Sea Music
Sea Music
Sara MacDonald
A beautifully written novel with great emotional appeal, of family secrets and wartime heritage, set in Cornwall, London and Warsaw.The house and the cottage overlooking the sea, on the corner of the big estate, was home to three generations of the Tremain family. Fred Tremain, the country doctor who – with his wife, Martha, for whose sake he had become estranged from his family – came first to this beloved corner of England: Anna, the difficult, determined older child, now a highly successful solicitor; and Barnaby, the easy-going second child, now a vicar to the parish: and the beloved granddaughter, Lucy. It is she whose discoveries of family papers, hidden in the old cottage, brings to light the first of the wartime secrets and begins the process of questioning so many old fears and hatreds, and unlocking the way to new relationships and new loves.Sara Macdonald has created a wonderful range of characters, depicted with great tenderness and understanding, against a background of the human price paid for the upheavals caused by prejudice, violence and wars today and yesterday. A wonderful novel for all the fans of Anita Shreve and Rosamund Pilcher.
SARA MACDONALD
Sea Music
Copyright (#ulink_e91d6e38-744d-58b2-b47c-fbc0b0b8e118)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003
Copyright © Sara MacDonald 2003
Lines taken from Old Man, Tears and Sowing from Collected Poems, copyright © Edward Thomas, reproduced by kind permission of Everyman’s Library
Sara MacDonald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007150731
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007396740
Version: 2017-05-02
Dedication (#ulink_d7e59a01-6e76-5503-ab9a-ab442cb252a3)
For Milly Who says, the past is gone. The present is what matters, and the future.
Contents
Cover (#uf5d4a209-7a80-5f24-a12f-828b9f5874d3)
Title Page (#ufe69d2e3-4668-55bd-84da-155666526b0d)
Copyright (#u51e5cecf-8b12-5b37-9ed0-daee29fd47ec)
Dedication (#ud1df3d6b-b972-5a7b-9a79-ef294300527c)
Prologue (#udfa426c4-b857-5ffd-b495-f1341c33974c)
Chapter 1 (#ubc4d9afd-f88e-558b-99bc-7f338b8d2c10)
Chapter 2 (#ufda5a0ed-2b6c-51d6-b19e-accab214ef71)
Chapter 3 (#u703b336f-3fb2-599d-94c6-45502718da25)
Chapter 4 (#u92190bb9-ce6e-5864-8ca4-95dad1d6ef03)
Chapter 5 (#u9ad3289f-20e6-5242-bcee-04be180ca96d)
Chapter 6 (#u0c67f6de-5444-5653-b054-abc2e0058f2c)
Chapter 7 (#ud7886d2c-8888-55a5-b7a0-80d605157651)
Chapter 8 (#u6bf90e73-0535-5ab5-9212-282304ba6288)
Chapter 9 (#ufd8264da-8c68-547a-8c8f-46d7a9832e3c)
Chapter 10 (#udb1f6c7a-2764-5e2d-b8de-1546e41dabd4)
Chapter 11 (#u5762ab66-e312-506a-9e1a-c28821b0405f)
Chapter 12 (#uc2ddf656-e67a-55c6-bb11-f2751a4aaaa0)
Chapter 13 (#uda6ff463-0ee9-59f2-a1cf-1b112f02edfb)
Chapter 14 (#u5c6ddd77-76ca-5e6d-a906-f3d2994806cb)
Chapter 15 (#uad0a4207-bc70-5db6-a1d8-8375a721b3a0)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_24323ebf-5d99-50fc-821c-a92208e75c4a)
It is not cold here in this land of blue sea, but shafts of ice reach out to pierce my skin with memory of coldness. Sometimes I dream of snow and the muffled silence it brings. I dream of snow with the sun glistening on its smooth surface, catching tiny particles of blue ice, incandescent and blinding.
I wake in the dark in a strange place of fierce storms and I remember what horror can lie beneath the silent beauty of snow.
I listen to Fred breathing beside me, his body warm. He is far away in sleep and the faces swoop down at me in the dark, their voices hover in the air, like distant whispers I cannot capture.
I get out of bed, go downstairs and wander about the little cottage, afraid that this life is only a dream and I am about to wake. I sit in the corner chair by the window and wait for the sun to rise out of the black water.
I will hear Fred wake, I will hear the bed creak, then his bare footsteps coming down the stairs. He will come to where I sit and he will reach out gently to stop me rocking. He will fold me in his arms, then he will pick me up as if I weigh nothing, throwing his hair out of his eyes, as he carries me back up the stairs to bed.
He will hold me tight to him and I will breathe him into me. This is my life. I have this life now, here with him. I can feel him smiling into my hair as he tells me about the plans for our new house across the garden.
How can this beautiful man love me? But he does. He does.
I will not always be this in-between person who walks on the sand dunes above the glittering sea, watching my dark shadow move ahead of me as we walk together, the girl I was, the woman I am now.
The house is almost finished. We live here in the cottage all the time now. No more long journeys at weekends. The house is wonderful. Light is everywhere; it fills every corner, it slides across the floor and colours the rooms in buttery sun. Great windows open up and let the untamed garden into the house.
I am so happy I tremble. I kiss Fred’s hands because I cannot speak. I run through the empty rooms laughing and Fred leans in the doorway, his long legs crossed, pushing tobacco into his pipe, watching me with those dark eyes that hold love and amusement.
I make myself walk into the village. I am afraid at first. People stare because I am foreign. Sometimes, in the shop, they stop talking. When I am nervous I forget my English. Then, slowly, people begin to talk to me and I learn their names.
The farm workers in the fields behind the house bring me vegetables and creamy milk from the farm. Fred laughs at me – he says I flirt atrociously – but it is not, as he teases me, because I am floosy, it is only because I am so thin.
The builders’ rubble has been taken away. At last we move in. I can plan the garden. It is going to be perfect. One day Fred comes home with a little mixed dog and we call him Puck. I love him. When we walk on the beach, people come up to me and they ask, ‘How is Puck? How are you?’
Summer is here, the fierce winds are warmer, but I am ill and cannot bear to go out. Fred is pale with worry. Suddenly the doctor tells me I am having a baby. I cannot believe this, I have to keep saying it over and over. After all we have been told, Fred and I are having a baby.
Fred says I must not hope too much, it is early days, I must be careful. But I know. I know this child will be born.
When Fred goes back to London to work for his finals and he cannot see to worry, I dance round the garden and sing because of the happiness of this incredible miracle.
Christmas comes and then the New Year. I lie in my bed, or in a chair that Fred places by the window in the sun. I am careful, waiting. Waiting for spring and my baby.
Our child, a boy, arrives safely on 18 March 1951. He weighs 6lbs 2oz. We call him Barnaby, after one of Fred’s favourite uncles. Barnaby. Such an English name.
Small shoots spring from my feet and take hold in this light, sandy soil and root me here in this extraordinary foreign place filled with blue sea and sky. The past is gone. Marta is gone. My future is here. Is now. I am Martha Tremain, the doctor’s wife. This is who I am.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b26c811c-dca6-5158-8071-fa751ff981c7)
Lucy finds Abi dead under the cherry tree. The little cat has crawled away to her favourite place and still feels warm to Lucy’s fingers. She knows it is stupid to feel so upset about an old tabby cat, especially when people are being killed all over the Balkans, but this one small cat has been with her most of her childhood.
She digs a hole to bury her deep next to Puck. She does not want her found and dug up by badgers or foxes. The cat is still loose-limbed and floppy, and Lucy places her in the hole cradled by roots as if she is still sleeping in the sun, but she cannot bear to push earth over the little feline face.
She picks bluebells and mint and garlic flowers and lays them over Abi’s eyes and head, makes a cover between the cat and the rain-soaked earth. Then she takes the spade and buries her. As Abi disappears from view Lucy suddenly sees herself under the ground too, a cold and literal walking over her grave.
Barnaby appears from the house and takes the spade from her, makes good the small grave and chats about what flowering thing they can plant on top of Abi. Lucy tells him about the horrible sensation and wonders if it is an omen. Barnaby says, smiling in that comforting way he has, ‘Lucy, remember when you and I went to pick her up from the farm? You were only six and that little cat has been a part of your childhood. You have just buried a chunk of your life, that is all.’
Lucy knows he is probably right. Barnaby has been central to her childhood. He has given her security and unconditional love. He has never let her down, ever.
She turns, shading her eyes from the sun, and stares back at the house. In the conservatory her grandparents are moving around each other aimlessly. Fred is looking for his newspaper and Martha, despite the warmth of the day, is clothed in many woollen garments. It is like looking at a bizarre backdrop to some surreal play.
A lump rises in Lucy’s throat. She is deserting them. She is leaving Barnaby with this and she has not even had the courage to tell him yet. She feels torn and suddenly apprehensive of the future. For Barnaby, for Tristan and for herself. These are her grandparents and she should be here for them. Lucy turns away, bends once more to the small grave and pats the earth flat.
Barnaby is watching her. ‘What is it, Lucy?’
‘Tristan has just been posted to Kosovo.’
Barnaby sighs. ‘Oh, Lucy, I am sorry.’ He picks up the spade and pulls her to her feet, putting his arm round her as they walk back to the house. ‘Tristan will be all right, Lu, I am absolutely sure of it.’
Martha is waving vaguely at them. Lucy does not think her grandmother has a clue who they are, but she and Barnaby both wave back, smiling.
Gran. Lucy feels again a lightning snake of sadness. She wants to protect and keep everything in this house safe, as it has been all her life, and she knows it is impossible. She has no power over her grandparents’ old age, state of mind or eventual death.
Barnaby locks the church door and stands on the porch looking out to where the sea lies in a semicircle round the churchyard. The tide is in and the estuary lies black and full, silhouetted by small, bent oak trees.
Barnaby walks past the ancient gravestones towards the water. He is reluctant to make the small journey across the road back to the house. He stands looking towards the harbour, listening to the throb-throb of the boat engines in the evening air as the small, colourful fishing fleet makes its way carefully over the bar and back to the quay.
Barnaby longs to spend this spring evening with another adult, a woman, if he is truthful. The familiar feeling of wasted years shoots through him briefly and painfully. It is not just loneliness that accentuates his single state; it is the slow, tragically funny and innocent return to childhood of both his parents, as if they have mutually given up being adult together. There is no one but Lucy to share this with: to laugh with, so he does not cry.
Lucy has been wonderful, rarely impatient, always concerned and tender with her grandparents. But she is another generation and she cannot share his memories. She has Tristan, her own life to lead.
There is Anna, but his sister does not want to accept what is happening to her parents. She is, as always, heavily involved with her career, and a husband. Anna, normally so practical, is in denial.
Barnaby turns away and makes his way down the church path and across the road to the house. Martha is peering out of the hall window, watching for him, or someone she recognises, within the fussy haze in which she now lives.
He opens the door and calls out, ‘I’m home.’
His mother dances towards him on tiny feet. ‘How do you do? I’m Martha Tremain,’ she says graciously.
Barnaby takes her small hand. ‘And I am Barnaby Tremain, your son.’ He smiles down at her, watching the bewildered expressions of doubt pass over her still-beautiful face.
Martha sees the laughter in his eyes and she laughs too, a little burst of relief. Of course. It’s Barnaby.
‘Oh, darling,’ she says. ‘How silly! I’m going quite dotty, you know.’
‘Rubbish,’ Barnaby says, kissing her. ‘Where’s Fred?’
‘Fred?’ Martha shrugs eloquently. She does not know, her face is blank again, but Barnaby can see his father and Mrs Biddulph out on the lawn. His father has Eric, the ginger tomcat, on a lead and is trying to get the cat to sit. Eric is not finding the lesson in the least amusing and Homer, his little Lab cross, is sitting on the grass, looking puzzled.
Poor Mrs Biddulph looks cold and ready for home. Barnaby opens the French windows and calls out to his father. The old man’s face lights up and he moves with surprising agility towards his son. Mrs Biddulph unclips the lead from Eric, who stalks off into the undergrowth, his thin tail twitching with indignation.
Mrs Biddulph is not pleased. ‘I’ve been trying to get Dr Tremain inside for at least an hour. He hasn’t had his tea yet.’
Barnaby gives her his best smile. ‘Never mind. Whisky time, I think, Dad?’
‘Good idea, old chap. Sun’s over the yardarm.’
Barnaby laughs and takes his father’s arm. ‘It is indeed. Mrs Biddulph, thank you so much. Will we see you tomorrow?’
‘I can’t really say. Mrs Thomas has taken on new staff. Young girls won’t stay five minutes,’ Mrs Biddulph says scathingly. ‘I’m surprised she didn’t ring and tell you.’
Barnaby prays there is not going to be a stream of indifferent girls to confuse Martha even further. Mrs Thomas, who runs the Loving Care Agency Barnaby uses, is universally unpopular with her staff.
‘She pays crap, expects the earth and buggers everybody around,’ Barnaby was told by an efficient, purple-haired girl who lasted a week.
Once indoors Barnaby closes the French windows. Mrs Biddulph puts on her shapeless wool coat, a garment she wears winter and summer.
‘I might see you tomorrow or I might not, Vicar. Good night all.’ Mrs Biddulph departs at speed, already thinking about Mr Biddulph’s tea, the bus, and getting home in time for the Antiques Roadshow.
Barnaby gathers both parents up, herds them into the sitting room and pours whisky into their familiar heavy tumblers. They watch him like expectant children and take their glasses greedily.
‘Thank you, darling.’ His mother raises her glass to him and smiles her sweet vacant smile.
‘You having one, old chap?’ his father asks.
‘Indeed I am.’ Barnaby sits tiredly in the armchair and looks at his parents fondly. All so normal. All calm and Sunday eveningish. If he closes his eyes for a moment he can almost believe he is twenty again and spending another soporific weekend with his parents, comforted by routine but restless to be away.
‘What’s Hattie cooking for supper, I wonder.’ Martha’s voice wavers against his closed eyelids. He opens them. His father is staring at his mother.
‘Hattie isn’t here any more. She died, didn’t she?’
Martha’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Oh dear, shouldn’t we have gone to the funeral? Shouldn’t we have sent flowers?’
Barnaby takes a long deep drink from his whisky glass. ‘Mum, Hattie retired about ten years ago, then sadly she died. You did send flowers, and you did go to the funeral, so that’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, darling. Sometimes I forget things. How silly.’
‘I’m going to finish this drink, then I’ll start your supper. Cheers! Here’s to summer.’
‘Cheers, darling.’
‘Cheers, old chap.’
There is silence as they drink and watch him. A blackbird sets up a squawking in the cherry tree, which is about to explode into blossom.
‘Naughty, naughty Eric cat,’ Martha murmurs, and Barnaby smiles and begins to relax.
His mother gets up and wanders round the room. ‘I’m rather hungry, darling. I’ll just go out to the kitchen and tell Hattie to do us all an omelette.’
Barnaby sighs, gives up and gets to his feet. ‘I’ve just told you, Mum, Hattie is no longer here. It’s just me tonight. You’d like an omelette?’
‘Why isn’t she here? I didn’t give her the day off. It’s too bad.’
Moving to the door, Barnaby hears his voice rising, although he is trying hard not to let it. ‘Hattie is dead, Mother. Look, I’ll put the television on for you. I think it’s the Antiques Roadshow. Sit and watch that with Dad, and I’ll be back in a minute with your supper.’
As he closes the door he hears his mother say, ‘I didn’t know Hattie was dead, darling. When did she die?’
‘Oh, ages ago, M., ages ago,’ his father says. ‘Think I might have another drink.’
Barnaby stares into the middle of the fridge, fighting an aching tiredness. He cannot see any eggs and an overpowering depression suddenly overtakes him. He hears the front door open, then the glass inner door shut with a bang that makes him wince.
‘Hi, Barnes, it’s me,’ Lucy calls out unnecessarily. He hears her making a run for the kitchen to see him alone before Martha hears her and dances out of the sitting room to see her beloved granddaughter
‘Help me, Lucy. What on earth can I give them for supper? The fridge seems empty.’
Lucy claps her hands over her mouth. ‘Oh, bugger, I forgot. I told Mrs Biddulph I would do the shopping. She will get things she likes and Gran and Grandpa hate.’
She opens the door of the freezer and pulls out fishfingers and chips with a flourish. ‘Here we are! Gran loves them.’
Barnaby looks doubtful. ‘She seems to live on them. I’m not sure your grandfather is so keen.’
‘Darling Barnes,’ Lucy says briskly, ‘they both ate a huge roast lunch. I keep telling you, honestly, they don’t need two cooked meals a day. You just make work for yourself.’
‘I know, bossyboots, but food is their one comfort and distraction. Look, there is some cheese at the back of the fridge; that will do for Fred.’
‘I’ll eat chips with Gran.’
Barnaby raises his eyebrows. ‘If I remember rightly, you too had a large Sunday lunch, or was I seeing things?’
Before Lucy can answer Martha flies in. ‘Lucy, Lucy, how lovely …’ She lifts her cheek up for her gangly granddaughter to kiss and Lucy hugs her.
‘Hi, Gran. I’m about to cook you fishfingers and chips. I’m going to pig out on the chips with you.’
‘Darling child, how lovely!’
Barnaby lays four trays out three times. Martha, longing to be helpful, promptly puts them away three times.
‘How can I help, darling?’ she keeps saying to Lucy. Lucy brings her alive in a way even I cannot do, Barnaby thinks, in a way the young spark the old with their energy and cheerfulness.
They have supper on their knees in the sitting room. Barnaby sits next to Fred and shares his cheese and biscuits.
‘Barnaby and Gramps are both going to dream their heads off, darling, whereas you and I are merely going to get porky,’ Lucy whispers to Martha.
From across the room Fred looks at his tiny wife and his tall, skinny granddaughter sitting beside each other on the sofa.
‘I am extremely concerned,’ he says drily, ‘that my antique sofa is going to give way under all that weight.’
He regards them so seriously from over his half-moon glasses that they all burst out laughing.
Glimpses, Barnaby thinks, small, joyous glimpses of people you love, swinging back.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a6996889-e190-5424-9be7-cd1eb3ba51a2)
A north-easterly wind blows in from the sea and hits the cottage head-on so that the small house shudders. The storm has gusted and rampaged around the coast for days, taking roofs and everything it can lift and hurling them around the gardens. It blows itself out in the first light of day and returns again at dusk. Trees bend and tear in the wind, their branches strewn across the road like broken limbs.
Lucy tosses and turns in the night to the mournful cry of curlews down on the estuary; wakes abruptly and lies anxious in the dark, feeling as if she is poised, waiting for some nebulous disaster that is edging her way.
She sits up, shivering. The church beyond the window looms out of the dark. The dawn sky is lightening to a faint pink above the gravestones which rise eerily up like small tors. She gets out of bed and pulls a pullover over her childlike pyjamas.
She misses the warmth of Abi jammed into her back. She goes downstairs to make some tea, switching on all the lights in the cottage. Carrying her tea back to bed she sits on the window seat in her bedroom, clutching the warm mug, listening to the wind begin to drop.
As a child she sat here so many times in the holidays, feeling relaxed and happy to be with her grandparents, listening to the church bells and the seabirds. Waiting for the first light when she could pull on shorts and T-shirt and run across the road, down the narrow path by the church to the beach.
When she was small, Fred and Martha still occasionally rented the cottage out, but when Fred retired he needed the spare room of the house for a study and they kept the cottage free for Barnaby or Anna and Lucy to stay in. If Lucy came alone she would sleep in Fred’s study. The room always smelt comfortingly of tobacco and leather, but the cottage was where she was happiest. It was like having her own den. She would walk with Anna or Barnaby across the garden to have breakfast with Martha and Fred at the round table in the conservatory surrounded by Martha’s geraniums.
Lucy and Tristan still often walk across the garden for breakfast, but it is Barnaby, not her grandparents, who cooks the bacon and makes the toast now.
Lucy suddenly longs for Tristan. Kosovo looms as foreign and unpredictable as another planet.
She jumps up. The only way to lift this mood will be to go out and walk. She pulls on jeans and two sweaters and makes her way downstairs again. Homer, who spends the nights with Lucy, opens one eye, but does not move. Lucy lets herself out, blowing across the road in the tail of the gale. She climbs the steps over the Cornish hedge into the silent and dark churchyard. She has never been afraid here; it is as familiar to her as Martha’s garden.
The sun is slow in rising and she is across the golf links and down on the beach before it emerges, a beautiful gilt curve, like the edge of a plate over the horizon. There is a high tide running and she sits on the rocks and watches the sun rise up, orange and gold over the harbour, glistening the surface of the water.
Lucy does not want to leave. This place, her grandparents and Barnaby have always been home. Now, suddenly and subtly over the past months, the responsibility has changed. The caring, the childlike dependence has shifted. Martha and Fred are slipping away from her into old age and the dread of one of them suddenly dying, of her not being here when it happens, feels unbearable. Lucy shivers despite her two sweaters. This anxiety is not just about her grandparents. It is about Tristan too. And the teaching job. And living in London on her own.
Anna will be in London, but Lucy is certainly not going to let her mother know she is nervous and afraid of failing. Anna would tell her she has spent too long in Cornwall, and this is what happens when you drop out, even for a short time.
She can hear her mother’s voice and she grins suddenly, thinking of Tristan, who would say the same thing but in a different way.
‘You’re just in a panic because you got a bloody good job when you didn’t expect to, Lu. Come on, you didn’t do languages to wait on tables, did you?’
Lucy sighs and jumps off the rocks onto the sand. She is not accustomed to being melancholy and she turns slowly for home. Now she is up and wide awake she might as well sort out her things. She has accumulated so much crap. She will have to go up into the attic and see if there is any room to store all the childhood stuff she cannot bear to throw away.
Lucy climbs the ladder up to the attic and pushes open the hatch. She feels vaguely guilty, as if she is about to trespass. She should really have asked Barnaby before she came up here.
Using her torch Lucy finds the light switch on her left, and the dim bulb swings slightly, catching the dust. There is plenty of room up here. Most of the floor has been professionally boarded and Lucy wonders why her grandfather has always had a thing about people coming up here and falling through the ceiling.
The room smells of mice and dust and a world that no longer exists. There is an old gilt mirror, mottled, the frame rotting. Heavy, old-fashioned golf clubs. A box of little pewter mugs, relics of school cricket matches. A box of books. A huge grim picture of a fast-running grey sea. A faded, frayed hat with paper flowers. Leather suitcases neatly stacked one on top of another. Rolled carpets, a broken wicker chair, and a disintegrating box of crockery and vases.
Lucy swings the torch round in an arc and sees a hardboard partition to the left of the hatch opening. Big enough to house a water tank, it has been eaten by mice and is beginning to disintegrate. There is a crude door into it with a small latch.
She heaves herself over the ledge of the open hatch and crawls over to the door. She pulls it cautiously and it falls away, completely rotten round the hinges. Kneeling upright she drags it carefully away from the partition and pushes it aside. Shining her torch inside the darkness she sees an old school trunk. Nothing else. No water tank, no hidden electric wires or pipes.
Moving inside the hidden room, Lucy sees that over the years the trunk lid, with her grandfather’s initials on the top, has warped, and documents have slid to the floor below. A rusty padlock lies broken in the lock. Lucy pulls it out and opens the lid. Mice have been in and made nests; there are droppings and small mounds of eaten paper. On the top lie cardboard files of deeds and medical journals; letters in bundles, some stored in plastic files.
Lucy shines the torch downwards into the trunk and pokes about with her free hand. Why has Grandpa made a room to hide this trunk? Under her fingers Lucy suddenly sees a faded pink box nestling under letters and old documents, pushed carefully to the bottom of the trunk, underneath diaries and ancient ledgers.
She leans over and moves the bundles of letters carefully so that she can pull the box out and she places it on the floor beside her. The box is tied with colourless ribbon and the writing on the lid is faded and in Polish. Lucy’s fingers hover over it.
Gran’s box? Her heart is thumping. In that small second of hesitation Lucy’s intuition tells her she should stop and put the box back in its hiding place, yet she is already sliding off the ribbon and lifting the lid.
Letters. Browning letters in a foreign hand. A large envelope with typewritten German: Social Welfare Department of the Municipal Administration of Warsaw. It is not sealed. Lucy opens a creased and faded piece of paper within a small cardboard folder like an identity card.
The document is torn and flimsy, almost in pieces. This writing too is in German. It seems to be some sort of crude birth certificate: ‘Anna Esther … Born 8 February 1941, Warsaw, Poland.’ The surname is indecipherable, as if it has been rubbed out.
‘Mother. Marta Esther …’ ‘Oweska’ has been added later, obliterating the name underneath. ‘Father …’ The paper is watermarked and conveniently torn.
All that is left on the card in which the paper is folded is some sort of German official stamp and the date, 1943. The rest is illegible. What does it mean? Her mother was born in London in 1945. Gran and Grandpa have told her so. This piece of paper would make Anna four years older than she is. It does not make sense, and why have the surnames been rubbed out?
Lucy shivers. With shaking fingers, she pushes the documents away from her, back into the box. She does not want to know. She replaces the lid and puts them all back into the top of the trunk. Clumsily she moves away backwards, anxious to be out of the attic. There is nothing she can do about the rotten door.
She closes the hatch with a bang, pushes the ladder back to the ceiling and, blanking from her mind all possible implications, she runs across the garden to go and dress Martha before she starts her breakfast shift at the hotel.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_73331aaf-7f59-5567-8601-fa5c52898f5c)
Coming out of court Anna congratulates herself. She was unsure she could win this case, but she was assisted by an overconfident Junior Counsel for the Prosecution who had not done his homework.
She stands for a moment, a tall figure in navy suit, blinking in the early evening sun. Her fair hair blows away from a face with high cheekbones and startling blue eyes. People glance at her as they pass, turn for another look, as if she might be someone they should know.
She looks at her watch: it is rush hour, too late to walk back to chambers and get involved with post mortems. She hails a taxi, without any difficulty, much to the annoyance of two business men, and climbs in. She will make her way to the Old Vic. If she is early she can have a drink while she waits for Rudi.
As she sits in the early evening traffic, Anna’s mind returns to the man she has just defended. His solicitor rang her at her chambers. He was not from the usual firm who instructed Anna, but he told her he had a client who had insisted he contacted Anna, as he had been told she was the best QC he could have to defend him.
The solicitor had apologised, knowing Anna’s list would be full, but he had promised his client that he would approach her. Anna was immediately interested when he mentioned the name of the firm involved in the fraud case. The solicitor also came from a prestigious law firm it would be useful for Anna to have instruct her in the future. She arranged for a conference with Counsel for the one hour she had left that week.
The client had come to her chambers on his own as his solicitor was in court. He had thanked her for seeing him and was visibly distressed.
‘I have nothing to lose by asking you to help me.’ He held out an envelope to Anna with shaking hands. ‘Would this be enough to retain you?’
Anna was amused, but she also admired his courage and determination in wanting her to defend him. She was aware she had a rather alarming reputation. She went over the case with him, then asked her long-suffering clerk to juggle her list so she could take on the case. Something in the man’s blind faith in her had made her sad. She rang the man’s solicitor and asked him to look into legal aid.
The Prosecution Counsel tried to prove that the defendant’s ignorance of the deception going on within his own firm was pure fabrication, a callous and calculated fraud. Anna’s defence rested on the fact that he was totally ingenuous and had had a steadfast but misplaced trust in the honesty of his business partner.
That fraud, operated on the vast scale it had been, would have been beyond him. She was forced to make him seem stupid in court, but it was part of her job. He’d paid dearly for blind trust. She worked for a fraction of her normal fee and, against all the odds, she won.
She takes her mobile phone from her bag and telephones Alice, her clerk. They chat for a moment about the case, then Anna asks her to return her client’s savings minus a derisory amount for her fee, and to tell him that legal aid had covered the costs. That small, rather pathetic man, without an ounce of malice or bitterness, has lost his wife, his house and every penny he possessed.
Before she rings off, she checks on her morning mail and her appointments for the following day. She has an unusual meeting in the afternoon with the CPS, who want her advice on the possibility of prosecuting an old Nazi living on a housing estate in Dorset.
Anna stretches tiredly, feeling herself coming down from the high she always gets when she wins a case. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the flash of a cherry tree about to explode into blossom and is reminded suddenly of Martha’s garden. She wants to take Rudi down to Cornwall so he can see it in the spring. Like a lot of Germans he has romantic notions of the west coast.
Barnaby seems to be making rather a meal of looking after Martha and Fred. After all he does have outside help, and he has Lucy. Cornwall is too far away for Anna to see Martha and Fred as much as she would like. Holidays have to be planned like a military campaign.
Not wanting to dwell on her parents’ senility, Anna hastily picks up her mobile phone again to speak to Rudi. His secretary tells her he has just left for the theatre. Anna leans back in the slow moving taxi and closes her eyes.
She still has trouble believing her luck in her late and happy marriage. Rudi, a financial consultant for a Swiss bank, works long hours himself, so accepts her workload and ambition as perfectly normal.
