by Roma Tearne
She passed an old hayrick with bales of hay stacked into a cone-shaped structure and covered with old black plastic sheeting standing up against the horizon. The hay had grown old like everything else. Green shoots sprouted out of the black sheets that covered it. She could imagine how it had been cut one summer, baled and stored. But those who had worked here had died or moved on so that now the hay was rotting. And the new farm stored its hay in a modern open shed, a pre-fabricated building carrying the printed name of a company just below the apex of the roof. Cecily walked on, head bowed. Shadows from a blue remembered past pressed like a stranger’s overcoat in a crowd, right up against her mouth.
She was no one. She was flotsam. Nobody wanted her. This hostile landscape had nothing to do with her memory. In the confusion of her cut-short youth she had missed the reality. And the war had come and created a further complication. It had created another country, a shanty-town of the mind, a temporary residence not meant to last. And what traces of the past remained were too fragmented to be of use.
Shivering with the shock, she walked on. The boat was there and she stood for a moment, looking at it with the wind in her hair. The rain increased and she lifted her face to greet it. Wanting to wash away everything, the past, the present and what future there might be. Silence broke down in the falling water. At last tear ducts released the tension she had held so tightly. In the long years of exile, what had kept her going had been the belief she knew this place like a piece of loved music. But even this was not so.
Kitty! The name rose unbidden. Why hadn’t she realised? The truth, discarded for years, floated towards her. Aunts don’t keep coming to visit.
One down, Cecily thought, filling in the puzzle.
Kitty to Agnes: ‘It isn’t her fault. Why are you always hardest on her?’ (There, it was spoken.)
Selwyn to Kitty and Cecily: ‘My two little girls.’ (How true.)
Rose: ‘Oh quite!’ (Had she known?)
Resentful Rose.
And then, much later after the betrayal, Agnes: ‘I lost two children. You forget.’
Yes!
There were other clues, thought Cecily, raising her cry to the skies. She heard her voice returning across the sodden meadow, like the wild song of a captured bird.
‘Daddy loves Kitty.’
‘Daddy’s in love with Kitty,’ Rose had said, head bent, darning a tear in her favourite dress.
‘Don’t be cruel, C.’ Agnes had said. ‘Don’t be cruel.’
Cruel, replied the echo, reproachfully. There was a boat bobbing on the water. On closer inspection, its base was smashed and how it floated was a mystery.
Rose had rowed across to her rendezvous on just such a boat. And then Cecily remembered something else. Yes! Yes!
‘Where are you going?’ she had asked, waking, making Rose jump.
Rose had thought she was asleep. Fooled you, Rose. I spy with my little eye. Rose had been busy with packing.
‘You can have my things.’
Cecily had thought she would say more but her sister had clammed up.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ Cecily had said.
‘I’m going anyway,’ Rose had said but she hadn’t sounded sure.
Cecily had seen her sister was almost crying. Sisterly feelings, undetected until now, surfaced and swam towards each other. They would go on swimming lengths forever more.
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’re too young.’
Neither had known what to say after that, the cold hand of the inevitable being upon them. A hand that had never left Cecily in twenty-nine years.
‘Are you meeting Carlo?’ she had asked.
And Rose laughing her last laugh had replied,
‘Why would I be meeting Carlo?’
‘Because he loves you.’
‘No he doesn’t!’
‘He does!’
‘Carlo,’ Rose had said, heavily, ‘is just a game.’
And she had continued packing. A small cardboard suitcase. Coat slung over her arm. How was she going to climb down the honeysuckle?
‘I’m not,’ Rose said, chin up, defiant.
The old Rose was suddenly in charge.
‘I’m going out through the back door.’
And she had gone. While the house slept and the air was cooler and the blackout blinds were in place in preparation for what was to come. She too had had a handful of glow-worms and a wobbly bicycle. A smile that would be remembered forever afterwards. Teeth that would survive her last adventure.
Cecily had strained her ears and heard the squeak of brakes and then nothing. So she had told Tom.
