The Last Pier

by Roma Tearne

  6.

  THERE HAD BEEN no one to ask the McNulty sisters, about their past.

  No one was interested in what went on in the lives of Agnes and Kitty in the old days. No one wanted to know about ‘before’.

  Before Rose was born.

  Before they grew old.

  Before they wrecked their lives.

  Before history was made.

  The past was always a thing of little consequence.

  But the facts were that Kitty was only eighteen months older than Agnes. When they were children people would often mistake them for twins, one more delicate, taller, and gentler than the other.

  Kitty, whose smallness had always been a source of annoyance to herself, made up for it with a laugh that could be heard from a distance and a way of tossing her sleek black hair that excited men (Agnes thought).

  Agnes, who wore any old hand-me-down clothes with ease, as though they came from Paris, had a deep, annoying dimple (Kitty thought).

  Agnes’ eyes were large and softly green. Kitty’s heron-grey and somewhat smaller.

  They had been brought up in a small town in Ireland. Years later they would both say (jokingly) that eighteen had been the age when they had grown up. First Kitty left for England when the boy she loved was ordained and then, eighteen months later, Agnes left on a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music. But by the time Agnes arrived in London Kitty had completely reinvented herself. Now her story was that she had run away to England because a distant cousin had abused her at home. She told this story with eerie glibness, in public, and to total strangers, thus shocking the more conservative Agnes. Kitty refused to retract a single word. (Cecily was said to have the same stubborn streak.) Eventually, having heard her sister’s fabrications so often, Agnes began to wonder if it had been true.

  In London they saw each other rarely, at first. Agnes was busy studying the piano, learning composition and working as a student répétiteur. When she graduated from the Royal College it was with a distinction, but at her graduation performance (she played Liszt and nearly destroyed the piano) her parents were noted for their absence. Only Kitty was present.

  Kitty, living in digs, working as a secretary at the government Board of Trade.

  Kitty, mixing now in grand city circles, talking about export and bonds and taking trips abroad with her boss with whom she was on first name terms. He was a wealthy, important man, able to converse in several languages and able to introduce Kitty to people in the diplomatic service. Kitty talked so often and so highly of him that Agnes wondered if her sister was not a little in love. But any questions on her part were sharply dismissed. Then, the week after her graduation Agnes finally met the man himself.

  Selwyn Maudsley, enigmatic loner, silent listener, slow to smile, up for the weekend expecting to meet Kitty for lunch, was surprised to find her sister Agnes present. Startled too, by the colour of Agnes’ eyes. Green was a colour Selwyn associated with the land, not eyes, he told her, many weeks later. Over the course of these weeks he told Agnes other things.

  That she reminded him of roses. (Later he would want to call his first daughter by this name).

  That he would one day inherit his father’s farm in Suffolk.

  That he dreaded the very idea.

  That the place reminded him of a childhood devoid of love with a father who had beaten both Selwyn and his older brother.

  That although their father hated all Germans he still sent his oldest son, Selwyn’s brother, to be killed by one.

  That Selwyn had loved only that older brother.

  That, were Agnes to marry him, he would buy her a grand piano.

  That every little thing in life she might ever want was hers for the asking.

  (How unrealistic, Kitty said, when she heard.)

  That he would love her forever.

  (Kitty had laughed until she almost cried when she heard this.)

  The news that Kitty had decided to marry a diplomat was lost in what followed. What had also been lost on Agnes was Selwyn’s momentary shocked silence after Kitty’s announcement. Selwyn was twenty-one years older than Agnes and two days later he proposed to her. For a man so slow the speed with which he did this was astonishing. The die was cast. And, even though farms and rural life were what she, like Selwyn, was escaping from, Agnes developed certainty. Feeling fatally sorry for him, mistaking it for love, she agreed to marry him.

