The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

  “Mrs. Tillingham’s having a jumble sale next month. In aid of the Organ Fund.”

  “Well. We’ll see. I’ll let you decide. Now, perhaps you could empty the wardrobe, and I’ll start in on the chest of drawers.”

  Mrs. Plackett set to work, flinging wide the doors of the wardrobe, and commencing to unload armfuls of shabby and dearly familiar garments. As she laid them across the bed … some so well-worn as to be threadbare, Olivia averted her eyes. It seemed indecent even to look. She had dreaded this sad task, and it seemed that it was going to be even more heart-rending than she had anticipated. Encouraged by Mrs. Plackett’s down-to-earth presence, she went on her knees and opened the bottom drawer. Sweaters and cardigans, much darned at the elbow. A white Shetland baby shawl; a navy-blue guernsey which Mumma used to wear for gardening.

  As they laboured, “What’s going to happen to the house then?” Mrs. Plackett inquired.

  “It’s going to be put on the market and sold. It’s what Mumma wished, and none of us would want to live here anyway. But Antonia and Danus are going to live here, and show people round, and generally keep things going until such time as it is sold. When that happens, we’ll get rid of the furniture.”

  “Antonia and Danus?” Mrs. Plackett, nodding sagely to herself, considered the implications of this. “That’s very nice.”

  “And afterwards, they’re going to go off and look for some bit of land they can rent or buy. They want to start a nursery garden together.”

  “Sounds to me,” said Mrs. Plackett, “as though they’re gathering twigs. Where are they, by the way? Didn’t see either of them when I came into the house.”

  “They went to church.”

  “They did?”

  “You sound approving, Mrs. Plackett.”

  “It’s nice when young people go to church. Doesn’t often happen these days. And I’m pleased that they’re going to be together. Do lovely for each other, I’ve always thought. Mind, they’re young enough. But for all that, they seem to have their heads screwed on. What about this?”

  Olivia looked. Mumma’s old boat cape. She had a sudden flash of piercing memory. Mumma and the young Antonia arriving at Ibiza Airport; Mumma wearing the cape, and Antonia running to throw herself into Cosmo’s arms. It all seemed dreadfully long ago.

  She said, “That’s too good to throw away. Put it by for the church jumble.”

  But Mrs. Plackett appeared reluctant to do this. “Thick and warm as anything it is. Years of wear in it yet.”

  “Then you have it. It’ll keep you cosy on your bicycle.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Miss Keeling. I’d be grateful.” She laid it over a chair. “I’ll think of your mother every time I wear it.”

  Another drawer. Underclothes, night-dresses, woollen tights, belts, scarves; a Chinese silk shawl, lavishly fringed and embroidered with scarlet peonies. A black lace mantilla.

  The wardrobe was nearly empty. Mrs. Plackett reached into its depths. “Just look at this!” She held it out, still on its padded hanger. A dress, youthful and skimpy, made of some cheap material that hung limply. A red dress, patterned with white daisies, with a square neckline and bulky pads in the shoulders. “I’ve never seen this before.”

  “Neither have I. I wonder why Mumma kept that. Looks like something she might have worn during the war. Throw it out, Mrs. Plackett.”

  The top drawer. Creams and lotions, emery boards, old scent bottles, a box of powder, a swansdown puff. A string of glass beads the colour of amber. Earrings. Worthless scraps of junk jewellery.

  And then the shoes. All her shoes. Shoes were the worst of all, more intensely personal than anything else. Olivia became increasingly ruthless. The trash-bags bulged.

  Finally, painfully, all was done. Mrs. Plackett knotted tight the plastic bags, and between them they thumped them down the, stairs and out of doors to where the dustbins stood.

  “They’ll be collected tomorrow morning. And that’ll be the end of it for you.”

  Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Plackett put on her coat.

  “I can’t thank you enough, Mrs. Plackett.” Olivia watched as Mrs. Plackett carefully folded her boat cape, packed it into a carrier-bag. “I couldn’t have faced it on my own.”

