The Shell Seekers

by Rosamunde Pilcher

They had about them a sort of poverty-stricken dignity that was beyond age, and when they smiled and said hello, their smiles did not reach their eyes.

As well, it was likely that he was constantly devilled by the almost unbearable anxiety for a family still living in Germany.

Perhaps Peter knew that he needed to talk. That, sometime, it all had to spill out, and why not now, when he and his wife were warm and safe in the thickly curtained room, and with friends.

Suddenly, it became personal, and terror breathed down the back of her own neck. Man’s inhumanity to man, unleashed, was an obscenity, and that obscenity was each person’s own private responsibility. This, then, was the meaning of the word WAR. It wasn’t just having to carry your gas mask, and do the black-out, and giggle at Miss Pawson, and paint the attic for the evacuees; but a nightmare infinitely more terrible, from which there could be no grateful awakening. It had to be endured, and this could only be done, not by running away, or putting your head under the blankets, but by picking up a sword and going to meet it.

As usual, it was marvellously warm, firelit, filled with flowers … he envied her. He had always envied her. Not just her success, but the competence with which she seemed to handle every facet of her busy life.

“I don’t want anything from Mumma. She’s given us enough. I just want her to be there, well, and secure, with no money worries, and able to enjoy herself.”

She did not disturb him, because, during that first day, she had been made to realize that he was not only hard-working, but a private sort of person, and would not relish her constantly appearing to give him the time of day, check on his activities, and generally make a nuisance of herself. If

“All right, I’ll think about it. But I shall never sell my darling Shell Seekers, and I shall continue to get the utmost satisfaction and comfort from looking at it. It’s all I’ve got left of the old days, and being a child, and Cornwall and Porthkerris.”

My only real sadness are the years that were wasted after Olivia went. He never had another woman. He loved Olivia very much. I think, probably, she was the love of his life.”

“I was alone. But that’s not the same as being lonely.”

A bedroom was a cabin; the floor, the deck; when she went to work, she was going on board; a Make and Mend was a half day; and if you had a row with your friend it was called Parting Brass Rags, but as she didn’t have a friend to have a row with, the occasion to use this seamanlike expression never arose.

It was a fine bright day; a day for escaping, for being on holiday, for going off for the weekend with a person you were really fond of.

The 4½-litre Bentley filled him with envy as nothing else could do. He had always longed for just such a car, a status symbol that would turn heads proclaiming wealth and masculinity, with just a touch of eccentricity thrown in for added flavour.

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

“Who does all this belong to?” he asked. “Papa.” “Won’t he mind if I drink it?” She gazed at him in astonishment. “But that’s what it’s there for. To give to friends.”

“I worry for your father. He worries. He has been through it all before.” “So have you.…” “Not as he did. Never as he did.”

guernsey

“Oh, Sophie, it’s Ambrose. I don’t love Ambrose. I should never have married him.”

But as soon as he walked into Carn Cottage I knew that it was hopeless. He was wrong. Everything was wrong. The house rejected him and he didn’t fit. And after that, it just went on getting steadily worse.”

But I do know that if I had been able to bring him to Carn Cottage, to meet you both, before we even got engaged, then I would never, in a thousand years, have married him.”

“My darling, at the moment, there is nothing that you can do. Except, I think, grow up a little. You’re not a child any longer. You have responsibilities now, a child of your own. We are in the middle of this dreadful war, and your husband is at sea with the Atlantic Convoys. There is nothing for it, but to accept the situation and carry on.

“Don’t forget those things,” Sophie told her. “They are all part of the person that he was. It is good to remember the bad times as well as the good. After all, that is what life is all about.”

Life goes on. Even in London in wartime. Especially, perhaps, in London, in wartime.”

Yes, of course, there is bomb damage, great holes in terraces of houses, like teeth knocked out, but everybody is brave and cheerful and carrying on as though nothing had happened. And there is so much going on.

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.

