The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

a gentle tiredness, assuaged and comforted by her surroundings, as though her house were a kindly person, and she was being embraced by loving arms.

And another awful thing about being on a boat was that there was no way you could leave. You couldn’t simply walk out of the door and into the street and find a taxi and go home. You were stuck. Jammed, moreover, face to face with a chinless man, who seemed to think that you would find it fascinating to be told that one was in the Guards, and how long it took one to drive, in one’s fairly fast car, from one’s place in Hampshire to Windsor.

into unreality; forgotten dreams of a life that had never been real. Like a vessel that has been empty for too long, she felt herself filled with peace. I could stay here. A small voice, a hand tugging at her sleeve. This is a place where I could stay.

She hesitated, searching for the right words, because all at once it became enormously important to use exactly the right words.

all this conversation had made him thirsty and he needed something to drink. Olivia said that she felt like a nice cup of tea. Cosmo told her that she didn’t look like one, but he got to his feet and ambled off, disappearing up through the garden towards the house in order to put the kettle on.

“You met up all right at Heathrow?” “No trouble at all; I carried a newspaper and wore a rose between my teeth.”

“And Noel? Have you seen Noel lately?” “No, haven’t set eyes on him for months. I rang him up the other day to make sure he was still alive. He was.”

“I have two beautiful new dresses that I bought to stun the hotel guests at Los Pinos and I never wore either of them. Never had time. You came into my life, and since then I’ve been forced to walk around in rags.”

“It doesn’t seem the same without her, does it?” Antonia said sadly as they made their way down the terrace. “Nothing ever does,” Olivia told her.

“I am shocked, Cosmo. I find it almost impossible to believe. It goes against the grain of something I feel most strongly about. To own your own house has always seemed to me the most important of priorities. It gives you security in every sense of the word. Oakley Street belonged to my mother, and because of that, as children, we always felt safe. Nobody could take it away from us. One of the best feelings in the world was coming home, indoors, off the street, and closing the door and knowing you were home.”

“It’s not important to me. It never has been. It’s only important if you haven’t got any. And because it buys lovely things; not fast cars or fur coats or cruises to Hawaii or any of that rubbish, but real, lovely things, like independence and freedom and dignity. And learning. And time.”

“These months with you are different, like nothing that’s ever happened before. It’s been like a dream, stolen out of time. And I’ll never cease to be endlessly grateful to you for giving me something that no person can ever take away. A good time. Not a good time, but a good time. But you can’t dream forever. You have to wake up. Soon, I shall start getting restless and probably irritable. And you will wonder what is wrong with me and so shall I. And I shall make a small private analysis of the problem and discover that it’s time I went back to London, picked up the threads, and got on with my life.”

He sighed deeply, and then, with a gesture of impatience, flung the half-smoked cigar into the fire. He said, “If I asked you to marry me, would you stay?” She said hopelessly, “Oh, Cosmo.” “You see, I find it hard to contemplate a future without you.” “If I married any man,” she told him, “it would be you. But I told you, that first day I came to Ca’n D’alt. I’ve never wanted to be married, have children. I love people. I’m fascinated by them, but I need my privacy too. To be myself. To live alone.” He said, “I love you.”

“Will you write to me? Keep in touch.” “I’ll send you Christmas cards with robins on them.” He put his hands on either side of her head and turned her face up to his. The expression in his pale eyes was immeasurably sad. “Now I know,” he told her. “Know what?” “That I’m going to lose you forever.”

Olivia was always so elegant, and the least one could do was to tidy oneself up a bit.

She had planted these herself, thousands of them; daffodils and crocus and scylla and snowdrops. When these faded and the summer grass grew deep and green, other wildflowers raised their heads. Cowslips and cornflowers and scarlet poppies, all grown from seed that she had scattered herself.

people went on living until somebody told you they were dead.

