The Last Pier

by Roma Tearne

  ‘Did you stay there too?’

  ‘Oh goodness, no. There was no room and besides I had the farm and the children to take care of. We thought it a good investment.’

  ‘Where did the money come from?’

  ‘His work at the Ministry,’ she shrugged. ‘It was well paid. He was an advisor to the Minister of Trade.’

  Robert Wilson nodded. This wasn’t news, he said. Then he held the empty bottle up to the light. And opened a new bottle.

  ‘My word!’ laughed Agnes, uneasily. ‘We shall be drunk.’

  But the day had been terrible enough, she supposed. She thought with longing about Lucio. He would come only under cover of the blackout. She was certain. Crossing the fields, the long way round. Bubbles of happiness rose in her.

  ‘Agnes,’ Robert Wilson said, at last.

  And he stopped. They sipped their champagne in silence.

  ‘Have you any idea what work Selwyn is doing now?’

  ‘Well of course not, it’s top secret,’ she giggled.

  She was beginning to sound like Tom, she thought. Robert Wilson was looking at her gravely.

  ‘He doesn’t talk to you about it?’

  Agnes shook her head.

  ‘Oh you needn’t worry, Robert. Selwyn isn’t in any special danger I promise you.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘How well d’you know the Italians?’ Robert asked, gently.

  ‘The Molinellos? They’re wonderful people. Why?’

  ‘No reason, but now we are at war and…’

  ‘They won’t be able to visit their relatives, poor things.’

  It would hit Mario hard, she told him. He was often homesick.

  ‘I’ll visit them in the morning. After all, we’re going to be related, soon!’

  Robert nodded.

  ‘I’m worried about them,’ he said, slowly. ‘We have to be careful of careless talk. From now on.’

  ‘Oh I know,’ Agnes told him, giggling again.

  ‘I think you should keep an eye open,’ he said, vaguely.

  Then he rose.

  ‘I should go to bed. Tomorrow all hell will be let loose. In all probability, I’ll have to return to London.’

  Picking up the file he had brought with him, he opened it, and then changed his mind and shut it again, noticing how Agnes glanced at her watch. She had looked at it several times during the evening. He wondered if she was expecting someone, later. He wished her goodnight. And stepped outside. He did not see Tom with a jam jar, slipping across to the orchard in search of glow-worms. He did not see, and neither did Agnes, Rose climbing down the honeysuckle wearing her best satin shoes.

  With a torch covered with two layers of black crepe paper, making for the bicycle shed.

  But Cecily could see it now. Every bit of it. She could not stop seeing the image of Agnes crying out that she would take to her grave the x-ray of her daughter’s teeth. Small, pearly, even, white teeth, held up to the light by the dentist.

  Oh yes, it was Rose’s all right.

  Rose’s teeth without its smile.

  Teeth without the mouth that ranted at the world at large.

  And a dress burnt to a cinder.

  Cinders? (Cecily would murmur out of habit later on, ensuring a slap) Like Cinderella?

  Without the glass slipper.

  Someone (it was forgotten in the cacophony of sounds whether it had been Kitty) would be unable to stop slapping Cecily.

  Shut up! Shut Up! Haven’t you done enough damage already? With your stupid games, your foolish imagination? Will you never learn to shut up?

  Stop, stop, stop! someone would cry, pulling Kitty’s hands apart as though they were a bunch of cut flowers. Reminding everyone of the seven flowers Robert Wilson sent as a sign every time he wanted a secret word with Kitty.

  Cecily had heard them tell Agnes it would not be advisable for her to see the rest of her daughter, Rose. Cecily had no idea who the devil they were. Even now, years later, she could not remember their faces, or their names; those people who lined up to hold her mother upright.

  And Agnes Maudsley never forgave herself for listening with horror to the news of the first British ship to go down in the middle of the Atlantic at the same moment that her own daughter was going up in flames.

  Twenty-nine years later, draining her cold tea into the dark-stained sink, Cecily washed up her mug. She realised she did not want to visit the grave.