The first rays of sunlight were slanting into her bedroom through the open window; these lay warm on the carpet, picked out the deep pink of the roses that patterned the curtains. She got out of bed and went to inspect the day, leaning bare forearms on the sill, smelling the damp and mossy-scented air. The thatch was so low that it tickled the top of her head, and she saw the dew glittering on the grass, and the two thrushes carolling away in the chestnut tree—the sweet mistiness of a perfect spring morning.

“Yes, I know, but we can’t all be perfect. And just think how good I am at other things. Like cooking meals for you and always having the right sort of drink in the cupboard. Your father’s mother, if you recall, never kept anything in her sideboard except bottles of sherry that tasted like raisins.”

It wasn’t anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

The result was delightful, both pretty and informal, and Nancy, standing back, marvelled, as she always did, at her mother’s natural talent for creating not only an ambience, but a real visual pleasure out of the most mundane of objects.

It was good. And nothing good is ever lost. It stays part of a person, becomes part of one’s character.

They had, without saying a word, restored her tranquillity of mind, her sense of values, and she sent up a swift and heartfelt thank-you to the twist of fate (or was it the hand of God?—she wished that she could be certain …) that had introduced them, like a second chance, into her life.

You care only what happens to yourself, and how swiftly and easily you can get your hands on yet more money.” Noel closed his mouth, his face tightening in anger and the colour draining from his thin cheeks. “I haven’t sold the panels and I may never sell them, but if I do I shall keep everything for myself, because it is mine, and mine to do as I like with, and the greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence.

Perhaps if you’d been a little less ambitious for them, and had spent more time on teaching them manners, they’d have turned out a great deal more appealing than they are at the moment.”

“No, Nancy. She is not meant to be a housekeeper. She is my friend. My guest.”

She smiled, and the smile lit up her dark eyes, and it was as though all the years that she had lived had never happened, and for an instant he saw her as the beautiful young woman she must once have been. And the thought occurred to him that if he had been young when she was young, he would probably have fallen in love with her.

The greatest gift a parent can leave a child is that parent’s own independence. That

“The nice thing about lemon trees is that they fruit and flower at the same time. That way they always look pretty.

“Then why don’t you just leave well alone? Here, you’re planting a seedling, not hammering in a nail. Do it gently, like you were putting a baby to bed. Tuck it in, no more. It has to have room to grow. It has to have space to breathe.”

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 a treadmill of boredom—shortages and black-out, relieved by occasional flashes of horror, terror, or resolution, as British battleships were blown out of the sea, disaster befell Allied troops, or Mr. Churchill came on the wireless to tell everybody how splendidly they were doing. 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.

Totally unselective, they sat through anything that came their way, simply to escape, if only for an hour or two, from the tedium of their existence.

“True. But it is hard not to be greedy. It is human nature always to want more.”

and men who spent their waking hours enduring wild sea journeys and the chilling face of the Boscarben Cliffs had no thought in mind, at the end of the day, but a hot shower, food, and sleep.

Often I see something that is so beautiful it hurts, like an old farm building, or foxgloves growing on a hedge, blowing in the wind against a blue sky. And I wish so much that I could capture them, put them on paper, keep them for ever. And, of course, I can’t.”

She thought of the last couple of years: the boredom, the narrowness of existence, the dearth of anything to look forward to. Yet now, in a single instant, the curtains had been whipped aside, and the windows beyond thrown open onto a brilliant view that had been there, waiting for her, all the time. A view, moreover, laden with the most marvellous possibilities and opportunities.

That the flash of ecstasy, the unexplained happiness, the extraordinary sensation of closeness and familiarity could simply have been part of an illusion, springing from her own rising spirits and the fact that the sun, after days of rain, had decided to shine.

But 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.

“Yes. It has a magic. You never get used to it, how ever long you live here.”

This evening—ever since Richard Lomax’s arrival—she had been with them; not dead, but alive; even now, sitting in the empty chair at the head of the table.

“So. Get involved.” “You know something, Papa? I really like you.” “I am gratified. Why?” “A thousand reasons. But mostly because we’ve always been able to talk.” “It would be a disaster if we couldn’t. As for Richard Lomax, you are no longer a child. I don’t wish to see you hurt, but your mind is your own. You make your own decisions.”