  “Very pleased to be able to help, I’m sure. Well, I must be off. See to Mr. Plackett’s dinner. Have a safe journey back to London, Miss Keeling, and you take care of yourself. Try and have a bit of a rest. It’s been a busy weekend.”

  “I’ll keep in touch, Mrs. Plackett.”

  “That’s right. And come back and see us. I wouldn’t like to think I wasn’t going to see you again.”

  She mounted her bicycle and rode away, a sturdy upright figure, with the carrier-bag dangling from her handlebars.

  Olivia went back upstairs into Mumma’s room. Stripped of all personal possessions, it stood unbelievably empty. Before long, Podmore’s Thatch would be sold, and this room would belong to another person. There would be other furniture, other clothes, other scents, other voices, other laughter. She sat on the bed, and saw, beyond the window, the fresh green leaves of the flowering chestnut. Hidden somewhere in its branches, the thrush was singing.

  She looked about her. Saw the bedside table, with its white china lamp and pleated parchment shade. The table had a little drawer. They had overlooked this drawer and never got around to clearing it. She opened it now and found a bottle of aspirins, a single button, the stub of a pencil, an out-of-date diary. And, at the back, a book.

  She reached into the drawer and took it out. A thin book, bound in blue. Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice. It bulged with some bulky marker, and, where this had been inserted, fell open of its own accord. There she found the wad of thin yellow paper, tightly folded … a letter perhaps? And a photograph.

  The photograph was of a man. She glanced at it and then laid it aside, and started to unfold the letter, but was diverted by a passage of poetry that leaped to her eye from the pages of the book, much as a remembered name will leap from a sheet of newsprint.…

  September has come, it is hers

  Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

  Whose nature prefers

  Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.

  So I gave her this month and the next

  Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already

  So many of its days intolerable or perplexed

  But so many more so happy.

  Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls

  Dancing over and over with her shadow

  Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls

  And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

  The words were not new to her. As a student at Oxford, Olivia had discovered MacNeice, become hooked, and voraciously devoured everything that he had ever written. And yet now, after the passage of many years, she found herself as freshly touched and moved as at her first encounter with the poem. She read it again, and then set the book down. What had been its significance to Mumma? She took up the photograph once more.

  A man. In some sort of uniform but bareheaded. He turned, smiling at the photographer, as though caught unawares, and a coil of climbing rope was looped across his shoulder. His hair was ruffled, and in the far distance lay the long line of the sea’s horizon. A man. Unknown to Olivia, and yet, in some odd way, familiar. She frowned. A resemblance? Not so much a resemblance as a reminder. But of whom? Someone…?

  But of course. And once recognized, obvious. Danus Muirfield. Not his features, nor his eyes, but other, more subtle likenesses. The shape of his head, the lift of his chin. The unexpected warmth of his smile.

  Danus.

  Was this man, then, the answer to the question to which neither Mr. Enderby, nor Noel, nor Olivia had been able to find an answer?

  By now deeply intrigued, she took up the letter and unfolded the fragile pages. The paper was lined, and the writing scholarly, with letters neatly formed by a broad-ni
bbed pen.

  Somewhere in England

  May 20th, 1944

  My darling Penelope,

  Over the last few weeks I have settled down a dozen times to write to you. On each occasion I have got no further than the first four lines, only to be interrupted by some telephone call, loud hailer, knock on the door, or urgent summons of one sort or another.

  But at last has come a moment in this benighted place when I can be fairly certain of an hour of quiet. Your letters have all safely come and are a source of joy. I carry them around like a lovesick schoolboy and read and reread them, time without number. If I cannot be with you, then I can listen to your voice.…

  She was very aware of being alone. The house, around her, lay empty and silent. Mumma’s room was silent, the quiet disturbed only by the whisper of pages, read and then set aside. The world, the present were forgotten. This was the past Olivia uncovered, and it was Mumma’s past, unsuspected until now, and unimagined.