  21.

  ON HER LAST visit, when Cecily was almost nineteen, Agnes broke a silence of a different sort.

  ‘At least she never knew what was to follow,’ she said.

  Sick, sad, quietly mad Agnes who visited Cecily for one last time, climbing up the steps to the front door, ringing the bell marked Maudsley. Out of breath, with a rattle in her chest and years of neglect imprinted on her eyes, bursting in on Cecily with random thoughts that were beyond comprehension.

  ‘We’ve breached the ordered peace we once had,’ she announced and Cecily, tired of her mother’s evasive lies, her refusal to tell her what had really gone on, the guilt of all she herself was carrying, closed her eyes and sighed.

  Leave me alone, she wanted to cry. None of this is relevant.

  But although on the edge of extinction, Agnes was unable to stop sifting the stones of confusion that would fill her life until it reached its bitter end.

  So on that last visit she had thrust a small cutting from The Times into Cecily’s hand, insisting she read of the boat the Italians had sailed on. Before the war it had been a luxury cruise liner floating across the Mediterranean.

  The British liner Arandora Star, with about 1,500 Germans and Italian subjects on board, has been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in the Atlantic. Germans and Italians, men interned at the outbreak of war, were being taken to Canada. It is feared that all Italian lives have been lost. British survivors state that as the ship was rapidly sinking there was panic amongst the aliens, and especially amongst the Germans, who thrust aside Italians in their efforts to reach the lifeboats first.

  ‘He loved me, you know,’ Agnes burst out. ‘Lucio! And now he’s gone.’

  ‘And the other Molinellos?’ Cecily had asked, unable to ask more.

  ‘All of them,’ Agnes said, pressing her lips tightly together.

  There had been only silence after that. Agnes sat, eyes closed, still as a bird, her tea untouched. On the table was a paper bag with some fresh brown eggs. All Agnes had these days were a few chickens. The orchard had gone, as had the top field where one magical night they had sung ‘Bella Ciao’.

  Her mother, Cecily saw, had painted pink hearts on the eggs as though they were for a child.

  On that last visit Agnes spent the morning with Cecily in her room at the top of a house on the Old Kent Road. The room was Cecily’s first completely Maudsley-free space. It was paid for by the grant she got from the County Council for her teacher-training course in Avery Hill.

  ‘Do you still write stories?’ Agnes asked.

  Cecily shook her head.

  ‘You used to write all the time, when you weren’t reading. And when you weren’t eavesdropping!’

  Neither of them laughed. The silence that had been growing between them stepped out of its shoes and pushed against the room.

  ‘I brought you Rose’s rug,’ Agnes said, finally.

  It had been an ordinary morning without pain.

  Until Cecily saw that rug.

  Why was her mother doing this? Did she want Rose to follow her everywhere?

  The voices in Cecily’s head, knowing silence was more powerful than words, were quiet.

  ‘See how nice it looks beside your bed,’ Agnes said.

  Her face, in the wake of her chemotherapy treatment, was yellow, her lovely piano-playing fingers swollen by steroids. The long slender neck truncated somehow. The sadness surrounding Agnes tainted the air like escaping gas, making Cecily want to cry.

  ‘It suits you, doesn’t it?’ Agnes asked. ‘L
iving here.’

  Not really a question, more of a distress flare. Cecily nodded. Agnes began to cough. Cecily prepared to wait. The spasm, she knew, would go on for longer than was socially polite.

  ‘Have you registered with a doctor, Cecci?’

  The old name slipping out made Cecily angry. She resented her mother using a nickname that wasn’t hers to use. Agnes continued to cough. Was she still smoking as much as before, Cecily wondered?

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well you should, you know. Health is wealth.’

  They paused as though they were boxers taking a break. Too many unsaid things made it impossible to move the slagheaps of regret. Truth remained trapped under them.

  ‘What are your flatmates like? D’you like them?’

  Agnes smiled a ghastly smile through a volume of sagging flesh. The tiny, lovely mother whose dimples had so delighted Cecily, where had she gone? Had the green eyes darkened through loss?