‘Of course,’ Tom had said. ‘I told you so, didn’t I?’
Excited Tom. There had been no one about. What else could she do?
You were not the sinner, thought Cecily, eyes wide against the rain. You were sinned against. You were just a little girl. A victim that no one counted in the census.
There had been just four hours of life left. How could either of them have known?
The rain had softened the cry of the curlew.
Thinking hard, Cecily realised she had missed the biggest clue of all on that Saturday afternoon.
Where had the others been at the time?
It had been during the tennis-court party. Everyone had their eye on the ball, of course.
Or had it been at night?
Speak memory, speak!
Cecily frowned, dredging up the past from the marshy waters. Using only the frayed threads she carried in her pocket and her bare hands.
When had it happened?
It must have been night. Or maybe the shutters had been closed because she remembered the blueness of the light. A white curtain moving like a flag at half-mast and a sound striking the surface of Cecily’s consciousness, sinking like a stone into mud, very, very slowly. It was why she had investigated further.
From the distance of years Agnes’ voice came to her.
‘Curiosity killed the cat, Cecily.’
Her mother! Kitty’s voice singing,
Why tell them all the old things
Who kissed there long ago?
There was blue-and-white wallpaper. Or maybe it was Agnes’ dress that was blue and white. Distance had slyly changed the view. So had she imagined it? But now she remembered how, for days after, she had rerun the scene in slow motion.
‘Oh Selwyn,’ a woman’s voice had gasped. ‘Say you still love me. Tell me there’s still a chance…’
Cecily had opened the door a fraction and seen two people lying completely naked, one on top of the other on the bed. She had stood perfectly still. The crack in the door was not wide enough for her to see faces. The blue, liquid light flowed into the tall room and she saw a naked piece of flesh, a prawn just like the one Bellamy had, stabbing away. On and on it went, as Cecily stood puzzled, one eye in the crack of the door. She had heard shouting far away.
‘Four-love!’
Applause, the faint sound of a ball being struck. It must have been during the tennis match after all. But then she had been distracted by a new development on the bed.
‘Selwyn,’ the voice said, again. Then more urgently, with a gasp, ‘Selwyn.’
There was a noise as if the bed was being rocked by poltergeists. Cecily opened the door a fraction wider but she still couldn’t see any faces.
Two body parts were what she saw.
Two pairs of legs, stretched out.
But only one prawn.
Moving slightly into the room she watched, fascinated, as the people on the bed seemed to tear at each other. Dismayed she wondered if she should break up the fight before something terrible happened. There was a shuffling and gasping. And as she watched, uncertain, witnessing what she should not, the terrible thing that had lurked in the room, waiting to happen, happened. Like an explosion, thought Cecily. Or a grenade going off. Like the way they must have killed people in the Great War. Was this how it would be if war
came again?
‘Out, out!’ someone shouted over by the tennis court and there followed laughter.
But in the blue, backlit room, now that it was all over there was only the soft sound of two people kissing. Making up, thought Cecily. The man on the bed moved and Cecily saw he no longer had his prawn. Perhaps it had broken off, she thought. And suddenly she was no longer interested but angry. Only she couldn’t say what about. And in that moment while she hesitated, wanting to leave, not knowing how she could do so without being seen, the man turned his head. And saw her.
‘What are you doing here, Cecily?’ he asked.
He pulled himself up on his knees and Cecily saw that he hadn’t in fact lost the prawn-thing but that it just was smaller. And she saw too, with something close to dismay, that the voice questioning her was that of her father. The figure on the bed had turned her face away and was pulling a sheet over herself.
‘I told you to knock whenever you wanted to come into our bedroom,’ Selwyn said, sternly. ‘What are you doing here? You should be watching the match.’
‘I…’ Cecily said.
For once she had nothing to say.
‘Now go downstairs and leave your mother and me alone. We were feeling tired and we came upstairs for a rest.’
Her father sounded out of breath. Cecily swallowed. Her eyes felt prickly and she was shivery. Perhaps she was coming down with a fever and she would have to go to bed too. She nodded.