  Selwyn Maudsley’s family had lived at Palmyra House for three generations. The farm consisted of a twelve-acre orchard, a field of strawberries and three others of wheat. It was situated on a bend in the River Ore halfway between the town of Bly and that of Eelburton. Beyond the orchards and the fields belonging to the farm were the salt marshes. From the windows on the east side of the house it was possible to see the sea and on the west side there were the woods. In winter the Martello tower just outside Bly was clearly visible but in summer it was always screened by the trees. There hadn’t been a wedding there for many years. The Maudsleys were a wealthy family known both for their charitable work and their aloofness so when Selwyn brought his new bride home the little town of Bly was suddenly abuzz with curiosity. Who would be invited?

  In the event the church was packed and at the reception in Palmyra House the bride played Schubert on the piano her new husband had bought for her. Then she played a version of ‘Honeysuckle Rose’, setting the tone for the next decade.

  But it was the even more brilliant and newly married Kitty who stole the show that day. Perhaps also, it was the presence of the girls’ parents that gave Kitty her sense of triumph. Or it might have been the presence of Kitty’s bored husband, adding a world-weary touch of glamour to a country event. Or it might have been the confusion in Selwyn’s eyes, of course. Whatever the reason, it was Kitty the locals remembered.

  After the wedding not a day passed without Selwyn seeing that he did not love his new wife. But the marriage set its own standards, unaided by anybody. They were neither happy nor sad together. Agnes quickly fell pregnant, and settled back into her old rural habits. The piano was still played but morning sickness moved uneasily into evening sickness and apathy took centre stage, supplanting Liszt. It was the best that could be expected although occasionally, when she heard a piece of piano music on the wireless, something a little dangerous would stir inside Agnes. Selwyn, about to be a father at forty-one, hardly noticed. It was left to Cecily to detect this unsafe edge in her mother in later years. Cecily wisely learnt to keep away from Agnes at such moments.

  When the elderly Mr Maudsley died soon after his first grandchild, Joe Maudsley, was born it was obvious to Selwyn and Agnes, living temporarily in Eel cottage, that they would take over the running of the farm. They moved into Palmyra House. The year was 1920. Two years later Rosemary Maudsley was born and by the time Cecily appeared the strains of ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ were rarely heard in Palmyra House while the piano had fallen badly out of tune. But such was the business of the era that no one complained.

  Staring at her wedding photograph, enveloped in yards of white tulle and Chantilly lace, Agnes would write in her notebook,

  I am not unlike a pupa!

  When one looked back several things happened in those last two weeks of August 1939 into which all time would be forever condensed. The first was that Cecily noticed her sister changing in an indefinable way. She had been listening to Partridge talking to Cook.

  ‘That one is going to be a beauty,’ he said.

  Cook sniffed.

  ‘D’you mean Rose?’ Cecily asked coming out from behind the door.

  ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ Cook said tartly.

  ‘But do you mean Rose?’

  ‘Ay,’ Partridge said relighting his pipe.

  ‘She doesn’t think so,’ Cecily told him.

  Cook sniffed again and Partridge laughed.

  ‘She will soon enough,’ he said. ‘I’ll be bound!’

  After that Cecily noticed that Rose’s sleepy, slanty eyes
had taken on a new indolence. She noticed her sister’s languorous air, the way her mouth twisted into an ironic half-smile whenever the Italian boys stared at her, the way she held herself, still and watchful when Bellamy appeared at the kitchen door. The way she would scratch her throat with her left hand, once even to the point of drawing blood. The boys must have been aware of this too for they never ruffled Rose’s hair, or offered her a piggy-back. It made Cecily look at her own face with dislike, longing for something just out of reach.

  The second thing that happened was the appearance of air-raid shelters in Suffolk. Not that anyone really believed they would be needed.

  Extracts of George VI’s speech about the True Greatness of the Empire was printed in the paper although in Germany, Jews were not allowed in public gardens and Picture Post published an article about Britain preparing for war.

  But the third thing that happened had nothing to do with war. Several posters appeared on the new pier announcing the arrival of the Sadler’s Wells dance company. This was the real news!

  Rose wanted to go with Franca.

  Cecily wanted to go too but Rose didn’t want a baby tagging behind.