As a child, Anna felt Martha and Fred’s disapproval if she was too competitive. She had learnt that to be openly ambitious at home was considered pushy. Not very nice. It was not that her parents ever articulated this sentiment, it was something she instinctively knew.
In the long nights away at boarding school she would sometimes day-dream she had been adopted or sent home with the wrong family at birth. She would lie imagining Fred’s wealthy, sophisticated family somewhere out there in the dark, wilds of Yorkshire, beyond the windows, longing to meet her, so alienated did she so often feel in the holidays, with Martha and Fred and saintly little Barnaby.
Her parents bent over backwards to appease her, and she had felt furious with them for being so patient, so bloody understanding. She felt her power, the sheer force of her own personality at a very young age.
She would get a surge of satisfaction in knowing Martha and Fred would do almost anything to pacify her, keep her sweet, because the alternative would be a pervading atmosphere that upset the whole household.
Yet imposing her will on her parents brought her a sharp loneliness and sense of loss. All through her childhood she had looked for something to anchor her to Martha and Fred, to the place where she lived.
Later, as a teenager, her fantasy changed and she would search in her mind now for a figure who would immediately recognise that she was far cleverer than these very average parents living in their insular, West Country world.
This person – usually in her daydreams a young and handsome man – would whisk her away from total obscurity in the country to her rightful position, centre stage. Like the place she effortlessly occupied all her school life.
Yet, something in her ached for the place Barnaby held in her parents’ hearts. Martha and Fred told her continually how proud they were of her, but Anna was sure they wished her kinder, gentler, other than she was. They seemed as puzzled at the way she had turned out, as she herself was.
Coming home from school in the holidays, Anna would immediately see Barnaby and be consumed by a frightening rage of jealousy of this placid baby, this good small boy, who had had her parents’ undivided attention while she had been away.
She would spend the holidays slyly making him cry. After he too left home for boarding school and she started university she still verbally bullied him. Once he was steeped in the timeless and barbaric ways of public school, he never told, never blabbed. There was something wet but intransigent in Barnaby that still irritated her to death.
As the taxi filters out of the traffic, Anna sees Rudi waiting for her outside the theatre. He waves, his face lighting up when he sees her. His eyes dwelling on her face. He moves forward to pay the taxi as she gets out. She feels the familiar surge of excitement and pleasure in him.
They met at a conference in Zurich. After a seminar she had given she overheard him muttering appreciative and complimentary remarks about her to a colleague, not realising she was fluent in German and understood every word.
Rudi had told her that he had been so bowled over by that beautiful English barrister, it had been like walking into a door. She was giving a series of lectures to clever, noisy delegates that weekend and it had been a challenge to keep them engrossed and silent.
They strolled through the parks of the city together. They went to the opera, talked of their failed marriages, their work and themselves. For the whole of that weekend Anna spoke only German and it was a strangely liberating feeling. She felt comfortable in her skin, in the country, and with Rudi. It had been like waking from a long, lonely sleep. That weekend was also the beginning of a successful international lecture she was establishing as a consultant. Rudi was seconded to the Swiss Bank in London the following year and he took a lease on a flat in Chiswick. His sons flew out regularly for holidays. They were adolescent and enjoyed London and all it had to offer, so they were polite to Anna. She found them much easier to handle than Lucy, who had always been an enigma.
Anna and Rudi married a year later, when their respective children had got used to the idea. Lucy begged to leave her Dorset boarding school and go down to live with Barnaby and her grandparents. She wanted to take her A levels at a sixth-form college.
After talking to her headmistress, Anna eventually agreed. Both she and Rudi tried to persuade Lucy to stay in London, believing that the standard of teaching would be higher, but Lucy was adamant. She did not want to live in the flat with Rudi, Anna, and Rudi’s visiting children.
Anna was not surprised. Anything or anybody Anna liked, Lucy would dislike on principle. However, the flat was too small for three teenage children, and the thought of having Rudi to herself, except for his sons’ visits, had been a huge relief. Lucy got surprisingly good A levels. She was as happy with Barnaby, Martha and Fred as Anna felt distanced and irritated by them.
Anna feels a sudden relief that Lucy is now adult. Life is so much easier. As Rudi bends to kiss her, she thinks how lucky she is. Rudi, having fulfilled most of his own ambitions, opted to forgo promotion and coast happily towards retirement in London to be with her. Anna knows she is happier than she has ever been.
Anna shakes hands with Rudi’s Swiss guests and they make their way to the bar. Rudi’s hand hovers courteously at the small of her back. It reminds Anna of the way Fred walked beside Martha, and she is touched. Somehow, it makes her feel secure, for Fred has been as constant to Martha as the changing seasons.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_7db7e55d-3341-5878-b703-3f0d3501c662)
Evensong is over and Lucy is helping Barnaby put Martha to bed. Fred is perfectly capable of managing himself, but he cannot manage Martha any more and it upsets him. Her grandparents have single beds now, near enough to touch, to hold hands in the night, but not to disturb each other’s sleep.
Martha always goes to bed first and Lucy will sit and hold her hands, check her hot-water bottle, give her her pills, talk to her and marvel at her still-beautiful face. Martha has always worn pretty linen nightdresses, and somehow, once she is in bed she relaxes, her face loses its anxious look and smoothes into a tiny unlined child’s face. Suddenly coherent, she will tell Lucy long rambling tales of building this house, of starting the garden from scratch. Of meeting Fred in London. Of love at first sight.
Fred will appear out of the bathroom, bathed and immaculate in pyjamas and dressing gown, and say politely but firmly to Lucy, ‘Good night, child.’
It is her signal to leave them. She will bend and kiss her grandmother, who twines her thin arms round Lucy’s neck. ‘Oh, my darling, how I love you!’
‘I love you too, Gran. Sleep well. Good night.’
She bends to her stooped grandfather. ‘Good night, Gramps. God bless.’
‘God bless, child.’
Every night it is the same. Barnaby comes then to tuck them in, to stand at the end of their beds, to say a good night prayer.
‘Good night, darling Barnaby,’ his mother whispers, eyes closed, half asleep.
‘Good night, Mum.’
‘Good night, old chap,’ his father says.
‘Good night, Dad. Sleep well.’
The security of ritual. Barnaby shuts the bedroom door and leans against it. ‘Sans everything,’ he breathes. Fred will fall into a deep and heavy sleep, but Martha could get up a dozen times and wander about during the evening.
Lucy is pouring them both a glass of wine and they sit together in silence, drinking. All week she has wanted to ask Barnaby about the box she found in the attic. She has never had secrets from him, but she looks at his drained and exhausted face and is silent.
After a while she says, ‘Barnes, you can’t go on like this. Sundays are hell for you. You need weekend carers now, not just old Mrs B. for a few hours. You are going to need round-the-clock help soon.’
She hesitates, then says miserably, ‘You know that interview I went up to London for, teaching foreign students? Well, I got the job.’
‘Lucy, that’s marvellous.’ Barnaby leaps up and kisses her. ‘You clever girl. I’m so pleased for you. Just think, you’ll be able to use your degree and earn some decent money.’
‘Well, the pay is not brilliant, but the best thing about it is that I can go and teach in Italy for three months. But how are you going to cope on your own? It’s going to get worse with Gran.’ She gets up and pours more wine into Barnaby’s glass.
‘I don’t start the job for a couple of months, but Tristan wants me to spend his leave with him before he goes. It means I would have to leave quite soon …’
‘Lucy,’ Barnaby says firmly, ‘how I manage is not your responsibility. You’ve got your own life to lead.’ He is watching her closely. He suspects Lucy is anxious about leaving Cornwall and the security of this household. ‘It will be fun for you to live in London for a while; it doesn’t have to be for ever. It will be a great adventure and much easier for you and Tristan to be together when he gets back from Kosovo. I’ll miss you enormously, you know that, Lu. You’ve been wonderful these last few months, but there is a world out there waiting for you.’
Lucy bursts into tears. ‘I don’t think I should go. I should be here, near my family. I don’t think you dare admit you need more help with Gran and Gramps. I feel sick just thinking of leaving you.’
Barnaby is startled because this is so unlike Lucy. ‘Then I’ve been very wrong and relied on you too much. I’d feel mortified if you thought you couldn’t get on with your own life, Lu, or that you might be influenced by my needs or those of Martha and Fred. I understand how you feel about Cornwall, but there’s always going to be a home for you here. You have your whole life ahead of you with a man you love, who thinks the light shines out of your bottom.’
Lucy gives a watery grin, then giggles. ‘True. But, Barnes, will you please, please think about getting live-in help? It doesn’t have to be through the agency. There must be retired nurses, people like that. You could move into the cottage, have a bit of space and peace. You need it.’
‘Lucy, round-the-clock care is very expensive. The only way we could begin to afford it would be to rent out the cottage again. Don’t forget the cottage does not just belong to me; Anna and I share it.’
‘Well, Mother will bloody well have to help financially. It’s about time she took some responsibility. Barnaby, you must have some life, somewhere to shut yourself away. You’ll go mad with carers here all the time –’
‘Lucy,’ Barnaby interrupts, ‘I am quite capable of looking after myself. Just think what you want to do, what will make you happy, and do it.’
The phone goes suddenly, making them both jump. Barnaby’s heart sinks; he knows who it will be.
‘That will be Anna,’ Lucy says, ‘with a guilty Sunday duty call. Don’t let her get to you, Barnes.’
But Barnaby is already tense, and listening to Anna’s firm, confident voice puts him more on edge. She is about to take a short break and would like to come down with Rudi to see Martha and Fred. She presumes it will be all right if they stay in the house as she would rather not inflict the cottage and Lucy’s lack of hygiene on Rudi.
Barnaby swallows his annoyance. ‘Anna, it’s not all right, I’m afraid. The carers arrive early. There is chaos in the mornings with only one bathroom. You’ll also find Martha and Fred very confused, especially with anyone they don’t know. I’m sorry, but it’s not fair on the carers, and I couldn’t cope with two extra people in the house either. Could you come down on your own this time and stay at the cottage? It’s some time since you last saw Martha and Fred and I’m afraid you will notice a difference.’
Anna is annoyed and snaps back at him, ‘You are evidently finding it difficult to cope, Barnaby. You should have let me know. It’s obviously time we thought about a home. We’d better talk about it when I come down.’
Barnaby explodes. ‘We most certainly will not! I can’t believe you are even suggesting it, Anna. Come down and see for yourself before you start making comments like that. I’ll get Lucy to tidy the cottage before you arrive.’
He waves at Lucy to be quiet. She is jumping up and down and punching the air, sticking her thumbs up to the sky.
‘Of course I haven’t any objection to you coming down with Rudi …’ Barnaby takes a deep breath. ‘It’s just that if you come down on your own, you could spend a little time with Martha and Fred, Anna. Have a holiday with Rudi another time. Fred, especially, will appreciate you coming. Please think about it and let me know. Good night.’
Barnaby finds he is trembling with weariness and suppressed rage as he replaces the receiver. Anna continues to be one of the most self-centred people he has ever come across.
Lucy is still hopping up and down. ‘She is such a totally selfish human being,’ she echoes. ‘Don’t tell me it’s wrong to dislike my own mother sometimes, Barnes. She makes me furious. Does she ever ask you how you are? Does she, hell! Thank God you stood your ground. She’s got such a bloody cheek. Sorry, I’m knackered … Got to go to bed …’ Lucy wilts, suddenly exhausted.
Barnaby kisses her good night. ‘Sleep well,’ he says drily. ‘Having a vicar as an uncle has done nothing to improve your language.’
He watches her walk across the damp grass and disappear through the little gate to the cottage. How could Anna have produced this child he loves so dearly?
The curlews down on the estuary warble mournfully into the darkness. Startling himself, Barnaby admits suddenly that he too can actively dislike his sister. Not only does he wish her in outer Mongolia, but he realises he has always felt like this.
Martha’s memories, so long suppressed and left behind, are beginning to surface slowly and slyly, like bubbles. Time for Martha has become meaningless. Past and present merge and blur. Voices and faces pass like shadows across her mind, throwing up long-forgotten lives. Those lives seem so real to Martha, so near, as if she can open a door and move into the rooms of her past life once more. Those far-gone lives of her childhood draw her back with long tentacle arms, to enfold her in their sense of nearness.
She reaches out to touch the fleeting sleeve of a dress, the rough tweed of a jacket. She smells fresh bread in the oven. She sees faces she loves bending to her, smiling, chiding her wildness. With longing, she lifts her head to feel their breath upon her cheek, turns to catch the sound of faint laughter and the warmth of a hand.
She listens to the wind rattling the long windows so that the sound echoes through the house, shutting doors with a sudden click, moving the curtains outwards, lifting the rug in little tremors, like ghostly footsteps through the hall.
Mama and Papa are having tea with the German doctor and his wife. Marta and Mama and Papa have travelled from Łódź all the way to Warsaw by train to see him. Marta has been sent into the garden with the doctor’s small boy and the nursemaid. The nursemaid is not watching them, she is flirting with the gardener.
Marta stares at the German boy with fascination. He has the whitest blond hair, very blue eyes and white, white teeth. He is wearing lederhosen and a pale shirt, and his bare arms and legs are brown and smooth as apples. He stares back at Marta disdainfully. He does not like to be sent outside to play with a girl.
Marta stands on the terrace steps, wary and a little frightened, like a small rabbit ready for flight. The boy puts his hands on his hips and, coming closer, looks down at her.
‘How old are you?’ he asks.
‘I am five,’ Marta says, trying to make herself tall.
The boy is pleased. ‘Well, I am older, I am eight. Mutti says I am going to be much taller than my father.’ There is a silence. Then he says in a bored voice, ‘Come, I am going to go and see the horses.’
He turns and marches away towards the stables. Marta follows him. She is afraid of horses, but she is not going to say so.
The horses are standing looking out of their stalls, shaking their great heads against the flies. They are groomed to a shiny perfection, their manes shimmer as they toss their heads.
The boy goes to a big stallion. ‘This is Tylicz, My favourite horse. When I am older I will ride him, but at the moment he is too big and strong.’ He takes an apple out of his pocket and turns to Marta. ‘Here, you may feed him if you like. Give this to Tylicz.’
He is watching her closely and he smiles suddenly. She is growing pale at the thought of approaching that huge mouth. He knows, he knows I am afraid, Marta thinks.
The boy places the apple in her hand and leads her towards Tylicz. Desperately, she tries to hang back, but the boy pulls her sharply forward, tells her there is nothing to be afraid of and lifts her clumsily towards the great head of the horse. Marta screams as his long yellow teeth reach out towards her. She drops the apple and jerks away. The boy loses his balance and lets Marta fall onto the hard stable floor.
He bursts out laughing; he can see she is not hurt and she looks so funny. Marta will not cry. She is angry. She picks herself off the floor, bends and takes the fallen apple, wipes it on the hem of her dress and breaks it into pieces with her teeth. She has remembered something Mama told her and she arranges the pieces on the flat of her hand.
She walks over to Tylicz and, trembling, stands on tiptoe and raises her hand up, up, towards the horse, keeping very still and balancing herself on the door of the stall with her other hand.
Tylicz looks down at her almost as if he is smiling and very slowly and gently he bends over the stable door, craning his neck down to her hand. He can only just reach the apple, only just brush her hand with his whiskery mouth. He tickles her open palm, his mouth velvety, as he scoops the apple up, and Marta laughs as he crunches it noisily.
She cannot stop laughing for the relief of not being bitten and the laughter lights up her face and fills her whole being. She is not afraid of this boy. She is not afraid of the horse.
When she turns round the boy is laughing too, and the look in his eyes is no longer scornful. Marta hears Mama calling and they turn together and run across the green lawn, back towards the house. Marta’s head is held high and her back is stiff with triumph.
The boy’s mother is standing with Mama outside the French windows. She reaches down and ruffles the thick blond hair of the boy. She is pretty, Marta thinks, and golden, but she does not smile. Next to her, Mama looks tiny and far more beautiful, with her shiny dark hair and smiling brown eyes.
The German doctor comes out into the garden with Papa, and bends to Marta. ‘Your father and I are old friends, Marta. We studied together. I hope you and my son will be friends also, because your papa has agreed to come and work with me. He is going to build you a house on that land over there that backs on to the forest. Then, you see, he can help me run my clinic.’
Behind the tall doctor, Marta is watching the boy. He is standing with his hands on his hips, feet apart, staring at her with those pale, intense, turquoise eyes. His mother reaches down and whispers something to him. He pulls away embarrassed, shrugs off her hand, and in a little lightning movement kicks out at a garden chair, which collapses with a clatter on top of a little dog, who gives a great yelp and dashes away.
The boy jumps. Marta does not think he knew the dog was there, but she is not sure. It is time to go. Her father takes her hand. She turns and looks over her shoulder. The boy is standing with his blond hair blowing in the wind, still watching her. He seems suddenly alone and strangely beautiful. Exciting. Marta shivers.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_c4c5ba85-3f79-5dfb-83f1-534444428d4e)
Lucy wakes early and pulls on a T-shirt and track-suit bottoms.
‘Sorry,’ she says to Homer, as she lets him out into the garden for a pee. ‘I’ll take you out later, but you can’t keep up with me when I’m running.’
Homer looks martyred and slinks back to his bed.
‘Come on, don’t be a drama queen.’ Lucy lifts his heavy old head and plants a kiss on it, but the dog is not to be mollified.
Lucy opens the front door and runs past the church and down the path towards the beach. The air feels warmer, expectant. Birds scuttle about in the undergrowth, flying low and gathering feathers and fluff, grass and twigs. She runs down the steps and jumps onto the sand. The tide has turned and she can just get round the point.
Lucy pushes herself, running steadily, jumping the waves that slide in and pool round her feet. She can feel herself beginning to relax. The beach is deserted, stretching long and colourless in early morning light.
Happiness flares suddenly, a joy in being alive. Lucy increases her speed, her hair flapping rhythmically as she gets into her stride. The lighter mornings always make her wake earlier, but it is not daylight that disturbs her sleep.
She has covered a great length of the beach fast; now she slows down as she feels her legs tiring, measuring the point she wants to reach. She pushes the thought of that small odd birth certificate firmly out of her mind. She will think of Tristan instead. She heads up the beach and collapses near the rocks, sweating and panting. In the distance fishing boats are coming out of the harbour, battling over the bar with the wind against them.
Lucy considers what it will be like to live away from the sea again – not just in London, but wherever it is that Tristan could be posted after Kosovo. She is unsure she can live for too long away from the coast. Worse, if they marry, what if he has another single posting and she is left on her own in some army quarter?
She squints up at the sky. She can hear skylarks in the dunes behind her. She and Tristan have never really discussed marriage; it is an understood thing. Tristan may be a lapsed Catholic, but his parents certainly are not.
Tristan and Lucy are firmly given separate bedrooms when they stay, despite his mother being quite aware that they sleep together. It is not done primly or critically and Tristan’s mother had gently explained that she could not have double standards. Laura, Tristan’s youngest sister, still lives at home and there was no way they could countenance her bringing a boy home and sleeping with him.
Lucy grins. Separate bedrooms were funny. Tristan, bringing her tea in the mornings, borrowed his father’s silk dressing gown and cravat, inked a curly moustache with her eye liner and did appalling Noël Coward impersonations, which sounded more like David Suchet playing Poirot.
Lucy wraps her arms round herself as she cools.
‘Do I end up with a baby every year and a waist the size of a block of flats?’ she asked him.
‘Certainly you do,’ Tristan replied. ‘I have a weakness for waistless women.’ Then, hastily, in case she took fright, ‘Has my mother got fifteen children? Of course not. We will just use the rhythm method. Coitus interruptus.’ Seeing her face, he burst out laughing. ‘Idiot! I’m teasing.’ He picked her up and twirled her round. ‘Anyway, you might throw me over for a fisherman and settle for ever in the place you love most, at the end of the world.’
He was smiling, but his eyes were serious. Tris. She cannot imagine life without him. All this, all she has here, would mean so much less if he was not there.
She gets up and stretches, jumps up and down, loosening her limbs. She starts to run back, slower this time. The outgoing tide has left a line of foamy scum on the wet sand.
Tristan has made her grow up. He does not always say what she wants to hear, but she listens, especially about Anna. Her heart gives that anxious lurch again. Like the moment you wake and know something is wrong. She closes her eyes tight, banishing unease.
Anna sent her a little note in a card, congratulating Lucy on getting the teaching job. It is not the sort of thing Anna usually does. Lucy suspects that Alice, Anna’s clerk, bought it, or Rudi. After the congratulations, Anna wrote, ‘About time you rejoined the civilised world. I think you will find it stimulating. Love, Mum.’
Lucy tossed the card aside crossly, but when she told Tristan, he said carefully, ‘I think you are a bit hard on Anna, Lu. She sent you a card because she was proud of you. It doesn’t matter who bought it.’
‘I’m not hard on her! Anna can never do or say anything that does not have a hidden barb. Not to me, anyway.’
‘Is it possible that she cannot do or say anything that you don’t feel defensive about?’
Lucy was stung. ‘You don’t understand. If I am defensive, it is because all my life she has been critical –’
‘Lu, this is a circular conversation. We are not going to have an argument about the dragon in a wig. You’re right, I don’t know what it feels like to be her daughter. I don’t know what it feels like to have had a working or ambitious mother. I think you are just very different people and it’s a shame you don’t get on. I am sure she is as proud of you under her fiery nostrils as you must be of her.’
Lucy reaches the steps and stops again, the sweat pouring down her face. The bloody thing is she is proud of Anna. She remembers her coming to her school to give a talk on careers, just after Lucy had taken her GCSEs. Anna arrived looking stunning, immaculate. When she started talking you could have heard a pin drop in the hall. Lucy was fascinated. It was like watching someone she did not know. Anna the barrister in full stimulating flow, encouraging debate, challenging assumptions. Anna alive, doing what she was best at. For two hours she had forty girls and thirty boys from a neighbouring school riveted.
Lucy pulls herself up the steps, panting. It was the same day that she told Lucy she was going to marry the German banker. In bed that night in the silent dormitory, Lucy thought: that is why she looked so beautiful, why she was so sparkling. Anna is in love.
Lucy had already decided she wanted to leave school and take her A levels at a sixth-form college. There was no way she was going to go back and stay in a small flat with Anna and her new husband. The thought was gross.
Barnaby was back from Northern Ireland and was staying in the cottage on leave. Lucy rang him and asked if she could go down and live in the cottage and take her A levels in Cornwall.
Barnaby thought she was too young to live in the cottage on her own, and her grandparents were too old to have a seventeen-year-old living with them permanently. Lucy argued that she had been staying in the cottage every holiday of her life and that it was ten steps to Fred and Martha’s front door.
Both her grandparents thought it a wonderful idea. It was the first time Lucy saw Barnaby sad. He was leaving the army and seemed distracted. He took off on his own, went travelling. Lucy thought maybe he wanted to stop being a priest.
When Lucy was about to leave for university he came home. He had applied for a parish in Cornwall to be near Martha and Fred. Martha was not very well, but no one knew what it was then.
Lucy reaches the cottage and bumps into Barnaby coming out of the gate. He bursts out laughing when he sees her. ‘Oh my goodness, look at the state of you! You haven’t got any fat to lose, for heaven’s sake. I came over because Homer was howling his head off.’
‘Homer is a spoilt brat,’ Lucy says, looking sternly down at the dog.
‘Of course he is, he has lived with your grandparents all his life. He only transferred his affections to you because you go for longer walks and do not ration his biscuits. Are you coming over for breakfast or are you working?’
‘I am coming over. Is Gran up? Are you cooking bacon and eggs?’
‘Your gran is having breakfast in bed as usual and I am not cooking bacon and eggs. The logic of you running and then eating a cooked breakfast escapes me.’
‘That is because you are a man,’ Lucy says sweetly. ‘I am on a twelve-to-three today and I need sustenance to get me through.’
‘You might get a boiled egg. Spoilt brat,’ Barnaby says, turning and ducking through the garden gate, trailed by Homer. Lucy grins and goes to ring Tristan.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_0ebef0d3-11e0-5cd8-8e9e-abcd44fa93db)
The first thing Anna hears as she opens the front door is Maria Callas. ‘Suicidio! In Questi fieri momenti.’ She stands listening, leaning against the door. Evening sun catches the coloured panes and flickers across the hall. She can smell the smoke from one of the small cigars Rudi smokes.
The moment is so perfect, Anna feels reluctant to break it. She goes up the stairs slowly. It has been an especially good day and she is home early. Her flat consists of two floors. The room off the hall at the front of the house she uses as a study or third bedroom. Adjoining it is a tiny breakfast room with a gas ring and small sink. It has French windows on to a tiny terrace garden, which she and Rudi use in summer. On the first floor there is a drawing room, two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen.
Anna loves this flat. It contains everything she needs. She has lived here a long time and spent a lot of money, but it is now worth four times what she paid.
She pushes the drawing-room door open quietly and watches Rudi for a moment. He is sitting in the leather swivel chair, half turned to the window. The Times is spread over his knees but he is not reading. His head lies back against the chair and his eyes are closed as he listens to the music.
Anna stands quite still looking at him. The way his hair, grey-white, grows just over his ears. The way his face seems always tanned. The way the long fingers of his right hand hang over the arm of the chair. His mouth firm, with tiny vertical lines.
There is something sensual and intimate in watching someone with their guard down, watching the face of someone you love when they think they are alone. Her stomach knots with the strength of this love. It bites suddenly at her being, unnerves her so much she puts her arm out to the wall to steady herself.
The shadow of her arm makes Rudi turn, swing round in his chair, startled. He just catches the expression on her face before it changes into a smile. He holds her eyes and his own heart leaps. There is a depth to Anna he will never be able to penetrate. Yet that fleeting, powerful look that he caught on her face tells him everything he needs to know. She loves him with a passion that renders her vulnerable. Someone once betrayed her.
The moment passes. He smiles and opens his arms, gets up out of the chair. ‘Anna, how wonderful! Unexpected. You are home early!’
Anna laughs. ‘It’s a miracle!’
They stand holding each other. The raw moment of exchange hovers between them, still there in the gentleness of their arms and hands resting on each other’s back as the voice of Maria Callas flows round them.
‘I thought,’ Anna says, leaning back to see his face, ‘that I would like to take you out to dinner. I booked a table at that new Italian place, because I thought we could walk, it’s such a lovely evening.’
Rudi breaks away to turn the music down. ‘Are we celebrating anything other than the fact you are home early, my darling Anna?’
‘Well, I have just been told my name has been put forward again as a circuit judge.’
‘Anna! How wonderful. This is what you want? Does it mean more work? Less work?’
‘Different work. It means travelling, but it would be promotion. I would not have the huge casework I have now.’ She smiles and picks her bag up. ‘But I have refused before, and I think I will refuse again, I am addicted to the fight on the floor. It is just gratifying to be asked!’
They walk into the kitchen and Rudi gets a bottle of wine from the refrigerator.
‘I start on the Piper case tomorrow – you know, the pharmaceutical negligence case, I was telling you about? It is going to be a marathon. So tonight, I thought it could be you and me celebrating having a whole long evening together on our own.’
Rudi moves towards her, tucks a tiny piece of her hair behind her ear.
‘Have we time for a long leisurely shower before we eat, do you think?’
‘I think,’ Anna says softly, ‘we definitely have time.’
The silence of night swoops, closes and traps Anna in darkness. She can hear the distant, haunting echo of weeping. The landscape is bleak and stark – no buildings, only stooped moving figures silhouetted against fires that flare out into the blackness.
Hands hold her too tight, cover her nose and mouth so she cannot breathe. She wakes with a jolt and lies, heart pumping, as if a cold hand has suddenly shaken her.
The exposed shoulder of Rudi sleeping beside her is clammily cold at three in the morning. Anna, brushing against him, shivers. The window on her right shows a cold, clear night full of distant fading stars and the blurred shape of rooftops and willow tree.
She cannot remember what woke her, only that the memory of it is disturbing. She goes over next week’s court case to see if there is something she has missed. She thinks about her appointments for the rest of the week and the lecture she is giving in Berlin on Friday, but there is nothing she can find to make her anxious or sleepless.
Martha comes into her mind; this slow, creeping senility of her parents. Has she just dreamt of them? Anna does not think so, but there is a growing problem down in Cornwall that she knows she is avoiding confronting. Round-the-clock care is available, but expensive. Presumably that is why Barnaby seems determined to shoulder most of the care.
Anna sighs. She hopes that Martha and Fred will not outlast their money. Fred has always worried about money and if he were forced to sell the house it would break his heart. There is going to be no easy answer. At least she tries to be practical about her parents’ welfare – unlike Barnaby, who is just sentimental. He is too close to Martha and Fred. It is not healthy. He should be married, have children, be living in the plain but easy-to-run modern vicarage in his other parish. He should have his own life, a separate life, from his parents.
Anna feels a sudden pang of pity. If that little nurse he had been engaged to had not been blown up in Northern Ireland, Barnaby might be living his own life by now.
Her parents have always been poor. She hated this fact as a child and it has made her careful with her money. Fred always made it clear to Anna that he would have no money to leave her and Barnaby, just the house, the cottage and the plot of land that Martha made into part of her garden.
