The Last Pier (9 page)

SELWYN HAD NEVER
wanted to own Palmyra Fruit Farm. Although there had been apple trees in these orchards since 1890, wonderful trees still producing twenty bushels of apples a year, there were other never-ending problems with pests.

While his father had been alive he had successfully and single-handedly managed the land. In those days it had simply been assumed Selwyn’s older brother would take over the running of it. Then his brother had died during the First World War, killed, as it turned out, not by any German, but in an accidental shooting by someone from his own side.

Men mistaking friends for enemies.

It happened all the time but Selwyn had never got over it.

It served only to intensify his conviction that life was something that would always pass him by. A conviction born from an earlier event also impossible to forget.

He had been fifteen at the time and his parents had sent their two sons to stay with old friends in Germany. It had been as glorious a summer as this one of 1939 and Selwyn had fallen in love with a German girl living close by. She had been older than him and at first he had thought she was interested in the company of his elder, more dashing brother. But it was not so and soon they were spending most of their time together, laughing, teasing each other, swapping books, comparing the authors they both loved. They went boating on the lake and as the days turned warmer took to riding their bicycles along the linden avenues to other villages and other towns.

All through those long, delicious weeks the younger, shyer Selwyn blossomed. Never had he felt so alive. And then their
parents, finding someone to mind Palmyra Farm for a short while, came to join their sons.

Within a few hours of arriving, Selwyn’s father had beaten him to the point almost of unconsciousness. For his friendship with a German girl. He had beaten his older brother too, for allowing Selwyn to behave in this indecent way, although when questioned he would not say what was indecent about this innocent friendship. Throughout these beatings their mother had neither said nor done anything. The next day both boys were sent home, back to Palmyra Farm. Selwyn was not even allowed to say goodbye to the girl. He had little recollection of the journey back but he would never forget the incident and afterwards he hated his parents with a vengeance. Then the war came and his brother enlisted. When he died Selwyn left for Oxford.

At Oxford he read English and German, vaguely recalling the Wilson man there. After Oxford, he seemed to remember they had both begun working for the government. But they had gone their separate ways and he had never seen Wilson again. Until now.

A loner and a bachelor for many years, when Selwyn’s boss sent him Kitty McNulty as his personal assistant he tried at first to have as little as possible to do with her. Grief over his brother’s death had silenced him and conversation with Kitty was limited to matters of work. Eye contact was painfully uncomfortable.

Kitty, speaking French and German, efficient and vivacious, was not about to let this get in the way of a friendship. She liked Selwyn, finding him uncommonly handsome. Very soon she was managing his personal affairs as well as the office business. She would pay money into the bank for him, ghost letters to his mother and keep at bay all those people he did not want to meet. He began taking her on trips abroad, unaware of the gossip that followed them. Kitty was surprisingly good company.

When Selwyn’s mother died his father wrote asking him to come back to manage the farm. He ignored the requests. For
the first time in his life, in an odd sort of way, he was having a good time. But he did nothing about Kitty and it was only when she, fed up with waiting, startled him by announcing her engagement to some other man, that he became aware of disappointment quickly suppressed. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the knowledge, gleaned from the punishment meted out during his troubled childhood, that self-control was the answer. He congratulated Kitty.

Finding Agnes hadn’t been part of any plan.

In the confusion of Kitty’s news, with his slender grasp on his own emotions, Selwyn proposed to Agnes. He hoped Kitty would simply fade from his consciousness.

No one told him that marrying the younger sister was hardly the solution.

No one told him Agnes would have needs of her own.

Then his father died and Selwyn took Agnes back to the farm. Joe, born nine months later, was intended to be the cement needed in their marriage. Rose, following soon after, the reinforcement. Selwyn saw he
ought
to love his children but really, he wasn’t up to the job. Duty was all he could manage. It was good but not good enough.

Thereafter a long gap followed when events settled uneasily on the topsoil of their lives. Kitty, living in Chicago with her new husband Danny, heard all her sister’s news. How handsome Joe was, how like his father, how happy the Maudsleys were to have little Rose. In return Kitty sent them a photograph of Danny whose huge moustache Selwyn instantly distrusted.

‘Didn’t I tell you,’ he told his startled wife, ‘a cad, if ever I saw one!’

In the event Selwyn’s distrust was to be proved right although it was several years before anyone put two and two together about the bruises on Kitty’s face. And arms, and legs.

And that was just the start of things. When Kitty related the story that she had been forced to have an abortion Agnes burst into tears. When she claimed the backroom botched job had
left her unable to have another child, Agnes was heartbroken for her.

The story prompted her to make her sister the godmother of her own third child.

Cecily, the godchild of Aunt Kitty, who would have predicted that!