  There is always the possibility that Ambrose will be gentlemanly and allow you to divorce him.… All that matters is that we should be together, and eventually—hopefully sooner than later—married. The war will, one day, be over.… But thousand-mile journeys begin with the first step, and no expedition is the worse for a little thought.

  She laid the page aside, and went on to the next one.

  … For some reason, I have no fears that I will not survive the war. Death, the last enemy, still seems a long way off, beyond old age and infirmity. And I cannot bring myself to believe that fate, having brought us together, did not mean us to stay that way.

  But he had been killed. Only death could have ended such a love. He had been killed and he had never come back to Mumma, and all his hopes and plans for the future had come to nothing, ended for eternity by some bullet or shell. He had been killed and she had simply carried on. Gone back to Ambrose, and battled through the rest of her life without remorse or bitterness, or a trace of self-pity. And her children had never known. Nor guessed. Nobody had ever known. Somehow, this seemed saddest of all. You should have talked about him, Mumma. Told me. I would have understood I would have wanted to listen. She discovered, to her surprise, that her eyes had filled with tears. These now spilled over and ran down her cheeks, and the sensation was strange and unfamiliar, as though it were happening to another person and not herself. And yet she wept for her mother. I want you to be here. Now. I want to talk to you. I need you.

  Perhaps it was good to cry. She had not cried for Mumma when she died but she wept now. Privately, with no person to jeer at her weakness, she allowed the tears to fall unchecked. The tough and intimidating Miss Keeling, Editor-in-Chief of Venus, might never have existed. She was a schoolgirl again, bursting in through the door of that huge basement room in Oakley Street, calling “Mumma!” and knowing that, from somewhere, Mumma would answer. And as she wept, that armour which she had gathered about herself—that hard shell of self-control—broke up and disintegrated. Without that armour she could not have got through the first few days of living in a cold world where Mumma no longer existed. Now, released by grief, she was human again and once more herself.

  After a little, more or less recovered, she took up the final page of the letter, and read to its conclusion.

  … I wish I were with you, sharing the laughter and domestic doings of what I have come to think of as my second home. All of it was good, in every sense of the word. And in this life, nothing good is ever lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of their character. So part of you goes everywhere with me. And part of me is yours forever. My love, my darling,

  Richard.

  Richard. She said the name aloud. Part of me is yours forever. She folded the letter and put it back, with the photograph, between the pages of Autumn Journal. She closed the book, and lay back on the pillows, and gazed at the ceiling, and thought, now I know it all. But knew that she did no such thing; just knew that she needed above all to learn every tiny detail of what had happened. How they had met; how he had come into her life; how they had fallen so inevitably and deeply in love; how he had been killed.

  But who knew? Only one person. Doris Penberth. Doris and Mumma had lived all through the war together. There would have been no secrets between them. Excitedly, Olivia laid plans. Sometime … maybe in September when things at the office were usually quiet … Olivia would take a few days off from work and drive to Cornwall. First, she would write to Doris and suggest a visit. In all likelihood, Doris would invite Olivia to stay. And Doris would talk, and remember Penelope, and little by little she would bring Richard’s name into the conversation, and eventually Olivia would know it all. But they wouldn’t just talk. Doris would show Olivia Porthkerris, and all the places that had been so much part of Mumma’s life, and which Olivia had never known. And she would take her to see the house where Mumma had once lived, and they would visit the little Art Gallery which Lawrence Stern had helped to start, and Olivia would see The Shell Seekers once more.

  She thought of the fourteen sketches, executed by Lawrence Stern at the turn of the century and now the property of Danus. She remembered Noel, yesterday evening, saying goodbye.

  Why did she leave them to that young man?

  She was fond of him? Sorry for him? Wanted to help him?

  There’s something more to it than that.

  Maybe. But I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out.

