The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  Sophie sighed. “Yes. It is unfortunate that there was no time for that. And as well, it was unfortunate that Papa and I were not able to be at your wedding. Even at that last moment, it might have been possible to change your mind and back away. But it’s no good looking back. It’s too late.”

  “You didn’t like him, did you, Sophie? You and Papa? Did you think I must have gone out of my mind?”

  “No, we didn’t think that.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “My darling, at the moment, there is nothing that you can do. Except, I think, grow up a little. You’re not a child any longer. You have responsibilities now, a child of your own. We are in the middle of this dreadful war, and your husband is at sea with the Atlantic Convoys. There is nothing for it, but to accept the situation and carry on. Besides,” she smiled, remembering, “he came to see us at a bad time. All that rain, and Aunt Ethel there as well, smoking her cigarettes, and nipping back her gin, and coming out with her usual outrageous and hideously outspoken remarks. And as for you, no pregnant woman is ever quite herself. Perhaps, next time you see Ambrose, things will be different. You might feel differently.”

  “But, Sophie, I’ve made such a fool of myself.”

  “No. You were just very young and caught up in circumstances that were totally beyond you. Now, please, for my sake, cheer up. Smile and ring the bell, and Sister Rogers will bring my first grandchild into the room for me to see. And we will forget that this conversation ever took place.”

  “Will you tell Papa?”

  “No. It would trouble him. I don’t like him worried.”

  “But you never have secrets from him.”

  “This one I shall keep.”

  * * *

  It was not only Penelope who found herself nonplussed by the baby’s appearance. Lawrence, coming, the next day, to view her for the first time, was equally puzzled.

  “My darling, who does she look like?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “She is very sweet, but she doesn’t appear to have anything to do with either you or her father. Perhaps she is like Ambrose’s mother?”

  “Not in the very least. I’ve decided she’s a throwback, come from generations away. Probably the spitting image of some long-dead ancestor. Whatever, to me it’s all a mystery.”

  “No matter. She seems to have come fully equipped. Which is all that really counts.”

  “Have the Keelings been told?”

  “Yes, I sent a cable to Ambrose’s ship, and Sophie telephoned his mother at her hotel.”

  Penelope made a face. “Brave old Sophie. And what did Dolly Keeling have to say?”

  “Apparently she sounded delighted. Always hoped it would be a little girl.”

  “Bet she’s telling all her cronies and Lady Bloody Beamish that it’s a seven-month baby.”

  “Oh, well, if appearances matter so much to her, what harm does it do?” Lawrence hesitated for a moment and then continued. “She said as well that it would be very nice if the baby could be called Nancy.”

  “Nancy? Where on earth did she get that from?”

  “That was her mother’s name. It might be a good idea. You know,” he made a small expressive gesture with his hand, “help to smooth things over a little bit.”

  “All right, we’ll call her Nancy.” Penelope sat up to peer at the baby’s face. “Nancy. Actually, it suits her quite well.”

  Lawrence, however was less concerned about the baby’s name than he was about her behaviour.

  “Not going to yell all the time, is she? Can’t stand yelling babies.”

  “Oh, Papa, of course not. She is very placid. She just eats her mother, and then sleeps, and then wakes up and eats her mother again.”

  “Little cannibal.”

  “Do you think she’ll be pretty, Papa? You’ve always had a discerning eye for a pretty face.”

  “She’ll be all right. She’ll be a Renoir. Fair and bloomy as a rose.”

  * * *

  And then, Doris. Most of the evacuees, unable to bear their exile another moment, had returned, in dribs and drabs, to London, but Doris, Ronald, and Clark stayed on and were now permanent residents of Carn Cottage and part of the family. In June, during the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from France, Doris’ husband Bert had been killed. The tidings were brought to them by the telegraph boy, cycling up the hill from the Porthkerris Post Office. He had opened the gate in the wall and come whistling through the garden, where Sophie and Penelope were hard at work grubbing weeds from the border.