  Cecily knew her sister had plans for later on that involved the fair.

  Agnes, knowing nothing of any of this, wanted Rose to take Cecily.

  All was, therefore, chaos and rage.

  A war developing right there around the farmhouse kitchen table.

  ‘Generosity is an old-fashioned virtue that’s getting lost in this talk of war,’ Agnes observed.

  ‘Like the scent of old roses,’ Aunt Kitty added.

  Aunt Kitty, long divorced, was by now nursing a Broken Heart as though it were a wounded soldier.

  ‘Wounded enemy soldier,’ Selwyn joked.

  His voice was gruff and indistinct because he spoke with his pipe in his mouth.

  There was an awkwardness around him that gave Cecily a puzzling feeling. Her father had changed somewhat of late and no longer played the I-spy games with her as he used to. These days he seemed preoccupied with the war, but once long ago it had been Selwyn who told Cecily that looking and listening were the most important skills for a writer. Her father no longer read or praised her stories. The war, it seemed, was destroying everything interesting.

  The clouds at the far end of the garden were as big as ice-cream cones and the air was hot as though it was a hydrogen balloon about to burst.

  Outside, behind the fields, the lanes had narrowed into a tangle of blackberry briar and pale pink dog roses. The sky was a silken blue. The larks, invisibly high up, threw down their eerie threads of song. It was the unforgettable summer voice of England calling out, a great humming bowl of activity, present in the murmur and buzz of uncut fields and the deep peaceful voices of the farmhands talking to each other. There could not possibly be a war.

  Could there?

  ‘I hate this waiting feeling,’ Aunt Kitty admitted.

  She made it sound like a song, Cecily thought. Aunt Kitty was what Cecily’s father called exotic. Like tinned pineapples.

  It was August the 16th, only two weeks before September arrived but still the summer squawked and hissed in the long grass. There had been no rain for ages. Agnes, head bent, was making strawberry jam.

  ‘You children are getting as brown as cobnuts,’ a farmhand observed.

  Everyone should have been helping with clearing the tennis court and the meadow next to it. But not everyone did what they should, observed Partridge, jovial in spite of Rose’s huffy manner, as he adjusted her bicycle brakes. And off Rose went, along the bridle path, somewhere on her own, calling out, toodle-pip.

  ‘Now where has she gone?’ Agnes asked, sighing out of sheer weariness.

  ‘She’s gone Out Of Sheer Weariness,’ Cecily said.

  ‘I’d like to get out of Sheer Weariness, occasionally,’ Kitty said, hugging her, smiling away her Broken Heart. ‘I’ve lived there too long already!’

  Selwyn, on his way out to milk the cow, glanced at Aunt Kitty but she was counting sweet williams.

  Sent by her unknown admirer.

  Seven.

  There were always seven, Cecily noticed. And every time Aunt Kitty received a bouquet of flowers she went out. Agnes saw Selwyn standing against the light in the doorway, smiling the smile that once had been her undoing but now only seemed to make her unhappy.

  Naughty Rose, sailing past the window on her bicycle, hair streaming behind her, thin beautiful legs showing through the delicate fabric of her dress.

  ‘Pinky’s just gone out in his car!’

  ‘Rose!’ Agnes cried, shrilly, horrified. ‘Come back immediately!’

  ‘What on earth is she up to?’ muttered Aunt Kitty, the laugh still in her voice, the Wounded Heart, in the recovery room.

  ‘Oh she’s just trying it on,’ Selwyn said.

  ‘Come back,’ Agnes cried, again. ‘You’ve forgotten to collect the eggs for me.’

  ‘Black Swan, White Swan,’ chanted Cecily.

  The town would be the ballet company’s hosts for only four nights before they moved on elsewhere. Four nights of B&Bs and resin and sweat and footlights and applause. Cecily, who had been reading her father’s copy of Murder in the Cathedral, thought she might write a story about a murder in the theatre.

