The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  “At least. But I always go back to it. It comforts me. Soothes me. It reminds me of a world that once existed and will exist again when the war is finished.”

  Penelope opened it at random and read aloud. “What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them.” She laughed and laid the book down again. “You’ve got all those things. It’s just the leisure you’re missing out on. Good night.” They kissed.

  “Good night, my darling.”

  * * *

  She telephoned from London, her voice joyous over the crackling line.

  “Lawrence. It’s me. Sophie. How are you, my darling? Yes, I am having a wonderful time. You were quite right, nothing is as bad as I thought it would be. Yes, of course, there is bomb damage, great holes in terraces of houses, like teeth knocked out, but everybody is brave and cheerful and carrying on as though nothing had happened. And there is so much going on. We have been to two concerts, we heard Myra Hess at lunch-time, so perfect, you would have loved her. And I have seen the Ellingtons and that nice boy, Ralph, who was studying at the Slade; he is in the RAF now. And the house is fine, standing up to all the bangs and thumps, and it is so lovely to be back, and Willi Friedmann is growing vegetables in the garden.…”

  When he could get a word in edgewise, “What are you doing this evening?” Lawrence asked.

  “We are going out for dinner with the Dickinses; Peter and Elizabeth and I. You remember them, he is a doctor, he used to work with Peter … they live out near Hurlingham?”

  “How will you get there?”

  “Oh, by taxi, or tube. The tubes are extraordinary, the stations full of sleeping people. They sing and have lovely parties and then they all go to sleep. Oh, my darling, there are the pips. I must hang up. Love to everybody, and I’ll be home the day after tomorrow.”

  * * *

  That night, Penelope awoke with a terrifying start. Something—some sound, some alarm. The baby, perhaps. Had Nancy cried out? She lay listening, but all she could hear was the frightened thudding of her own heart. This gradually subsided. Then she heard the footsteps crossing the landing, the creaking boards of the staircase, the click as a light was switched on. She got out of bed and went out of her room and leaned over the bannisters. The hall light burned.

  “Papa?”

  There was no reply. She crossed the landing and looked into his bedroom. The bed was disturbed, but empty. She returned to the landing, hesitated. What was he doing? Was he ill? Listening, she heard him moving about in the sitting room. Presently all was still. He was wakeful, that was all. Sometimes when he was wakeful, he did this: took himself downstairs, built up the fire, found himself a book to read.

  She returned to bed. But sleep eluded her. She lay in the darkness and watched the dusky sky beyond the open window. Down on the beach, a flood tide murmured, rollers shushing in on the sand. Listening to the ocean’s stirring, she waited, wide-eyed, for the dawn.

  At seven, she got up and went downstairs. He had switched on the radio. There was music. He was waiting for the early-morning news.

  “Papa.”

  He put up a hand, motioning her to be silent. The music faded. The time signal sounded. “This is London. The seven-o’clock news and Alvar Liddell reading it.” The calm voice, impassionate, objective, told them what had happened. Told them of last night’s bombing raid on London.… incendiaries, landmines, high explosives had all been showered upon the city. Fires still burned, but were under control … the docks had been hit.…

  Penelope put out her hand and switched the radio off. Lawrence looked up at her. He wore his old Jaeger dressing-gown, the stubble on his chin glinted white.

  He said, “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I know. I heard you come down.”

  “I have been sitting here, waiting for the morning.”

  “There have been other raids. It will be all right. I’ll make tea. Don’t worry. We’ll have a cup of tea, and then we’ll ring Oakley Street. It’ll be all right, Papa.”

  They tried to put a call through, but the operator told them that, after last night’s raid, there were no lines to London. All morning, hour by hour, they tried to get through. Without success.

  “Sophie will be trying to ring us, Papa, just as we are trying to ring her. She’ll be just as frustrated as we are, and just as anxious, because she knows that we are worried.”

  But it was midday before the telephone finally rang. Penelope, chopping vegetables for soup at the kitchen sink, heard the bell, dropped the knife and ran for the sitting room, wiping her hands on her apron as she went. But Lawrence, sitting beside the instrument, had already picked up the receiver. She went to kneel beside him, leaning close, so as not to miss a word.

