderstood the meaning.

Carlo saw that the questions forming on her lips needed to be addressed.

Yes, he had lost the sight of one eye.

Yes, after the war. Back in Genova where he had gone to find out what had happened to his family. G.o.d knows his mother and sister had waited long enough for news.

He stared at Cecily. Had she forgotten, he asked, how all of a sudden, she had turned her head that day? Standing at the window, before the guard had closed the train door. No? She had glanced up from watching her mother's face, stopped her pleadings for a moment, and seen him. It had broken Carlo's heart.

He had wanted to come over and press his hand over hers on the gla.s.s. Palm to palm. But he had been told to keep away from the family. So he had watched instead.

A small mouth, crying. Lips that would some day be beautiful, already were. Eyes so violet that even pa.s.sers-by would stop and stare.

She had been such a young girl, then. Now she had become a faultlessly elegant woman. Did she know?

Cecily shook her head, dumbstruck. Faultless?

Her sister's mouth. Only there was hurt there, too.

Goodbye Cecily, goodbye.

It had been the last time he had seen her.

Afterwards, when the train disappeared into the green tunnel on its coast-hugging journey, taking the army and the navy and Cecily with it, the station went back to its sleepy emptiness.

He had walked back slowly, avoiding the main road, not wanting to see Agnes, not wanting to attract attention to himself. Everyone had known about Rose's death. The local newspaper had been so interested that for a while, a few weeks or so, Rose had become more important than the British Expeditionary Force. The death of a hundred and fifty-eight thousand men was easier to ignore than one young English girl killed by her own father. The court case was about to commence. The Allied Effort was not in the same sensational league.

Had he known what was waiting for him at home Carlo might have taken longer to get there.

WHEN HE RETURNED home Carlo found the mayhem had already begun. Lucio had been arrested.

'Yes, Lucio!'

'What?' Cecily asked aghast. 'What had he done?'

The view back in 1939 was confused.

'He was an Italian, wasn't he?' Carlo said, his hands making a simple gesture. 'They took him away. I tried to get them to take me. I felt it was all my fault.'

Cecily stared. Never had she heard anyone else say such words.

Things far beneath the surface of the earth had begun to move.

Carlo waited. Giving her time to catch her breath, to speak if she wanted to. Then he told her.

'They took him away in a car like a thief. Oh the policeman was friendly enough. We all knew him, you see. He used to come to the ice-cream parlour with his two daughters.'

Cecily covered her mouth with her hand and Carlo nodded.

'Yes. The man told my father he was only doing his duty.'

Lucio didn't need to pack a bag. It was just a formality, they'd been told. Lucio had taken out a packet of cigarettes and stuck an unlit one between his lips. Then he grabbed his hat and put it on his head at an angle. Carlo remembered thinking his uncle looked like a gangster.

'In spite of ourselves, we smiled,' Carlo told Cecily. 'I remember him telling us Torno presto!, back soon. Then, two days later it was the turn of my father.'

The same policeman, but this time he'd brought along two others.

'We, my mother, Franca and I, were the only ones left in the shop.'

The police knocked on the door, politely.

'Again they told us it was just a routine. As if my father went to the police station every day.'

This time it was a different matter.

'My father asked about his brother but the policeman shook his head and said he had no information. But they asked my father to pack a small overnight bag. Just in case they were delayed. I remember my mother crying out, asking what my father had done.'

'What did the police say?' Cecily asked in a whisper.

'Nothing! He said my father hadn't done anything as far as he knew. Actually the man looked really upset. And he called my mother "madam". He'd never called her that before. He told her he was just obeying orders. And he wouldn't look at any of us. My father asked my mother for his pa.s.sport. I saw her hand shaking as she gave it to him. But she kept a brave face. It was Franca who burst into tears.'

Carlo swallowed.

'My father turned to us all. I remember it so clearly. It was as though a piece of sky had fallen to the ground. It was like those old Italian fairy tales our mother used to tell us when we were small. I swear I heard a c.o.c.k crowing. My father took my head in his hands and kissed me. Then he held my mother and my sister in his arms.

Non piangere! Non piangere! he told us. Andr tutto bene! Don't cry, don't cry. Everything will be all right! He told me to help my brothers to look after the shop. He would be back very soon, he told us. We never saw him again.'

'And Lucio?'

'We never saw him again either.'

When the older boys came home they were outraged by what had happened and went to the police station to find out what was going on.

'My mother begged them to be careful. She sent clean s.h.i.+rts and a food parcel with them. She was worried they would be missing her cooking. So she packed some spaghetti and a little cheese and a sugo. She packed home-made biscotti and, foolishly, a small bottle of wine. For years we wondered if the wine was what did it.'

Cecily stared at Carlo, wordlessly. He shook his head. His brothers had vanished too.

'Non piangere! Non piangere! Andr tutto bene!'

That night the moon was shaped like a scythe. The c.o.c.k, Carlo remembered, crowed all night, delivering its tale of betrayal. Death was hiding everywhere. Behind closed doors, in the bushes, on other people's land.

'It was years before we found out what had actually happened,' he told Cecily.

But by then their life had taken on the colours of a nightmare.

In the little sleepy town of Bly, not built for such matters, word went around as quickly as the fire that had cremated Rose. Soon everyone knew what had happened and there were some who tried to exorcise their fears by being supportive. For a few weeks the shop filled up. But that didn't last long. Fear and fire are equally panic-inducing. And the War was Here and Now.

The papers had nothing much to report. The war was a balloon that had been inflated to breaking point and now was deflating slowly. The ARPs yawned. Without Selwyn to lead them, they too were slacking.