The Last Pier Part 11

The tennis match and charity dance were to be held on Sat.u.r.day September 2nd. Joe and Franca and Giorgio had been selling tickets for weeks and a lot of people were coming from Bly and Eelburton and even from Ipswich. Agnes grumbled that most of the locals were just coming out of curiosity but Selwyn didn't think that mattered so long as all the tickets were sold. He had grown up being host to such events. Both events were to be held the same day but the harvest would have to come first. Rose was only interested in the dance. Joe, it transpired, was looking forward to both. And Cecily, rereading Wuthering Heights, thought that Bellamy was very like Heathcliff. He would love Rose forever, no matter what. So why couldn't her sister be content with him? Rose is just greedy, decided Cecily, her anger rising like the bread Cook was baking.

'I'm staying up all night,' Rose said with a toss of her bright hair. 'I'm almost seventeen.'

'So shall I,' cried Cecily.

'Very well, then,' Agnes said cunning and quick. 'If you are all so grown up you should be helping your brother by collecting up the cut gra.s.s around the tennis court. He's been working there for days with very little help.'

Although Selwyn could not remember him, Robert Wilson remembered Selwyn well enough. He remembered the name Palmyra Farm and when the posting to Suffolk had come up he decided to look him up. He found they had an empty cottage on their land and curiosity made him rent it.

'Was it true,' he asked Agnes, 'Kitty used to work as Selwyn's personal a.s.sistant?'

Agnes laughed, nodding. It had all been so long ago.

'But our paths never crossed until now,' he told Agnes.

'Hmm,' said Rose, when Cecily conveyed this interesting information to her. 'Is Kitty McNulty after him now?'

Luckily Agnes didn't hear her say that.

Was he going to be Aunt Kitty's lover, Cecily wondered?

'How on earth do I know?' Rose asked crossly.

And she went out, again. The only thing that interested Rose these days was the dance after the tennis match.

Cecily could see her walking with Bellamy in the direction of the top field. It was one of the many stories she was following with some curiosity this summer. For research purposes. Rose and her friend Bellamy.

Cecily wondered if Bellamy would get his prawn out, again.

After the tennis party the court would be ploughed up, thanks to the wretched Pinky Wilson. Cecily thought of all the games Joe, and Carlo too, had played with her here when she had been small. How they had pushed her around the court in the old pram, while she screamed with delight. And she thought of the wind in her hair and Carlo's happy face and how he used to hug her in the way he no longer did. And thinking too how the court had been present her entire life and was now disappearing forever made her want to cry.

'The world is changing,' Agnes said in a voice that gave nothing away.

This match would be the very last one at Palmyra Farm and though August was almost gone, September still seemed a long way off.

BUT SOMEONE WAS making lists in high places. There were lists of Fascists and lists of anti-Fascists in Britain. Italian names, jumbled together, reading like a cast list for an opera.

Alessandro Anzi from London, Carlo Campolonghi from Edinburgh, Giovanni Oresfi from Clerkenwell, Francesco Cesar from Eastbourne and Mario Molinello from Bly.

Who knew which list each belonged to?

Someone, a clerk with neat handwriting, wrote the names into a book. Then a fat man with a cigar dropped ash all over them and someone else with nimble fingers came along and filed them away. So that one day a man wearing a trilby would find the list.

No one except Cecily saw Pinky Wilson sitting in the apple orchard reading a newspaper in another language.

'It's in Italian, silly,' Rose said crossly when Cecily told her. 'Why don't you spy on someone else?'

The tennis party was on everyone's lips.

Franca talked about it all the time with Rose, their faces alight with antic.i.p.ation. The Molinellos, when the shop was closed, came over to the farm to compare notes with Joe endlessly as to who was the best tennis player.

'Rose is,' said Franca.

'Yes,' admitted Joe smiling wryly. 'She is!'

'Papi thinks he is,' said Giorgio and Carlo laughed.

'Papi's hopeless,' he said. 'I'm the best in the family, you know.'

'Oh, Lucio is pretty good too,' Anna told them and at that, Agnes, who had just made her a cup of tea, looked up sharply. Her deep dimple made a swift appearance. And disappeared again. There were just fourteen days left to the tennis match.

'Please G.o.d it doesn't rain,' prayed Franca.

Agnes was making a canary yellow satin dress that Rose would wear to the dance. They were giggling together, good friends for once. Cecily, hurrying along the corridor, heard Rose whispering to her mother and stopped to listen.

'But I do wish he wasn't my father,' Rose said.

Agnes spoke with her mouth full of pins so Cecily couldn't make out what she said. And then Rose said something else, her voice different now. She spoke in the same cold flat voice she used when upset. Finally she made an impatient sound, a slight 'oh' as though she had turned away.

'Keep still, darling,' Agnes said.

'Ah ha!' Aunty Kitty said, pouncing on Cecily.

Laughing.

'Caught you!'

And she propelled Cecily into the room with her.

'Look who was hiding outside!'

Rose scowled.

'Oh my! The Listening Queen! What a surprise!'

'Why can't I have a dress like Rose's?' demanded Cecily. 'Why do I always have to have her cast-offs?'

'Because you're not old enough,' Rose said.

'It's irreversibly damaging my character,' Cecily said.

And she stuck her tongue out at her sister. Kitty burst out laughing.