Meanwhile Selwyn was making a discovery of his own. To his surprise he found that his feelings for his third child were altogether different from anything he had experienced before. It wasn’t a subject he dwelt on but whenever his eyes lighted on little Cecily’s dark head, hair straight like a Chinaman’s, he felt an overwhelming, unaccountable tenderness towards her. He began to take her out for long walks and, as she grew older, taught her to read and write. When, at the age of five, Cecily developed a passion for writing stories, it was Selwyn who encouraged her. Agnes saw what was happening and made no comment. Joe saw and wasn’t bothered, being so much older. Only Rose for some reason was furious and began to hate her father with a barely suppressed passion.

Eventually Kitty left her husband. Cecily was eight at the time and, remembering how her father had told her to listen, did so fiercely, hoping to hear something interesting about the divorce. In those days, eavesdropping was far more exciting than now.

‘Perhaps Aunty Kitty has stopped loving him,’ she suggested to Rose, in the privacy of their bedroom.

Rose shrugged. Her aunt’s lily-livered lifestyle held no interest for her. So Cecily continued to chip her way through the puzzle alone until Rose gave in.

‘No of course not, silly! She only married him to get her own back.’

Her Own Back over what, remained undisclosed information.
In school Cecily continued to go from strength to strength in English. She won two end-of-year prizes for her story about the girl who married a man she did not love.

In the end she got her Own Man Back,
she wrote.

And when Agnes bumped into the teacher in Bly the woman took her hand eagerly.

‘Mrs Maudsley, your daughter has great imagination,’ she had smiled.

Cecily’s eyes had sharpened. She had found a new daydream. It would last for many months and interfere with her ability to concentrate on the chores her mother gave her.

‘If she goes on in this way I think she might become a writer some day,’ the teacher enthused.

‘She certainly is a compulsive eavesdropper,’ Agnes said, exasperated.

‘It’s all part of the process, Mrs Maudsley,’ the teacher beamed.

‘Silly, earnest woman!’ Agnes told Selwyn later. ‘She was more or less giving Cecily permission to carry on poking her nose into other people’s affairs.’

Selwyn laughed indulgently. He reminded Agnes how, long ago, he had been tied to a chair by his father, as part of the punishment for eavesdropping.

‘There’s nothing wrong with C,’ he told his wife. ‘It’s all part of her vivid imagination, part of her creative spirit. We can’t blame her if we say unsuitable things in her presence.’

Agnes was silent. It was useless to tell her husband that Cecily was hopelessly indulged, that her behaviour was immoral. Or that by refusing to punish her Selwyn was merely encouraging the child. Couldn’t he see Cecily was far too headstrong?

‘No wilder than Rose,’ Selwyn said.

An edge had crept into his voice. Behind the door, still as a stork, Cecily was simply dying to scratch her leg.

‘What’s immoral about curiosity?’ Selwyn asked. ‘If we give her information she can use against us, that’s not her fault, for heaven’s sake! Don’t be so old-fashioned.’

There was a silence.

‘I’m going fishing,’ Selwyn said.

Rose, on her way out on private business of her own, doubled up with laughter.

Standing in the kitchen all these many years later, Cecily remembered with an acute blinding pain her father’s face. The love he had always had for her, the way he had encouraged her to write, to be curious. How had she forgotten these precious little things? There was a constriction in her chest. Memories were turning up like unwanted guests. Events from the past collided and buckled, making it hard for her to separate them out. She remembered the Ness and its dangerous tidal currents. And she recalled how she had always known that Rose had been there several times with Bellamy.

Yet, try as she might, staring at the sky on those last peaceful August days of 1939, Cecily failed to see the War Clouds everyone was talking about.

Perhaps they were hiding behind the Pole star?

By August, with her divorce long over and her ex-husband in North Africa, Aunt Kitty closed up her flat in London and came to stay on the farm. She had meant to stay for just a weekend but, because she was feeling bored, the visit went on for far longer. While in the sultry, sweet, hay-scented heat, Pinky Wilson’s dark distorted shadow continued to survey the land belonging to Palmyra Farm. Aunt Kitty, meeting him for the first time on one of her walks along a country lane, told her sister she found him really rather nice. Especially when he gave her a bunch of lovely flowers.

Everyone in the town of Bly knew it was because of the impending crisis and the need to feed the troops that Pinky Wilson had to visit all the local farms. But in spite of this, many people distrusted him.

Bellamy was one, but for reasons that weren’t clear.

Cook disliked him on principle. The man was a stranger to Suffolk, wasn’t he? Well then!

And Anna Molinello disliked Pinky because he had not checked with her before giving chocolates to her daughter.

Lucio kept his thoughts to himself.

Selwyn remembered Robert Wilson as a nondescript man, now concerned only with national acreage.

Rose of course couldn’t care less. She yawned rudely every time his name was mentioned. No one told her off because it would mean feeding her Attitude. Cecily wondered why, when there was only three years between them, it was
her
Attitude that needed feeding, whereas Rose’s never did.

Every day they were saying it was the driest, hottest summer for fifty years. But some people, Partridge being one of them, shook his head because he felt there was something wrong about the sequence of dead dry days.

The tennis match and charity dance were to be held on Saturday 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 grass 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 assistant?’

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.