It measured perhaps five feet by three and dominated the room. The Shell Seekers. Olivia knew that she would never tire of the painting, even if she lived with it for most of her life. Its impact hit you like a gust of cold, salty air. The windy sky, racing with clouds; the sea, scudding with white-caps, breaking waves hissing up onto the shore. The subtle pinks and greys of the sand; shallow pools left by the ebbing tide and shimmering with translucent reflected sunlight. And the figures of the three children, grouped to the side of the picture; two girls with straw hats and dresses bundled up, and a boy. All brown-limbed, barefoot, and intent on the contents of a small scarlet bucket.

He had a studio on the North Beach at Porthkerris, and he painted that from his studio window. It’s called The Shell Seekers, and I am the little girl on the left.”

Your children never stopped being children.

He was, in truth, not much interested in anything but himself, for he resembled his father not only in looks but in character as well.

Miss Pawson was one of those very masculine ladies who turned up in Porthkerris from time to time. The misfits of the thirties, Lawrence called them, who, un-desirous of the normal joys of husband, home, and children, earned their livings in a number of ways, usually associated with animals, and taught riding, or ran kennels, or photographed other people’s dogs.

When she was sixteen, Penelope had read The Well of Loneliness. After that she looked at Miss Pawson and Miss Preedy with new eyes, but still remained innocently baffled by their relationship.

which left her here, in Gloucestershire, in her own bed, in her own house, Podmore’s Thatch. She was—and this was one of the occasions when the fact took her by surprise, as though the years had encapsulated themselves and played a cruel trick upon her—not nineteen, but sixty-four. Not even middle-aged, but elderly.

“Have a cup of tea,” suggested Penelope, as she always did. “Well, I wouldn’t mind,” said Mrs. Plackett, as she always did.

you name it, it’s there. And like I said, it’s all a hideous fire risk. The thatch does nothing to help. One spark on a windy day and the whole house would go up like a furnace. One simply hopes Ma will have time to fling herself from some window before she’s incinerated.

I must go soon, she told herself. Spring in Cornwall is such a magical time. I must go soon, otherwise it will be too late.

But now, she lay open-eyed, gazing into the gloomy darkness that was not truly dark, and knew that she had no option but to go back. And it was an extraordinary experience; like watching an old film, or discovering a dog-eared photograph album, turning the pages, and being amazed to find that the sepia snapshots had not faded at all, but had stayed evocative, clear, and sharp-edged as ever.

Usually so sure of himself, he was filled by unfamiliar uncertainty, and the uneasy suspicion that, by coming here, to Penelope’s house, he had somehow lost control of the situation. This was disturbing, because it had never happened before, and he had a horrid premonition that her extraordinary mixture of naïvety and sophistication could well have the same effect on him as a tremendously strong dry martini, leaving him both legless and incapable.

It was nearly two o’clock before they returned to Oakley Street. Holding hands, stifling laughter, they made their way in the inky darkness through the wrought-iron gate and down the steep stone steps. “Who bothers about bombs?” Ambrose said. “We can just as easily kill ourselves stumbling around in the black-out.”

And then, afterwards … when he finishes at Whale Island, he’ll be sent to sea. Can I come home and live with you and Papa? Have the baby at Carn Cottage?” “What a question to ask! What else would you do?” “I suppose I could become a professional fallen woman, but I’d much rather not.” “You’d be useless at it, anyway.” Penelope was filled with grateful love.

Lady Beamish knew that Dolly was only forty-four. Dolly had told her at some length of her own frailties; the horrid headaches (she called them migraines) that were apt to strike her low at the most opportune moments; and there was her back trouble, which could be brought on by any simple domestic task such as bed-making or a session at the ironing board. Working stirrup-pumps or driving ambulances was simply out of the question. But still Lady Beamish remained unsympathetic, and from time to time made unkind remarks about Bomb-Dodgers and people who Didn’t Pull Their Weight.

“Will you tell Papa?” “No. It would trouble him. I don’t like him worried.” “But you never have secrets from him.” “This one I shall keep.”