'I'm sorry, child,' Rose said glaring at Aunty Kitty. 'It's simply a matter of birth order.'

'Don't pull faces, Rose,' Aunt Kitty said, ready to start another argument.

Later Cecily learnt that birth order was an important kind of order, never spoken about but always present. Until you died.

'When I'm twenty you'll only be twenty-two,' murmured Cecily.

'You're not twenty yet.'

'But I will be!'

'Wait until then.'

'Oh for goodness' sake,' Agnes said, worn down like a step that had been walked on too often.

Like the step, she was becoming slippy and dangerous.

'What's the point?' wailed Cecily. 'There won't be a tennis dance when I'm twenty. Not if the war comes.'

Rose laughed.

'Wars don't last six years,' she said.

'I hate you,' Cecily said.

But she said it without heat. Carlo would be at the party and suddenly she hated him too. She had asked him again if he would dance with her and he had agreed. But he had answered in a way that made her feel she was begging.

Children aren't supposed to have feelings, she wrote in her diary.

Outside in the country lanes, along the cottage walls and in the tangled hedgerows, dog roses bloomed. Untended, wild, and beautiful. It was truly ferocious weather that made the scent of honeysuckles stronger than ever before. On the wireless the news was that Hitler had sent a personal message to Stalin. And life seemed h.e.l.l-bent on pa.s.sing Cecily by. Would the tennis party never come?

The two girls with feet turned out like Jemima Puddleduck's had moved into the small bedroom in the annexe at the back of the house. They were very thin and white.

'Pasty, city girls,' Partridge said, amused.

'Streamlined like soda fountains,' Selwyn agreed.

He seemed awfully jolly. Considering.

'Do you mean pretty?' Aunty Kitty asked with a trace of discord buried in her voice, annoyed at something no one else could see.

Selwyn grinned a young boyish grin, helplessly. Like a man carried along by sea currents.

'Yes,' agreed Joe, thinking of someone else, entirely. 'Very pretty.'

The others were dubious. A discussion on prettiness ensued; light-heartedly, innocently blowing away the cobwebs of past irritations.

But Cecily knew there was no one more beautiful than Rose.

At the ice-cream parlour one of the Italian boys began to practise Honeysuckle Rose on the violin. One of them (it was Carlo) had told Rose he would play it at the dance. By the way he blushed whenever he mentioned her name, everyone knew what he was thinking. The Molinellos smiled good-naturedly and Mario whistled, Ain't Misbehavin'. And when no one was around Lucio listened to the wireless to see how grim the news was getting.

By Friday the 18th the weather was scorching and there wasn't even a thread of a breeze. The thermometer stood at eighty-seven. The grand clear-up had taken four whole days because the heat made everyone stop for too many rests. Rose wore a large hat to keep the sun off her face but it soon got knocked off her head. b.u.t.terflies danced around her. Joe paused, straightening his hat. He didn't mind the sun on his face, he told Cecily when she arrived with the ice-cold lemonade. Bellamy, high on the tractor, glanced at Rose with heat-sapped, challenging eyes.

Rose looked away. Bellamy revved up the engine. He looks as hot as the devil himself, Cecily thought.

Across every field swallows flew low beneath the searing white clouds. The tractor, a lump of solidified oily heat, moved past Rose, leaving her with a curious air of being unsheltered in the shadeless field, under a naked sky. Bellamy was staring straight at the shadow between her legs and her white skirt. Rose stood up and wandered towards the trees. Her voice drifted towards them.

'This heat is something awful,' she said. 'If I sit too long in it I feel sick!'

'We've almost finished,' Joe called after her. 'Can't you get Bellamy to give us a bit more help?'

'Ask him yourself,' Rose said crossly over her shoulder.

The sweat was pouring down Bellamy's face as he moved the tractor towards the trees. Then it stopped and Cecily saw him get down. He raised his hand in the direction of Rose's head. She saw Rose turn her face towards him, her long white neck arching backwards. Then they both disappeared into the long gra.s.s and once again Cecily felt a ripple of some strange sensation rush across her own body. Carlo, who was walking towards them, must have seen it too because he stopped for a moment and looked towards the spot where Rose had stood. Feeling a sudden agony for him, Cecily ran across the field.

'Are you all right?' she asked a little out of breath.

Carlo turned towards her, startled. He frowned as though he didn't quite recognise who she was. Then he murmured something and raised his hand. And touched her hair, adjusting the silk ribbon that was falling off.

'Yes, yes,' he said, adding, 'you look different today.'

But then he laughed with delight, waved his hand and went to join Joe.

Inside the dark cool kitchen, Agnes held an ice-cold jug in her hands as Lucio Molinello, having loaded the trays of greengages onto his truck, backed out of the drive. When he saw Cecily running across the field he waved. But he did not smile.

'This war will change everything,' Agnes said. 'None of us will ever be the same.'

For once there was no one listening.

Cecily, sitting on the highest branch of the oak tree, was hugging herself.

AND NOW, ALL these years later, back in Palmyra House, Cecily was daring to take out that summer from the drawer marked 'Interrupted' and place it in the one marked 'Remember'.

The summer of more strawberries than you could eat.

The summer of war clouds gathering over the streets.

The summer the tennis court was ploughed up.