  “Hello? Carn Cottage here. Hello?”

  A buzz, a squeak, a strange burring sound, and then, at last, “Hello.” But it was not Sophie’s voice.

  “Lawrence Stern speaking.”

  “Oh, Lawrence, this is Lalla Friedmann. Yes, Lalla from Oakley Street. I couldn’t get through before. I have been trying for over two hours. I—” Her voice suddenly broke and stopped.

  “What is it, Lalla?”

  “You aren’t alone?”

  “Penelope is with me. It’s … Sophie, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Oh, Lawrence, yes. And the Cliffords. All of them. They have all been killed. A land-mine fell directly on the Dickinses’ house. There is nothing left. We went to see, Willi and I. This morning, when they had not returned, Willi tried to ring the Dickinses, but of course it was impossible. So we went ourselves to find out what had happened. We had been before, one Christmas, so we knew the way. We took a taxi, but then we had to walk…”

  Nothing left.

  “… and when we reached the end of the street, it was cordoned off; nobody was allowed there, and the firemen were still working. But we could see. The house had disappeared. Nothing there but a great crater. And there was a policeman and I spoke to him. And he was very kind, but he said there is no hope. No hope, Lawrence.” She began to weep. “All of them. Dead. I am so sorry. I am so sorry to tell you.”

  Nothing left.

  Lawrence said, “It was good of you to go and look for them. And good of you to ring me up.…”

  “It is the worst thing I have ever had to do.”

  “Yes,” said Lawrence. “Yes.” He sat there. After a little, he hung up, his twisted fingers fumbling as he tried to replace the receiver. Penelope turned her head and laid it against the thick wool of his sweater. The silence that ensued was empty of everything. A vacuum.

  “Papa.”

  He put up a hand, stroked her hair.

  “Papa.”

  She looked up at him, and he shook his head. She knew that he wanted only to be left alone. She saw then that he was old. He had never seemed so to her before, but now she knew that he would never be anything else. She got to her feet and went out of the room and closed the door.

  Nothing left.

  She went upstairs and into her parents’ bedroom. The bed, on this ghastly morning, had never been made. The sheets were still awry, the pillow dented from her father’s sleepless head. He had known. They both had. Hoping, keeping up their courage, but filled with deadly certainty. They both had known.

  Nothing left.

  On the table at Sophie’s side of the bed lay the book that she had been reading the night before she went to London. Penelope went and sat there and picked up the book. It fell open in her hands at that well-worn page.

  “What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily.”

  The words dissolved and were lost, like figures seen through a rain-washed window. To find happiness so easily. Sophie had not only found happiness, but radiated it. And now, there was nothing left. The book slipped from her fingers. She lay dow
n, burying her streaming face in Sophie’s pillow, the linen cool as her mother’s skin, and smelling sweetly of her scent, as though she had, just a moment before, gone from the room.

  10

  ROY BROOKNER

  Although a competent games player and a wizard of keen-eyed speed on the squash courts, Noel Keeling was not a man addicted to physical labour. At weekends, if dragooned by his hostess into an afternoon of tree-cutting, or communal gardening, he invariably took on to himself the least arduous of tasks, gathering small branches for a bonfire, or cutting the dead heads off the roses. He would volunteer to mow the lawn, but only if the machine was one he could ride, and made a point of seeing that another person—usually some besotted girl—trundled the wheelbarrow of grass cuttings to the compost heap. If things grew really tough, with fence posts having to be sledge-hammered into rocky ground, or an enormous hole excavated for a newly acquired shrub, he had perfected the art of slinking indoors, where he would eventually be discovered, by exhausted and indignant fellow-guests, at ease in front of the television, watching cricket or golf, with the Sunday newspapers strewn, like leaves, all about him.