Anna and Barnaby grew up knowing that there had been a terrible disagreement between Fred and his parents after the war. They remained steadfast in their refusal to speak to Fred or acknowledge his family.
‘But why?’ Anna asked her father. ‘Why don’t they want to see us?’
‘It is me they do not wish to see, not you, darling,’ Fred said.
Martha, across the room, put down her sewing and said quietly, ‘That is not quite true.’ She looked at Anna. ‘It is me that they do not wish to see or acknowledge.’
Fred turned and smiled at Martha with such love in his eyes that Anna said quickly, loudly, ‘Because you are Polish?’
‘Because I am Jewish as well as being foreign, darlink.’
Anna saw the hurt in her father’s eyes and her heart hardened. She would not care about grandparents who made her parents sad. All the same, it was the stuff of fantasies. And Anna did fantasise.
The uncle whom Barnaby had been named after was also his godfather. He had come to Barnaby’s christening and he and Fred remained close. He used to send Barnaby and Anna beautifully wrapped Christmas presents.
Once, when she was at Durham University, he took Anna out. The anger that he felt about Fred’s banishment, even when he was an old man, was still in his eyes.
‘They are only hurting themselves. They have missed out on the only grandchildren they will ever have.’ He grinned foxily at Anna. ‘Younger son a grave disappointment. Neither inclined to marriage nor to work.’
Anna has always found it hard to believe that Fred could have been left totally without means. When people grow old they forgive. Lord and Lady Tremain would surely have wanted to make peace with their son before they died.
She remembers her father going to Lady Tremain’s funeral the year she sat her O levels. He drove up to Yorkshire alone and did not return the next day as planned, and Martha was worried. When he eventually arrived home, he looked sad and defeated; muddy and dishevelled.
He had walked for the whole of that lost day, round the grounds of his home, visiting people on the estate, reliving gentle memories of a happy childhood. Saying goodbye to ghosts. Trying, Martha explained to her children, to come to terms with the terrible waste, the pointlessness of his parents’ endless stance.
The deliberate loss of a son … Martha could not understand it. As if Fred were really dead. Lady Tremain, old but still bitter, had refused to let Fred go to his father’s funeral.
‘So cruel,’ Anna would hear Martha say to Fred over the years. ‘They are entitled to pretend I do not exist, even that our children do not exist, but not you, their elder and beloved son. I will never understand this. Never. I cannot.’
Anna feels the familiar irritation, even now in the dark, at the flowery dramatic way her mother has of talking. Martha might think of herself as English, she might have incorporated all the small English mannerisms, but the way she uses phrases, the way she uses her hands and gently presses people’s arms is not English. It used to embarrass Anna at school; she much preferred her father’s soft, English voice.
If it hadn’t been for a trust fund set up by Fred’s grandparents for him, something even his parents could not legally deny him, Anna would have had to go to a state school. The thought often makes her go cold. She almost certainly would not be in the position she is today. The judiciary of her age group is still almost entirely made up of people who have been privately educated.
Fiercely loyal to Fred, and eavesdropping as a child, Anna can remember distant aunts and uncles passing guiltily through Cornwall to visit them. Fred sometimes went to London to meet old friends, to Martha’s joy. But he never saw his parents again. The only time he returned to Yorkshire was to bury his mother.
Fred’s brother is dead now too. What did they say to each other on the day of their mother’s funeral? Why did they not become reconciled? Too much bitterness? Betrayal? Fred has never explained.
The anxiety is still with Anna. Will she wake Rudi if she gets out of bed to go to make tea? It is so rare for her not to sleep these days and she is afraid of disturbing him.
She thinks of Lucy. Lucy coming back to London is a very good thing. The cottage can be rented out at the going rate. Barnaby has steadfastly refused to take any rent from Lucy, and Anna is pretty sure she can afford it as she has been working in a hotel.
It would not surprise Anna if Tristan has been living at the cottage at weekends or when he is on leave. Rudi stopped her asking Lucy, pointing out that it would have cost them far more to have her living in London and that his sons were subbed on their visits, so it was important to be fair.
Anna let the matter drop. Rudi was right: she could be hard on Lucy. She shudders at the thought of what some of their friends and colleagues are going through, with children who sponge off their parents for as long as possible. Lucy has never asked for money; she has always been good about getting herself holiday jobs.
The day is lightening. Anna slides down the bed, hoping to sleep again. She cannot put off going down to Cornwall for much longer. She will have to discuss plans for the future with Barnaby. She must think about arranging power of attorney so she can see how Fred and Martha are financially. Barnaby can be bloody awkward when he decides on a course of action.
It would be much easier to have Rudi with her. Barnaby would find it more difficult to argue with her. Surely it is not because Rudi is German that Barnaby suggested she go down on her own? Fred was always too protective. She and Barnaby were always discouraged from discussing anything to do with the war in front of Martha.
It must have been terrible for Martha to have to leave her family at a young age and flee to England, alone. But it was all such a long time ago now. Life has moved on.
She has never thought about having Jewish blood. She is so fair, she has always identified with Germans and Northern Europeans, especially since she started lecturing. God alone knows what sort of throwback she is. Some Scandinavian ancestor Fred had in the family cupboard. She has that rare blonde hair that does not fade but stays a Nordic white. Anna has always been proud of her looks and a little vain, enjoying the attention she attracts.
Lucy is olive-skinned and dark, although she highlights her hair now in thin streaks of blonde. Still gangly and colt-like, Lucy is like Martha, except in height. She has the same creamy coffee skin and shiny blue-black hair that gleams in the light. And like her father, of course. The same eyes, the same way of using her hands.
Claudio was an Italian musician Anna had a short fling with and uncharacteristically got pregnant by. She briefly married him for form’s sake and they parted in a sad but friendly fashion before Lucy was born. The only thing he asked of Anna was that his child carried his name.
Anna has absolutely no idea what happened to him. He just drifted completely out of her life, and it is something Lucy holds against her. ‘Everyone needs to know who they are,’ she will cry dramatically from time to time, but not very seriously.
Barnaby has been Lucy’s father, brother and best friend. Lucy is pragmatic and inclined to make her own happiness. Anna has never felt close to her daughter, and perhaps one day she will try to find Claudio. When she has children of her own.
Anna never intended to have children and Lucy was left with nannies for most of her childhood, or with Martha and Fred. Barnaby would whisk her away in the holidays, when he was on leave. He would take her to France or Italy with a girlfriend and spoil her atrociously.
A surprise baby arrived at an awkward moment in Anna’s career. She was junior counsel and fiercely ambitious. She wanted to be one of the youngest women to take silk. In your thirties you had to make good or you were lost to the young, mostly men, coming up behind you. She became a Queen’s Counsel at thirty-six.
Rudi is snoring gently and Anna is still wide awake. She likes the warmth of his body in the bed next to her. Comforting. Yet this vague but familiar unease still lingers, like a half-heard snatch of conversation blown in at an upstairs window.
Anna’s heart starts to thump painfully again. ‘Oh God,’ she whispers into the coming day. ‘Don’t let me start these wretched nightmares again.’
Barnaby sits on the battered old sofa in the conservatory, experiencing a tangible sense of timelessness, a brief lament for the years that have slid slyly by while his back was turned. If he closes his eyes he is once more that prep schoolboy curled up, dreading the end of the Easter holidays.
He used to crouch in this peachy-smelling glasshouse listening to the birds at twilight while the destructive wind brought in scents of cherry blossom, of wallflowers, and dropped pittsoporum seeds. Early pollen filled his nostrils, making him sniff and sneeze as he lolled there as dusk came, making the trees luminous in the dark.
He would listen to Fred read softly to his mother, his whisky glass perched precariously on the arm of the chair in Martha’s dressing room, which led directly through glass doors from the conservatory.
T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen – sad and brilliant dead poets. All his life snatches of lines have popped into Barnaby’s head, and with those lines come the evocative smells that accompanied the words: sausages, flowers, cordite, dogs. House plants, whisky, dust, his own unwashed feet.
As the rise and fall of his father’s voice soothed Martha’s headache and reached him just outside their room, loneliness would descend out of nowhere. There was a close intenseness between his parents that excluded him without their realising it.
In bed, in the dark, a haunting, animal keening would penetrate the cobwebs of his sleep. A cry, a whisper. Hushed voices. In the morning, loss real and enduring breathed and moved behind quick smiles.
Barnaby could not understand why his happy family life, full of love, did not make him feel as safe and secure as it should have done. Martha and Fred were never indifferent or uncaring. Warmth filled this house. Yet, Barnaby knew that the strength of what he felt was not imagined.
His childhood felt as if he was following a snatch of song down a dusky corridor, only to find when he turned the corner there was only a vibration hovering in the night air, no singer held the trembling notes he heard. The feeling of loss was searing. He was sure that if he could only capture that lingering echo he would recognise the singer and the haunting song they sang. Then his feeling of carrying a weighty sadness might end. Instead of his parents disappearing into shadow, they would remain flesh and blood to him.
Barnaby sensed a truth that was missing from their lives. A bewilderment of childhood where honesty is obscured, where secrets are kept.
Standing, bleak on the station platform as he went back to school, he would wait for Martha to hug him to her again and again. Fred would bend and kiss him. Always. Barnaby would board the train, would hurry down the corridor to the school carriage and jostle to the window to catch sight of them. Each time he would will them to see him, Barnaby Tremain, eight and a half years old. Not just another white-faced little schoolboy in school cap and blazer identical to hundreds of others with their noses pressed to the window on the school train for Paddington.
He knew they loved him, yet before the train even pulled out of the station they would turn once more to one another, their heads close together, walking away from him down the platform. His mother so thin and tiny. His father bent towards her, his left hand hovering protectively behind her back.
They never turned for one last wave although he always waited, breath held with longing, leaning out of the carriage window to capture that last glimpse of them as the train hooted and sidled forward. But they never ever turned to wave.
To them he had already gone. Their concentration was on one another. Barnaby would pull in his head before a master caught him, and collapse into his seat, concentrating on pulling his socks up, on not blubbing.
He always, always wanted to shout to his parents’ disappearing backs, ‘I’m still here. I haven’t gone yet. I’m still here.’
Barnaby, sitting on the long-faded sofa, drinking his own whisky, whispers to himself now, ‘I’m still here.’
For it feels sometimes that the piercing echo of his parents’ secret song still hovers in the flickering shadows and movements of the house. As they reach the end of their lives, it seems to move nearer.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_5d20ac50-5130-58fb-9417-39b62ac438d7)
Berlin
He has not been to the Freie Universität for over a year. He used to lecture regularly at the Institut für Physiologie, then suddenly he tired of the young; wanted to travel.
Ulrich Scheffell rang him out of the blue, asked him to come to the Institut to discuss a European lecture tour he was trying to organise.
‘Why do you ask me at my age?’ he asked.
‘You know very well,’ Ulrich replied. ‘You are one of the most eminent orthopaedic surgeons in Berlin.’
‘I am a retired orthopaedic surgeon.’
‘You are not too old to travel round the world. And you are not too old to lecture. Admit that you are interested.’
‘I will admit to nothing. But I will let you give me lunch.’
‘Hah!’ Ulrich rang off, delighted.
He parks his car with difficulty, thinking: no one walks anywhere any more. Everyone has cars. This is why we are growing as fat as Americans.
He walks into the Business and Environmental Law School. Ulrich asked to meet here, as his grandson, studying European Law, wanted Ulrich to welcome some visiting lecturer.
There are a lot of people milling about and he feels vaguely annoyed at having to hang around with a mass of students waiting for Scheffell. He turns and suddenly sees through a doorway a tall, striking blonde woman in a black gown holding a pile of books. She holds herself a little away from the group of people talking around her.
He stares at her. He knows he has never seen her before, yet she seems familiar to him. He goes on staring with a tight feeling growing in his chest. She has a focused beauty, a sort of detachment he recognises. It is a clever, ambitious face. Shaken, he turns abruptly away.
Scheffell appears suddenly by his side. ‘So sorry to keep you waiting.’ He smiles. ‘She is very beautiful, is she not?’
They push past students eager to get into the lecture hall, and go out into the fresh air. He breathes deeply.
‘Who is she?’ he asks.
‘She is an English barrister. Her name is Anna. She is married to Rudi Gerstein, a friend of my wife. Where did you leave your car?’ Ulrich guides him across the grass towards his office. ‘We will talk, then I will take you out for a good lunch. I would very much like you on my team again. At the very least, I hope you will think about it.’
It is Saturday. He turns the pages of the newspaper slowly. A little pulse beats in his left cheek. It is raining outside, a steady downpour that splatters against the windows of his flat, making the large panes rattle and a cold draught waft through the room.
There. There it is, where he knew it would be: a photograph of the smiling British barrister taken at the FU. He stares down at it; smoothes the creases in the paper. Her face jumps out at him. The piece tells him that she has just given a series of three-day lectures to a group of law students on corporate fraud and the differences in the British and German judicial systems.
The paper congratulates her on her perfect German, her intellect, her beauty and the possibility that she is in line to become a British judge. He looks down at the photograph and the strange feeling returns. Her eyes stare back as if challenging him. He shivers and closes the page. Those eyes … Those eyes remind him of someone else.
He goes to the window. The world out there is deserted. He is not a man accustomed to being lonely. There has always been someone. There has always been a woman.
He crosses to the mirror and stares at his reflection: eyes still the lightest blue, maybe slightly faded, body lean and carefully looked after. Women always think he is a decade younger than he is. He fingers the soft skin under his eyes. Lately he has begun to sleep badly and it is beginning to show.
Since Inga left the flat has seemed bigger, emptier. Of course he was expecting it. The age gap made it inevitable. It was not as if she even lived here permanently. She perched on the edge of his life, the few clothes and possessions she left here tidily placed in wardrobe and drawer so she did not take up too much room. Inga, patiently hovering, hoping for the more he could not give her.
He did not expect her to stay with him as long as she did. Sometimes he took her with him when he travelled. More often he preferred to be on his own.
‘Are you not lonely?’ Scheffell asked him at lunch, full of red wine. ‘I have often wondered why you have never married. Even at your age, I see women look at you.’
‘I am rarely lonely,’ he replied. ‘Nor have I had any urge to marry. This does not mean I do not like women.’
He returns to the window. A squirrel is running through the rain, over the bench and up the tree outside his flat. It looks in at him, waiting. He goes to the kitchen for nuts, opens the sliding doors and puts them on the table.
Inga was still young enough to find someone to marry her and have children. He told her so.
‘Have you ever really loved anyone?’ she asked quietly and bitterly.
He replied, honestly: ‘I am very fond of you, Inga, but you knew from the very beginning that with me there would be no marriage and no children. I never pretended or promised otherwise.’ It seemed as he said these words that he had used them to too many women.
When he was young and, he hoped, as he got older, he gave the women who marched hopefully through his life a good time. But if they wanted to breed or settle or get monotonously domestic they would have to look elsewhere. That each one thought she would be different was not his fault.
He suspects that Inga will be the last woman in his life. He is too old now even to pretend not to be selfish. At half his age, Inga is the woman he was fondest of. He has always been fascinated by the strength of the maternal pull. Inga, he is sure, despite her feelings for him, wanted a last chance of a child.
The squirrel runs down the bird table, along the railings of his balcony and leaps away among the leaves of the tree.
He goes back to the paper and stares down again at the photograph. The room is silent, still – so still that something stirs within him: a remembered, haunting pain that no amount of travelling can entirely banish.
Disturbed, he picks up the phone and dials a number with fingers not entirely steady. A number he has dialled many times. For so many reasons down the years. Hans can find out anything about anybody. Living or dead.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_b69db467-c0d6-5d65-935d-cdab13d5f858)
Fred is feeding the birds with Martha’s breakfast crusts. There is no wind and the morning is mild. Barnaby has fixed a swing bird table on a branch of the old medlar tree, away from the aged interest of Eric, who can still produce a sneaky pounce from the shelter of weeds and bluebells.
Fred notices that the twisted branches of the medlar look as if they might be dying. The wind has caught the leaves and the back branches are too near the Monterey pine. What a pity. What were the three trees that were always planted together in his grandfather’s day? Medlar, mulberry … Damn it, he cannot remember the third.
He moves across the lawn and looks down at the disturbed earth between the roots of the cherry. He and Martha buried Puck under the tree. Lucy and Barnaby have just buried her little tabby here. He smiles to himself. He lost count of the hamsters buried here, until Martha had the idea of placing the catatonic little bodies in the warming oven of the Rayburn as a test. It was alarming how many of the poor creatures had only been hibernating. Barnaby was stricken with remorse, sure that they must have buried most of his hamsters alive.
Fred cannot remember how the tradition of burying all their pets under the trees came about. Perhaps because the dogs always sat here, half in and half out of the sun. He looks out towards the shrubbery for the blackbird with the freak white tail, and tosses a crust into the undergrowth. There is always a danger taming birds with a cat.
It is such a beautiful day and he has no headache. For once his mind is clear. This is the best bit of the day, just before the day begins in earnest. His private communion with the garden. For a few minutes he can pretend … Is it pretend? Or just looking back? Like old men do when they get ancient.
He can pretend that he has woken to find Martha already in the garden, checking her seeds in neat little trays in the old wooden greenhouse. He would walk across the grass with a cup of tea for her and she would look up as excited as a child and point out what each tray held and where in the garden they were going to be planted out.
She was so organised. From rubble and rampant weeds the garden evolved and grew steadily every year. She kept track of things in a little red exercise book, marking carefully where things failed or had been planted in the wrong place. She drew little diagrams for borders of colour and smell; made sure that in winter there were bright berries, shiny leaves and shrubs to look at.
Eventually, he had to employ someone to help her. At first she was reluctant – she was intensely possessive of her garden and her privacy – but Fred knew he must find someone who would not take over but who would understand the sort of garden she wanted to create.
They had two false starts and then Hattie suggested her nephew, a boy of sixteen. Neither Martha nor Fred knew anything about him, and that was just as well or Fred would never have employed him.
Hattie arrived one morning with a surly youth called Adam, who looked as if he had been frogmarched up the drive. Martha, pretending not to notice his scowl, sat him down in the kitchen, made him tea and gave him a huge slice of home-made cake. Then she took him into the garden, pointed out the things she hoped to do and asked for his advice on this and that. What did he think about a pond here? Did he think they could enlarge the terrace, so that it had steps coming down?
Fred, hovering nearby, saw Hattie’s anxious face at the kitchen window. The boy was monosyllabic. Fred wondered what on earth Hattie was palming them off with. He was about to leave to go back to medical school, and was anxious too, but he trusted Hattie.
He returned from London the following weekend to find Martha had a willing and able slave. The scowl had gone. The boy’s white face was beginning to tan and half a pond had been dug.
Adam and Martha worked together twice a week for ten years. They made a spectacular garden, through trial and error, both learning as they went along. The boy had a natural talent and when he was offered a job as under-gardener on an estate on the Helford, Martha made him take it. She never wanted to replace him.
Fred turns away from the bird table and takes a walk round the garden. The old wooden greenhouse fell down a long time ago and nature has reclaimed so much of the garden. There is no telling where the borders once were. Tulips and daffodils spring up everywhere through tufts of long grass and bluebells. The old pond lies choked in the corner, covered in green algae. The heavy Victorian statue of an angel Martha found in a junk shop still stands placidly facing the house, snails nestling in his arms in little clusters. Lichen grows on his face and body like an extra filigree robe.
Much later, Martha told him that Adam had been in constant trouble for his violent, uncontrollable temper. Hattie took him in when her sister washed her hands of him. All he had done at her house, apart from being bored and sullen, was read her gardening magazines. Adam told Martha that he had been beaten constantly by his father. If Hattie had not taken him in, he would have killed him.
Fred thought then how right it was that Martha and Adam had come together. This garden that they made out of nothing had for both of them begun as a replacement activity and became an obsession and an abiding passion.
He supposes he ought to go in. Must not hold Barnaby up. The one thing he did not want to happen has happened. He and Martha have become Barnaby’s burden. So unfair. His head begins to throb. Damn head. Difficult to think sometimes.
Is he sacrificing Barnaby for Martha? No. No. Can’t think like that. Useless. Barnaby would no more think of a home than he would.
He walks slowly across the grass back to the house and the ghost of Martha flits with him. He so much wants to remember the young woman full of life and joy, who could make an ordinary day special. The young woman who built a garden. The young woman who wept in the dark when the shadows came and reached out for him. The woman he held and made love to. Breathed in. Breathed new life into.
He looks up. An old woman is standing at the French windows in her nightgown, waving at him. He could be Fred. He could be the gardener. He could be anyone. Her beautiful face is vacant, contains nothing of their life together. This, Fred thinks, is the hardest thing I have ever had to bear.
The new carer, arriving that morning, makes something of an entrance. She has spiky dark hair, a nose ring, an ethnic sweater and flimsy skirt finished off with a tight leather belt and boots. When Barnaby has finished showing her around, briefed her on Martha and Fred’s routine and left the house in a rush, she makes coffee and takes it into the conservatory.
She stands looking down at Martha as the cup of coffee she holds for her grows cold. The old lady is crying silently and the girl examines her wonderful high cheekbones and sees the tears falling from Martha’s closed eyes. She is disturbed and touched by the smallness of the old lady and the isolation of her senility.
She bends to Martha. ‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘What’s the matter, Martha? Look, I’ve brought you a cup of coffee.’
Martha opens her eyes at the sound of her name. She is going to say, ‘I am Mrs Tremain to you,’ but when she sees the pretty girl whose anxious face is close to hers she is so pleased she smiles. ‘Hanna! Where have you sprung from? I haven’t seen you for ages!’
The girl places the cup of coffee in Martha’s hands. ‘My name is Kate. Is Hanna your daughter?’
Martha looks puzzled. ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
‘I’m from the agency. I’m here to help look after you.’
‘You’re very pretty.’
The girl laughs. ‘So are you.’
Martha’s face lights up. ‘I used to be, darling.’
In that small face suddenly alight, in the ease of that casual endearment, Kate is captivated. Fred lowers the Daily Telegraph he is not reading and smiles at her.
‘Hello, Kate. Welcome.’
‘Thank you, Dr Tremain. I’ll just go and get your coffee.’
She comes back and perches on a chair next to him. ‘The vicar suggested you might like a drive this afternoon. There is a little gallery at Newlyn? He said you both enjoy going there, and then walking or driving along the front past the harbour.’
Fred looks up at her. ‘That sounds absolutely wonderful. Martha would love it. How kind. Mrs Biddulph doesn’t drive, you know.’
Kate smiles. ‘So I understand. Are you both OK here, if I go and do a bit of tidying up?’
‘Of course. Of course. We are both fine. Enjoying the sun.’
Kate makes their beds and tidies the bathroom. She is intrigued by this strange house with its shabby sofas and beautiful furniture, by its fading elegance and enormous conservatory that throws sunlight everywhere. The whole house smells dusty, rather like a greenhouse, and there is this sense of waiting. Is it waiting, this stillness? Or is it a vague sense of sadness, of lives coming to an end? Kate is not sure.
The Loving Care Agency jumped at the chance of taking her on even though she assured them she would only be temporary, that she intended to move on. The pay is appalling, but Kate is used to working for peanuts. The only help she has accepted, from the aunt she was working for in London, is the cost of a few weeks in an hotel while she looks for somewhere to live for the summer.
Kate goes to check on the two old people. Dr Tremain is sitting beside Martha and has taken her hand. They both sit looking out through the French windows to the garden. ‘“It was a perfect day /For sowing: just/ As sweet and dry was the ground / As tobacco-dust. / I tasted deep the hour/ Between the far/ Owl’s chuckling first soft cry” …’ Dr Tremain is reading aloud to Martha. Kate smiles. How wonderful.
She starts to prepare their lunch with the food Barnaby has put out for her. It is incredibly quiet here after London. She has a moment’s dislocation, as if she has suddenly jumped lives and found herself in someone else’s kitchen.
Edward Thomas? Of course it is! She studied him for A level. ‘And now, hark at the rain,/ Windless and light/ Half a kiss, half a tear,/ Saying good-night.’
Martha, suddenly restless, comes in and out of the kitchen asking the same question. ‘What are we having for lunch today?’
‘Chicken and chips?’
‘How lovely!’
Martha wanders off, circles the house again and comes in through the conservatory door.
‘Hello. Who are you?’
‘I’m Kate. I’m just getting your lunch ready.’
‘Lovely, darling, what are we having?’
‘Chicken and chips. Is that OK?’
‘My favourite.’
‘Good. It won’t be long. Shall I come and put the lunch-time news on for you?’
‘Thank you,’ Martha says vaguely.
Kate finds Fred has already turned the television on.
‘Come and sit down, darling,’ he says to Martha, ‘and watch the news with me.’
‘I will in a moment,’ Martha says, ‘but I am worried about lunch. What –’
‘Chicken and chips,’ Kate says firmly, pushing Martha gently down next to her husband. ‘I will be back in a moment.’
She is beginning to wonder how the vicar has not taken to drink. It is taking her ages to get this meal ready and she feels dizzy with repeating the same thing over and over again. She puts both their lunches on trays and carries them into the sitting room.
The room is empty. The television is talking to an empty room. Kate cannot believe it. Fighting panic she rushes back to the kitchen and dumps the trays and runs round the empty house shouting for them. How on earth could they both disappear so quickly and quietly?
She bolts out of the front door and down the drive, shaking with anxiety. Why did this have to happen on her first day?
Barnaby comes from the church with a parent on each arm. He smiles at her as he crosses the road with them. ‘Lost anyone?’ he jokes.
Kate, mortified, nearly in tears with fright, turns and rushes back into the house.
Barnaby settles his parents in front of the television with their trays of food and a sherry each and waits for the new carer to come out of the bathroom. He makes them both a cup of coffee while he waits.
When Kate returns to the kitchen, embarrassed, he says gently, ‘It’s quite all right, you know. I was only joking. You can’t have eyes in the back of your head and I don’t want my parents imprisoned in their own home.’ He pauses, facing the facts. ‘It’s becoming obvious that I’ll have to have two people here soon; it’s going to be too much for one person. I’m truly sorry you got a fright, Kate. I really am well aware how tiring looking after my parents is.’ He grins at her. ‘One dotty person is bad enough, two is a nightmare! It will be no discredit to you if you decide it’s just too much.’
‘No way!’ Kate says quickly. ‘I just completely misjudged the speed of your parents. I’m not going to give up after one day!’
Barnaby hands her a mug of coffee. ‘I’m glad. Go and have your lunch in the garden. Relax. It is like summer out there this morning. I’ll sit with my parents for an hour. I like to do that if I have time.’
Kate digs out a book and a sandwich from her bag and goes and sits against the trunk of the cherry tree under a great, sweeping arch of buds about to burst into blossom. She wonders what a good-looking, youngish vicar – young by priestly standards anyway – is doing unmarried and looking after senile parents on his own.
Barnaby tucks Martha into bed for her afternoon nap. Fred has gone back to his chair in the conservatory to try to do the crossword. Barnaby is puzzled by Fred. He wonders if his father has simply withdrawn from a life where his beloved Martha is now dotty. Sometimes Fred seems quite dotty himself; at other times Barnaby has the sensation he is merely hiding behind a supposed dottiness in order to avoid facing what is happening, as if a dark cloud of depression or loss has stunned him into a senility he does not really have.
Barnaby says goodbye to a more cheerful Kate and drives off to a parish council meeting in the village hall. Normally he dreads these competitive parochial monthly meetings, but today everyone seems united in their desire to raise funds to help the refugees in Kosovo.
Martha lies propped up on pillows watching the movement of wind through buds of pink cherry blossom. The tree is getting old and gnarled. The branches bend and creak, spread and arch. Soon fat fingers of blossom will trail almost to the ground in great sprays of pink hands that layer the lawn like confetti.
It reminds Martha of something. Of somewhere else. The feeling she cannot capture squeezes her stomach, as if her body has recovered a memory her mind refuses to recall. She closes her eyes, tries to banish this disturbing sensation and is taken suddenly back to another garden, where the flowers are gone, and all is now laid with vegetables.
She sees Papa bend to pick a caterpillar off a cabbage, his face grave as he turns to Mama, standing in the doorway of their house.
‘Esther? It is time we talked about sending Marta to England. I don’t know how long we have.’
‘Paul, no! Please, let’s wait … Don’t be pessimistic. We have so many good friends here, you are respected by everyone. The patients and the staff love you. We have standing here, my dear, and financial means, if things get difficult.’
Papa stares at Mama and shakes his head. ‘Esther’, he says quietly, ‘I beg you not to bury your head. Things are not just difficult, they are dangerous. What is the good of money if we cannot keep Marta safe? Please, you must accept what is happening. Everyone is fearing the worst. Both Germans and Poles are jumpy and frightened. Everyone is looking out for themselves. You must not count on anyone except fellow Jews. You will see, our Polish neighbours and German colleagues will not want to know us if Poland is invaded.’