  ‘I want you to be happy.’ Agnes said. ‘I mean really happy.’

  In the silence that followed, the dead were not named.

  ‘Shall we go out for lunch?’ Cecily asked.

  The room had become stuffy. She needed to get out into the open.

  ‘I would like a steak,’ her mother said and proceeded to lead the way to Leicester Square.

  Cecily wondered whether she had been drinking.

  Over lunch (Agnes insisted that she would pay, ‘Of course you’re not paying. This is my treat!’) the silence between the two of them was broken only by the sound of Agnes chewing her steak. Her mother had lost one of her bottom teeth and when she ate it sounded as if she were swallowing phlegm. Cecily felt sick. It was all she could do to eat her salad without retching. Agnes ordered a gin and slurped it in great glugs. She cut into another piece of meat. Blood oozed out. Cecily saw white sinewy bits.

  ‘It’s very fatty,’ Agnes said, her mouth open as she chewed.

  The waiter hovered and then went away again. Agnes dropped first her fork and then her napkin. When the waiter tried to give her a new fork she waved him away, then changed her mind and asked for another gin instead.

  ‘We must do this again,’ she said squeezing Cecily’s hand.

  Despair took Cecily’s voice hostage.

  The waiter returned with Agnes’ drink. This time there were two ice cubes in the glass and a piece of lemon. Agnes pushed her plate away.

  ‘You should come home,’ she ventured.

  She lit a cigarette. In spite of what cigarettes had done to her, she still loved them. An abusive relationship if ever there was one, Cecily thought.

  Carlo was dead. What was there to come home for now?

  Agnes shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. To see the sea, maybe?’

  Speechless, Cecily thought of all the years when she had fallen asleep in her attic room in Kitty’s house, listening to the sound of the trains rumbling along the railway line towards Vauxhall Bridge. Wishing it were the sound of the sea. Wishing she were lying in her bed in Palmyra House. And she thought of the years she had spent wishing her mother would invite her back. Just once. Just to collect those things she had left behind in the unseemly haste of her departure from paradise.

  ‘I wonder if I could have another drink?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘You’ve had enough,’ Cecily told her.

  Hopelessness melted in Agnes’ glass. Cecily felt the obstruction in her chest was growing.

  ‘I have to go to the library,’ she lied.

  ‘Do you need money?’ Agnes asked, peering anxiously at her.

  Cecily shook her head. Outside it had begun to rain. Red London buses were passing noiselessly by. Agnes sighed. I don’t know what you want, her sigh said. She gathered up her shopping bag, a string one that Cecily remembered from years before.

  ‘I suppose I had better be getting back then,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a journey.’

  Cecily stood up and went to the lavatory. When she returned, Agnes was sitting at the empty table hugging her bag and staring out of the window, her eyes bewildered.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  It was the last time Cecily saw her mother alive.

  Agnes died in her bedroom in Palmyra House twenty-five years after she had arrived there as a young bride. She died alone. With a sackful of green walnuts ready to be pickled standing in the grimy kitchen. She was fifty-one. No age at all, the people in the town would say. Pity, they would say, there had never been another man to warm her bed.

  All the staff working at the farm before the war had left, even Partridge. The orchard had gone. Cook took retirement when her arthritis had made it impossible to lift the chicken feed into the yard. Agnes had tried to get a girl from the town but most of them, having heard the rumours that circulated about the Maudsleys, were reluctant to come. In any case, after the farm had been sold, what was the point of having any help when no help was needed? Agnes had no friends in the town. The war had swept a lot away. Things that were unnecessary in this new after-the-war life had gone, like ice-cream parlours and digging-for-victory kitchen gardens. Only the walnut tree remained, still producing two sackfuls of nuts.