  Accordingly, he laid his plans. The whole of Saturday would be spent, quite simply, nosing around, sifting through the contents of every trunk, every box, every battered lopsided chest of drawers. (The actual heavy work, the pushing and heaving, and humping of rubbish down the two narrow flights of stairs, could be safely left until the next day, with the new gardener to act as labourer, and Noel having to do nothing more strenuous than give the orders.) If he was successful in his search and came upon what he was looking for … one, two, or even more of Lawrence Stern’s rough oil sketches … then he was going to play it very cool. These might be interesting, he would say to his mother, and depending on her reaction would carry on from there. Might be worth having some expert to cast his eye; I’ve got this chum, Edwin Mundy …

  The next morning he was up early, to cook himself a vast breakfast of bacon, egg, and sausage, four slices of toast, and a pot of black coffee. Eating this at the kitchen table, he watched the rain pour down the window-pane and was glad of it, because there could be no chance of his being seduced out into the garden and asked to perform some task for his mother. When he was onto his second cup of coffee and fully awake, she appeared in her dressing-gown, looking mildly surprised at his appearance, so early on a Saturday morning, and so spry.

  “You won’t make too much noise, will you, darling? I’d like Antonia to sleep as long as she can. Poor child, she must have been exhausted.”

  “I heard you gassing away into the small hours. What were you talking about?”

  “Oh, just things.” She poured herself some coffee. “Noel, you won’t throw anything away, will you, without asking me first?”

  “I’m not going to do anything except find out what you’ve got stashed away up there. The burning and destruction can wait until tomorrow. But you must be sensible. Old knitting patterns and wedding photographs circa 1910 are definitely for the chop.”

  “I dread to think what you’re going to turn up.”

  “You never know,” Noel told her, smiling wide-eyed into her face. “You simply never know.”

  He left her drinking coffee, and went upstairs. But before he could start work, one or two practical difficulties had to be ironed out. The loft had only one tiny window, set deep in the east gable, and the single light bulb, suspended from the centre beam of the thatched roof, was so weak and dim, it did little to supplement the small gleam of grey daylight. Noel went back downstairs and demanded of his mother a good strong bulb. She unearthed one from a box under the stairs, and he took this back to the loft and, balancing on a rickety chair, unscrewed the old bulb and screwed in the new. But, turning on the switch, he realized that even this did not give enough light to perform the careful investigation he had in mind. A lamp, that was what he needed. There was one right there, an old standard lamp with a crooked broken shade and a long, trailing flex, but no plug. This entailed a further journey downstairs. He took another strong bulb out of the cardboard box and asked his mother if she had a spare plug. She said that she hadn’t. Noel said that he had to have one. She said, in that case, take one from some other appliance. He said that he would need a screwdriver. She told him that there was one in her useful drawer, and, beginning to look a little exasperated, she pointed it out to him.

  “That one, Noel, in the dresser.”

  He opened the drawer to a tangle of picture wire, fuses, hammers, boxes of tacks, and flattened tubes of glue. Stirring around, he came upon a small screwdriver, and with this removed the plug from her iron. Upstairs again, he rewired, with some difficulty, the plug to the flex of the old lamp and, praying that it would be long enough, eased it down the stairs and plugged it into the socket on the landing. For what felt like the hundredth time, he went back up the stairs, pressed the switch of the lamp, and breathed a sigh of relief as the light went on. Easily discouraged by the smallest difficulty, he felt quite drained, but now all was illuminated, and he could, at last, begin.

  By midday he had worked his way half down the length of the cluttered and dusty attic. Had gone through three trunks, a worm-eaten desk, a tea-chest, and two suitcases. He had found curtains and cushions, a number of wineglasses wrapped in newspaper, photo albums, massive in their sepia dullness, a doll’s tea-set, and a pile of age-yellowed pillowcases, worn beyond repair. He had found leather-bound account books, the entries meticulous in faded copperplate handwriting; bundles of letters, tied in ribbon; half-finished tapestries stuck with rusty needles, and some instructions for operating the very latest invention, a knife-cleaning machine. Once, coming upon a large cardboard folder tied with tapes, hope had risen. With hands trembling with excitement, he had untied the tapes, only to be faced with a number of governessy water-colours depicting the Dolomites, and executed by God knows whom. The disappointment was tremendous, but he gathered up his energy and continued with his task. There were ostrich feathers, and silken shawls with long tangled fringes; embroidered table-cloths, yellowed at their folds; jigsaws, and some half-finished knitting. He found a chessboard, but no chess men; playing cards, a 1912 edition of Burke’s Landed Gentry.