  “Telegram for Mrs. Potter.”

  Sophie knelt up, her hands covered in earth, her hair awry, and an expression on her face that Penelope had never seen before. “Oh, mon Dieu.”

  She took the orange envelope and the boy went away. The door in the wall banged shut behind him.

  “Sophie?”

  “It must be her husband.”

  After a little, “What are we to do?” Penelope whispered.

  Sophie did not reply. She simply wiped her hand on the seat of her cotton trousers and slit the envelope open with a black-nailed thumb. She took out the message and read it, and then folded it and put it back into the envelope.

  “Yes,” she said. “He is dead.” She got to her feet. “Where is Doris?”

  “Up in the paddock, hanging out washing.”

  “And the boys?”

  “They’ll be back from school any moment now.”

  “I must tell her before they come. If I am not back, keep them busy. She must have time. Before she tells them, she must have time.”

  “Poor Doris.” It sounded painfully inadequate, banal to the point of idiocy, but what else could one say?”

  “Yes. Poor Doris.”

  “What will she do?”

  What Doris did was to be immensely brave. She wept, of course, unleashing her grief and rage in a sort of tirade against her young husband, who had been such a bloody fool as to go and get himself killed. But once that was over and she had pulled herself together, and she and Sophie were drinking a comforting hot strong cup of tea together, sitting over the kitchen table, her thoughts were all for her sons.

  “Poor little buggers, what’s life going to be like for them without a dad?”

  “Children are resilient.”

  “How the hell am I going to manage?”

  “You will.”

  “Suppose I ought to go back to Hackney. Bert’s mum … well, she’ll need me, maybe. She’ll want to see the boys.”

  “I think that you should go. Make certain that she is all right. And if she is, I think you should come back to us. The boys are happy here, they have made their friends, it would be cruel to uproot them now. Let them keep what security they have.”

  Doris stared at Sophie. She sniffed a bit. She had only just stopped crying and her face was swollen and blotchy. “But I can’t just stay here, indefinite-like.”

  “Why not? You are happy with us.”

  “You’re not just being kind?”

  “Oh, my dear Doris, I don’t know now what we would do without you. And the boys are like our own children. We would miss you so much if you left us.”

  Doris thought about this. “I’d rather stay than anything. I’ve never been so happy as what I’ve been here. And now, with Bert gone…” Her eyes filled with tears again.

  “Don’t cry, Doris. The boys mustn’t see you crying. You must show them how to be brave. Tell them to be proud of their father, dying for such a cause, to free all those poor people in Europe. Teach them to be good men, just as he was.”

  “He wasn’t all that good. He was a bloody nuisance sometimes.” The tears receded, and the ghost of a smile showed on Doris’ face. “Coming home drunk from the football; falling into bed with his boots on.”

  “Don’t forget those things,” Sophie told her. “They are all part of the person that he was. It is good to remember the bad times as well as the good. After all, that is what life is all about.”r />
  And so Doris stayed. And when Penelope’s baby was born, she could not wait to see it A little girl. Doris had always longed for a daughter, and now, with Bert dead, it did not look as though she would ever have one. But this baby … She was the only one of them instantly besotted by the infant.

  “Ooh, she’s lovely.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Penelope, she’s beautiful. Can I pick her up?”

  “Of course.”

  Doris stooped and gathered the child into her practised and capable arms, stood gazing down at her with an expression on her face of adoring motherhood that made Penelope feel slightly ashamed, because she knew that she was incapable of such transparent devotion.

  “We none of us know who she looks like.”

  But Doris did. Doris knew exactly who she resembled. “She’s the spitting image of Betty Grable.”