What are you reading?” She picked up the book. “Elizabeth and her German Garden. Sophie, you must have read that a hundred times.” “At least. But I always go back to it. It comforts me. Soothes me. It reminds me of a world that once existed and will exist again when the war is finished.” Penelope opened it at random and read aloud. “What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them.”

She went upstairs and into her parents’ bedroom. The bed, on this ghastly morning, had never been made. The sheets were still awry, the pillow dented from her father’s sleepless head. He had known. They both had. Hoping, keeping up their courage, but filled with deadly certainty. They both had known. Nothing left. On the table at Sophie’s side of the bed lay the book that she had been reading the night before she went to London. Penelope went and sat there and picked up the book. It fell open in her hands at that well-worn page. “What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find happiness so easily.”

The words dissolved and were lost, like figures seen through a rain-washed window. To find happiness so easily. Sophie had not only found happiness, but radiated it. And now, there was nothing left. The book slipped from her fingers. She lay down, burying her streaming face in Sophie’s pillow, the linen cool as her mother’s skin, and smelling sweetly of her scent, as though she had, just a moment before, gone from the room.

Antonia thought of other bells: goat bells in Ibiza, discordant, clanging away in the early mornings across the rocky arid fields that surrounded Cosmo’s house. That and the crowing of cocks, and the crickets of the darkness … all sounds of Ibiza, gone forever, swept away into the past.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn’t anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

Danus paused to lean on his pitchfork, and make some unheard remark, and Antonia laughed. And the sound of her laughter brought back, with a piercing clarity, ringing across the years, the memory of other laughter, and the unexpected ecstasies and physical joys that happen, perhaps, only once in any person’s lifetime. It was good. And nothing good is ever lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of one’s character. Other voices, other worlds.

Penelope, at the open door, stopped dead. She turned her head and looked at Nancy, and there was an expression of disgust in her dark eyes that caused Nancy to suspect that she had actually gone too far. But her mother did not throw the tray of coffee-cups at her.

the nicest thing in the world is doing something constructive in a garden on a fine morning.

But she wasn’t searching for shells, she was searching for something, somebody else; he was somewhere around.

The wind brought a sea mist with it, curling in over the beach like smoke, and she saw him walking out of the smoke towards her. He was in uniform but his head was bare. He said, “I’ve been looking for you,” and took her hand, and together, they came to a house.

You must never go back, they all told her. Everything will be changed. But she knew that they were wrong because those things that she most craved were elemental, and blessedly, unless the world blew itself up, remained unchanging.

It was like the last two weeks before you had a baby, when you knew for certain that the baby was never going to come, and you were going to look like the Albert Hall for the rest of your life.

But soon, after this war, something splendid is going to happen. I and my generation, and the generation which followed it, have gone as far as we can go. The prospect of the revolution which will come to the world of art is something which fills me with enormous excitement. For that reason only, I should like to be a young man again. To be able to watch it all happening. Because, one day, they will come. As we came. Young men with bright visions and deep perceptions and tremendous talent. They will come, not to paint the bay and the sea and the boats and the moors, but the warmth of the sun and the colour of the wind. A whole new concept. Such stimulation. Such vitality. Marvellous.” He sighed. “And I shall be dead before it even begins. Do you wonder I feel regretful? To miss all that.”

It was going to be all right and she hadn’t been wrong about him. He wasn’t ordinary. He was immensely special because he had brought with him, into Carn Cottage, not only a certain glamour but ease as well.

with this tall stranger came only the most comfortable of presences. He might have been an old friend of many years, calling to renew acquaintance, to catch up on mutual news.

It was not easy to find good reason for this persistent illusion: that everything was as it had been. That nothing had changed. Whereas, in truth, everything had changed. Fate had been cruel; flung the war at them, torn their family life apart; seen Sophie and the Cliffords killed in the Blitz. Fate, perhaps, had thrown Penelope at Ambrose.

The General’s eye, hostly, strayed. “I’m going to rescue Mellaby. He’s had ten minutes of undiluted Trubshot, and that’s enough for any man.”