by Roma Tearne
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 ju
st 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.
‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany,’ Chamberlain said and Cecily caught and held a dandelion wisp.
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.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Selwyn said.
Cook, her hands shaking, her eyes wiped, went off to get lunch.
‘Make sure you’re down in half an hour, Rose,’ she called after the closing door. ‘With your face and hands washed.’
Cecily had crushed the dandelion clock in her hand by mistake. Dandelion bits fell to the ground.
‘Don’t make a mess,’ Agnes said, absent-mindedly. ‘Go and wash your hands.’
‘Come on, C,’ Tom said but the hideous wailing of the air raid siren made them all jump. No one could find their gas masks.
It’s the end of everything as we know it, Cecily thought.
She was thinking of the fields, the woods, the church with its lovely spire and the marshes with all the birds that lived in it. And of Joe, who was leaving tonight.
And of Carlo who wasn’t old enough to be called up. He was angry that his brothers could. It made him feel useless, he had said, a serious look on his face.
Agnes had tears in her eyes. She could not even mention Lucio’s name to herself.
There was no air raid. It had been a false alarm and a moment later the notes of the all-clear sounded. Perhaps, thought Agnes, that’s a good omen. Kitty announced she would perhaps need to travel to London, to join the Wrens.
‘I don’t want to be a Land Girl,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I’m not interested in taking a step backwards!’
‘After lunch,’ Selwyn said, ‘I shall have to call a meeting with the ARPs. And after that I may need to go up to London, too. I could give you a lift, Kitty, if you wanted? Petrol rationing will start immediately, you know.’
But Kitty wasn’t quite ready.
‘Thank you, but I won’t stay for lunch, if you don’t mind,’ Robert Wilson said, smiling politely. ‘I still haven’t finished writing my report on the land management in this area.’
No one minded.
‘Good,’ muttered Tom.
It would make it easier to watch him. But it was a long time until the evening and what if he drove off to London, now?
‘What on earth are you children plotting, now?’ Kitty asked, making them jump.
‘This evening,’ Tom said loudly, ‘C and I are going to look for glow-worms. We’re going to use them as torches from now on.’
It was a very long and tiring day with unaccountable tensions. At five, Joe left. It was much worse for Franca, Agnes reminded them. Agnes did not make a fuss, although Cecily saw that the fuss was going on inside her mother. Joe was stopping off in town to say goodbye to Franca and the Molinellos. When he returned in two weeks (he hoped) he would buy a ring.
‘That’s nice,’ Rose said in a voice that didn’t quite match her words.
Only Cecily noticed. Everyone else was too subdued. Everyone except Kitty, of course, who went outside to read a book. Rose just wanted to sleep and sleep.
‘Are you going out tonight?’ Cecily asked her, not really expecting a reply and not getting one, either.
Lethargy hung around Palmyra Farm like a dying wasp. While Anger followed Bellamy into the bushes. He too was making plans.
Night came slowly. Starless and moonless and all that Tom had hoped for. It was still damp from last night’s rain. Joe would be at his camp by now, listening to the King’s speech from his mess.
‘There may be dark days ahead, and war can no longer be confined to the battlefields,’ the King said.
Afterwards as they stood for the National Anthem, Cecily saw Captain Pinky hurrying across the lawn. But he had missed the King. Agnes in heightened mood, tears not far off, looked around at those members of her family that were present. What was Lucio thinking? It was not his National Anthem. The lights were going out all over Europe. In the Molinellos’ little village in Italy, too. What were they feeling at this moment?
‘I’m going to post a letter,’ Kitty said, abruptly.
That evening Robert Wilson brought round a bottle of champagne to toast a speedy end to the war.
‘You see,’ Tom hissed. ‘He’s always here.’
‘He’s waiting to see if Rose goes out.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ Tom said.
‘We’re tired,’ Cecily told her mother, ignoring Pinky.
A preoccupied Agnes accepted this flawed story.
‘Did you see his black file?’ Tom asked as they parted on the stairs. ‘He’s trying to recruit your mother, make her a spy, like him.’
‘Tonight’s the night,’ Cecily agreed. ‘When the fish will bite!’
They synchronised their watches and went their separate ways.
September the 3rd, 1939; it might as well have been etched on her own headstone in gold letters.
Afterwards Agnes blamed herself for drinking too much champagne. But hindsight was still some hours away as Robert Wilson poured her another glass of fizzing, bubbling trouble.
‘He had salt and pepper hair,’ she said of Selwyn.
And he had remarked on her eyes.
For a love-starved girl who had only lived for Liszt, this was a
thrill like no other.
‘And Kitty?’
‘Oh she was always prettier than me,’ Agnes said, misunderstanding.
Robert Wilson refrained from comment.
‘I don’t want you to think it was all bad,’ Agnes said.
‘No.’
‘We got on very well to start with.’
She paused, thinking through the jungle of missed opportunities.
‘He used to make me laugh…’
Ah! thought Robert. Yes!
‘And he loved my music.’
She remembered how in the early days they had had little concerts. How Joe in his pram had grown up listening to Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert. Getting his musical education from the cradle, Selwyn had said. As indeed Rose had, too.
‘Until it all changed.’
‘How?’ Robert asked, his voice gentle.
Agnes hesitated. When had she realised?
‘What?’ asked Robert Wilson.
‘His bitterness.’
‘Bitterness?’
Again Agnes hesitated. How could a man like Robert Wilson understand?
‘It hasn’t been easy for me either,’ Robert said, slowly.
There was a pause.
‘His father was a terrible man,’ Agnes said at last. ‘Selwyn never forgave him for what he did to him.’
Something to do with a German girl he had been friendly with.
‘Yes…’
‘And of course there was also his brother’s death…’
‘Yes.’
‘He closed his mind to everything except C. He loves her with a passion that makes Rose resent him.’
‘Why have favourites?’ asked Robert Wilson, surprised.
Agnes shrugged.
‘When Selwyn has an obsession, he doesn’t give it up easily,’ she said. ‘When the job offer came he could not refuse. So I took over the running of the farm. Bit by bit, you know.’
Bit by bit Selwyn staying away, going up to London early, returning late.
‘In the end we thought it sensible to buy a small flat. So he wouldn’t have to keep driving back at all sorts of unearthly hours.’