  For years she hadn’t bothered to pickle any but on the day before she died she went into the yard and stared up at the tree. Then she found the ladder. The cat, seeing this unusual activity, wandered out with a kitten in its mouth, alarmed. Agnes took no notice of it. She began to collect the unripe walnuts. They were particularly large this year. She would send Cecily some, she decided. Frowning, she continued with her task until the sun had travelled across the yard. Then she dragged her sack in towards the kitchen door to deal with later. Later she would go into the town to buy vinegar. Later she would sterilise some of the hundreds of bottles in the scullery and warm them ready for the walnuts. Later. Smoking her thirtieth cigarette of the day, she brushed ash off her cardigan. There was comfort in the notion of Later. It gave shape to the rest of her life.

  ‘Taste me,’ she had said, once long ago, in some other life, ‘I’m real!’

  Where are you, now, she wanted to cry.

  ‘You will be with me wherever I go,’ he had told her. ‘What I hand over to you is yourself; yourself loved in every part.’

  Oh the things he had said! She had trusted him, never doubting he would remain with her throughout the war. But he had vanished, leaving only the sound of his name. To be remembered by her.

  ‘Lucio!’ she cried, helplessly.

  That night she was awoken by a recurring dream. In the dream she was making a list just as Cecily used to. Agnes’ list was about the things she once Had Not Known.

  She had not known about what was about to happen.

  Or that she was having her last unsullied memories.

  That the sound of the fire engines would stay with her for the rest of her life.

  That the knives and forks she was setting out on the table for tomorrow’s breakfast were merely decorative.

  That the kidney pie in the oven would go to waste.

  That she would never have an appetite again.

  That the war when it came would be of no importance for her.

  That the car slowing down outside the house on the night the pier burnt down would not belong to Selwyn.

  Or that the man driving the car would take from her all that mattered.

  Sitting up in her large bed she pushed away the cover. It was the eiderdown that had once, long ago, belonged on Cecily’s bed but which, after she had banished Cecily, Agnes had taken to keep her company and staunch her grief.

  ‘Why,’ she asked herself now, as she had done a thousand times before, ‘why did I send her away? We could have weathered it together.’

  Outside a thin, cloud-veiled moon shone on the rooftops of the houses built where the tennis court had once been. Agnes sat up, puzzled. Where had the tennis court gone?

  The room was suddenly full of other people’s whispered voices contradicting each other.

  ‘Love,
’ she cried, ‘where are you?’

  She put her hand over her ears trying to blot out the noise but the sounds got louder. She tried to call out to her daughter Rose but the name wouldn’t form in her throat. She thought of her sister but couldn’t remember what her name was.

  ‘Cecci,’ she said, out of habit.

  And that was all she remembered.

  Outside in the early autumn sky, the paper-thin moon had had enough of spreading itself over Palmyra Farm and moved off silently in another direction.

  She wasn’t found for two days and then it was by chance that the postman, delivering a gas bill to the house, noticed the side light still switched on and walked round to the kitchen. There he saw the open sack of walnuts and the ladder leaning against the tree.

  He knew Mrs Maudsley from many years before. He knew all about her hard life, in fact he had been a young boy when she had first come to live at Palmyra House. He remembered her as a tall, slender beauty with vivid green eyes who didn’t take care of herself. Others had thought her sister prettier but the postman knew better. Besides, he had seen how quickly the older sister went to seed after trouble came to Palmyra Farm. Whereas poor Mrs Maudsley, for what it was worth, had kept her looks for much longer. The postman had taken it upon himself to keep an eye on her whenever he came up this way. Seeing the light on, he followed it to its source and saw the scullery door ajar.

  She had fallen off the bed holding the eiderdown and now lay on the cold floor clutching a photograph. One of those Eytie men who used to work in the ice-cream parlour, thought Postie, puzzled. He saw that poor Mrs Maudsley’s face had darkened and her lips parted. Only her deep green eyes, wide open and unseeing, remained as iridescent as ever. Like a finch’s wing, the postman thought sadly, much later after he had called the ambulance.

  Outside in the corpse-free air he saw with relief that the autumn mist was clearing. He stared up at the big house where, for the first time in years, no smoke rose from the chimney, remembering the day, many decades before, when he had come here to play in a tennis match.