  And no sooner had mother and child returned to Carn Cottage than Doris took Nancy over, and Penelope, assuaging a certain guilt by telling herself that she was doing Doris a good turn, was happy to let her. It was Doris who bathed Nancy and washed her nappies, and, when Penelope grew bored with breastfeeding, made up the bottles and nursed the infant herself, sitting on a low chair in the warm kitchen, or by the sitting room fire. Ronald and Clark were equally devoted, bringing their school friends home to admire the new arrival. As the winter slowly passed, Nancy thrived, grew hair, teeth, grew fatter than ever. From the tool-shed Sophie produced Penelope’s old high-wheeled, strap-slung perambulator, and this was polished up by Doris, and pushed, with some pride, up and down the hills of Porthkerris, with many stops to show Nancy off to any passer-by who happened to be interested, and many who were not.

  Nancy’s temperament remained sweet and placid. She lay in her pram in the garden, either sleeping, or tranquilly observing passing clouds or the fluttering branches of the white cherry tree. When the spring came and the blossoms fell, her blankets were scattered with white petals. Soon she was lying on a rug, reaching for a tinkling rattle. Then she was sitting up, hitting two clothes-pegs together.

  She was a source of much amusement to Sophie and Lawrence and a source of much comfort and joy to Doris. But Penelope, dutifully playing with the child, building bricks, turning the pages of battered picture books, privately decided that she was dreadfully dull.

  Meanwhile, beyond the frontiers of this tiny domestic world, the storm of the war, reverberating, dark-clouded, gathered momentum. Europe was occupied, Lawrence’s beloved France overrun, and no day passed that he did not anguish for that country, and fear for old friends. In the Atlantic the U-boats prowled, hunting the slow convoys of naval destroyers and helpless merchant ships. The Battle of Britain had been won, but at terrible cost of planes, pilots, and airfields, and the Army, re-formed after France and Dunkirk, were taking up positions in Gibraltar and Alexandria, in anticipation of the next onslaught of German military might.

  And, of course, the bombing had started. The endless raids on London. Night after night, the warning sirens sounded, and night after night, the massive formations of Heinkels, black-crossed and sinister, throbbed in, across the Channel, out of the darkness of France.

  At Carn Cottage, they listened each morning to the news, and their hearts bled for London. On a more personal level, Sophie’s concern was for Oakley Street, and the people who lived there. The Friedmanns, on her instructions, had moved from the attics to the basement, but the Cliffords stayed where they had always been, on the second floor, and every time there was news of a raid (which was most mornings), Sophie imagined them dead, wounded, blown up, or buried in rubble.

  “They are too old to be enduring this dreadful experience,” she told her husband. “Why don’t we ask them to come and live here, with us.”

  “My darling girl, we have no space. And even if we had, they wouldn’t come. You know that They are Londoners. They would never leave.”

  “I would be happier if I could see them. Talk to them. Make certain that they are all right…”

  Covertly, Lawrence watched his young wife, sensing her restlessness. For two years, she had been stuck here, at Porthkerris, his Sophie who had never lived more than three months in any place during the whole of their married life. And Porthkerris in wartime was grey and dull and empty, very different from the lively town to which they had thankfully escaped every summer before the war. She was not bored, for she was never bored, but day-to-day life became, steadily, increasingly difficult, as food grew short, rations grew smaller, and a new and more tiresome shortage cropped up every day—shampoo, cigarettes, matches, camera films, whisky, gin—any tiny luxury that helped to oil the drudge of existence. Housekeeping also became more difficult. Everything had to be queued for, and then lugged back up the hill from the town, because none of the tradespeople had petrol to deliver any longer. Petrol was perhaps the greatest deprivation of all. They still had the old Bentley, but it spent most of its life in the recesses of Grabney’s Garage, simply because they were not allowed enough fuel to drive it more than a few miles.

  And so, he understood the restlessness. Wise in the ways of women, he understood and sympathized. She needed, he knew, to get away from them all for a few days. He bided his time, waiting for an opportunity to bring the subject up, but it seemed now that they were never alone; the little house buzzed with activity and voices. Doris and the boys, Penelope and now the baby filled every room, every waking hour, and when they finally fell into bed each night, Sophie was so exhausted that she was usually asleep by the time that Lawrence climbed in beside her.