They stare at each other over the space that was once a garden full of flowers and now contains only things they can eat. Marta knows her father is frustrated by her mother, who has never in her life faced hardship or loss, and cannot yet grasp what is happening. Cannot, or is reluctant to face the end of their way of life.
‘Heinrich will see we are all right. Heinrich won’t let anything happen to us. I know it. You are colleagues, Paul. You are friends. Our children have played together nearly all their lives.’
Papa walks abruptly towards the house. He does not see Marta sitting up in the window, listening. ‘Esther!’ he says angrily. ‘We are Jews. His wife comes from one of the old Imperial families. Do you really think that Heinrich can protect us from anything? What is the matter with you? Are your eyes shut? How can you fail to notice what is going on around you? Do you think our money can project us against this rising tide of anti-Semitism? Do you?’
Marta’s mother grows pale at her husband’s anger. He is a gentle man who does not raise his voice. Esther is not used to people being unkind to her. She was a spoilt child and went straight on to being a sheltered and beautiful child-wife. ‘Our children have known each other, played together … all their lives,’ she repeats.
‘That time is over. It is gone. They are children no more,’ Papa says firmly. ‘I don’t want that boy, who has the makings of a dangerous little Nazi, anywhere near Marta.’
His voice is sad: ‘Heinrich and I have known each other for longer than I care to remember. But whatever he privately feels about what is happening, they are Germans, Esther, and we are on the brink of war. Already the family are distancing themselves. At work I am being relieved of many of my patients, many of my duties. If the Germans invade Poland, I Would be relieved of all of them. You must understand, Esther, I could lose my clinic, my life’s work and probably all my money.’
‘You can’t know that!’ Mama’s voice is full of panic. ‘England will stop the Germans, you’ll see, Paul.’ She claps her hand to her mouth.
Papa says quietly, ‘I Wish with all my heart I could protect you and Marta from what is coming, but I can’t. I cannot leave. I am a doctor and will be needed. The only thing I can do is send you both to England.’
Mama stares at him, suddenly very sure. ‘No, Paul, We stay together as a family. Whatever happens, We stay together.’
Marta, sitting up in the window of her room, shivers. She looks down on her arms, which are covered in goose bumps as if a cold wind has suddenly sprung up. She runs down the stairs, past her mother and across the garden to her father and clutches his arms. ‘Don’t send me away,’ she cries. ‘You’re frightening me, Papa.’
Her father holds her hands between his for a moment and apologises for frightening her. He tries to change the subject, Make her laugh. He calls Pepe, their dog, and as they set off for their evening walk together he tells Marta about England and his friends who live there.
‘England is a very beautiful place, full of rivers and trees. In the towns there are parks to sit in the sun. People take their children and picnic and sail small boats in lakes. People mix freely, Matusia …’ Marta’s papa takes her arm. ‘A distant cousin of mine has offered to take you in. This is a great opportunity for you to learn, to extend your education. You are so good at languages … My dear child, I need to persuade your mama to let you go even if she will not leave me. You must trust me and help me to convince her that it really is the best thing to do.’
Marta is silent, for she knows Mama is right: they must all stay together. The birds of evening are singing and fluttering, caught in the blossom of the huge apple tree at the bottom of the next-door garden, where she plays with the boy. Marta listens to the noise the birds are making and her fear is back. She shivers again, her father draws her away and they circle the wood and go home for supper.
Marta remembers that walk. It was the last walk she ever took with her father without fear, without the hated yellow armband with the star.
Coming into Martha’s bedroom, Kate sees that despite the warmth of the room, Martha is shivering with cold, sitting upright in bed, her tiny limbs trembling. She looks in the cupboard and finds a pale blue mohair sweater, which she wraps round Martha. Then she helps her into her trousers, which she has taken off. Her legs are like sticks and slightly misshapen. Odd little legs.
Kate chats to Martha while she does these things, but Martha is a long, long way away and Kate knows in Martha’s head there is a different scene playing.
Twenty minutes later Kate has both the old people safely in the back of her car. She drives out of the gates and takes the road towards Newlyn.
As they drive along Kate thinks about how she will cope once she parks the car. She must hang on to both of them without seeming like a sheepdog. She is not going to lose them twice.
She turns the radio on low and twiddles the knob to Classic FM. Fred turns contentedly towards the sea as they reach the coast road. Frothy waves are bouncing off the sea wall and the sun glints on the surface of the sea in dancing sparks.
Martha does not see the sea. She is still somewhere far in the past. She is worrying about her knitting needle. Has someone stolen it? Her knitting needle is vital. Before she goes to bed she wants to poke it into the holes. She wants to poke out those revolting bugs that stop her sleeping.
‘My knitting needle,’ she murmurs.
Kate looks at her through the car mirror. ‘Don’t worry, Martha,’ she says comfortingly. ‘We’ll find it when we get you home.’
Fred folds her tiny hand in his large one and Martha is soothed. She looks out and sees the shimmering blueness of the sea and the bright fishing boats heading in and out of Newlyn, and is enchanted.
As they drive past the harbour with the heavy trawlers and sleek yachts crammed together, the wind catching their stanchions and making a wonderful clinking sound, Martha smiles happily.
‘How beautiful,’ she says to Fred, turning to him. ‘How beautiful, darling.’
Fred, seeing her lovely smile, smiles too, his heart aching with love and fear. All his life he has protected her, now the knowledge that he can no longer do so is slowly killing him. He brings her hand to his mouth.
‘My beloved little Martha,’ he whispers.
Kate turns the car round at the end of the road and drives back to park near the gallery. Watching their faces, she realises they don’t get out enough. She will try and change that.
‘What did you say?’ she asks Dr Tremain.
‘I said, it’s a long time since I was last here,’ Fred says clearly.
Kate smiles.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_b61a14cc-1bd3-5128-9602-56a13ea0540d)
Anna sits with her chair swivelled round from her desk, facing the long window of her study. She loves these early mornings. The stillness helps her think. She feels mellow and calm, as if she has not yet put up a barrier between herself and the coming day.
Wisps of pink cloud hang in a vivid blue sky. Anna is reminded of Cornwall where the day unfolds from a blackness over the ocean to slow-unfurling ribbons of colour reflected in the water. Even before dawn there was light behind the darkness, waiting.
She had forgotten, almost forgotten those Cornish mornings.
She closes her mind and breathes in the sky outside the window. Tries to remember the child she was with no demands or responsibilities, waking to a summer morning, running down to the water in near darkness. The acute shiver of loneliness and wonder in the sound and size of a huge sea rolling in to empty sands stretching all around her.
Lucy was the same as a child. Half the fun was getting outside with no one hearing you … She used to take Puck, the small Labrador cross Martha adored. Or was that later? Was she older when they got the dog?
Deep pink slashes of cloud are dispersing over the Thames, spreading across the city, blurring and smudging into the sky, like spilt water paints, tingeing the river and touching the buildings. She hears Martha’s voice: ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning, darlink.’
How old was she before Martha said ‘darling’ properly? Anna cannot remember that either. She always has trouble remembering the sequence of her childhood. She often thinks her bad memory is the result of being so bored most of her childhood. Nothing of note ever happened to pierce the monotony of those seemingly endless years.
She gets up, goes to the long window and looks out into the wide, tree-lined road, at the elegant Edwardian houses opposite. It is deserted except for the line of parked cars. Curtains drawn. People sleeping.
She must be getting old, she concludes, if a sly trick of memory can turn those endless Cornish summers into nostalgia. Yet for a moment she does not see the houses; she hears the bent palm in Martha’s garden, hanging skewwhiff to the wind, rattling like dry fingers. She sees the glint of silver water and white houses illuminated on the other side of the harbour. She can hear the scream of gulls wheeling and circling above her head and the sensation of cold wet sand clinging to her feet. She sees Fred waving to her from the steps to the beach. She smells baking, and Martha, standing in that old-fashioned kitchen, pulls a chair out so she can lick the bowl.
Something rises up in her throat for what might have been. If she had been different. If they had. It is like fingering a bruise. She is sure her nightmares go back to her early years. She often thinks it must be because Martha was so often ill when she was small. When Martha took to her bed, or could not eat, it must have been an emotional illness, not a physical one. Anna does remember spending a lot of time with Hattie. Fear and sadness affect children. When she was little something about Martha frightened her. Easy to be frightened when you do not understand.
Only one thing sticks in her mind. She was furious with her mother and threw herself at her, clutching at her legs in a rage that consumed her. That is all she can remember: not wanting to let go of those legs. She cannot remember a face or arms or a voice. Just those legs trying to get away from her.
Anna pushes the image away, stretches and takes a deep breath. She can hear Rudi moving about upstairs and she goes back to her desk. For heaven’s sake, she is supposed to be studying her brief. Berlin was a success, but exhausting. Now she is about to reconvene a complicated criminal injury case and she is tired. Her workload is frightening this year.
She goes into the kitchen and grinds coffee and puts the pot on the stove. Places her files and papers back into her briefcase. She will have coffee with Rudi, then grab a sandwich later.
Rudi comes in smelling of soap, and kisses her. ‘You seem to get up earlier and earlier. Two complicated cases at the same time. Are you worrying, darling?’
Anna smiles at him. ‘No, not really. I’ve got a good team. But so have they. I do need to be on the ball …’ She reaches out and touches his arm. ‘Sorry if I bored you last night. I just wanted to run it past you.’
‘You never bore me. And I do know a bit about insurance companies.’
‘Well, I am still sure they, or the airline, are stalling, playing for time, and I am not sure why. My client will certainly never walk again. They cannot avoid liability. I expected the usual initial derisory offer of compensation, which would be unacceptable. Instead of which they asked for four days’ grace to make inquiries about a matter “vital to the outcome of the case”.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means, either they have discovered something which makes the airline culpable and they will pull out, or something that I have not been told that makes my client responsible, or partly responsible, for his injuries.’ Anna puts down her half-finished coffee. ‘Anyway, this morning I will find out. I must go.’ She gets up and kisses him. ‘Why are you smiling?’
‘At the glint in your eye. God help the opposition.’
Anna laughs. ‘I shouldn’t be too late home tonight.’
‘In that case,’ Rudi says, ‘I shall cook you something delicious and healthy.’
Anna holds his face to her for a moment. ‘Wonderful.’
By the time she leaves the house the pink sky has disappeared and grey clouds cover the whole of the sky. As Anna walks to the tube station she remembers a task she was set at school: What is your very first memory? On the blackboard the teacher wrote, ‘My very first memory is …’
Anna sat and sat in front of a blank sheet of paper. She was quite unable to pick up her pen. Eventually her teacher said, ‘Anna, come on, this is not like you. What’s the matter?’
Anna had gone white and begun to shake. She was not going to write. She was not going to. She could not think … beyond … before … behind … For the first time in her life she fainted. Fred came to collect her, took her straight home. For some reason he was cross with her teacher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Anna is only nine years old. I know she is bright, but I don’t want my daughter pressurised.’
‘It was not Mrs Poole’s fault,’ Anna said to him in the car. ‘Dad, I can’t remember anything before my nightmares. I didn’t want to write about my nightmares.’
Fred turned to look at her and for a terrible moment Anna thought he was going to cry. He tucked her up on the sofa and lit a fire in the afternoon. Martha, pregnant with Barnaby, sat with Anna by the fire, playing snakes and ladders, and then they baked scones together. That day I did not spoil … I must have been ill, Anna thinks wryly.
What was it I was afraid of remembering?
She flashes her season ticket, goes through the barrier and stands on the platform waiting for the tube. This is the worst bit. She has finally trained herself, with Rudi’s help, to use the underground. But she hates the gathering moment before the train whooshes in and people prepare to rush and push. She can cope this early in the day, but she would not dream of travelling during the rush hour.
I suppose, she thinks, my childhood must have been happy. It must have been later, as I grew up and recognised the smallness, the limitations of their lives, that I grew bored and contemptuous. Maybe I was afraid I would grow up like them.
The train comes hurtling into the station and Anna gets in. She sits down and opens her briefcase. It is going to be a long day in court. She smiles suddenly at her reflection in the train window. She is far happier having an enormous caseload than maudlin and totally useless memories of her childhood.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_eb8d228b-24ec-57bd-be54-4294a6a3bfc5)
Berlin
He drives into the city early. It is a beautiful spring morning and the city unfolds in front of him, glittering and clean.
Inga’s travel bag lies on the passenger seat beside him with the last of her possessions. She has not wanted to return to the flat to collect them and has asked him to meet her before she starts work.
He drives along the Unter den Linden towards the Bauhaus Museum where she works. He had hoped to take her for coffee in Kreuzberg but she said she was too busy to leave the building.
He is not looking forward to this meeting. He hopes they can at least get back to the point of civilised friendship. They have mutual friends and he would like to establish an understanding to avoid embarrassment for everyone. Remembering her cold voice on the phone he thinks friendship, at this point, is unlikely.
He parks the car and carries her bag to the entrance. He has always liked the clear modern lines of the museum. It had risen from the ruins of post-war Berlin like a building newly washed.
Inga is standing watching him walking towards her. She is not smiling. He greets her with two kisses. Her back is stiff, her face cold.
‘How are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m just fine,’ she says evenly.
‘Are you sure that you don’t have time to have a coffee with me? The museum does not open for two hours.’
‘My hours are nothing to do with whether the museum is open or shut, but with the artefacts. As you know.’
‘Of course,’ he says, smiling, ‘I know. I would like to have coffee and talk for a few minutes, if you have the time.’
She hesitates. Sadness and the feeling he can still engender in her pass briefly across her face. It would be kinder if he just handed her bag to her and left, but something obstinate in him wants to leave this relationship tidy and finished. Without rancour.
She holds the door open for him, reluctantly. ‘Come in. I’ll make you a quick coffee.’
She fiddles with the filter machine in her office and he watches her. She is very pretty, he is very fond of her, yet he feels no regret. ‘Inga, I really do want you to be happy. You must have known, as I did, that if you got involved with a man much older than yourself this parting was inevitable?’
She pours his coffee and carries it over to him, places sugar and milk in front of him, but does not sit with him.
‘It was only inevitable when you decided that it was. I suddenly bored you with a need for something more from you. I stayed the course longer than most, so perhaps I should be flattered.’
He is surprised. ‘You made the decision to end our relationship.’
Inga laughs without humour. ‘You ended our relationship. Look, I understand. You are incapable of emotional commitment. You told yourself I left because I wanted children. This is not true. I am not overtly maternal. I left because I suddenly saw no future … Nothing was going to change.’
Her anger shows suddenly. ‘I deserve more. You are happy to be with me when you are a little lonely and equally happy to drop me when you are your normal self-sufficient self. Yes, we often had a very good time – you are an interesting and charming man to be with – but it was not enough. I wanted to live with you and you made it clear that you did not want me to. Too often you preferred to go away without me …’
She looks away, fiddles with her coffee cup. ‘You seem to need no one. I have some pride. I left because you were destroying my sense of self. I was losing confidence in myself and my work.’
She looks straight at him suddenly. ‘I pity you. To avoid the pain of loving, you miss the joy. Like so many of your generation, you are dishonest about your motives, in everything you do and in everything you did.’
They stare at each other. The coffee scalds his mouth. The words hang between them. Both their faces are shocked and angry. Like your generation. She has wanted to say this before to him, he can see that. It came out before she could stop it, startling her as much as him. Words that cannot be taken back. The meaning all too clear.
Silence hangs between them. He gets out of his chair and walks away towards the entrance. As he reaches the doors he hears her voice, softly this time.
‘I know that you wanted to draw a neat line under us today. So much easier when we meet in public. Neat lines are not always possible. Real life is messy and it hurts.’
He does not turn round, but moves steadily to his car. He does not see that she is crying as she watches his tall figure walk away from her. Ten years ago she was thirty-two. Young enough to be his daughter. She found him dangerous in an exciting and powerfully sexual way. He was a challenge she has lost. Her friends warned her. She knows him barely better now than she did ten years ago. She shuts the entrance door firmly so that she does not see him drive away.
The traffic is much heavier as he drives home. He taps the wheel impatiently as he sits trapped between two school buses, idly watching the people on the pavements, some hurrying, some stopping at the little Turkish café he used to wait in for Inga sometimes.
Your generation. His generation watched Berlin reborn from rubble. What the American and British bombers did not destroy, the Red Army finished. His generation watched as Berlin was carved up into four pieces … ‘YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR’ – the sign, which had you sweating in your sleep, that one wrong turning, one small error, would land you in the Eastern sector.
The traffic picks up speed and he breathes more easily as he heads out of town. Mutti moved sharply and wisely from her old family home in the east, ahead of the Red Army. She hated the British and American bombers, but she feared the oncoming Russians more.
He was sent back to Berlin at the end of the war with a medical unit. Berlin, about to fight for its life, left with only the old, the lame and children to defend it. Berlin had not been his childhood home as it had been Mutti’s but the devastation was still shocking. He thought that Berlin could never be rebuilt.
Reaching home, he parks and lets himself into the flat. He is angry with Inga for reminding him of the past, his age, and the fact that her generation and her children’s generation can never forgive or forget his. Because it is held in front of them, in books, films, or a left-wing challenge, by someone, somewhere, every single day. Her age group seem to have a monopoly on self-righteousness, while knowing nothing.
He lights a small cheroot and sees with a start that he has received the fax he has been waiting for. He has waited, restless, all week for Hans to get in touch. He tears the message off the machine.
What am I starting here? What am I doing?
Hans urged caution. Any hint of irrationality made him nervous. He left for London reluctant and tight-lipped. He knows only too well obsession can grow. Catch a glimpse, a smell, a memory and you want more. The past you buried always surfaces. Who said that to him? Suddenly, he needs to know what is shadow caused by faulty memory, and what is substance.
The fax is disappointingly brief; tells him little. The woman is, unsurprisingly, clever and ambitious. Hans lists her academic achievements at length. He details minutely the steady rise of her career. But there is little about her personal life. Is he doing this on purpose? Hans can find out how a man turns in his bed. How he makes love to his wife. What he eats for breakfast. He can find out anything he wishes to know. If he wants to …
This woman was born and brought up in the west of England. Head girl at some English boarding school. One brother. One child from a brief marriage to an Italian. Married for four years to Rudi Gerstein, a Swiss-German banker. She is an excellent linguist and so is her daughter.
Is this it? This barrister could be any middle-class English girl. Yet the one thing he needs to know Hans cannot possibly give him. He looks out of the window at the rain blowing sideways, obscuring his view, trapping him with ghosts that are rising like whispers out of the dark edges of the room.
The past is suddenly crowding in from all directions. In the long nights alone now he feels the horror of being overtaken by memories he believed he had firmly buried.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_72b7a459-1508-5a7c-a4dd-20049d141f62)
Dancing against Martha’s closed eyelids, the sun. Light and bobbing colours, patterns and floaters. A thrush in the garden sings and sings. The rain has stopped and the smell of cut grass comes in the window on a faint breeze.
In a moment Mama, or Hanna, their maid, will call up the stairs to make sure she is awake. Hanna, who is not much older than Marta, gets very cross with her because she will lie there ignoring Mama’s calls.
Hanna is a thin, obedient girl, who comes from a religiously observant Jewish family who vaguely disapprove of the Oweski family. Papa says they are so poor it is no wonder little Hanna has no sense of humour.
Marta loves these mornings. She has secretly been out in the garden in the first light, running in bare feet across the deliciously cold wet grass.
She likes to lie without moving, her face in pale yellow sunshine, daydreaming. She loves the dancing colours behind her closed lids and the safeness of opening her eyes again to familiar background noises, the sounds of a household waking up. Marta would like to be a child for ever and as she thinks this she remembers … she remembers with a jolt and her eyes fly open.
Fly open to an unfamiliar room of beige walls and white paint work. Beyond the long windows, lawns stretch into glossy-leafed shrubs and old fir trees that form a wall of green.
Martha sits up quickly, then, suddenly dizzy, hangs on to the edge of the bed for a moment. She goes slowly to the door and listens. Hearing nothing, she turns the handle and goes out into a large flagstone hall that leads into a drawing room filled with hot afternoon sun, which has bleached, over the years, all the covers and cushions to a uniform beige.
No one is there, but in a corner of the room a television flickers with images. Martha looks out into a musty geranium-smelling conservatory but cannot see her parents or Hanna. She swallows a slow-rising panic that they have all been taken from her while she slept in this place she does not remember coming to.
She pads on small bare feet to the French windows and looks out into the garden. She can hear voices now. A man and a girl are planting something near the cherry tree. She has no idea who they are.
Confused, desperately searching her mind for a clue to anchor herself here, Martha turns back inside to the flickering movements of the small screen, which has the sound turned off. She sees columns and columns of people moving in a mass along a road. Walking, hobbling, being pulled on carts or tractors. A great wash, a tide of human misery, dragging themselves onwards to safety, moving like robots in stunned bewilderment and fear.
The camera pans in on haunted faces and Martha, transfixed, is back, back with the fear and the smell, and the movement like an endless surge of water. Vast masses of human beings being herded, displaced and hated, to a fixed end. She crumples to the floor, watching. Remembering.
She rocks for Mama, for Papa, for poor serious little Hanna, for all those she loves, her eyes glued to the small flickering screen.
An old man is suddenly beside her, calling her name. The television is abruptly switched off. He bends and helps her to her feet, sits her in a chair, talking, talking in that gentle loving voice she recognises. Martha stares at him. It is Fred. Of course. It is Fred. This house is her home.
She smiles at him, closes her eyes with utter, utter relief, relaxes. She is Martha Tremain, an Englishwoman.
Barnaby takes Lucy to the garden centre to buy primroses for Abi’s grave. Little else will grow under the cherry tree. They buy six cream primroses, and a white cyclamen for Martha.
Barnaby looks at seed packets, wondering if he should buy earth so that Martha can plant seeds in trays in the conservatory. The greenhouse is now irremediable, having collapsed inward on itself, burying seed trays, pots, faded baskets of plant food and all things dumped there over the years. Vine and nettles have all but obscured where it lies.
Barnaby keeps meaning to do something about it, but time and tiredness, or perhaps a depression that he knows will descend if he starts looking too closely at all that needs doing, defeat him every time.
Lucy has wandered away and he finds her looking at the water plants.
‘Be nice to clear the pool, wouldn’t it? I loved the lilies and those water buttercup things that used to grow there.’
They both look down, thinking of how the garden once was. Lucy says suddenly: ‘Barnaby, Gran left Poland in 1940, didn’t she?’
Barnaby smiles. ‘Yes, she did. What made you suddenly ask that?’
‘I was just wondering if Mum was born here in Cornwall or in London. I always thought it was London, but I can’t remember anyone telling me that.’
‘It was definitely London. Martha and Fred lived there at the end of the war. They came down regularly, despite the journey, to stay in the cottage and check on the house, which was being built at that time.’
‘So … I know they met in London when Gramps was on leave, but when did they get married?’
‘I gather, very soon after they met. In the war people didn’t wait. They grabbed at happiness because no one knew what was going to happen next.’
‘So they would have been married in 1943?’
‘Yes. Why the sudden interest, darling?’ He looks at her closely. ‘Were you wondering if Anna was born before they were married?’
Lucy goes red. ‘It is just,’ she says quickly, ‘that when I was younger I used to ask questions about them meeting and although Gran always told me it was the best day of her life when she met Grandpa, neither of them seemed to like talking about that time, and Mum always seemed vague whenever I asked her things about London.’
Barnaby laughs. ‘I should think she was vague. She was a baby in London and very young when they moved here, Lucy. Can you remember anything much before you were four or five?’
Lucy thinks. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she says. ‘I think my first memory is either you taking me to a fair at night. Or getting smacked by Anna for locking that horrible au pair in a cupboard.’
‘You were, let me see, about four and a half when I took you to that fair. You hated every minute. You were coming down with a bug and the crowds bothered you. The horrible au pair, I’m not sure … five, maybe six.’
They make their way to the till. Barnaby grabs some small seed trays, two packets of Virginia stock and a small bag of compost.
‘For Martha?’ Lucy asks.
‘Yes, I thought it might be something for her to do.’
Back in the car, Barnaby says, ‘What you have got to remember, Lucy, is that Martha arrived in a strange country, younger than you are now, having left everyone she loved, to live with strangers. We have no idea of the conditions she left behind her. She had the rest of the war, frightened and lonely, to imagine what might be happening to her family. Knowing that they probably would not survive.’
Barnaby glances at Lucy as he drives. ‘I do not know what state of trauma she was in when she and Fred met. All I do know is that your grandfather never let Anna or me ask her questions about the war or about her life in Poland.’
‘I know. Anna told me she never knew anything about Martha’s childhood. I can understand about the years just before the war, but I can’t understand why Gran would not want to talk about her childhood if it was happy. I mean, everyone looks back on the happy bits of their lives, don’t they?’
‘When I was very young, Lucy, when I had fallen or had a temperature, she sometimes used to sing to me without knowing she was singing in Polish. As I listened, the sound always seemed to turn into a lament. She would stop suddenly and I would put my hand up to her face and she would hold it there, flat against her cheek, her own hand over it. Small as I was, I felt the enormity of her sadness without, of course, understanding why.’
Lucy swallows. Cannot speak.
Barnaby goes on, almost to himself. Lucy cannot ever remember him talking to her like this. ‘When I was growing up I longed to know; felt Anna and I would be enriched by knowing. We only had tiny snippets: a recipe, a childish game. Fred would tell both Anna and me that we only had the right to know the things Martha wanted to tell us. Maybe one day she would be able to speak of happy times in Poland. If not, we would have to understand.’
‘Now,’ Lucy says slowly, ‘even if she wanted to tell us anything, she can’t. It’s not fair for Gran to end up like this. God is cruel.’
‘Life is cruel, darling. I often think – I may be quite wrong, of course – that Anna might often be … tricky –’
‘Difficult, you mean, Barnes.’
‘Don’t interrupt me. Anna might often be … difficult because Martha and Fred must have been adapting to each other, to life after the war, to all that had happened to them both, when she was born. Even when I was a child I can remember them being very wrapped up in each other, very concerned for each other’s welfare.’
‘Were you lonely, then?’
‘All children are lonely sometimes. Our generation had a different relationship with their parents. Fred and Martha were the most loving of parents, but there was more distance between us than your generation has, on the whole, with their parents. Boarding school, as you know, accentuates that distance.’
They turn in the gates. It is early afternoon and Martha will be resting and Fred will be asleep under the paper. Mrs Biddulph will be listening to The Archers. As they pull up in front of the house, Lucy knows this is the time to ask Barnaby about the documents she found.
She opens her mouth, and Barnaby says, suddenly, very quietly, ‘Maybe life is not so cruel. Martha, returning to her childlike state – maybe now she can remember happy times in Poland, memories she blocked because they were too painful to remember.’ He pulls the key out of the ignition and turns to Lucy. ‘Maybe the sadness now is mine and Fred’s, because we can remember her when she was young and bright and full of fun. I am so afraid I will forget how she once was.’
Barnaby’s face. The line of his mouth held in a loss he feels everyday and hides. Lucy leans forward and hugs him, her head pressed away, hard into his shoulder. For the first time she feels the sheer weight of his tiredness in caring for Martha and Fred, day in and day out, without reprieve.
‘I am so glad we talked,’ she says into his shirt.
‘So am I, darling.’ He kisses the top of her head. ‘Come on, let’s go and get some bread and cheese while everyone sleeps. Then we’ll put those primroses under the tree.’
As Lucy waters the primroses on Abi’s small grave she realises it is the first uninterrupted conversation she and Barnaby have had for ages. Mostly they are both too busy or too tired by the time Martha and Fred are in bed.
She thinks of her own father, whom she has never met. Anna does not even know where he is any more. Claudio Pedrazzini – she has a cloudy photograph of him standing squinting into the sun in Milan. She could bump into him and never even know. Barnaby says one day she will probably want to try to trace him. She has inherited none of his musical talent, but, so Anna says, much of his laid-back nature.
She wonders, as she presses the wet earth down over the roots, if he ever, in idle moments, thinks about her. She has been lucky; she has always had Barnaby.
Lucy walks across the garden to put the watering can back into the falling-down garage, full of ancient bicycles and rusty paint tins. She thinks that her first instinct in not telling Barnaby about the papers she found was right. Either Barnaby knows and it is some secret he thinks should be kept, or it would be one more thing about Martha to make him sad. It isn’t her business. It is Gran’s. If there is a secret, it is not hers to give away.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_a38cf500-d8b2-59fb-b047-fdeb35151b45)
Lucy, finishing her early shift at the hotel, drives slowly home. It is an amazingly beautiful morning with no clouds. Cold but clear. The trees are unfurling pale virgin leaves, like tiny fists. Spring is everywhere, and Tristan will soon be gone to a cold and hostile place where spring comes late.
She stops the car and fishes in her bag for her mobile phone. She gets out and goes to sit on the sea wall, watching a fast sea swell and crash on the rocks below her. After she and Barnaby talked about Martha she felt better, for a while. When she is busy, she can push away the image of that strange piece of paper in the brown envelope, but her mind keeps returning to it.