  ‘Daddy says Murder in the Cathedral is really about the rise of fascism in central Europe,’ she said out loud to no one in particular.

  Robert Wilson, thin as a stick that could unblock a drain, had a face made for playing poker. Already it appeared as it would one day look, staring out from a hardback edition of history.

  In a crowd he would be invisible.

  In a crowd no one would notice the tortoiseshell spectacles he didn’t need, but which made him look dependable.

  And every single time Rose saw him dislike spread across her face like jam oozing from a scone.

  ‘I wish you children would stop calling him Pinky,’ complained Agnes again and again. ‘It’s very rude and ignorant especially now that he’s going to be our long-term guest.’

  ‘Why on earth does he have to stay in our cottage?’ Cecily objected.

  She liked going to Eel cottage, to tuck herself in its depths, out of sight and reading. Now she would have to move her den back to the hornbeam.

  ‘We have to do the best we can in the current situation,’ Agnes told her family.

  She was using her I’m-not-having-an-argument-with-you voice.

  ‘He’s a nice man.’

  ‘Who says?’ asked Rose, returning through the back door grinning, unrepentant, Bellamy the tinker’s lad hovering in her shadow.

  There was menace in his raised fist. Now what’s he angry about? wondered Cecily.

  ‘Ah!’ said Selwyn, amused by his elder daughter’s flushed cheeks. ‘Hello Bellamy. Come to give me a hand? Or to talk to Rose?’

  He spoke with a kind of empty gentleness as if he were thinking of other things. Bellamy looked dumbly at Rose and Cecily couldn’t help feeling sorry for him.

  ‘Right, I’m off,’ Selwyn said at last, bored, taking his hat down from the peg. Through the open kitchen door the fields were gold.

  ‘Isn’t that boy you told us about arriving soon? The evacuee,’ Rose asked, looking at Cecily.

  ‘Oh no! Not an evacuee, mummy?’

  ‘Rose, stop teasing your sister,’ snapped Agnes. ‘He isn’t an evacuee, Cecily. And I believe he’s a nice boy.’

  ‘Dear, dear,’ said Kitty under her breath. ‘What a lot of bother.’

  And that was when Cecily saw her aunt pick up the jug full of sweet williams.

  ‘I’ll just put them in the cottage, for Pinky Wilson,’ she said, smiling at Agnes. ‘They will look nice there. And then I’m going into Ipswich.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t you start,’ cried Agnes. ‘It’s bad enough with the children. And anyway I’m sure he’s not interested in flowers. Why don’t you put them in the parlour instead?’

  ‘I don
’t want any boys coming here,’ muttered Cecily. ‘I don’t want to share my things with them. I’ll kill them if they come.’

  Years later on a crisply starched morning, when the Beatles were singing ‘Yesterday’, in quite a different place altogether, Cecily was reminded of the scent of flowers. It was different from any other scent. It was the scent of dew on sweet williams. A very slight fragrance that she had not realised she had caught and contained in her nose. Perhaps the dew had been different before the war? Purer, more innocent.

  By the time she came to think this, the war had been long over, leaving only a few traces in their hastily rebuilt lives. One of them had been the scent that made her decide to return to her old home twenty-nine years, three days and twelve hours later.

  However on that August day, now only three days before the evacuee arrived and sixteen before the tennis party, the war could not make up its mind whether to happen or not. The weather of course remained exceptional. For days now, the mornings had started in exactly the same way. There were deep white clouds on the horizon and the sun beat up against them, battling its way across the sky. Sometimes the clouds darkened and rolled slowly over the fields.

  But there was no rain.

  And the news on the wireless was so boring.

  The Führer is jubilant because the Russians are prepared to sign a non-aggression pact.

  The old charismatic Pope had died and some Italians were worried about the new Pope who hated Communists and preferred Fascists.

  An article in Picture Post said: We want Peace. Britain Does Not Hate Germany. Everyone listened to the news on the wireless all the time. It drove Rose mad.

  ‘But I hate them,’ said Rose whose dress was almost ready for the charity dance.