The Last Pier by Roma Tearne Page A

baby tagging behind.
    Cecily knew her sister had plans for later on that involved the fair.
    Agnes, knowing nothing of any of this, wanted Rose to take Cecily.
    All was, therefore, chaos and rage.
    A war developing right there around the farmhouse kitchen table.
    ‘Generosity is an old-fashioned virtue that’s getting lost in this talk of war,’ Agnes observed.
    ‘Like the scent of old roses,’ Aunt Kitty added.
    Aunt Kitty, long divorced, was by now nursing a Broken Heart as though it were a wounded soldier.
    ‘Wounded enemy soldier,’ Selwyn joked.
    His voice was gruff and indistinct because he spoke with his pipe in his mouth.
    There was an awkwardness around him that gave Cecily a puzzling feeling. Her father had changed somewhat of late and no longer played the I-spy games with her as he used to. These days he seemed preoccupied with the war, but once long ago it had been Selwyn who told Cecily that looking and listening were the most important skills for a writer. Her father no longer read or praised her stories. The war, it seemed, was destroying everything interesting.
    The clouds at the far end of the garden were as big as ice-cream cones and the air was hot as though it was a hydrogen balloon about to burst.
    Outside, behind the fields, the lanes had narrowed into a tangle of blackberry briar and pale pink dog roses. The sky was a silken blue. The larks, invisibly high up, threw down their eerie threads of song. It was the unforgettable summer voice of England calling out, a great humming bowl of activity, present in the murmur and buzz of uncut fields and the deep peaceful voices of the farmhands talking to each other. There could not possibly be a war.
    Could there?
    ‘I hate this waiting feeling,’ Aunt Kitty admitted.
    She made it sound like a song, Cecily thought. Aunt Kitty was what Cecily’s father called exotic. Like tinned pineapples.
     
    It was August the 16th, only two weeks before September arrived but still the summer squawked and hissed in the long grass. There had been no rain for ages. Agnes, head bent, was making strawberry jam.
    ‘You children are getting as brown as cobnuts,’ a farmhand observed.
    Everyone should have been helping with clearing the tennis court and the meadow next to it. But not everyone did what they should, observed Partridge, jovial in spite of Rose’s huffy manner, as he adjusted her bicycle brakes. And off Rose went, along the bridle path, somewhere on her own, calling out, toodle-pip.
    ‘Now where has she gone?’ Agnes asked, sighing out of sheer weariness.
    ‘She’s gone Out Of Sheer Weariness,’ Cecily said.
    ‘I’d like to get out of Sheer Weariness, occasionally,’ Kitty said, hugging her, smiling away her Broken Heart. ‘I’ve lived there too long already!’
    Selwyn, on his way out to milk the cow, glanced at Aunt Kitty but she was counting sweet williams.
    Sent by her unknown admirer.
    Seven.
    There were always seven, Cecily noticed. And every time Aunt Kitty received a bouquet of flowers she went out. Agnes saw Selwyn standing against the light in the doorway, smiling the smile that once had been her undoing but now only seemed to make her unhappy.
    Naughty Rose, sailing past the window on her bicycle, hair streaming behind her, thin beautiful legs showing through the delicate fabric of her dress.
    ‘Pinky’s just gone out in his car!’
    ‘Rose!’ Agnes cried, shrilly, horrified. ‘Come back immediately!’
    ‘What on earth is she up to?’ muttered Aunt Kitty, the laugh still in her voice, the Wounded Heart, in the recovery room.
    ‘Oh she’s just trying it on,’ Selwyn said.
    ‘Come back,’ Agnes cried, again. ‘You’ve forgotten to collect the eggs for me.’
    ‘Black Swan, White Swan,’ chanted Cecily.
    The town would be the ballet company’s hosts for only four nights before they moved on elsewhere. Four nights of B&Bs and resin and sweat and footlights and applause. Cecily, who had been reading her father’s copy of