What else lies up there in the trunk? What other shock lies in that faded box? At first, she did not want to know. But as the days slip by and leaving for London gets closer, she feels torn between wanting a glimpse of something that might settle her anxiety, and a longing and equal dread of knowing the truth.
She has not told Tristan. It is not something she can discuss on the phone. Talking about it will make it real instead of lying like a dark place on the edge of her mind. Lucy wants to believe there is a simple explanation. She wants to believe everything is exactly as she has always been told all her life. The story of Gran’s arrival in England in the war. The romantic meeting and falling in love with Fred. A rushed war wedding before his leave ended. Anna’s birth at the end of the war.
She wants to go on believing this. Yet that small faded box was obviously not meant to be found, so why not burn the papers instead of hiding them? Lucy has thought about it a lot. It is hard, maybe impossible, to destroy your own or other people’s identity or possessions. After all, it is who you are.
Lucy knows she would have had to block her mind too if the people she loved had been left behind, killed in the war or perished in a concentration camp. So why is her mother’s birth registered in a German document dated 1941 with an identity card dated 1943?
Was Anna really born in Warsaw, not London? Is she really four years older than she thinks she is? Perhaps Martha came to London later. Perhaps Grandpa met her somewhere else and they had a baby before they were married. Maybe Martha and Anna had to have German papers to get to England. That would mean Grandpa …
Lucy shivers, suddenly afraid, as if Martha’s past is about to cast a great shadow over them and they will be swallowed in darkness. Like Barnaby, she hates secrets: they surface unexpectedly and hurt.
She dials Tristan, looking down on the waves, feeling the cold spray on her hands. She hates the thought of him going to a place full of hatred, American bombing and streams of refugees. She listens as the phone rings and rings, then Tristan’s breathless voice comes on the line.
‘It’s only me,’ she says. ‘I know it’s early, but I just wanted to hear your voice.’
‘Soppy tart … Phew … Hang on … got to get my breath back. Just got back from a run. Phhhew … It’s an amazing day here.’
‘It is here too. Huge sea.’
‘Are you OK, Luce?’
‘Yes. Just dreading you going. Tris, was it really necessary to flatten Belgrade?’
Tristan sighs. ‘Debatable. Luce, come on, I’m not taking off yet. We’ve got leave together before I go. This isn’t like you, my little ray of sunshine. Is there something you’re not telling me? Like you want to throw me over, not for a fisherman but, quelle horreur, a bleached and muscled surf guard?’
‘You wish!’ Lucy almost tells him what is worrying her, but it is not the time.
‘Luce, I have to go. I’ve got to shower and get into uniform. I’ll ring you later in the day. Be happy, sweetheart, it’s such a gorgeous day.’
Lucy drives home and parks in the drive. She sits for a moment looking across the lawn, listening to the morning birds. Gran’s garden is a spring garden and everything is poised to explode into colour. She shrugs her mood off, closes her mind. It is impossible to be unhappy on a morning like this.
Lucy lets herself into the house. Barnaby is dashing about with Martha’s tray and he looks relieved to see her.
‘Thank goodness, darling. Your gran has dressed herself for high summer and refuses to change into warmer clothes. She’s in the bathroom at the moment, very cross with me. Fred is having tea in bed until the bathroom is free and I have ten minutes to get over to St Michael’s for Holy Communion.’
Lucy grins at him. ‘You’ve also got marmalade on your cassock, Barnes. Did you tell me we haven’t got anyone coming in until later today?’
‘Oh, yes. Sorry, Lucy, it’s a training morning or something, I can’t quite remember. Kate is not coming until midday, but Mrs Biddulph has just rung to say she can relieve you at ten o’clock. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, it’s fine. What a pity, I’ll miss Kate again. I’m back at work at twelve o’clock. I’m dying to meet her. What’s she like?’
‘She’s … different – quietly capable, and she drives, thank God. I quailed a touch when I first saw her – nose ring, short spiky hair – but Martha and Fred did not bat an eyelid. Lovely face, rather like a young Audrey Hepburn. I might be wrong, but I’d say she was a bit overqualified to stay long term.’
Lucy raises an eyebrow at him ‘You noticed her then?’
Barnaby gathers up his books filled with small flaglike book marks. ‘Kate is not someone you can avoid noticing.’
Martha emerges from the bathroom, looking stunning in a mustard-yellow dress, a cream scarf and bare legs in tiny smart court shoes.
Lucy claps her hands. ‘Gran, you look beautiful, utterly beautiful!’
Martha smiles at her granddaughter. ‘Darling, thank you,’ she says graciously, throwing Barnaby a baleful look as he heads for the front door.
‘Bye. See you all later …’ Barnaby is out of the front door, galloping gratefully to his car.
Lucy giggles, suddenly deliciously happy again. ‘Tell you what, Gran, put this coat on … there … Now I want you to see your garden – it’s looking stunning – then you can tell me if you are warm enough in those clothes.’
She peers round the bedroom door at her grandfather while simultaneously helping Martha into her coat. ‘Gramps? Are you OK? Barnaby’s just left. Gran and I are just going to have a quick potter round the garden.’
Fred puts his tea cup down. ‘I’m fine, Lucy, thank you.’ He winks at her wryly. ‘I’m going to get up in five minutes. Take your gran up to the copse. The wood anemones are out under the trees … look splendid.’
Lucy and Martha walk across the damp grass. The early sun seems warm, but the wind from the sea is not. Martha holds her coat close as they turn towards the trees where the wood pigeons nest at the far end of the large, overgrown garden.
They both gasp at the sight of the great circular cloud of blue, white and gold lying under the spindly saplings and old sycamore trees. Lucy goes behind Martha to shield her from the cold wind and twines her arms around her neck.
‘Did you plant all those, Gran?’
‘No … Fred planted more and more each year until there was a great carpet of them, which grew and grew. So lovely. Oh, so lovely.’
‘Everything is just coming out. Look at that yellow, and the pink there in the corner near that white prickly bush thing.’
Martha laughs. ‘Quince,’ she says. ‘I think.’ Then suddenly, ‘I don’t want this all dug up for vegetables.’
‘Gran, why ever should it be? Of course not.’
‘It happens.’ Martha shivers, and takes one foot out of her shoe and dips it in the long wet winter grass. Lucy opens her mouth to say she will get cold, then seeing Martha’s face, says nothing.
Martha, leaning against Lucy, closes her eyes, pushes her old toes into the damp grass and for a moment the sharp cold sensation shoots her down the years to another place, another time. She smiles, savouring the birdsong, the flash of new-born, translucent yellow leaves, red flowering camellias, closed bud of cherry. She raises her face to the smell of spring, the first exciting promise of summer, to being young and full of hope, with the whole of life shimmering before her.
‘Gran?’ Lucy whispers after a while. ‘Don’t get cold.’
Martha opens her eyes, expecting to see Hanna, sent by Mama to bring her inside. But it is … it is …? ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘it is a little cold.’
Lucy bends and fits Martha’s small bent toes back into her shoe, and arm in arm they walk back to the house.
Fred is in the bathroom with the radio on and Lucy sits Martha on the bed and, fetching a towel, dries and gently rubs Martha’s feet warm again.
Martha places her hand on Lucy’s silky dark hair with the streaks of gold. ‘Darling, what would I do without you?’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me.’
Lucy looks up and says fiercely, ‘Gran, why not? All my life you have been here for me and now I am here for you.’
Lucy’s eyes fill with tears suddenly and so do Martha’s; for what has been between them and is now gone. Lucy longs to say, ‘Oh, Gran, I found something I wasn’t meant to in the loft. What really happened to you in the war?’ But she can’t. It’s too late. A few years ago, maybe. But not now. The Gran of her childhood is gone for ever, but the person she was is still here, burning with the same unquenchable spirit. Lucy takes Martha’s small hands and holds them to her cheeks for a moment, closing her eyes against her loss.
When she opens them, she says briskly, ‘Right, Gran, I’m afraid it’s woolly tights, passion-killer tweed skirt and shapeless warm sweater for you. You’ve done enough trolloping for one cold spring morning.’
Martha giggles. ‘Oh, darling, it’s so much more fun being a trollop.’
Fred, coming into the bedroom shaved and immaculate in tie and clean shirt, looks at the two women and the array of clothing on the bed and snorts at them.
‘If ever there were a couple of trollops, it’s you two.’
Outside in the garden, the very first bud on the cherry tree opens a fraction and NATO drops a bomb by mistake on a bridge full of Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_c296d89e-e889-5d9c-adec-3a69f7ad98ed)
The rain has stopped and the Berlin night is quite still except for the muted sound of traffic out on the autobahn. He wakes in the dark and for a moment believes he is back in his childhood. He can smell the roses from his mother’s garden, but stronger still is the smell of horses and things he does not wish to remember. He can hear his heartbeat loud in the dark and the overpowering silence closes in on him. Why, after all these years, do the memories come flooding back? He has buried the past. He has buried it deep.
That was that life. This is another.
He can remember the first time he saw the little girl clearly. She had long, shiny black hair he wanted to touch. She was tiny, like a little doll, and she was afraid of horses. But she was not afraid of him.
Mutti was furious with his father. She did not want him to go into practice with a Jew, and she stood in the garden that day, unsmiling and icy. She called him to her and whispered loudly, ‘Ugh! How I hate the darkness of them.’
He pulled away from her. Kicked out at a garden chair because of the sickness in his stomach, and the gardener’s puppy lying underneath shot out with a squeal … I shiver at the memory of her eyes. Close my mind against the echo of her laugh.
All his childhood Mutti told him stories, terrible fairy stories of a race who ate their own babies, who were inferior, but a threat to all good Germans. After he met the little girl his heart told him something quite else.
How lonely they were, he and that fearless little girl. There were no other children nearby and only a hedge and a lawn between them. He defied Mutti, refused to think of her as Jewish. He and the girl were friends. They were friends.
Although he was older, she was the one with the imagination. They made small dens in the rambling garden on the edge of the forest, like nests, with old horse rugs and straw as linings against the cold and damp.
They always made more than one den to outwit Mutti. The girl seemed to know exactly where his mother would send the nurse or gardener to look for them, and where, in a tangle of dried fir branches, close under the branches of overhanging trees, grown-ups never ventured, if you stayed very quiet.
He was the practical one, carefully lining the small floor of their tree caves with layers of warmth. Pinching food from the kitchen and old coats from the hook in the stables so they would not freeze. Tying torn pieces of cloth to the trees so that they would know which way they had come.
In the depth of winter, when it was too cold to play in the garden, they often hid in the little tack room in the stable block. It had a small fire, and they played board games or drew pictures or read. The groom and the stable boy used to warn them when Mutti was on the warpath.
His mother knew perfectly well he played with the girl and she hated it. He could not take her into the house when Mutti was home, and even when his mother was out or away, the girl was so nervous she jumped at every sound, hated being inside his house.
His mother could not ban the little girl from the house and garden. She could not stop them playing together or from being friends, because of his father. He adored the child. She amused him. He also admired her mother, who was gentle and extremely well read.
Mutti was much too clever to dislike the family openly or show her jealousy and prejudice in front of his father. She enjoyed the money and lifestyle that the new clinic engendered. Instead, she made life difficult for the children, and any social interaction beyond the polite interchanges between the two families impossible.
This was neither unusual nor a surprise. Initially, the two families knew exactly where they stood and the conventions were strictly adhered to, in front of her. Jewish families kept to their own, lived amongst each other, not with Poles or Germans. As far as Mutti was concerned it should stay that way. Behind her back, the boy visited the girl in her home and so did his father.
As the years went by Mutti’s jealousy of the girl and her mother, combined with her prejudice, became all-consuming, obsessive. Fuelled by politics, the papers, her friends, Polish and German, it seemed to his mother that she had waited all her life for the time that was coming.
As his father’s marriage disintegrated, as Poland began to prepare for war and indigenous Germans waited for their chance to seize coveted houses and jobs, as houses became empty and the trains overflowed with refugees fleeing while they could, his mother would beat him with his horsewhip for even talking to the girl.
He and the girl were like brother and sister. Until he changed schools. Until the company of his peers became more exciting. Until he began to understand the threat to the purity of the German race. Suddenly, they were children no longer and it was not possible to be friends.
He was a German. She was a Jew.
I shut her out. I shut out the memory of those haunting dark eyes. I shut out what I did and what I became. I close my eyes against the coming day, the boy I was. Against the sick endless knowledge of my own betrayal.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_33c589b8-4657-5757-ae64-169f0e60f121)
Kate found a small vegetarian hotel on the edge of the village. Her room faces the estuary and she opens her window wide to a thick airless afternoon. This will be fine until she can find somewhere to rent.
Away over the water purple clouds are amassing. There is going to be a storm and she is glad of it. Her head aches and she feels tense and vaguely apprehensive.
She thinks of Martha. Martha and Fred living in that one-storey, timeless house that holds the faint resonance of a colonial era.
Restless, she makes tea she does not really want, then throws herself on top of the bed and closes her eyes. She hears the first distant rumble of thunder start like a mumbled threat and with it the strange anxiety surfaces.
She thinks she knows the cause of it. Entering that house reminded her of Dora. The reminiscent smells of an old house, where long-faded curtains and fabrics of sofas and chairs hold still the nostalgic memories of childhood. And of hope. Another visit, one more chance of saying and doing the right thing.
She thinks about that freak London storm that sent her here, which woke her from a dream of such joy that she tried to cling on to it. She did not want to wake up in her aunt’s flat in the centre of London where any moment the dull roar of traffic would begin.
She lay listening to the violent wind isolating her in yet another city, and felt an overpowering dislocation and a longing to change the course her life had suddenly taken: regular employment, city salary, punishing hours.
She knew she should be grateful. She should be enjoying writing travel features. She should be glad of decent money. But she was homesick for India, for a job she had loved, for her friends. For the person she had thought Richard was.
The knowledge that she could never go back, never return to that place and time of happiness was a sharp pain under her ribs. It had ended so abruptly that Kate knew she would never take joy or fulfilment for granted again.
Her brother, Luke, had phoned to tell her that Dora was dying, the same week Richard’s wife had flown unexpectedly to Karachi to join him.
– I have to give it another try, Kate. I have a four-year-old child.
– Of course you do. I see that. I’ll stay in England. I won’t come back.
– It might be easier for us both. It would be awful to have you so near.
– Yes. I expect it would.
Kate stunned, in shock; Richard trying to keep the relief out of his voice.
Later, when she could think straight, she realised Richard must have known for months that his wife was coming. An estranged wife does not travel thousands of miles with a small child, just hoping they will be welcome.
Kate gets off the bed, picks up her cooling tea and goes to the window. Why did Richard, thousands of miles away, after months of silence, decide to ring her at that particular moment, in the middle of a storm, his voice finally ending a life she could not let go of. Somehow she knew it would be him. Kate believes in karma.
– Kate, it’s me, Richard.
– Richard. Is something wrong?
– Darling Kate, I just needed to hear your voice. You don’t even sound surprised.
– No, I’m not surprised. Not in the least.
– Kate, you sound so … cold.
– Not cold, Richard. Sensible. It is what you wanted me to be, wasn’t it?
Silence, Then – You are angry with me. I’ve hurt you, Kate. I’m sorry.
Kate was not angry, she was furious.
– Richard, I lived and worked with you for two years. You told me your marriage was over. Definitely over. Your wife rings you out of the blue to announce her return, and you suddenly tell me you must try again for the sake of your child … And, oh, by the way, as you have to go back to England because your mother is dying, maybe, it is better, easier, if you don’t come back. Isn’t that how it was? Tell me if I have got it wrong!
– I thought you agreed it was the best thing, Kate. I thought I had to try once more …
– So why are you ringing me now?
– Because I miss you very much and because I don’t know if I can make this marriage work.
– I see. You want to keep all your options open, in case you get bored trying to piece together a relationship for the sake of your child?
– For heaven’s sake, Kate, you seem intent on twisting everything I say.
– No, Richard! I flew home because my mother was dying and suddenly things became very clear. I saw things as they really were, not as I wanted them to be. You never stopped for one moment to consider our relationship before you leapt back into your marriage. You never rang me once to see how I was or to find out if my mother had died …
Kate felt the tears behind her eyelids.
– I thought we were close friends, but I was only a stopgap. An aid worker passing through. Unimportant, or you would have told your wife that it was too late, you had met someone else who meant something to you. Anyway, anyway, it doesn’t matter.
– Of course it matters … Kate, please, I’m sorry, really sorry. I have made a big mistake …
– Tough.
– Can I at least fly home and talk to you?
– No. It’s much too late, for me, anyway. Just for once, think about someone else. Your wife and child. Make your marriage work. After all, it was important enough six months ago to end our life together. I hope it all works out. No! I don’t want to hear any more. I am going to put the phone down …
She felt Marjorie’s arms round her shoulders as her heart jumped painfully.
– Well done, favourite niece.
– I’m your only niece.
– True.
Marjorie threw two books of maps onto the table between them.
– Where is it going to be this time? Which country?
– You old witch. England. For a bit anyway.
They placed the map on the floor. – Close your eyes and point.
– Have I told you, you are absolutely my favourite aunt?
– I am your only aunt.
Marjorie turned the map round. Kate closed her eyes and randomly stabbed her finger somewhere. She expected to land in the sea, but when she opened her eyes her finger was right on the toe of Cornwall.
– Very apt, Marjorie murmured. – All the nuts land in the toe.
Now Kate gets off the bed and goes to the window. How do you ever know you have done the right thing? She is drawn to caring for strangers, when she could not reach her own mother in any meaningful way.
She is about to become peripheral, drawn into lives that have nothing to do with her. People living, not with actual death, but loss, all the same. A small sneaky death of the mind. Is this too soon after Dora?
Against the backdrop of purple sky a fisherman in waders digs for eels, seemingly oblivious to the coming storm. The tall figure of a girl walks slowly along the foreshore with an elderly-looking dog. Her dark hair, streaked with random blonde strands, is caught up in a slide. She is young, coltlike, with an innocent elegance. She wears a cropped black T-shirt with bare midriff and white cut-off jeans. She stops on the shingle, looking up the estuary, out to where white waves are gathering on an incoming tide. Seabirds wheel in the wind over her head and curlews swoop low, calling out, flying inland against the coming storm. How bleak and lonely it is out there, the weather turns so capricious, changing quickly and suddenly.
The girl stands very still for a long time, and something in the slight and vulnerable figure catches at Kate. She knows suddenly it is a leave-taking, a long silent goodbye. Sadness starts up inside her, a strange pull at her heart. The girl must be Lucy; Kate recognises the dog.
It is as if she is watching a small private lament. As if she is watching herself grieving for something she cannot change.
Kate stands at the window like a sentinel, as motionless as the girl below her silhouetted against that violent collecting sky. Another rumble in the distance, far away over the sea, and a flurry of fat raindrops lands in gusts against the window.
The girl moves slowly, the dog gathers its legs and jerks upright after her and they disappear slowly together round the point, leaving Kate watching the empty foreshore.
Chapter 15 (#ulink_9622a3d5-01a9-57e8-b199-7ccc89f00dd8)
Berlin
He sits in his flat studying a street map of London. He stares down at the tiny row of houses where Hans has told him the woman lives. He circles the house, the law courts and her chambers in the city with a soft lead pencil.
He makes another little circle on his English map, right down in the toe of England where the woman grew up. Far from London, but London is not far from Berlin, London is only a few hours away.
He pours coffee, then goes to open the glass doors and sits on the small balcony. If he took up Scheffell’s offer he would have a valid reason for going to London. A two-week seminar would be good for him, keep his hand in, stop his brain from atrophying.
He looks across the swathe of park in front of him to the city glinting below. The faint roar of muffled traffic comes to him from the autobahn. He thinks of his working life, the years flying by too quickly, the time so easily taken for granted. That time when you are young and single-minded. Striving to get to the top of your profession. Strands of a life gathered up in careful calculated threads. Career, travel and women. In that order. Each thread separate, unless he wished it otherwise.
Academically fulfilling years. Exciting. Because of the power. Every surgeon becomes aware of the seductive power in his hands, the thrill of learning, teaching, becoming expert. Healing tired, diseased and broken bones. Mending, stapling together, piecing like an intricate jigsaw smashed limbs. Devising new ways of operating and post-operative care. Becoming eminent. All this, behind him.
Every doctor, at some time, abuses that aura of godlike status. Not necessarily with his hands as he heals, but with his heart, as he so casually picks up and discards the people who pass through his life.
Women, you mean. He sips his coffee and watches the wind get up, filling the air with pollen. Is it not amazing the euphemisms one uses to delude oneself? A third party detachment. A collective every and we to distance ourselves from our own responsibility.
I have spent my life distancing myself. How many women, young or old, professionally and personally, have I hurt by my actions? Theatre nurses berated for a simple mistake. Patients and young doctors sycophantic to avoid my sarcastic tongue.
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Sara MacDonald
A beautifully written novel with great emotional appeal, of family secrets and wartime heritage, set in Cornwall, London and Warsaw.The house and the cottage overlooking the sea, on the corner of the big estate, was home to three generations of the Tremain family. Fred Tremain, the country doctor who – with his wife, Martha, for whose sake he had become estranged from his family – came first to this beloved corner of England: Anna, the difficult, determined older child, now a highly successful solicitor; and Barnaby, the easy-going second child, now a vicar to the parish: and the beloved granddaughter, Lucy. It is she whose discoveries of family papers, hidden in the old cottage, brings to light the first of the wartime secrets and begins the process of questioning so many old fears and hatreds, and unlocking the way to new relationships and new loves.Sara Macdonald has created a wonderful range of characters, depicted with great tenderness and understanding, against a background of the human price paid for the upheavals caused by prejudice, violence and wars today and yesterday. A wonderful novel for all the fans of Anita Shreve and Rosamund Pilcher.
SARA MACDONALD
Sea Music
Copyright (#ulink_e91d6e38-744d-58b2-b47c-fbc0b0b8e118)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2003
Copyright © Sara MacDonald 2003
Lines taken from Old Man, Tears and Sowing from Collected Poems, copyright © Edward Thomas, reproduced by kind permission of Everyman’s Library
Sara MacDonald asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007150731
Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007396740
Version: 2017-05-02
Dedication (#ulink_d7e59a01-6e76-5503-ab9a-ab442cb252a3)
For Milly Who says, the past is gone. The present is what matters, and the future.
Contents
Cover (#uf5d4a209-7a80-5f24-a12f-828b9f5874d3)
Title Page (#ufe69d2e3-4668-55bd-84da-155666526b0d)
Copyright (#u51e5cecf-8b12-5b37-9ed0-daee29fd47ec)
Dedication (#ud1df3d6b-b972-5a7b-9a79-ef294300527c)
Prologue (#udfa426c4-b857-5ffd-b495-f1341c33974c)
Chapter 1 (#ubc4d9afd-f88e-558b-99bc-7f338b8d2c10)
Chapter 2 (#ufda5a0ed-2b6c-51d6-b19e-accab214ef71)
Chapter 3 (#u703b336f-3fb2-599d-94c6-45502718da25)
Chapter 4 (#u92190bb9-ce6e-5864-8ca4-95dad1d6ef03)
Chapter 5 (#u9ad3289f-20e6-5242-bcee-04be180ca96d)
Chapter 6 (#u0c67f6de-5444-5653-b054-abc2e0058f2c)
Chapter 7 (#ud7886d2c-8888-55a5-b7a0-80d605157651)
Chapter 8 (#u6bf90e73-0535-5ab5-9212-282304ba6288)
Chapter 9 (#ufd8264da-8c68-547a-8c8f-46d7a9832e3c)
Chapter 10 (#udb1f6c7a-2764-5e2d-b8de-1546e41dabd4)
Chapter 11 (#u5762ab66-e312-506a-9e1a-c28821b0405f)
Chapter 12 (#uc2ddf656-e67a-55c6-bb11-f2751a4aaaa0)
Chapter 13 (#uda6ff463-0ee9-59f2-a1cf-1b112f02edfb)
Chapter 14 (#u5c6ddd77-76ca-5e6d-a906-f3d2994806cb)
Chapter 15 (#uad0a4207-bc70-5db6-a1d8-8375a721b3a0)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_24323ebf-5d99-50fc-821c-a92208e75c4a)
It is not cold here in this land of blue sea, but shafts of ice reach out to pierce my skin with memory of coldness. Sometimes I dream of snow and the muffled silence it brings. I dream of snow with the sun glistening on its smooth surface, catching tiny particles of blue ice, incandescent and blinding.
I wake in the dark in a strange place of fierce storms and I remember what horror can lie beneath the silent beauty of snow.
I listen to Fred breathing beside me, his body warm. He is far away in sleep and the faces swoop down at me in the dark, their voices hover in the air, like distant whispers I cannot capture.
I get out of bed, go downstairs and wander about the little cottage, afraid that this life is only a dream and I am about to wake. I sit in the corner chair by the window and wait for the sun to rise out of the black water.
I will hear Fred wake, I will hear the bed creak, then his bare footsteps coming down the stairs. He will come to where I sit and he will reach out gently to stop me rocking. He will fold me in his arms, then he will pick me up as if I weigh nothing, throwing his hair out of his eyes, as he carries me back up the stairs to bed.
He will hold me tight to him and I will breathe him into me. This is my life. I have this life now, here with him. I can feel him smiling into my hair as he tells me about the plans for our new house across the garden.
How can this beautiful man love me? But he does. He does.
I will not always be this in-between person who walks on the sand dunes above the glittering sea, watching my dark shadow move ahead of me as we walk together, the girl I was, the woman I am now.
The house is almost finished. We live here in the cottage all the time now. No more long journeys at weekends. The house is wonderful. Light is everywhere; it fills every corner, it slides across the floor and colours the rooms in buttery sun. Great windows open up and let the untamed garden into the house.
I am so happy I tremble. I kiss Fred’s hands because I cannot speak. I run through the empty rooms laughing and Fred leans in the doorway, his long legs crossed, pushing tobacco into his pipe, watching me with those dark eyes that hold love and amusement.
I make myself walk into the village. I am afraid at first. People stare because I am foreign. Sometimes, in the shop, they stop talking. When I am nervous I forget my English. Then, slowly, people begin to talk to me and I learn their names.
The farm workers in the fields behind the house bring me vegetables and creamy milk from the farm. Fred laughs at me – he says I flirt atrociously – but it is not, as he teases me, because I am floosy, it is only because I am so thin.
The builders’ rubble has been taken away. At last we move in. I can plan the garden. It is going to be perfect. One day Fred comes home with a little mixed dog and we call him Puck. I love him. When we walk on the beach, people come up to me and they ask, ‘How is Puck? How are you?’
Summer is here, the fierce winds are warmer, but I am ill and cannot bear to go out. Fred is pale with worry. Suddenly the doctor tells me I am having a baby. I cannot believe this, I have to keep saying it over and over. After all we have been told, Fred and I are having a baby.
Fred says I must not hope too much, it is early days, I must be careful. But I know. I know this child will be born.
When Fred goes back to London to work for his finals and he cannot see to worry, I dance round the garden and sing because of the happiness of this incredible miracle.
Christmas comes and then the New Year. I lie in my bed, or in a chair that Fred places by the window in the sun. I am careful, waiting. Waiting for spring and my baby.
Our child, a boy, arrives safely on 18 March 1951. He weighs 6lbs 2oz. We call him Barnaby, after one of Fred’s favourite uncles. Barnaby. Such an English name.
Small shoots spring from my feet and take hold in this light, sandy soil and root me here in this extraordinary foreign place filled with blue sea and sky. The past is gone. Marta is gone. My future is here. Is now. I am Martha Tremain, the doctor’s wife. This is who I am.
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b26c811c-dca6-5158-8071-fa751ff981c7)
Lucy finds Abi dead under the cherry tree. The little cat has crawled away to her favourite place and still feels warm to Lucy’s fingers. She knows it is stupid to feel so upset about an old tabby cat, especially when people are being killed all over the Balkans, but this one small cat has been with her most of her childhood.
She digs a hole to bury her deep next to Puck. She does not want her found and dug up by badgers or foxes. The cat is still loose-limbed and floppy, and Lucy places her in the hole cradled by roots as if she is still sleeping in the sun, but she cannot bear to push earth over the little feline face.
She picks bluebells and mint and garlic flowers and lays them over Abi’s eyes and head, makes a cover between the cat and the rain-soaked earth. Then she takes the spade and buries her. As Abi disappears from view Lucy suddenly sees herself under the ground too, a cold and literal walking over her grave.
Barnaby appears from the house and takes the spade from her, makes good the small grave and chats about what flowering thing they can plant on top of Abi. Lucy tells him about the horrible sensation and wonders if it is an omen. Barnaby says, smiling in that comforting way he has, ‘Lucy, remember when you and I went to pick her up from the farm? You were only six and that little cat has been a part of your childhood. You have just buried a chunk of your life, that is all.’
Lucy knows he is probably right. Barnaby has been central to her childhood. He has given her security and unconditional love. He has never let her down, ever.