  She had supposed wrong. Mumma had left the sketches to Danus for a number of reasons. Noel, with his endless needling, had driven her beyond the limits of patience, but in Danus she had found a person worth helping. While they were at Porthkerris, she had watched his love for Antonia grow and flower, guessed that, in the fulness of time, he would probably marry the girl. They were special to her, and she was anxious to give them some sort of start in life. But, most important reason of all, Danus had reminded her of Richard. She must have noticed—the first time she laid eyes on him—the strong physical resemblance, and so felt an immediate and close affinity with the young man. Perhaps, through Danus and Antonia, she had felt she was being offered some sort of a second chance of happiness … a vicarious identification with them. Whatever—they had rendered her last few weeks of life extremely happy, and for this she had thanked them, in her usual spectacular fashion.

  Now, Olivia looked at her watch. It was nearly midday. In moments, Danus and Antonia would return from church. She got off the bed and went to close and latch the window for the last time. At the mirror she paused to check on her reflection and make certain that her face betrayed no trace of tears. Then she picked up the book, the letter and the photograph safe within its pages, and went out of the room, closing the door behind her. Downstairs in the deserted kitchen, she took up the heavy iron poker and used it to lift the lid from the boiler. A furnace heat flowed up, scorching her cheeks, and she dropped Mumma’s secret into the heart of the glowing red coals and watched it burn.

  It took only seconds, and then was gone forever.

  16

  MISS KEELING

  The middle of June, and the summer was at its height. The warm and early spring had kept its promise, and the whole country basked in a heat wave. Olivia revelled in this. She relished the warmth and the sun-baked streets of London; the sight of crowds of tourists strolling, lightly clad; of striped umbrellas set up on the pavements outside pubs; of lovers lying supine, entwined, beneath the shade of the trees in the park. All conspired to create the sensation of living perpetually abroad, and where others wilted, her own vitality leaped. She was Miss Keeling once more, at her most dynamic, and Venus claimed all her attention.

  She was grateful for the therapy of absorbing, satisfying work, and content, for the time being, to put the family, and all that had happened, out of her mind. Since Penelope’s funeral, she had seen neither Nancy or Noel, although, from time to time, she had spoken to them on the telephone. Podmore’s Thatch, put on the market, had been snapped up almost immediately, and for an inflated sum far beyond eve
n Noel’s wildest dreams. With this business concluded, and the contents of the house sold at auction, Danus and Antonia had departed. Danus had bought Mumma’s old Volvo, and into this, they had packed their few possessions and taken off in the direction of the West Country to look for some place to set up a little nursery garden that they could call their own. They had telephoned Olivia to say goodbye, but that had been a month ago, and since then she had had no word of them.

  Now, a Tuesday morning, and she sat at her desk. A new young Fashion Editor had joined her staff, and Olivia was reading the proofs of her first attempt at editorial copy. Your Best Accessory Is You. That was good. Instantly intriguing. Forget about scarves, earrings, hats. Concentrate on eyes, glowing skin, the shine of sparkling health.…

  The intercom buzzed. Without raising her eyes Olivia flipped the switch. “Yes?”

  “Miss Keeling,” her secretary said, “I have an outside call for you. Antonia’s on the line. Will you speak to her?”

  Antonia. Olivia hesitated, taking this in. Antonia was gone from her life, incarcerated somewhere in the West Country. Why should she telephone, out of the blue? What did she want to talk about? Olivia resented interruption. And what a time to ring. She sighed, removed her spectacles, and sat back in her chair. “All right, you’d better put her through.” She reached for the telephone.

  “Olivia?” The youthful, familiar voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “In London. Olivia, I know you’re dreadfully busy, but you wouldn’t be able to have lunch today, would you?”

  “Today?” Olivia could not keep the dismay from her voice. Today, she knew, was packed with appointments, and she had planned a working lunch-hour, with a sandwich at her desk. “It’s rather short notice.”

  “I know and I’m sorry but it’s really important. Please say you will, if you possibly can.”