‘Go on, C. Scram. Get Rose to give you some ice cream. It’s very hot. We’ll be down in a minute. All right?’
Again Cecily nodded. She tried to look at the figure on the bed but her father was blocking her view. She looked up into his face because she didn’t know where to look. Nowhere else seemed safe. Selwyn bent his head and kissed her forehead and although she didn’t make a sound she felt herself shrink into her shell like a small animal. Smaller than her father’s prawn. And then, without a sound, she turned and scurried downstairs. It was only on her way towards the tennis court that she remembered her father had called the person on the bed Kitty.
Stopping beside the lilac bush, (there was no sign of her sister) Cecily convulsed. But nothing came out except thoughts. And sounds. In and out, between her father’s gasps.
‘Kitty, Kitty!’
But then thankfully, everything in her had contracted and she vomited. It was how, first Bellamy, and then Tom, found her.
‘Are you sick?’
‘No.’
‘Yes you are.’
She had everything she wanted.
A long summer holiday.
As much ice cream as possible.
No worries.
Two parents.
People who loved her.
‘It must be the ice cream,’ she said. ‘Maybe I ate too much.’
‘Maybe,’ Bellamy said, laughing, ‘you’ve eaten a prawn.’
Cecily vomited again and a second later Tom, hurrying around the corner, saw Bellamy standing like an exhibitionist bat with his batwings open like a mackintosh. Tom saw the things he’d been wanting to see for days.
‘I’m telling,’ he said, absolutely certain.
Both boys rolled together in a ground fight, narrowly avoiding the vomit. Only they, Cecily saw, had their clothes on.
‘Don’t tell,’ she whispered.
She was alarmed although, what was there to tell, anyway?
A bluish room,
An open window,
Her father forgetting her mother’s name.
There wasn’t anything to tell.
‘Cecci, Cecci,’ Carlo has cried coming up. ‘What’s wrong, cara?’
And he had hugged her.
‘I think it’s bed for you, my girl,’ Agnes said, her clothes back on, her normal self in place by the tennis court.
‘Too much ice cream, I should think,’ smiled Anna in her comforting way.
Their faces swam before Cecily and she thought what sad smiles they all had. The singing was still going on in the field. There were lanterns of light like night buttercups.
There would never be another party like this again, everyone said.
Now she stood, twenty-nine years too late, in the rain, hearing the sound of an imaginary piano. The day had taken on a whitish blur. It wasn’t the sort of day that could be withdrawn. Like the vomit from long ago, it had to come out. Useless asking more questions or hunting for clues. Most had been washed away with buckets of passing years. Cecily lifted her wet face to the sky and made a list.
Her last list but one.
Well it’s why you came, wasn’t it, the voices in her head said, in unison.
Twin voices that were like two little girls in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
More things happened at the tennis-court party than Cecily had realised.
Bellamy had been punished by Selwyn for making her sick. But Bellamy hadn’t made her sick. Tom had only thought he had done so.
A water vole scurried past on its way to its reed-bed home and the wind whipped up the rain so that it now fell in slants against her. She was soaking wet. Turning, she ran back to the house, head bent, mind screaming. She had hated Kitty for so long that she had convinced herself she had been born with her hatred. In Palmyra House the rain saturated the air and she realised that she would have to light the stove. There was wood in the shed she knew. She took off her wet things, thin legs on the damp linoleum floor, and stared at herself in the mirror, looking for changes when there were none to be seen. Two eyes still stared back at her. Raven-black hair, pale, delicate face, good cheekbones. Rose, uncovered, and with a different mother.
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 cock crowed in the distance, the sound separated into two parts, like a document clipped to another document.
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 glasses. 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 document 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 shift 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 muffled, 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.
23.
SO WHO ELSE had known these terrible secrets?
‘Oh Daddy!’ cried Cecily, switching on a l
ight that had no bulb in it.
Identity 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 Mass 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 scrap 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 assumed 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 chores, 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.