She turns, shading her eyes from the sun, and stares back at the house. In the conservatory her grandparents are moving around each other aimlessly. Fred is looking for his newspaper and Martha, despite the warmth of the day, is clothed in many woollen garments. It is like looking at a bizarre backdrop to some surreal play.
A lump rises in Lucy’s throat. She is deserting them. She is leaving Barnaby with this and she has not even had the courage to tell him yet. She feels torn and suddenly apprehensive of the future. For Barnaby, for Tristan and for herself. These are her grandparents and she should be here for them. Lucy turns away, bends once more to the small grave and pats the earth flat.
Barnaby is watching her. ‘What is it, Lucy?’
‘Tristan has just been posted to Kosovo.’
Barnaby sighs. ‘Oh, Lucy, I am sorry.’ He picks up the spade and pulls her to her feet, putting his arm round her as they walk back to the house. ‘Tristan will be all right, Lu, I am absolutely sure of it.’
Martha is waving vaguely at them. Lucy does not think her grandmother has a clue who they are, but she and Barnaby both wave back, smiling.
Gran. Lucy feels again a lightning snake of sadness. She wants to protect and keep everything in this house safe, as it has been all her life, and she knows it is impossible. She has no power over her grandparents’ old age, state of mind or eventual death.
Barnaby locks the church door and stands on the porch looking out to where the sea lies in a semicircle round the churchyard. The tide is in and the estuary lies black and full, silhouetted by small, bent oak trees.
Barnaby walks past the ancient gravestones towards the water. He is reluctant to make the small journey across the road back to the house. He stands looking towards the harbour, listening to the throb-throb of the boat engines in the evening air as the small, colourful fishing fleet makes its way carefully over the bar and back to the quay.
Barnaby longs to spend this spring evening with another adult, a woman, if he is truthful. The familiar feeling of wasted years shoots through him briefly and painfully. It is not just loneliness that accentuates his single state; it is the slow, tragically funny and innocent return to childhood of both his parents, as if they have mutually given up being adult together. There is no one but Lucy to share this with: to laugh with, so he does not cry.
Lucy has been wonderful, rarely impatient, always concerned and tender with her grandparents. But she is another generation and she cannot share his memories. She has Tristan, her own life to lead.
There is Anna, but his sister does not want to accept what is happening to her parents. She is, as always, heavily involved with her career, and a husband. Anna, normally so practical, is in denial.
Barnaby turns away and makes his way down the church path and across the road to the house. Martha is peering out of the hall window, watching for him, or someone she recognises, within the fussy haze in which she now lives.
He opens the door and calls out, ‘I’m home.’
His mother dances towards him on tiny feet. ‘How do you do? I’m Martha Tremain,’ she says graciously.
Barnaby takes her small hand. ‘And I am Barnaby Tremain, your son.’ He smiles down at her, watching the bewildered expressions of doubt pass over her still-beautiful face.
Martha sees the laughter in his eyes and she laughs too, a little burst of relief. Of course. It’s Barnaby.
‘Oh, darling,’ she says. ‘How silly! I’m going quite dotty, you know.’
‘Rubbish,’ Barnaby says, kissing her. ‘Where’s Fred?’
‘Fred?’ Martha shrugs eloquently. She does not know, her face is blank again, but Barnaby can see his father and Mrs Biddulph out on the lawn. His father has Eric, the ginger tomcat, on a lead and is trying to get the cat to sit. Eric is not finding the lesson in the least amusing and Homer, his little Lab cross, is sitting on the grass, looking puzzled.
Poor Mrs Biddulph looks cold and ready for home. Barnaby opens the French windows and calls out to his father. The old man’s face lights up and he moves with surprising agility towards his son. Mrs Biddulph unclips the lead from Eric, who stalks off into the undergrowth, his thin tail twitching with indignation.
Mrs Biddulph is not pleased. ‘I’ve been trying to get Dr Tremain inside for at least an hour. He hasn’t had his tea yet.’
Barnaby gives her his best smile. ‘Never mind. Whisky time, I think, Dad?’
‘Good idea, old chap. Sun’s over the yardarm.’
Barnaby laughs and takes his father’s arm. ‘It is indeed. Mrs Biddulph, thank you so much. Will we see you tomorrow?’
‘I can’t really say. Mrs Thomas has taken on new staff. Young girls won’t stay five minutes,’ Mrs Biddulph says scathingly. ‘I’m surprised she didn’t ring and tell you.’
Barnaby prays there is not going to be a stream of indifferent girls to confuse Martha even further. Mrs Thomas, who runs the Loving Care Agency Barnaby uses, is universally unpopular with her staff.
‘She pays crap, expects the earth and buggers everybody around,’ Barnaby was told by an efficient, purple-haired girl who lasted a week.
Once indoors Barnaby closes the French windows. Mrs Biddulph puts on her shapeless wool coat, a garment she wears winter and summer.
‘I might see you tomorrow or I might not, Vicar. Good night all.’ Mrs Biddulph departs at speed, already thinking about Mr Biddulph’s tea, the bus, and getting home in time for the Antiques Roadshow.
Barnaby gathers both parents up, herds them into the sitting room and pours whisky into their familiar heavy tumblers. They watch him like expectant children and take their glasses greedily.
‘Thank you, darling.’ His mother raises her glass to him and smiles her sweet vacant smile.
‘You having one, old chap?’ his father asks.
‘Indeed I am.’ Barnaby sits tiredly in the armchair and looks at his parents fondly. All so normal. All calm and Sunday eveningish. If he closes his eyes for a moment he can almost believe he is twenty again and spending another soporific weekend with his parents, comforted by routine but restless to be away.
‘What’s Hattie cooking for supper, I wonder.’ Martha’s voice wavers against his closed eyelids. He opens them. His father is staring at his mother.
‘Hattie isn’t here any more. She died, didn’t she?’
Martha’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Oh dear, shouldn’t we have gone to the funeral? Shouldn’t we have sent flowers?’
Barnaby takes a long deep drink from his whisky glass. ‘Mum, Hattie retired about ten years ago, then sadly she died. You did send flowers, and you did go to the funeral, so that’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yes, darling. Sometimes I forget things. How silly.’
‘I’m going to finish this drink, then I’ll start your supper. Cheers! Here’s to summer.’
‘Cheers, darling.’
‘Cheers, old chap.’
There is silence as they drink and watch him. A blackbird sets up a squawking in the cherry tree, which is about to explode into blossom.
‘Naughty, naughty Eric cat,’ Martha murmurs, and Barnaby smiles and begins to relax.
His mother gets up and wanders round the room. ‘I’m rather hungry, darling. I’ll just go out to the kitchen and tell Hattie to do us all an omelette.’
Barnaby sighs, gives up and gets to his feet. ‘I’ve just told you, Mum, Hattie is no longer here. It’s just me tonight. You’d like an omelette?’
‘Why isn’t she here? I didn’t give her the day off. It’s too bad.’
Moving to the door, Barnaby hears his voice rising, although he is trying hard not to let it. ‘Hattie is dead, Mother. Look, I’ll put the television on for you. I think it’s the Antiques Roadshow. Sit and watch that with Dad, and I’ll be back in a minute with your supper.’
As he closes the door he hears his mother say, ‘I didn’t know Hattie was dead, darling. When did she die?’
‘Oh, ages ago, M., ages ago,’ his father says. ‘Think I might have another drink.’
Barnaby stares into the middle of the fridge, fighting an aching tiredness. He cannot see any eggs and an overpowering depression suddenly overtakes him. He hears the front door open, then the glass inner door shut with a bang that makes him wince.
‘Hi, Barnes, it’s me,’ Lucy calls out unnecessarily. He hears her making a run for the kitchen to see him alone before Martha hears her and dances out of the sitting room to see her beloved granddaughter
‘Help me, Lucy. What on earth can I give them for supper? The fridge seems empty.’
Lucy claps her hands over her mouth. ‘Oh, bugger, I forgot. I told Mrs Biddulph I would do the shopping. She will get things she likes and Gran and Grandpa hate.’
She opens the door of the freezer and pulls out fishfingers and chips with a flourish. ‘Here we are! Gran loves them.’
Barnaby looks doubtful. ‘She seems to live on them. I’m not sure your grandfather is so keen.’
‘Darling Barnes,’ Lucy says briskly, ‘they both ate a huge roast lunch. I keep telling you, honestly, they don’t need two cooked meals a day. You just make work for yourself.’
‘I know, bossyboots, but food is their one comfort and distraction. Look, there is some cheese at the back of the fridge; that will do for Fred.’
‘I’ll eat chips with Gran.’
Barnaby raises his eyebrows. ‘If I remember rightly, you too had a large Sunday lunch, or was I seeing things?’
Before Lucy can answer Martha flies in. ‘Lucy, Lucy, how lovely …’ She lifts her cheek up for her gangly granddaughter to kiss and Lucy hugs her.
‘Hi, Gran. I’m about to cook you fishfingers and chips. I’m going to pig out on the chips with you.’
‘Darling child, how lovely!’
Barnaby lays four trays out three times. Martha, longing to be helpful, promptly puts them away three times.
‘How can I help, darling?’ she keeps saying to Lucy. Lucy brings her alive in a way even I cannot do, Barnaby thinks, in a way the young spark the old with their energy and cheerfulness.
They have supper on their knees in the sitting room. Barnaby sits next to Fred and shares his cheese and biscuits.
‘Barnaby and Gramps are both going to dream their heads off, darling, whereas you and I are merely going to get porky,’ Lucy whispers to Martha.
From across the room Fred looks at his tiny wife and his tall, skinny granddaughter sitting beside each other on the sofa.
‘I am extremely concerned,’ he says drily, ‘that my antique sofa is going to give way under all that weight.’
He regards them so seriously from over his half-moon glasses that they all burst out laughing.
Glimpses, Barnaby thinks, small, joyous glimpses of people you love, swinging back.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a6996889-e190-5424-9be7-cd1eb3ba51a2)
A north-easterly wind blows in from the sea and hits the cottage head-on so that the small house shudders. The storm has gusted and rampaged around the coast for days, taking roofs and everything it can lift and hurling them around the gardens. It blows itself out in the first light of day and returns again at dusk. Trees bend and tear in the wind, their branches strewn across the road like broken limbs.
Lucy tosses and turns in the night to the mournful cry of curlews down on the estuary; wakes abruptly and lies anxious in the dark, feeling as if she is poised, waiting for some nebulous disaster that is edging her way.
She sits up, shivering. The church beyond the window looms out of the dark. The dawn sky is lightening to a faint pink above the gravestones which rise eerily up like small tors. She gets out of bed and pulls a pullover over her childlike pyjamas.
She misses the warmth of Abi jammed into her back. She goes downstairs to make some tea, switching on all the lights in the cottage. Carrying her tea back to bed she sits on the window seat in her bedroom, clutching the warm mug, listening to the wind begin to drop.
As a child she sat here so many times in the holidays, feeling relaxed and happy to be with her grandparents, listening to the church bells and the seabirds. Waiting for the first light when she could pull on shorts and T-shirt and run across the road, down the narrow path by the church to the beach.
When she was small, Fred and Martha still occasionally rented the cottage out, but when Fred retired he needed the spare room of the house for a study and they kept the cottage free for Barnaby or Anna and Lucy to stay in. If Lucy came alone she would sleep in Fred’s study. The room always smelt comfortingly of tobacco and leather, but the cottage was where she was happiest. It was like having her own den. She would walk with Anna or Barnaby across the garden to have breakfast with Martha and Fred at the round table in the conservatory surrounded by Martha’s geraniums.
Lucy and Tristan still often walk across the garden for breakfast, but it is Barnaby, not her grandparents, who cooks the bacon and makes the toast now.
Lucy suddenly longs for Tristan. Kosovo looms as foreign and unpredictable as another planet.
She jumps up. The only way to lift this mood will be to go out and walk. She pulls on jeans and two sweaters and makes her way downstairs again. Homer, who spends the nights with Lucy, opens one eye, but does not move. Lucy lets herself out, blowing across the road in the tail of the gale. She climbs the steps over the Cornish hedge into the silent and dark churchyard. She has never been afraid here; it is as familiar to her as Martha’s garden.
The sun is slow in rising and she is across the golf links and down on the beach before it emerges, a beautiful gilt curve, like the edge of a plate over the horizon. There is a high tide running and she sits on the rocks and watches the sun rise up, orange and gold over the harbour, glistening the surface of the water.
Lucy does not want to leave. This place, her grandparents and Barnaby have always been home. Now, suddenly and subtly over the past months, the responsibility has changed. The caring, the childlike dependence has shifted. Martha and Fred are slipping away from her into old age and the dread of one of them suddenly dying, of her not being here when it happens, feels unbearable. Lucy shivers despite her two sweaters. This anxiety is not just about her grandparents. It is about Tristan too. And the teaching job. And living in London on her own.
Anna will be in London, but Lucy is certainly not going to let her mother know she is nervous and afraid of failing. Anna would tell her she has spent too long in Cornwall, and this is what happens when you drop out, even for a short time.
She can hear her mother’s voice and she grins suddenly, thinking of Tristan, who would say the same thing but in a different way.
‘You’re just in a panic because you got a bloody good job when you didn’t expect to, Lu. Come on, you didn’t do languages to wait on tables, did you?’
Lucy sighs and jumps off the rocks onto the sand. She is not accustomed to being melancholy and she turns slowly for home. Now she is up and wide awake she might as well sort out her things. She has accumulated so much crap. She will have to go up into the attic and see if there is any room to store all the childhood stuff she cannot bear to throw away.
Lucy climbs the ladder up to the attic and pushes open the hatch. She feels vaguely guilty, as if she is about to trespass. She should really have asked Barnaby before she came up here.
Using her torch Lucy finds the light switch on her left, and the dim bulb swings slightly, catching the dust. There is plenty of room up here. Most of the floor has been professionally boarded and Lucy wonders why her grandfather has always had a thing about people coming up here and falling through the ceiling.
The room smells of mice and dust and a world that no longer exists. There is an old gilt mirror, mottled, the frame rotting. Heavy, old-fashioned golf clubs. A box of little pewter mugs, relics of school cricket matches. A box of books. A huge grim picture of a fast-running grey sea. A faded, frayed hat with paper flowers. Leather suitcases neatly stacked one on top of another. Rolled carpets, a broken wicker chair, and a disintegrating box of crockery and vases.
Lucy swings the torch round in an arc and sees a hardboard partition to the left of the hatch opening. Big enough to house a water tank, it has been eaten by mice and is beginning to disintegrate. There is a crude door into it with a small latch.
She heaves herself over the ledge of the open hatch and crawls over to the door. She pulls it cautiously and it falls away, completely rotten round the hinges. Kneeling upright she drags it carefully away from the partition and pushes it aside. Shining her torch inside the darkness she sees an old school trunk. Nothing else. No water tank, no hidden electric wires or pipes.
Moving inside the hidden room, Lucy sees that over the years the trunk lid, with her grandfather’s initials on the top, has warped, and documents have slid to the floor below. A rusty padlock lies broken in the lock. Lucy pulls it out and opens the lid. Mice have been in and made nests; there are droppings and small mounds of eaten paper. On the top lie cardboard files of deeds and medical journals; letters in bundles, some stored in plastic files.
Lucy shines the torch downwards into the trunk and pokes about with her free hand. Why has Grandpa made a room to hide this trunk? Under her fingers Lucy suddenly sees a faded pink box nestling under letters and old documents, pushed carefully to the bottom of the trunk, underneath diaries and ancient ledgers.
She leans over and moves the bundles of letters carefully so that she can pull the box out and she places it on the floor beside her. The box is tied with colourless ribbon and the writing on the lid is faded and in Polish. Lucy’s fingers hover over it.
Gran’s box? Her heart is thumping. In that small second of hesitation Lucy’s intuition tells her she should stop and put the box back in its hiding place, yet she is already sliding off the ribbon and lifting the lid.
Letters. Browning letters in a foreign hand. A large envelope with typewritten German: Social Welfare Department of the Municipal Administration of Warsaw. It is not sealed. Lucy opens a creased and faded piece of paper within a small cardboard folder like an identity card.
The document is torn and flimsy, almost in pieces. This writing too is in German. It seems to be some sort of crude birth certificate: ‘Anna Esther … Born 8 February 1941, Warsaw, Poland.’ The surname is indecipherable, as if it has been rubbed out.
‘Mother. Marta Esther …’ ‘Oweska’ has been added later, obliterating the name underneath. ‘Father …’ The paper is watermarked and conveniently torn.
All that is left on the card in which the paper is folded is some sort of German official stamp and the date, 1943. The rest is illegible. What does it mean? Her mother was born in London in 1945. Gran and Grandpa have told her so. This piece of paper would make Anna four years older than she is. It does not make sense, and why have the surnames been rubbed out?
Lucy shivers. With shaking fingers, she pushes the documents away from her, back into the box. She does not want to know. She replaces the lid and puts them all back into the top of the trunk. Clumsily she moves away backwards, anxious to be out of the attic. There is nothing she can do about the rotten door.
She closes the hatch with a bang, pushes the ladder back to the ceiling and, blanking from her mind all possible implications, she runs across the garden to go and dress Martha before she starts her breakfast shift at the hotel.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_73331aaf-7f59-5567-8601-fa5c52898f5c)
Coming out of court Anna congratulates herself. She was unsure she could win this case, but she was assisted by an overconfident Junior Counsel for the Prosecution who had not done his homework.
She stands for a moment, a tall figure in navy suit, blinking in the early evening sun. Her fair hair blows away from a face with high cheekbones and startling blue eyes. People glance at her as they pass, turn for another look, as if she might be someone they should know.
She looks at her watch: it is rush hour, too late to walk back to chambers and get involved with post mortems. She hails a taxi, without any difficulty, much to the annoyance of two business men, and climbs in. She will make her way to the Old Vic. If she is early she can have a drink while she waits for Rudi.
As she sits in the early evening traffic, Anna’s mind returns to the man she has just defended. His solicitor rang her at her chambers. He was not from the usual firm who instructed Anna, but he told her he had a client who had insisted he contacted Anna, as he had been told she was the best QC he could have to defend him.
The solicitor had apologised, knowing Anna’s list would be full, but he had promised his client that he would approach her. Anna was immediately interested when he mentioned the name of the firm involved in the fraud case. The solicitor also came from a prestigious law firm it would be useful for Anna to have instruct her in the future. She arranged for a conference with Counsel for the one hour she had left that week.
The client had come to her chambers on his own as his solicitor was in court. He had thanked her for seeing him and was visibly distressed.
‘I have nothing to lose by asking you to help me.’ He held out an envelope to Anna with shaking hands. ‘Would this be enough to retain you?’
Anna was amused, but she also admired his courage and determination in wanting her to defend him. She was aware she had a rather alarming reputation. She went over the case with him, then asked her long-suffering clerk to juggle her list so she could take on the case. Something in the man’s blind faith in her had made her sad. She rang the man’s solicitor and asked him to look into legal aid.
The Prosecution Counsel tried to prove that the defendant’s ignorance of the deception going on within his own firm was pure fabrication, a callous and calculated fraud. Anna’s defence rested on the fact that he was totally ingenuous and had had a steadfast but misplaced trust in the honesty of his business partner.
That fraud, operated on the vast scale it had been, would have been beyond him. She was forced to make him seem stupid in court, but it was part of her job. He’d paid dearly for blind trust. She worked for a fraction of her normal fee and, against all the odds, she won.
She takes her mobile phone from her bag and telephones Alice, her clerk. They chat for a moment about the case, then Anna asks her to return her client’s savings minus a derisory amount for her fee, and to tell him that legal aid had covered the costs. That small, rather pathetic man, without an ounce of malice or bitterness, has lost his wife, his house and every penny he possessed.
Before she rings off, she checks on her morning mail and her appointments for the following day. She has an unusual meeting in the afternoon with the CPS, who want her advice on the possibility of prosecuting an old Nazi living on a housing estate in Dorset.
Anna stretches tiredly, feeling herself coming down from the high she always gets when she wins a case. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the flash of a cherry tree about to explode into blossom and is reminded suddenly of Martha’s garden. She wants to take Rudi down to Cornwall so he can see it in the spring. Like a lot of Germans he has romantic notions of the west coast.
Barnaby seems to be making rather a meal of looking after Martha and Fred. After all he does have outside help, and he has Lucy. Cornwall is too far away for Anna to see Martha and Fred as much as she would like. Holidays have to be planned like a military campaign.
Not wanting to dwell on her parents’ senility, Anna hastily picks up her mobile phone again to speak to Rudi. His secretary tells her he has just left for the theatre. Anna leans back in the slow moving taxi and closes her eyes.
She still has trouble believing her luck in her late and happy marriage. Rudi, a financial consultant for a Swiss bank, works long hours himself, so accepts her workload and ambition as perfectly normal.
As a child, Anna felt Martha and Fred’s disapproval if she was too competitive. She had learnt that to be openly ambitious at home was considered pushy. Not very nice. It was not that her parents ever articulated this sentiment, it was something she instinctively knew.
In the long nights away at boarding school she would sometimes day-dream she had been adopted or sent home with the wrong family at birth. She would lie imagining Fred’s wealthy, sophisticated family somewhere out there in the dark, wilds of Yorkshire, beyond the windows, longing to meet her, so alienated did she so often feel in the holidays, with Martha and Fred and saintly little Barnaby.
Her parents bent over backwards to appease her, and she had felt furious with them for being so patient, so bloody understanding. She felt her power, the sheer force of her own personality at a very young age.
She would get a surge of satisfaction in knowing Martha and Fred would do almost anything to pacify her, keep her sweet, because the alternative would be a pervading atmosphere that upset the whole household.
Yet imposing her will on her parents brought her a sharp loneliness and sense of loss. All through her childhood she had looked for something to anchor her to Martha and Fred, to the place where she lived.
Later, as a teenager, her fantasy changed and she would search in her mind now for a figure who would immediately recognise that she was far cleverer than these very average parents living in their insular, West Country world.
This person – usually in her daydreams a young and handsome man – would whisk her away from total obscurity in the country to her rightful position, centre stage. Like the place she effortlessly occupied all her school life.
Yet, something in her ached for the place Barnaby held in her parents’ hearts. Martha and Fred told her continually how proud they were of her, but Anna was sure they wished her kinder, gentler, other than she was. They seemed as puzzled at the way she had turned out, as she herself was.
Coming home from school in the holidays, Anna would immediately see Barnaby and be consumed by a frightening rage of jealousy of this placid baby, this good small boy, who had had her parents’ undivided attention while she had been away.
She would spend the holidays slyly making him cry. After he too left home for boarding school and she started university she still verbally bullied him. Once he was steeped in the timeless and barbaric ways of public school, he never told, never blabbed. There was something wet but intransigent in Barnaby that still irritated her to death.
As the taxi filters out of the traffic, Anna sees Rudi waiting for her outside the theatre. He waves, his face lighting up when he sees her. His eyes dwelling on her face. He moves forward to pay the taxi as she gets out. She feels the familiar surge of excitement and pleasure in him.
They met at a conference in Zurich. After a seminar she had given she overheard him muttering appreciative and complimentary remarks about her to a colleague, not realising she was fluent in German and understood every word.
Rudi had told her that he had been so bowled over by that beautiful English barrister, it had been like walking into a door. She was giving a series of lectures to clever, noisy delegates that weekend and it had been a challenge to keep them engrossed and silent.
They strolled through the parks of the city together. They went to the opera, talked of their failed marriages, their work and themselves. For the whole of that weekend Anna spoke only German and it was a strangely liberating feeling. She felt comfortable in her skin, in the country, and with Rudi. It had been like waking from a long, lonely sleep. That weekend was also the beginning of a successful international lecture she was establishing as a consultant. Rudi was seconded to the Swiss Bank in London the following year and he took a lease on a flat in Chiswick. His sons flew out regularly for holidays. They were adolescent and enjoyed London and all it had to offer, so they were polite to Anna. She found them much easier to handle than Lucy, who had always been an enigma.
Anna and Rudi married a year later, when their respective children had got used to the idea. Lucy begged to leave her Dorset boarding school and go down to live with Barnaby and her grandparents. She wanted to take her A levels at a sixth-form college.
After talking to her headmistress, Anna eventually agreed. Both she and Rudi tried to persuade Lucy to stay in London, believing that the standard of teaching would be higher, but Lucy was adamant. She did not want to live in the flat with Rudi, Anna, and Rudi’s visiting children.
Anna was not surprised. Anything or anybody Anna liked, Lucy would dislike on principle. However, the flat was too small for three teenage children, and the thought of having Rudi to herself, except for his sons’ visits, had been a huge relief. Lucy got surprisingly good A levels. She was as happy with Barnaby, Martha and Fred as Anna felt distanced and irritated by them.
Anna feels a sudden relief that Lucy is now adult. Life is so much easier. As Rudi bends to kiss her, she thinks how lucky she is. Rudi, having fulfilled most of his own ambitions, opted to forgo promotion and coast happily towards retirement in London to be with her. Anna knows she is happier than she has ever been.
Anna shakes hands with Rudi’s Swiss guests and they make their way to the bar. Rudi’s hand hovers courteously at the small of her back. It reminds Anna of the way Fred walked beside Martha, and she is touched. Somehow, it makes her feel secure, for Fred has been as constant to Martha as the changing seasons.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_7db7e55d-3341-5878-b703-3f0d3501c662)
Evensong is over and Lucy is helping Barnaby put Martha to bed. Fred is perfectly capable of managing himself, but he cannot manage Martha any more and it upsets him. Her grandparents have single beds now, near enough to touch, to hold hands in the night, but not to disturb each other’s sleep.
Martha always goes to bed first and Lucy will sit and hold her hands, check her hot-water bottle, give her her pills, talk to her and marvel at her still-beautiful face. Martha has always worn pretty linen nightdresses, and somehow, once she is in bed she relaxes, her face loses its anxious look and smoothes into a tiny unlined child’s face. Suddenly coherent, she will tell Lucy long rambling tales of building this house, of starting the garden from scratch. Of meeting Fred in London. Of love at first sight.
Fred will appear out of the bathroom, bathed and immaculate in pyjamas and dressing gown, and say politely but firmly to Lucy, ‘Good night, child.’
It is her signal to leave them. She will bend and kiss her grandmother, who twines her thin arms round Lucy’s neck. ‘Oh, my darling, how I love you!’
‘I love you too, Gran. Sleep well. Good night.’
She bends to her stooped grandfather. ‘Good night, Gramps. God bless.’
‘God bless, child.’
Every night it is the same. Barnaby comes then to tuck them in, to stand at the end of their beds, to say a good night prayer.
‘Good night, darling Barnaby,’ his mother whispers, eyes closed, half asleep.
‘Good night, Mum.’
‘Good night, old chap,’ his father says.
‘Good night, Dad. Sleep well.’
The security of ritual. Barnaby shuts the bedroom door and leans against it. ‘Sans everything,’ he breathes. Fred will fall into a deep and heavy sleep, but Martha could get up a dozen times and wander about during the evening.
Lucy is pouring them both a glass of wine and they sit together in silence, drinking. All week she has wanted to ask Barnaby about the box she found in the attic. She has never had secrets from him, but she looks at his drained and exhausted face and is silent.
After a while she says, ‘Barnes, you can’t go on like this. Sundays are hell for you. You need weekend carers now, not just old Mrs B. for a few hours. You are going to need round-the-clock help soon.’
She hesitates, then says miserably, ‘You know that interview I went up to London for, teaching foreign students? Well, I got the job.’
‘Lucy, that’s marvellous.’ Barnaby leaps up and kisses her. ‘You clever girl. I’m so pleased for you. Just think, you’ll be able to use your degree and earn some decent money.’
‘Well, the pay is not brilliant, but the best thing about it is that I can go and teach in Italy for three months. But how are you going to cope on your own? It’s going to get worse with Gran.’ She gets up and pours more wine into Barnaby’s glass.
‘I don’t start the job for a couple of months, but Tristan wants me to spend his leave with him before he goes. It means I would have to leave quite soon …’
‘Lucy,’ Barnaby says firmly, ‘how I manage is not your responsibility. You’ve got your own life to lead.’ He is watching her closely. He suspects Lucy is anxious about leaving Cornwall and the security of this household. ‘It will be fun for you to live in London for a while; it doesn’t have to be for ever. It will be a great adventure and much easier for you and Tristan to be together when he gets back from Kosovo. I’ll miss you enormously, you know that, Lu. You’ve been wonderful these last few months, but there is a world out there waiting for you.’
Lucy bursts into tears. ‘I don’t think I should go. I should be here, near my family. I don’t think you dare admit you need more help with Gran and Gramps. I feel sick just thinking of leaving you.’
Barnaby is startled because this is so unlike Lucy. ‘Then I’ve been very wrong and relied on you too much. I’d feel mortified if you thought you couldn’t get on with your own life, Lu, or that you might be influenced by my needs or those of Martha and Fred. I understand how you feel about Cornwall, but there’s always going to be a home for you here. You have your whole life ahead of you with a man you love, who thinks the light shines out of your bottom.’