  He did not find anything remotely resembling a work of Lawrence Stern.

  Footsteps sounded on the stair. He was perched, dusty, and grimy, on a footstool, disconsolately reading a Household Hint on how to launder black woollen stockings, and, looking up, saw Antonia at the top of the stairs. She wore jeans and sneakers and a white sweater, and it crossed his mind that it was a pity about the pale eyelashes, because she had a quite sensational figure.

  “Hello,” she said; sounding shy and tentative, as though reluctant to disturb him.

  “Hello there.” He closed the battered book with a bang and dropped it on the floor at his feet. “When did you surface?”

  “About eleven o’clock.”

  “I didn’t wake you?”

  “No. I didn’t hear a thing.” She moved towards him, edging through and stepping Over the painfully sorted lumber. “How are you getting on?”

  “Slowly. The general idea is to sort the wheat from the chaff. Try to get rid of anything that’s a possible fire risk.”

  “I hadn’t any idea it would be as bad as this.” She stopped to look about her. “Where’s it all come from?”

  “You may well ask. The attics at Oakley Street. And other attics of other houses, going back through the centuries, by the look of things. It must be an inherited failing, this total inability ever to throw anything away.”

  Antonia stooped and picked up a scarlet silk shawl. “This is pretty.” She draped it around her shoulders, arranging the tangled fringe. “How does it look?”

  “Bizarre.”

  She removed the shawl, folding it with care. “Penelope sent me up to find out if you wanted something to eat.”

  Noel glanced at his watch and saw, with some surprise, that it was half past twelve. The day had not light
ened, and so intent had he been on his task that he had lost all sense of time. He realized that he was not only hungry, but thirsty as well. He pulled himself off the footstool and onto his feet. “What I need more than anything else is a gin and tonic.”

  “Are you coming back this afternoon?”

  “Have to. Otherwise it’ll never get done.”

  “If you like, I’ll come and help.”

  But he did not want her around … did not want any person watching. “That’s sweet of you, but I’m better on my own, working at my own pace. Come on…” He shooed her in front of him, towards the stairs. “Let’s go and see what Ma’s got for lunch.”

  By half past six that evening, the long search was over, and Noel knew that he had drawn a blank. The attics of Podmore’s Thatch were empty of treasure. Not so much as a single Lawrence Stern sketch had turned up, and the entire project had been a total waste of time. Coming to terms with this bitter truth, he stood, with his hands in his pockets, and surveyed the trail of confusion which was all that he had achieved. Tired and dirty, with hopes dashed, his gloom burnt to resentment. This was mostly directed against his mother, whose fault everything was. She had probably, at some time or other, destroyed the sketches, or sold them for a song, or even given them away. Her mindless generosity, along with her squirrel-like obsession with hoarding rubbish, had always maddened him, and now he let that fury flare, silently raging. His time was precious to him, and he had wasted a day going through the flotsam of God knew how many generations, simply because she had never got around to doing it for herself.

  By now in a filthy temper, for a moment he actually contemplated abandoning ship and taking the escape route normally earmarked for One Star weekends, which was to remember suddenly a pressing engagement in London, make his goodbyes, and head for home.

  But this was not possible, because he had gone too far and said too much. It was he who had initiated the exercise (house unsafe, fire risk, inadequate insurance, et cetera) and as well told Olivia about the possible existence of the sketches. Now, although he was pretty sure that they didn’t exist, he could imagine Olivia’s caustic remarks should he light out, leaving the job unfinished, and, thick-skinned as he was, he did not relish the prospect of a tongue-lashing from his clever sister.