The Last Pier Read Online Free

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    Ten bob a week, bugger all to eat, great big boots and blisters on your feet.
    Another memory sprang out to startle her. It was Rose! In one of her bad moods of course, head bent, darning a stocking, swearing and sucking her finger.
    A drop of blood spreading like an evil spell on her frock. Rose swore again.
    ‘I’ll tell,’ Cecily had threatened.
    ‘Tell then!’
    ‘I shall. Unless you give me a penny!’
    ‘What a joke, you outrageous child!’
    And then Rose’s laugh fading as suddenly as it began.

2.
    AFTER THE FUNERAL was over, Selwyn and the policemen went away together in a car. There were two other men in the convoy of police cars. One of them was Robert Wilson in his trilby. He wouldn’t look at Cecily even though she had tried to say hello.
    People called him by another name. It sounded like Finch.
    The police had been to Palmyra Farm several times earlier that week and one of them had talked to Cecily in a voice that couldn’t make up its mind whether to be angry or sad. His voice had made Aunt Kitty very angry.
    ‘Did you hear him?’ she had shouted afterwards, glaring at Cecily. ‘Anybody would think they felt sorry for the little wretch.’
    ‘What is the point of shouting at her?’ Cecily’s mother had asked. ‘ She’s not the one to blame.’
    ‘She might have kept her mouth shut!’ Aunt Kitty snarled.
    Cecily had heard the policeman tell her mother there would be no bail.
    After Selwyn had gone Agnes cried harder. So, tactful for once, Cecily didn’t ask why he needed to have a government meeting when they had just buried Rose. A small, invisible suitcase that no one knew existed as yet waited in Cecily’s bedroom. Afterwards she would go to live with her Aunty Kitty.
    But first, people had to stand around for ages eating cucumber sandwiches. It struck Cecily as funny that this gathering was called Awake when she herself felt as though she was dreaming. A girl from the village pub handed out plates. Normally Cecily’s mother would have asked Cecily to be helpful but today wasn’t normally, so Cecily was banished to the kitchen instead. To help Cook and the girl from the pub cut ham-into-thin-slices. Thecook was slurring her speech. Ham-cut-into-thin-slices were what Cook was concentrating on.
    No one talked about Rose. The absence of war was what they talked about. You would think it was the War that had died, the way they went on blaming it. The War, it seemed, was late like Cecily’s sister.
    Two children whom she knew by sight came up to the kitchen door and stared at her and the Eavesdropper became Eavesdropped-on, the Spy the Spied-on.
    ‘There she is! That’s her. She was talking to herself in the church!’
    ‘The one who –’
    ‘Shhh!’
    The War’s to blame, thought Cecily. Not me. And she went on cutting ham-into-thin-slices.
    ‘That’s enough, Cecily,’ Cook said in her stern-slurry voice.
    Cook had been crying for days.
    ‘It’s a great big machine,’ Cecily heard someone else say. ‘A killing machine for people.’
    ‘Poor little mite,’ Cook said to no one in particular. ‘It were just a game that went wrong.’
    ‘Pretty stupid game, eh?’
    ‘They meant no harm and anyway it was the boy that started it!’
    ‘And ’im that finished it. Don’t forget the real culprit!’
    Cecily heard that the boat Rose had used to row towards the Last Pier had probably sunk.
    And still there was no Tom.
    Or Carlo, or even Franca.
    Only Bellamy, standing in the kitchen garden, by the black iron water pump scowling and refusing to come near the house. Cook took him out a cup of tea but he pushed her hand so the tea flew all over her and the cup smashed to the ground. The guests who were Awake stopped talking and looked outside.
    ‘Land’s sake!’ Cook said and she started to cry, again. ‘I can’t be doing with you.’
     
    And now, twenty-nine years, three days, twelve hours later, standing in the room that had things-brushed-under-the-carpet, Cecily