Lucy gives a watery grin, then giggles. ‘True. But, Barnes, will you please, please think about getting live-in help? It doesn’t have to be through the agency. There must be retired nurses, people like that. You could move into the cottage, have a bit of space and peace. You need it.’
‘Lucy, round-the-clock care is very expensive. The only way we could begin to afford it would be to rent out the cottage again. Don’t forget the cottage does not just belong to me; Anna and I share it.’
‘Well, Mother will bloody well have to help financially. It’s about time she took some responsibility. Barnaby, you must have some life, somewhere to shut yourself away. You’ll go mad with carers here all the time –’
‘Lucy,’ Barnaby interrupts, ‘I am quite capable of looking after myself. Just think what you want to do, what will make you happy, and do it.’
The phone goes suddenly, making them both jump. Barnaby’s heart sinks; he knows who it will be.
‘That will be Anna,’ Lucy says, ‘with a guilty Sunday duty call. Don’t let her get to you, Barnes.’
But Barnaby is already tense, and listening to Anna’s firm, confident voice puts him more on edge. She is about to take a short break and would like to come down with Rudi to see Martha and Fred. She presumes it will be all right if they stay in the house as she would rather not inflict the cottage and Lucy’s lack of hygiene on Rudi.
Barnaby swallows his annoyance. ‘Anna, it’s not all right, I’m afraid. The carers arrive early. There is chaos in the mornings with only one bathroom. You’ll also find Martha and Fred very confused, especially with anyone they don’t know. I’m sorry, but it’s not fair on the carers, and I couldn’t cope with two extra people in the house either. Could you come down on your own this time and stay at the cottage? It’s some time since you last saw Martha and Fred and I’m afraid you will notice a difference.’
Anna is annoyed and snaps back at him, ‘You are evidently finding it difficult to cope, Barnaby. You should have let me know. It’s obviously time we thought about a home. We’d better talk about it when I come down.’
Barnaby explodes. ‘We most certainly will not! I can’t believe you are even suggesting it, Anna. Come down and see for yourself before you start making comments like that. I’ll get Lucy to tidy the cottage before you arrive.’
He waves at Lucy to be quiet. She is jumping up and down and punching the air, sticking her thumbs up to the sky.
‘Of course I haven’t any objection to you coming down with Rudi …’ Barnaby takes a deep breath. ‘It’s just that if you come down on your own, you could spend a little time with Martha and Fred, Anna. Have a holiday with Rudi another time. Fred, especially, will appreciate you coming. Please think about it and let me know. Good night.’
Barnaby finds he is trembling with weariness and suppressed rage as he replaces the receiver. Anna continues to be one of the most self-centred people he has ever come across.
Lucy is still hopping up and down. ‘She is such a totally selfish human being,’ she echoes. ‘Don’t tell me it’s wrong to dislike my own mother sometimes, Barnes. She makes me furious. Does she ever ask you how you are? Does she, hell! Thank God you stood your ground. She’s got such a bloody cheek. Sorry, I’m knackered … Got to go to bed …’ Lucy wilts, suddenly exhausted.
Barnaby kisses her good night. ‘Sleep well,’ he says drily. ‘Having a vicar as an uncle has done nothing to improve your language.’
He watches her walk across the damp grass and disappear through the little gate to the cottage. How could Anna have produced this child he loves so dearly?
The curlews down on the estuary warble mournfully into the darkness. Startling himself, Barnaby admits suddenly that he too can actively dislike his sister. Not only does he wish her in outer Mongolia, but he realises he has always felt like this.
Martha’s memories, so long suppressed and left behind, are beginning to surface slowly and slyly, like bubbles. Time for Martha has become meaningless. Past and present merge and blur. Voices and faces pass like shadows across her mind, throwing up long-forgotten lives. Those lives seem so real to Martha, so near, as if she can open a door and move into the rooms of her past life once more. Those far-gone lives of her childhood draw her back with long tentacle arms, to enfold her in their sense of nearness.
She reaches out to touch the fleeting sleeve of a dress, the rough tweed of a jacket. She smells fresh bread in the oven. She sees faces she loves bending to her, smiling, chiding her wildness. With longing, she lifts her head to feel their breath upon her cheek, turns to catch the sound of faint laughter and the warmth of a hand.
She listens to the wind rattling the long windows so that the sound echoes through the house, shutting doors with a sudden click, moving the curtains outwards, lifting the rug in little tremors, like ghostly footsteps through the hall.
Mama and Papa are having tea with the German doctor and his wife. Marta and Mama and Papa have travelled from Łódź all the way to Warsaw by train to see him. Marta has been sent into the garden with the doctor’s small boy and the nursemaid. The nursemaid is not watching them, she is flirting with the gardener.
Marta stares at the German boy with fascination. He has the whitest blond hair, very blue eyes and white, white teeth. He is wearing lederhosen and a pale shirt, and his bare arms and legs are brown and smooth as apples. He stares back at Marta disdainfully. He does not like to be sent outside to play with a girl.
Marta stands on the terrace steps, wary and a little frightened, like a small rabbit ready for flight. The boy puts his hands on his hips and, coming closer, looks down at her.
‘How old are you?’ he asks.
‘I am five,’ Marta says, trying to make herself tall.
The boy is pleased. ‘Well, I am older, I am eight. Mutti says I am going to be much taller than my father.’ There is a silence. Then he says in a bored voice, ‘Come, I am going to go and see the horses.’
He turns and marches away towards the stables. Marta follows him. She is afraid of horses, but she is not going to say so.
The horses are standing looking out of their stalls, shaking their great heads against the flies. They are groomed to a shiny perfection, their manes shimmer as they toss their heads.
The boy goes to a big stallion. ‘This is Tylicz, My favourite horse. When I am older I will ride him, but at the moment he is too big and strong.’ He takes an apple out of his pocket and turns to Marta. ‘Here, you may feed him if you like. Give this to Tylicz.’
He is watching her closely and he smiles suddenly. She is growing pale at the thought of approaching that huge mouth. He knows, he knows I am afraid, Marta thinks.
The boy places the apple in her hand and leads her towards Tylicz. Desperately, she tries to hang back, but the boy pulls her sharply forward, tells her there is nothing to be afraid of and lifts her clumsily towards the great head of the horse. Marta screams as his long yellow teeth reach out towards her. She drops the apple and jerks away. The boy loses his balance and lets Marta fall onto the hard stable floor.
He bursts out laughing; he can see she is not hurt and she looks so funny. Marta will not cry. She is angry. She picks herself off the floor, bends and takes the fallen apple, wipes it on the hem of her dress and breaks it into pieces with her teeth. She has remembered something Mama told her and she arranges the pieces on the flat of her hand.
She walks over to Tylicz and, trembling, stands on tiptoe and raises her hand up, up, towards the horse, keeping very still and balancing herself on the door of the stall with her other hand.
Tylicz looks down at her almost as if he is smiling and very slowly and gently he bends over the stable door, craning his neck down to her hand. He can only just reach the apple, only just brush her hand with his whiskery mouth. He tickles her open palm, his mouth velvety, as he scoops the apple up, and Marta laughs as he crunches it noisily.
She cannot stop laughing for the relief of not being bitten and the laughter lights up her face and fills her whole being. She is not afraid of this boy. She is not afraid of the horse.
When she turns round the boy is laughing too, and the look in his eyes is no longer scornful. Marta hears Mama calling and they turn together and run across the green lawn, back towards the house. Marta’s head is held high and her back is stiff with triumph.
The boy’s mother is standing with Mama outside the French windows. She reaches down and ruffles the thick blond hair of the boy. She is pretty, Marta thinks, and golden, but she does not smile. Next to her, Mama looks tiny and far more beautiful, with her shiny dark hair and smiling brown eyes.
The German doctor comes out into the garden with Papa, and bends to Marta. ‘Your father and I are old friends, Marta. We studied together. I hope you and my son will be friends also, because your papa has agreed to come and work with me. He is going to build you a house on that land over there that backs on to the forest. Then, you see, he can help me run my clinic.’
Behind the tall doctor, Marta is watching the boy. He is standing with his hands on his hips, feet apart, staring at her with those pale, intense, turquoise eyes. His mother reaches down and whispers something to him. He pulls away embarrassed, shrugs off her hand, and in a little lightning movement kicks out at a garden chair, which collapses with a clatter on top of a little dog, who gives a great yelp and dashes away.
The boy jumps. Marta does not think he knew the dog was there, but she is not sure. It is time to go. Her father takes her hand. She turns and looks over her shoulder. The boy is standing with his blond hair blowing in the wind, still watching her. He seems suddenly alone and strangely beautiful. Exciting. Marta shivers.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_c4c5ba85-3f79-5dfb-83f1-534444428d4e)
Lucy wakes early and pulls on a T-shirt and track-suit bottoms.
‘Sorry,’ she says to Homer, as she lets him out into the garden for a pee. ‘I’ll take you out later, but you can’t keep up with me when I’m running.’
Homer looks martyred and slinks back to his bed.
‘Come on, don’t be a drama queen.’ Lucy lifts his heavy old head and plants a kiss on it, but the dog is not to be mollified.
Lucy opens the front door and runs past the church and down the path towards the beach. The air feels warmer, expectant. Birds scuttle about in the undergrowth, flying low and gathering feathers and fluff, grass and twigs. She runs down the steps and jumps onto the sand. The tide has turned and she can just get round the point.
Lucy pushes herself, running steadily, jumping the waves that slide in and pool round her feet. She can feel herself beginning to relax. The beach is deserted, stretching long and colourless in early morning light.
Happiness flares suddenly, a joy in being alive. Lucy increases her speed, her hair flapping rhythmically as she gets into her stride. The lighter mornings always make her wake earlier, but it is not daylight that disturbs her sleep.
She has covered a great length of the beach fast; now she slows down as she feels her legs tiring, measuring the point she wants to reach. She pushes the thought of that small odd birth certificate firmly out of her mind. She will think of Tristan instead. She heads up the beach and collapses near the rocks, sweating and panting. In the distance fishing boats are coming out of the harbour, battling over the bar with the wind against them.
Lucy considers what it will be like to live away from the sea again – not just in London, but wherever it is that Tristan could be posted after Kosovo. She is unsure she can live for too long away from the coast. Worse, if they marry, what if he has another single posting and she is left on her own in some army quarter?
She squints up at the sky. She can hear skylarks in the dunes behind her. She and Tristan have never really discussed marriage; it is an understood thing. Tristan may be a lapsed Catholic, but his parents certainly are not.
Tristan and Lucy are firmly given separate bedrooms when they stay, despite his mother being quite aware that they sleep together. It is not done primly or critically and Tristan’s mother had gently explained that she could not have double standards. Laura, Tristan’s youngest sister, still lives at home and there was no way they could countenance her bringing a boy home and sleeping with him.
Lucy grins. Separate bedrooms were funny. Tristan, bringing her tea in the mornings, borrowed his father’s silk dressing gown and cravat, inked a curly moustache with her eye liner and did appalling Noël Coward impersonations, which sounded more like David Suchet playing Poirot.
Lucy wraps her arms round herself as she cools.
‘Do I end up with a baby every year and a waist the size of a block of flats?’ she asked him.
‘Certainly you do,’ Tristan replied. ‘I have a weakness for waistless women.’ Then, hastily, in case she took fright, ‘Has my mother got fifteen children? Of course not. We will just use the rhythm method. Coitus interruptus.’ Seeing her face, he burst out laughing. ‘Idiot! I’m teasing.’ He picked her up and twirled her round. ‘Anyway, you might throw me over for a fisherman and settle for ever in the place you love most, at the end of the world.’
He was smiling, but his eyes were serious. Tris. She cannot imagine life without him. All this, all she has here, would mean so much less if he was not there.
She gets up and stretches, jumps up and down, loosening her limbs. She starts to run back, slower this time. The outgoing tide has left a line of foamy scum on the wet sand.
Tristan has made her grow up. He does not always say what she wants to hear, but she listens, especially about Anna. Her heart gives that anxious lurch again. Like the moment you wake and know something is wrong. She closes her eyes tight, banishing unease.
Anna sent her a little note in a card, congratulating Lucy on getting the teaching job. It is not the sort of thing Anna usually does. Lucy suspects that Alice, Anna’s clerk, bought it, or Rudi. After the congratulations, Anna wrote, ‘About time you rejoined the civilised world. I think you will find it stimulating. Love, Mum.’
Lucy tossed the card aside crossly, but when she told Tristan, he said carefully, ‘I think you are a bit hard on Anna, Lu. She sent you a card because she was proud of you. It doesn’t matter who bought it.’
‘I’m not hard on her! Anna can never do or say anything that does not have a hidden barb. Not to me, anyway.’
‘Is it possible that she cannot do or say anything that you don’t feel defensive about?’
Lucy was stung. ‘You don’t understand. If I am defensive, it is because all my life she has been critical –’
‘Lu, this is a circular conversation. We are not going to have an argument about the dragon in a wig. You’re right, I don’t know what it feels like to be her daughter. I don’t know what it feels like to have had a working or ambitious mother. I think you are just very different people and it’s a shame you don’t get on. I am sure she is as proud of you under her fiery nostrils as you must be of her.’
Lucy reaches the steps and stops again, the sweat pouring down her face. The bloody thing is she is proud of Anna. She remembers her coming to her school to give a talk on careers, just after Lucy had taken her GCSEs. Anna arrived looking stunning, immaculate. When she started talking you could have heard a pin drop in the hall. Lucy was fascinated. It was like watching someone she did not know. Anna the barrister in full stimulating flow, encouraging debate, challenging assumptions. Anna alive, doing what she was best at. For two hours she had forty girls and thirty boys from a neighbouring school riveted.
Lucy pulls herself up the steps, panting. It was the same day that she told Lucy she was going to marry the German banker. In bed that night in the silent dormitory, Lucy thought: that is why she looked so beautiful, why she was so sparkling. Anna is in love.
Lucy had already decided she wanted to leave school and take her A levels at a sixth-form college. There was no way she was going to go back and stay in a small flat with Anna and her new husband. The thought was gross.
Barnaby was back from Northern Ireland and was staying in the cottage on leave. Lucy rang him and asked if she could go down and live in the cottage and take her A levels in Cornwall.
Barnaby thought she was too young to live in the cottage on her own, and her grandparents were too old to have a seventeen-year-old living with them permanently. Lucy argued that she had been staying in the cottage every holiday of her life and that it was ten steps to Fred and Martha’s front door.
Both her grandparents thought it a wonderful idea. It was the first time Lucy saw Barnaby sad. He was leaving the army and seemed distracted. He took off on his own, went travelling. Lucy thought maybe he wanted to stop being a priest.
When Lucy was about to leave for university he came home. He had applied for a parish in Cornwall to be near Martha and Fred. Martha was not very well, but no one knew what it was then.
Lucy reaches the cottage and bumps into Barnaby coming out of the gate. He bursts out laughing when he sees her. ‘Oh my goodness, look at the state of you! You haven’t got any fat to lose, for heaven’s sake. I came over because Homer was howling his head off.’
‘Homer is a spoilt brat,’ Lucy says, looking sternly down at the dog.
‘Of course he is, he has lived with your grandparents all his life. He only transferred his affections to you because you go for longer walks and do not ration his biscuits. Are you coming over for breakfast or are you working?’
‘I am coming over. Is Gran up? Are you cooking bacon and eggs?’
‘Your gran is having breakfast in bed as usual and I am not cooking bacon and eggs. The logic of you running and then eating a cooked breakfast escapes me.’
‘That is because you are a man,’ Lucy says sweetly. ‘I am on a twelve-to-three today and I need sustenance to get me through.’
‘You might get a boiled egg. Spoilt brat,’ Barnaby says, turning and ducking through the garden gate, trailed by Homer. Lucy grins and goes to ring Tristan.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_0ebef0d3-11e0-5cd8-8e9e-abcd44fa93db)
The first thing Anna hears as she opens the front door is Maria Callas. ‘Suicidio! In Questi fieri momenti.’ She stands listening, leaning against the door. Evening sun catches the coloured panes and flickers across the hall. She can smell the smoke from one of the small cigars Rudi smokes.
The moment is so perfect, Anna feels reluctant to break it. She goes up the stairs slowly. It has been an especially good day and she is home early. Her flat consists of two floors. The room off the hall at the front of the house she uses as a study or third bedroom. Adjoining it is a tiny breakfast room with a gas ring and small sink. It has French windows on to a tiny terrace garden, which she and Rudi use in summer. On the first floor there is a drawing room, two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen.
Anna loves this flat. It contains everything she needs. She has lived here a long time and spent a lot of money, but it is now worth four times what she paid.
She pushes the drawing-room door open quietly and watches Rudi for a moment. He is sitting in the leather swivel chair, half turned to the window. The Times is spread over his knees but he is not reading. His head lies back against the chair and his eyes are closed as he listens to the music.
Anna stands quite still looking at him. The way his hair, grey-white, grows just over his ears. The way his face seems always tanned. The way the long fingers of his right hand hang over the arm of the chair. His mouth firm, with tiny vertical lines.
There is something sensual and intimate in watching someone with their guard down, watching the face of someone you love when they think they are alone. Her stomach knots with the strength of this love. It bites suddenly at her being, unnerves her so much she puts her arm out to the wall to steady herself.
The shadow of her arm makes Rudi turn, swing round in his chair, startled. He just catches the expression on her face before it changes into a smile. He holds her eyes and his own heart leaps. There is a depth to Anna he will never be able to penetrate. Yet that fleeting, powerful look that he caught on her face tells him everything he needs to know. She loves him with a passion that renders her vulnerable. Someone once betrayed her.
The moment passes. He smiles and opens his arms, gets up out of the chair. ‘Anna, how wonderful! Unexpected. You are home early!’
Anna laughs. ‘It’s a miracle!’
They stand holding each other. The raw moment of exchange hovers between them, still there in the gentleness of their arms and hands resting on each other’s back as the voice of Maria Callas flows round them.
‘I thought,’ Anna says, leaning back to see his face, ‘that I would like to take you out to dinner. I booked a table at that new Italian place, because I thought we could walk, it’s such a lovely evening.’
Rudi breaks away to turn the music down. ‘Are we celebrating anything other than the fact you are home early, my darling Anna?’
‘Well, I have just been told my name has been put forward again as a circuit judge.’
‘Anna! How wonderful. This is what you want? Does it mean more work? Less work?’
‘Different work. It means travelling, but it would be promotion. I would not have the huge casework I have now.’ She smiles and picks her bag up. ‘But I have refused before, and I think I will refuse again, I am addicted to the fight on the floor. It is just gratifying to be asked!’
They walk into the kitchen and Rudi gets a bottle of wine from the refrigerator.
‘I start on the Piper case tomorrow – you know, the pharmaceutical negligence case, I was telling you about? It is going to be a marathon. So tonight, I thought it could be you and me celebrating having a whole long evening together on our own.’
Rudi moves towards her, tucks a tiny piece of her hair behind her ear.
‘Have we time for a long leisurely shower before we eat, do you think?’
‘I think,’ Anna says softly, ‘we definitely have time.’
The silence of night swoops, closes and traps Anna in darkness. She can hear the distant, haunting echo of weeping. The landscape is bleak and stark – no buildings, only stooped moving figures silhouetted against fires that flare out into the blackness.
Hands hold her too tight, cover her nose and mouth so she cannot breathe. She wakes with a jolt and lies, heart pumping, as if a cold hand has suddenly shaken her.
The exposed shoulder of Rudi sleeping beside her is clammily cold at three in the morning. Anna, brushing against him, shivers. The window on her right shows a cold, clear night full of distant fading stars and the blurred shape of rooftops and willow tree.
She cannot remember what woke her, only that the memory of it is disturbing. She goes over next week’s court case to see if there is something she has missed. She thinks about her appointments for the rest of the week and the lecture she is giving in Berlin on Friday, but there is nothing she can find to make her anxious or sleepless.
Martha comes into her mind; this slow, creeping senility of her parents. Has she just dreamt of them? Anna does not think so, but there is a growing problem down in Cornwall that she knows she is avoiding confronting. Round-the-clock care is available, but expensive. Presumably that is why Barnaby seems determined to shoulder most of the care.
Anna sighs. She hopes that Martha and Fred will not outlast their money. Fred has always worried about money and if he were forced to sell the house it would break his heart. There is going to be no easy answer. At least she tries to be practical about her parents’ welfare – unlike Barnaby, who is just sentimental. He is too close to Martha and Fred. It is not healthy. He should be married, have children, be living in the plain but easy-to-run modern vicarage in his other parish. He should have his own life, a separate life, from his parents.
Anna feels a sudden pang of pity. If that little nurse he had been engaged to had not been blown up in Northern Ireland, Barnaby might be living his own life by now.
Her parents have always been poor. She hated this fact as a child and it has made her careful with her money. Fred always made it clear to Anna that he would have no money to leave her and Barnaby, just the house, the cottage and the plot of land that Martha made into part of her garden.
Anna and Barnaby grew up knowing that there had been a terrible disagreement between Fred and his parents after the war. They remained steadfast in their refusal to speak to Fred or acknowledge his family.
‘But why?’ Anna asked her father. ‘Why don’t they want to see us?’
‘It is me they do not wish to see, not you, darling,’ Fred said.
Martha, across the room, put down her sewing and said quietly, ‘That is not quite true.’ She looked at Anna. ‘It is me that they do not wish to see or acknowledge.’
Fred turned and smiled at Martha with such love in his eyes that Anna said quickly, loudly, ‘Because you are Polish?’
‘Because I am Jewish as well as being foreign, darlink.’
Anna saw the hurt in her father’s eyes and her heart hardened. She would not care about grandparents who made her parents sad. All the same, it was the stuff of fantasies. And Anna did fantasise.
The uncle whom Barnaby had been named after was also his godfather. He had come to Barnaby’s christening and he and Fred remained close. He used to send Barnaby and Anna beautifully wrapped Christmas presents.
Once, when she was at Durham University, he took Anna out. The anger that he felt about Fred’s banishment, even when he was an old man, was still in his eyes.
‘They are only hurting themselves. They have missed out on the only grandchildren they will ever have.’ He grinned foxily at Anna. ‘Younger son a grave disappointment. Neither inclined to marriage nor to work.’
Anna has always found it hard to believe that Fred could have been left totally without means. When people grow old they forgive. Lord and Lady Tremain would surely have wanted to make peace with their son before they died.
She remembers her father going to Lady Tremain’s funeral the year she sat her O levels. He drove up to Yorkshire alone and did not return the next day as planned, and Martha was worried. When he eventually arrived home, he looked sad and defeated; muddy and dishevelled.
He had walked for the whole of that lost day, round the grounds of his home, visiting people on the estate, reliving gentle memories of a happy childhood. Saying goodbye to ghosts. Trying, Martha explained to her children, to come to terms with the terrible waste, the pointlessness of his parents’ endless stance.
The deliberate loss of a son … Martha could not understand it. As if Fred were really dead. Lady Tremain, old but still bitter, had refused to let Fred go to his father’s funeral.
‘So cruel,’ Anna would hear Martha say to Fred over the years. ‘They are entitled to pretend I do not exist, even that our children do not exist, but not you, their elder and beloved son. I will never understand this. Never. I cannot.’
Anna feels the familiar irritation, even now in the dark, at the flowery dramatic way her mother has of talking. Martha might think of herself as English, she might have incorporated all the small English mannerisms, but the way she uses phrases, the way she uses her hands and gently presses people’s arms is not English. It used to embarrass Anna at school; she much preferred her father’s soft, English voice.
If it hadn’t been for a trust fund set up by Fred’s grandparents for him, something even his parents could not legally deny him, Anna would have had to go to a state school. The thought often makes her go cold. She almost certainly would not be in the position she is today. The judiciary of her age group is still almost entirely made up of people who have been privately educated.
Fiercely loyal to Fred, and eavesdropping as a child, Anna can remember distant aunts and uncles passing guiltily through Cornwall to visit them. Fred sometimes went to London to meet old friends, to Martha’s joy. But he never saw his parents again. The only time he returned to Yorkshire was to bury his mother.
Fred’s brother is dead now too. What did they say to each other on the day of their mother’s funeral? Why did they not become reconciled? Too much bitterness? Betrayal? Fred has never explained.
The anxiety is still with Anna. Will she wake Rudi if she gets out of bed to go to make tea? It is so rare for her not to sleep these days and she is afraid of disturbing him.
She thinks of Lucy. Lucy coming back to London is a very good thing. The cottage can be rented out at the going rate. Barnaby has steadfastly refused to take any rent from Lucy, and Anna is pretty sure she can afford it as she has been working in a hotel.
It would not surprise Anna if Tristan has been living at the cottage at weekends or when he is on leave. Rudi stopped her asking Lucy, pointing out that it would have cost them far more to have her living in London and that his sons were subbed on their visits, so it was important to be fair.
Anna let the matter drop. Rudi was right: she could be hard on Lucy. She shudders at the thought of what some of their friends and colleagues are going through, with children who sponge off their parents for as long as possible. Lucy has never asked for money; she has always been good about getting herself holiday jobs.
The day is lightening. Anna slides down the bed, hoping to sleep again. She cannot put off going down to Cornwall for much longer. She will have to discuss plans for the future with Barnaby. She must think about arranging power of attorney so she can see how Fred and Martha are financially. Barnaby can be bloody awkward when he decides on a course of action.
It would be much easier to have Rudi with her. Barnaby would find it more difficult to argue with her. Surely it is not because Rudi is German that Barnaby suggested she go down on her own? Fred was always too protective. She and Barnaby were always discouraged from discussing anything to do with the war in front of Martha.
It must have been terrible for Martha to have to leave her family at a young age and flee to England, alone. But it was all such a long time ago now. Life has moved on.
She has never thought about having Jewish blood. She is so fair, she has always identified with Germans and Northern Europeans, especially since she started lecturing. God alone knows what sort of throwback she is. Some Scandinavian ancestor Fred had in the family cupboard. She has that rare blonde hair that does not fade but stays a Nordic white. Anna has always been proud of her looks and a little vain, enjoying the attention she attracts.
Lucy is olive-skinned and dark, although she highlights her hair now in thin streaks of blonde. Still gangly and colt-like, Lucy is like Martha, except in height. She has the same creamy coffee skin and shiny blue-black hair that gleams in the light. And like her father, of course. The same eyes, the same way of using her hands.
Claudio was an Italian musician Anna had a short fling with and uncharacteristically got pregnant by. She briefly married him for form’s sake and they parted in a sad but friendly fashion before Lucy was born. The only thing he asked of Anna was that his child carried his name.
Anna has absolutely no idea what happened to him. He just drifted completely out of her life, and it is something Lucy holds against her. ‘Everyone needs to know who they are,’ she will cry dramatically from time to time, but not very seriously.
Barnaby has been Lucy’s father, brother and best friend. Lucy is pragmatic and inclined to make her own happiness. Anna has never felt close to her daughter, and perhaps one day she will try to find Claudio. When she has children of her own.
Anna never intended to have children and Lucy was left with nannies for most of her childhood, or with Martha and Fred. Barnaby would whisk her away in the holidays, when he was on leave. He would take her to France or Italy with a girlfriend and spoil her atrociously.
A surprise baby arrived at an awkward moment in Anna’s career. She was junior counsel and fiercely ambitious. She wanted to be one of the youngest women to take silk. In your thirties you had to make good or you were lost to the young, mostly men, coming up behind you. She became a Queen’s Counsel at thirty-six.
Rudi is snoring gently and Anna is still wide awake. She likes the warmth of his body in the bed next to her. Comforting. Yet this vague but familiar unease still lingers, like a half-heard snatch of conversation blown in at an upstairs window.
Anna’s heart starts to thump painfully again. ‘Oh God,’ she whispers into the coming day. ‘Don’t let me start these wretched nightmares again.’
Barnaby sits on the battered old sofa in the conservatory, experiencing a tangible sense of timelessness, a brief lament for the years that have slid slyly by while his back was turned. If he closes his eyes he is once more that prep schoolboy curled up, dreading the end of the Easter holidays.
He used to crouch in this peachy-smelling glasshouse listening to the birds at twilight while the destructive wind brought in scents of cherry blossom, of wallflowers, and dropped pittsoporum seeds. Early pollen filled his nostrils, making him sniff and sneeze as he lolled there as dusk came, making the trees luminous in the dark.
He would listen to Fred read softly to his mother, his whisky glass perched precariously on the arm of the chair in Martha’s dressing room, which led directly through glass doors from the conservatory.
T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen – sad and brilliant dead poets. All his life snatches of lines have popped into Barnaby’s head, and with those lines come the evocative smells that accompanied the words: sausages, flowers, cordite, dogs. House plants, whisky, dust, his own unwashed feet.
As the rise and fall of his father’s voice soothed Martha’s headache and reached him just outside their room, loneliness would descend out of nowhere. There was a close intenseness between his parents that excluded him without their realising it.
In bed, in the dark, a haunting, animal keening would penetrate the cobwebs of his sleep. A cry, a whisper. Hushed voices. In the morning, loss real and enduring breathed and moved behind quick smiles.