  Finally, one day, he caught her on her own. He had been digging potatoes, painfully, for his crippled hands had difficulty in wielding the spade and groping for the earthy shaws, but he finally had filled a basket and carried it indoors, through the back-door, where he found his wife sitting at the kitchen table disconsolately shredding a cabbage.

  “Potatoes.” He dumped them on the floor by the stove.

  She smiled. Even when she was down in the dumps, she could always provide that smile for him. He pulled up a chair and sat and looked at her. She was too thin. There were lines around her mouth, around her beautiful dark eyes.

  He said, “Alone at last. Where is everybody?”

  “Penelope and Doris have taken the children down to the beach. They will be back presently, for lunch.” She took another chop or two at the cabbage. “And I am giving them this to eat, and the boys will say that they hate it.”

  “Just cabbage. Nothing else.”

  “Macaroni cheese.”

  “You make the best.”

  “It is boring. Boring to cook and boring to eat. I don’t blame them for complaining.”

  He said, “You have too much to do.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You are tired and fed up.”

  She looked up and met his eyes. After a little, “Does it show so much?” she asked him.

  “Only to me, who knows you so well.”

  “I am ashamed. I hate myself. Why should I be discontented? But I feel so useless. What am I doing? Making nets and cooking meals. I think of women all over Europe, and I hate myself, but I can’t help it. And if I have to go and queue for another hour for an oxtail that some other person has just bought, I think I shall start to have hysterics.”

  “You should go away for a day or two.”

  “Go away?”

  “Go to London. See your house. Stay with the Cliffords. Reassure yourself.” He reached out and put his hand over hers, covering it with earth from the potato patch. “We listen to the news of the bombing, and we’re horrified, but disaster relayed is often more frightening than the horror itself. The imagination bolts, the heart sinks in dread. But, in truth, nothing is ever so bad as we think it is going to be. Why don’t you go to London and find that out for yourself?”

  Looking, already, more cheerful, Sophie considered this. “Will you come too?”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear. I am too old for junketings,
and junketings are exactly what you need. Stay with the Cliffords, giggle with Elizabeth. Go shopping with her. Get Peter to take you out to lunch at the Berkeley or L’Ecu de France. I believe the food there is still excellent, despite all the shortages. Call up your friends. Go to a concert, the theatre. Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime.”

  “But will you not mind if I go without you?”

  “I shall mind more than I can say. Not a moment will pass when I shall not miss you.”

  “For three days? Could you bear it for three days?”

  “I can bear it. And when you come back you can spend three weeks telling me everything you have done.”

  “Lawrence, I love you so much.”

  He shook his head, not refuting this, but simply letting her know that she had no need to tell him. He leaned forward and kissed her mouth, and then got to his feet and went to the sink to wash the mud from his hands.

  The night before she was due to catch the train to London, Sophie went to bed early. Doris was out, gone to some hop in the town hall, and the children already asleep. Penelope and Lawrence sat up for a little, listening to a concert on the radio, but then Penelope began to yawn, put away her knitting, kissed her father good night, and made her way upstairs.

  The door to Sophie’s bedroom stood open, the light still shone. Penelope put her head around the door. Sophie was in bed, and reading.

  “I thought you came up early to get your beauty sleep.”

  “I am too excited to sleep.” She laid down her book on the eiderdown. Penelope went to sit beside her. “I wish you were coming with me.”

  “No. Papa’s right. You’ll have much more fun on your own.”

  “What shall I bring back for you?”

  “I can’t think of anything.”

  “I shall find something special. Something that you never dreamed you wanted.”

  “That’ll be nice. What are you reading?” She picked up the book. “Elizabeth and her German Garden. Sophie, you must have read that a hundred times.”