Barnaby could not understand why his happy family life, full of love, did not make him feel as safe and secure as it should have done. Martha and Fred were never indifferent or uncaring. Warmth filled this house. Yet, Barnaby knew that the strength of what he felt was not imagined.
His childhood felt as if he was following a snatch of song down a dusky corridor, only to find when he turned the corner there was only a vibration hovering in the night air, no singer held the trembling notes he heard. The feeling of loss was searing. He was sure that if he could only capture that lingering echo he would recognise the singer and the haunting song they sang. Then his feeling of carrying a weighty sadness might end. Instead of his parents disappearing into shadow, they would remain flesh and blood to him.
Barnaby sensed a truth that was missing from their lives. A bewilderment of childhood where honesty is obscured, where secrets are kept.
Standing, bleak on the station platform as he went back to school, he would wait for Martha to hug him to her again and again. Fred would bend and kiss him. Always. Barnaby would board the train, would hurry down the corridor to the school carriage and jostle to the window to catch sight of them. Each time he would will them to see him, Barnaby Tremain, eight and a half years old. Not just another white-faced little schoolboy in school cap and blazer identical to hundreds of others with their noses pressed to the window on the school train for Paddington.
He knew they loved him, yet before the train even pulled out of the station they would turn once more to one another, their heads close together, walking away from him down the platform. His mother so thin and tiny. His father bent towards her, his left hand hovering protectively behind her back.
They never turned for one last wave although he always waited, breath held with longing, leaning out of the carriage window to capture that last glimpse of them as the train hooted and sidled forward. But they never ever turned to wave.
To them he had already gone. Their concentration was on one another. Barnaby would pull in his head before a master caught him, and collapse into his seat, concentrating on pulling his socks up, on not blubbing.
He always, always wanted to shout to his parents’ disappearing backs, ‘I’m still here. I haven’t gone yet. I’m still here.’
Barnaby, sitting on the long-faded sofa, drinking his own whisky, whispers to himself now, ‘I’m still here.’
For it feels sometimes that the piercing echo of his parents’ secret song still hovers in the flickering shadows and movements of the house. As they reach the end of their lives, it seems to move nearer.
Chapter 7 (#ulink_5d20ac50-5130-58fb-9417-39b62ac438d7)
Berlin
He has not been to the Freie Universität for over a year. He used to lecture regularly at the Institut für Physiologie, then suddenly he tired of the young; wanted to travel.
Ulrich Scheffell rang him out of the blue, asked him to come to the Institut to discuss a European lecture tour he was trying to organise.
‘Why do you ask me at my age?’ he asked.
‘You know very well,’ Ulrich replied. ‘You are one of the most eminent orthopaedic surgeons in Berlin.’
‘I am a retired orthopaedic surgeon.’
‘You are not too old to travel round the world. And you are not too old to lecture. Admit that you are interested.’
‘I will admit to nothing. But I will let you give me lunch.’
‘Hah!’ Ulrich rang off, delighted.
He parks his car with difficulty, thinking: no one walks anywhere any more. Everyone has cars. This is why we are growing as fat as Americans.
He walks into the Business and Environmental Law School. Ulrich asked to meet here, as his grandson, studying European Law, wanted Ulrich to welcome some visiting lecturer.
There are a lot of people milling about and he feels vaguely annoyed at having to hang around with a mass of students waiting for Scheffell. He turns and suddenly sees through a doorway a tall, striking blonde woman in a black gown holding a pile of books. She holds herself a little away from the group of people talking around her.
He stares at her. He knows he has never seen her before, yet she seems familiar to him. He goes on staring with a tight feeling growing in his chest. She has a focused beauty, a sort of detachment he recognises. It is a clever, ambitious face. Shaken, he turns abruptly away.
Scheffell appears suddenly by his side. ‘So sorry to keep you waiting.’ He smiles. ‘She is very beautiful, is she not?’
They push past students eager to get into the lecture hall, and go out into the fresh air. He breathes deeply.
‘Who is she?’ he asks.
‘She is an English barrister. Her name is Anna. She is married to Rudi Gerstein, a friend of my wife. Where did you leave your car?’ Ulrich guides him across the grass towards his office. ‘We will talk, then I will take you out for a good lunch. I would very much like you on my team again. At the very least, I hope you will think about it.’
It is Saturday. He turns the pages of the newspaper slowly. A little pulse beats in his left cheek. It is raining outside, a steady downpour that splatters against the windows of his flat, making the large panes rattle and a cold draught waft through the room.
There. There it is, where he knew it would be: a photograph of the smiling British barrister taken at the FU. He stares down at it; smoothes the creases in the paper. Her face jumps out at him. The piece tells him that she has just given a series of three-day lectures to a group of law students on corporate fraud and the differences in the British and German judicial systems.
The paper congratulates her on her perfect German, her intellect, her beauty and the possibility that she is in line to become a British judge. He looks down at the photograph and the strange feeling returns. Her eyes stare back as if challenging him. He shivers and closes the page. Those eyes … Those eyes remind him of someone else.
He goes to the window. The world out there is deserted. He is not a man accustomed to being lonely. There has always been someone. There has always been a woman.
He crosses to the mirror and stares at his reflection: eyes still the lightest blue, maybe slightly faded, body lean and carefully looked after. Women always think he is a decade younger than he is. He fingers the soft skin under his eyes. Lately he has begun to sleep badly and it is beginning to show.
Since Inga left the flat has seemed bigger, emptier. Of course he was expecting it. The age gap made it inevitable. It was not as if she even lived here permanently. She perched on the edge of his life, the few clothes and possessions she left here tidily placed in wardrobe and drawer so she did not take up too much room. Inga, patiently hovering, hoping for the more he could not give her.
He did not expect her to stay with him as long as she did. Sometimes he took her with him when he travelled. More often he preferred to be on his own.
‘Are you not lonely?’ Scheffell asked him at lunch, full of red wine. ‘I have often wondered why you have never married. Even at your age, I see women look at you.’
‘I am rarely lonely,’ he replied. ‘Nor have I had any urge to marry. This does not mean I do not like women.’
He returns to the window. A squirrel is running through the rain, over the bench and up the tree outside his flat. It looks in at him, waiting. He goes to the kitchen for nuts, opens the sliding doors and puts them on the table.
Inga was still young enough to find someone to marry her and have children. He told her so.
‘Have you ever really loved anyone?’ she asked quietly and bitterly.
He replied, honestly: ‘I am very fond of you, Inga, but you knew from the very beginning that with me there would be no marriage and no children. I never pretended or promised otherwise.’ It seemed as he said these words that he had used them to too many women.
When he was young and, he hoped, as he got older, he gave the women who marched hopefully through his life a good time. But if they wanted to breed or settle or get monotonously domestic they would have to look elsewhere. That each one thought she would be different was not his fault.
He suspects that Inga will be the last woman in his life. He is too old now even to pretend not to be selfish. At half his age, Inga is the woman he was fondest of. He has always been fascinated by the strength of the maternal pull. Inga, he is sure, despite her feelings for him, wanted a last chance of a child.
The squirrel runs down the bird table, along the railings of his balcony and leaps away among the leaves of the tree.
He goes back to the paper and stares down again at the photograph. The room is silent, still – so still that something stirs within him: a remembered, haunting pain that no amount of travelling can entirely banish.
Disturbed, he picks up the phone and dials a number with fingers not entirely steady. A number he has dialled many times. For so many reasons down the years. Hans can find out anything about anybody. Living or dead.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_b69db467-c0d6-5d65-935d-cdab13d5f858)
Fred is feeding the birds with Martha’s breakfast crusts. There is no wind and the morning is mild. Barnaby has fixed a swing bird table on a branch of the old medlar tree, away from the aged interest of Eric, who can still produce a sneaky pounce from the shelter of weeds and bluebells.
Fred notices that the twisted branches of the medlar look as if they might be dying. The wind has caught the leaves and the back branches are too near the Monterey pine. What a pity. What were the three trees that were always planted together in his grandfather’s day? Medlar, mulberry … Damn it, he cannot remember the third.
He moves across the lawn and looks down at the disturbed earth between the roots of the cherry. He and Martha buried Puck under the tree. Lucy and Barnaby have just buried her little tabby here. He smiles to himself. He lost count of the hamsters buried here, until Martha had the idea of placing the catatonic little bodies in the warming oven of the Rayburn as a test. It was alarming how many of the poor creatures had only been hibernating. Barnaby was stricken with remorse, sure that they must have buried most of his hamsters alive.
Fred cannot remember how the tradition of burying all their pets under the trees came about. Perhaps because the dogs always sat here, half in and half out of the sun. He looks out towards the shrubbery for the blackbird with the freak white tail, and tosses a crust into the undergrowth. There is always a danger taming birds with a cat.
It is such a beautiful day and he has no headache. For once his mind is clear. This is the best bit of the day, just before the day begins in earnest. His private communion with the garden. For a few minutes he can pretend … Is it pretend? Or just looking back? Like old men do when they get ancient.
He can pretend that he has woken to find Martha already in the garden, checking her seeds in neat little trays in the old wooden greenhouse. He would walk across the grass with a cup of tea for her and she would look up as excited as a child and point out what each tray held and where in the garden they were going to be planted out.
She was so organised. From rubble and rampant weeds the garden evolved and grew steadily every year. She kept track of things in a little red exercise book, marking carefully where things failed or had been planted in the wrong place. She drew little diagrams for borders of colour and smell; made sure that in winter there were bright berries, shiny leaves and shrubs to look at.
Eventually, he had to employ someone to help her. At first she was reluctant – she was intensely possessive of her garden and her privacy – but Fred knew he must find someone who would not take over but who would understand the sort of garden she wanted to create.
They had two false starts and then Hattie suggested her nephew, a boy of sixteen. Neither Martha nor Fred knew anything about him, and that was just as well or Fred would never have employed him.
Hattie arrived one morning with a surly youth called Adam, who looked as if he had been frogmarched up the drive. Martha, pretending not to notice his scowl, sat him down in the kitchen, made him tea and gave him a huge slice of home-made cake. Then she took him into the garden, pointed out the things she hoped to do and asked for his advice on this and that. What did he think about a pond here? Did he think they could enlarge the terrace, so that it had steps coming down?
Fred, hovering nearby, saw Hattie’s anxious face at the kitchen window. The boy was monosyllabic. Fred wondered what on earth Hattie was palming them off with. He was about to leave to go back to medical school, and was anxious too, but he trusted Hattie.
He returned from London the following weekend to find Martha had a willing and able slave. The scowl had gone. The boy’s white face was beginning to tan and half a pond had been dug.
Adam and Martha worked together twice a week for ten years. They made a spectacular garden, through trial and error, both learning as they went along. The boy had a natural talent and when he was offered a job as under-gardener on an estate on the Helford, Martha made him take it. She never wanted to replace him.
Fred turns away from the bird table and takes a walk round the garden. The old wooden greenhouse fell down a long time ago and nature has reclaimed so much of the garden. There is no telling where the borders once were. Tulips and daffodils spring up everywhere through tufts of long grass and bluebells. The old pond lies choked in the corner, covered in green algae. The heavy Victorian statue of an angel Martha found in a junk shop still stands placidly facing the house, snails nestling in his arms in little clusters. Lichen grows on his face and body like an extra filigree robe.
Much later, Martha told him that Adam had been in constant trouble for his violent, uncontrollable temper. Hattie took him in when her sister washed her hands of him. All he had done at her house, apart from being bored and sullen, was read her gardening magazines. Adam told Martha that he had been beaten constantly by his father. If Hattie had not taken him in, he would have killed him.
Fred thought then how right it was that Martha and Adam had come together. This garden that they made out of nothing had for both of them begun as a replacement activity and became an obsession and an abiding passion.
He supposes he ought to go in. Must not hold Barnaby up. The one thing he did not want to happen has happened. He and Martha have become Barnaby’s burden. So unfair. His head begins to throb. Damn head. Difficult to think sometimes.
Is he sacrificing Barnaby for Martha? No. No. Can’t think like that. Useless. Barnaby would no more think of a home than he would.
He walks slowly across the grass back to the house and the ghost of Martha flits with him. He so much wants to remember the young woman full of life and joy, who could make an ordinary day special. The young woman who built a garden. The young woman who wept in the dark when the shadows came and reached out for him. The woman he held and made love to. Breathed in. Breathed new life into.
He looks up. An old woman is standing at the French windows in her nightgown, waving at him. He could be Fred. He could be the gardener. He could be anyone. Her beautiful face is vacant, contains nothing of their life together. This, Fred thinks, is the hardest thing I have ever had to bear.
The new carer, arriving that morning, makes something of an entrance. She has spiky dark hair, a nose ring, an ethnic sweater and flimsy skirt finished off with a tight leather belt and boots. When Barnaby has finished showing her around, briefed her on Martha and Fred’s routine and left the house in a rush, she makes coffee and takes it into the conservatory.
She stands looking down at Martha as the cup of coffee she holds for her grows cold. The old lady is crying silently and the girl examines her wonderful high cheekbones and sees the tears falling from Martha’s closed eyes. She is disturbed and touched by the smallness of the old lady and the isolation of her senility.
She bends to Martha. ‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘What’s the matter, Martha? Look, I’ve brought you a cup of coffee.’
Martha opens her eyes at the sound of her name. She is going to say, ‘I am Mrs Tremain to you,’ but when she sees the pretty girl whose anxious face is close to hers she is so pleased she smiles. ‘Hanna! Where have you sprung from? I haven’t seen you for ages!’
The girl places the cup of coffee in Martha’s hands. ‘My name is Kate. Is Hanna your daughter?’
Martha looks puzzled. ‘No, no, I don’t think so.’
‘I’m from the agency. I’m here to help look after you.’
‘You’re very pretty.’
The girl laughs. ‘So are you.’
Martha’s face lights up. ‘I used to be, darling.’
In that small face suddenly alight, in the ease of that casual endearment, Kate is captivated. Fred lowers the Daily Telegraph he is not reading and smiles at her.
‘Hello, Kate. Welcome.’
‘Thank you, Dr Tremain. I’ll just go and get your coffee.’
She comes back and perches on a chair next to him. ‘The vicar suggested you might like a drive this afternoon. There is a little gallery at Newlyn? He said you both enjoy going there, and then walking or driving along the front past the harbour.’
Fred looks up at her. ‘That sounds absolutely wonderful. Martha would love it. How kind. Mrs Biddulph doesn’t drive, you know.’
Kate smiles. ‘So I understand. Are you both OK here, if I go and do a bit of tidying up?’
‘Of course. Of course. We are both fine. Enjoying the sun.’
Kate makes their beds and tidies the bathroom. She is intrigued by this strange house with its shabby sofas and beautiful furniture, by its fading elegance and enormous conservatory that throws sunlight everywhere. The whole house smells dusty, rather like a greenhouse, and there is this sense of waiting. Is it waiting, this stillness? Or is it a vague sense of sadness, of lives coming to an end? Kate is not sure.
The Loving Care Agency jumped at the chance of taking her on even though she assured them she would only be temporary, that she intended to move on. The pay is appalling, but Kate is used to working for peanuts. The only help she has accepted, from the aunt she was working for in London, is the cost of a few weeks in an hotel while she looks for somewhere to live for the summer.
Kate goes to check on the two old people. Dr Tremain is sitting beside Martha and has taken her hand. They both sit looking out through the French windows to the garden. ‘“It was a perfect day /For sowing: just/ As sweet and dry was the ground / As tobacco-dust. / I tasted deep the hour/ Between the far/ Owl’s chuckling first soft cry” …’ Dr Tremain is reading aloud to Martha. Kate smiles. How wonderful.
She starts to prepare their lunch with the food Barnaby has put out for her. It is incredibly quiet here after London. She has a moment’s dislocation, as if she has suddenly jumped lives and found herself in someone else’s kitchen.
Edward Thomas? Of course it is! She studied him for A level. ‘And now, hark at the rain,/ Windless and light/ Half a kiss, half a tear,/ Saying good-night.’
Martha, suddenly restless, comes in and out of the kitchen asking the same question. ‘What are we having for lunch today?’
‘Chicken and chips?’
‘How lovely!’
Martha wanders off, circles the house again and comes in through the conservatory door.
‘Hello. Who are you?’
‘I’m Kate. I’m just getting your lunch ready.’
‘Lovely, darling, what are we having?’
‘Chicken and chips. Is that OK?’
‘My favourite.’
‘Good. It won’t be long. Shall I come and put the lunch-time news on for you?’
‘Thank you,’ Martha says vaguely.
Kate finds Fred has already turned the television on.
‘Come and sit down, darling,’ he says to Martha, ‘and watch the news with me.’
‘I will in a moment,’ Martha says, ‘but I am worried about lunch. What –’
‘Chicken and chips,’ Kate says firmly, pushing Martha gently down next to her husband. ‘I will be back in a moment.’
She is beginning to wonder how the vicar has not taken to drink. It is taking her ages to get this meal ready and she feels dizzy with repeating the same thing over and over again. She puts both their lunches on trays and carries them into the sitting room.
The room is empty. The television is talking to an empty room. Kate cannot believe it. Fighting panic she rushes back to the kitchen and dumps the trays and runs round the empty house shouting for them. How on earth could they both disappear so quickly and quietly?
She bolts out of the front door and down the drive, shaking with anxiety. Why did this have to happen on her first day?
Barnaby comes from the church with a parent on each arm. He smiles at her as he crosses the road with them. ‘Lost anyone?’ he jokes.
Kate, mortified, nearly in tears with fright, turns and rushes back into the house.
Barnaby settles his parents in front of the television with their trays of food and a sherry each and waits for the new carer to come out of the bathroom. He makes them both a cup of coffee while he waits.
When Kate returns to the kitchen, embarrassed, he says gently, ‘It’s quite all right, you know. I was only joking. You can’t have eyes in the back of your head and I don’t want my parents imprisoned in their own home.’ He pauses, facing the facts. ‘It’s becoming obvious that I’ll have to have two people here soon; it’s going to be too much for one person. I’m truly sorry you got a fright, Kate. I really am well aware how tiring looking after my parents is.’ He grins at her. ‘One dotty person is bad enough, two is a nightmare! It will be no discredit to you if you decide it’s just too much.’
‘No way!’ Kate says quickly. ‘I just completely misjudged the speed of your parents. I’m not going to give up after one day!’
Barnaby hands her a mug of coffee. ‘I’m glad. Go and have your lunch in the garden. Relax. It is like summer out there this morning. I’ll sit with my parents for an hour. I like to do that if I have time.’
Kate digs out a book and a sandwich from her bag and goes and sits against the trunk of the cherry tree under a great, sweeping arch of buds about to burst into blossom. She wonders what a good-looking, youngish vicar – young by priestly standards anyway – is doing unmarried and looking after senile parents on his own.
Barnaby tucks Martha into bed for her afternoon nap. Fred has gone back to his chair in the conservatory to try to do the crossword. Barnaby is puzzled by Fred. He wonders if his father has simply withdrawn from a life where his beloved Martha is now dotty. Sometimes Fred seems quite dotty himself; at other times Barnaby has the sensation he is merely hiding behind a supposed dottiness in order to avoid facing what is happening, as if a dark cloud of depression or loss has stunned him into a senility he does not really have.
Barnaby says goodbye to a more cheerful Kate and drives off to a parish council meeting in the village hall. Normally he dreads these competitive parochial monthly meetings, but today everyone seems united in their desire to raise funds to help the refugees in Kosovo.
Martha lies propped up on pillows watching the movement of wind through buds of pink cherry blossom. The tree is getting old and gnarled. The branches bend and creak, spread and arch. Soon fat fingers of blossom will trail almost to the ground in great sprays of pink hands that layer the lawn like confetti.
It reminds Martha of something. Of somewhere else. The feeling she cannot capture squeezes her stomach, as if her body has recovered a memory her mind refuses to recall. She closes her eyes, tries to banish this disturbing sensation and is taken suddenly back to another garden, where the flowers are gone, and all is now laid with vegetables.
She sees Papa bend to pick a caterpillar off a cabbage, his face grave as he turns to Mama, standing in the doorway of their house.
‘Esther? It is time we talked about sending Marta to England. I don’t know how long we have.’
‘Paul, no! Please, let’s wait … Don’t be pessimistic. We have so many good friends here, you are respected by everyone. The patients and the staff love you. We have standing here, my dear, and financial means, if things get difficult.’
Papa stares at Mama and shakes his head. ‘Esther’, he says quietly, ‘I beg you not to bury your head. Things are not just difficult, they are dangerous. What is the good of money if we cannot keep Marta safe? Please, you must accept what is happening. Everyone is fearing the worst. Both Germans and Poles are jumpy and frightened. Everyone is looking out for themselves. You must not count on anyone except fellow Jews. You will see, our Polish neighbours and German colleagues will not want to know us if Poland is invaded.’
They stare at each other over the space that was once a garden full of flowers and now contains only things they can eat. Marta knows her father is frustrated by her mother, who has never in her life faced hardship or loss, and cannot yet grasp what is happening. Cannot, or is reluctant to face the end of their way of life.
‘Heinrich will see we are all right. Heinrich won’t let anything happen to us. I know it. You are colleagues, Paul. You are friends. Our children have played together nearly all their lives.’
Papa walks abruptly towards the house. He does not see Marta sitting up in the window, listening. ‘Esther!’ he says angrily. ‘We are Jews. His wife comes from one of the old Imperial families. Do you really think that Heinrich can protect us from anything? What is the matter with you? Are your eyes shut? How can you fail to notice what is going on around you? Do you think our money can project us against this rising tide of anti-Semitism? Do you?’
Marta’s mother grows pale at her husband’s anger. He is a gentle man who does not raise his voice. Esther is not used to people being unkind to her. She was a spoilt child and went straight on to being a sheltered and beautiful child-wife. ‘Our children have known each other, played together … all their lives,’ she repeats.
‘That time is over. It is gone. They are children no more,’ Papa says firmly. ‘I don’t want that boy, who has the makings of a dangerous little Nazi, anywhere near Marta.’
His voice is sad: ‘Heinrich and I have known each other for longer than I care to remember. But whatever he privately feels about what is happening, they are Germans, Esther, and we are on the brink of war. Already the family are distancing themselves. At work I am being relieved of many of my patients, many of my duties. If the Germans invade Poland, I Would be relieved of all of them. You must understand, Esther, I could lose my clinic, my life’s work and probably all my money.’
‘You can’t know that!’ Mama’s voice is full of panic. ‘England will stop the Germans, you’ll see, Paul.’ She claps her hand to her mouth.
Papa says quietly, ‘I Wish with all my heart I could protect you and Marta from what is coming, but I can’t. I cannot leave. I am a doctor and will be needed. The only thing I can do is send you both to England.’
Mama stares at him, suddenly very sure. ‘No, Paul, We stay together as a family. Whatever happens, We stay together.’
Marta, sitting up in the window of her room, shivers. She looks down on her arms, which are covered in goose bumps as if a cold wind has suddenly sprung up. She runs down the stairs, past her mother and across the garden to her father and clutches his arms. ‘Don’t send me away,’ she cries. ‘You’re frightening me, Papa.’
Her father holds her hands between his for a moment and apologises for frightening her. He tries to change the subject, Make her laugh. He calls Pepe, their dog, and as they set off for their evening walk together he tells Marta about England and his friends who live there.
‘England is a very beautiful place, full of rivers and trees. In the towns there are parks to sit in the sun. People take their children and picnic and sail small boats in lakes. People mix freely, Matusia …’ Marta’s papa takes her arm. ‘A distant cousin of mine has offered to take you in. This is a great opportunity for you to learn, to extend your education. You are so good at languages … My dear child, I need to persuade your mama to let you go even if she will not leave me. You must trust me and help me to convince her that it really is the best thing to do.’
Marta is silent, for she knows Mama is right: they must all stay together. The birds of evening are singing and fluttering, caught in the blossom of the huge apple tree at the bottom of the next-door garden, where she plays with the boy. Marta listens to the noise the birds are making and her fear is back. She shivers again, her father draws her away and they circle the wood and go home for supper.
Marta remembers that walk. It was the last walk she ever took with her father without fear, without the hated yellow armband with the star.
Coming into Martha’s bedroom, Kate sees that despite the warmth of the room, Martha is shivering with cold, sitting upright in bed, her tiny limbs trembling. She looks in the cupboard and finds a pale blue mohair sweater, which she wraps round Martha. Then she helps her into her trousers, which she has taken off. Her legs are like sticks and slightly misshapen. Odd little legs.
Kate chats to Martha while she does these things, but Martha is a long, long way away and Kate knows in Martha’s head there is a different scene playing.
Twenty minutes later Kate has both the old people safely in the back of her car. She drives out of the gates and takes the road towards Newlyn.
As they drive along Kate thinks about how she will cope once she parks the car. She must hang on to both of them without seeming like a sheepdog. She is not going to lose them twice.
She turns the radio on low and twiddles the knob to Classic FM. Fred turns contentedly towards the sea as they reach the coast road. Frothy waves are bouncing off the sea wall and the sun glints on the surface of the sea in dancing sparks.
Martha does not see the sea. She is still somewhere far in the past. She is worrying about her knitting needle. Has someone stolen it? Her knitting needle is vital. Before she goes to bed she wants to poke it into the holes. She wants to poke out those revolting bugs that stop her sleeping.
‘My knitting needle,’ she murmurs.
Kate looks at her through the car mirror. ‘Don’t worry, Martha,’ she says comfortingly. ‘We’ll find it when we get you home.’
Fred folds her tiny hand in his large one and Martha is soothed. She looks out and sees the shimmering blueness of the sea and the bright fishing boats heading in and out of Newlyn, and is enchanted.
As they drive past the harbour with the heavy trawlers and sleek yachts crammed together, the wind catching their stanchions and making a wonderful clinking sound, Martha smiles happily.
‘How beautiful,’ she says to Fred, turning to him. ‘How beautiful, darling.’
Fred, seeing her lovely smile, smiles too, his heart aching with love and fear. All his life he has protected her, now the knowledge that he can no longer do so is slowly killing him. He brings her hand to his mouth.
‘My beloved little Martha,’ he whispers.
Kate turns the car round at the end of the road and drives back to park near the gallery. Watching their faces, she realises they don’t get out enough. She will try and change that.
‘What did you say?’ she asks Dr Tremain.
‘I said, it’s a long time since I was last here,’ Fred says clearly.
Kate smiles.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_b61a14cc-1bd3-5128-9602-56a13ea0540d)
Anna sits with her chair swivelled round from her desk, facing the long window of her study. She loves these early mornings. The stillness helps her think. She feels mellow and calm, as if she has not yet put up a barrier between herself and the coming day.
Wisps of pink cloud hang in a vivid blue sky. Anna is reminded of Cornwall where the day unfolds from a blackness over the ocean to slow-unfurling ribbons of colour reflected in the water. Even before dawn there was light behind the darkness, waiting.
She had forgotten, almost forgotten those Cornish mornings.
She closes her mind and breathes in the sky outside the window. Tries to remember the child she was with no demands or responsibilities, waking to a summer morning, running down to the water in near darkness. The acute shiver of loneliness and wonder in the sound and size of a huge sea rolling in to empty sands stretching all around her.
Lucy was the same as a child. Half the fun was getting outside with no one hearing you … She used to take Puck, the small Labrador cross Martha adored. Or was that later? Was she older when they got the dog?
Deep pink slashes of cloud are dispersing over the Thames, spreading across the city, blurring and smudging into the sky, like spilt water paints, tingeing the river and touching the buildings. She hears Martha’s voice: ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning, darlink.’
How old was she before Martha said ‘darling’ properly? Anna cannot remember that either. She always has trouble remembering the sequence of her childhood. She often thinks her bad memory is the result of being so bored most of her childhood. Nothing of note ever happened to pierce the monotony of those seemingly endless years.
She gets up, goes to the long window and looks out into the wide, tree-lined road, at the elegant Edwardian houses opposite. It is deserted except for the line of parked cars. Curtains drawn. People sleeping.
She must be getting old, she concludes, if a sly trick of memory can turn those endless Cornish summers into nostalgia. Yet for a moment she does not see the houses; she hears the bent palm in Martha’s garden, hanging skewwhiff to the wind, rattling like dry fingers. She sees the glint of silver water and white houses illuminated on the other side of the harbour. She can hear the scream of gulls wheeling and circling above her head and the sensation of cold wet sand clinging to her feet. She sees Fred waving to her from the steps to the beach. She smells baking, and Martha, standing in that old-fashioned kitchen, pulls a chair out so she can lick the bowl.
Something rises up in her throat for what might have been. If she had been different. If they had. It is like fingering a bruise. She is sure her nightmares go back to her early years. She often thinks it must be because Martha was so often ill when she was small. When Martha took to her bed, or could not eat, it must have been an emotional illness, not a physical one. Anna does remember spending a lot of time with Hattie. Fear and sadness affect children. When she was little something about Martha frightened her. Easy to be frightened when you do not understand.
Only one thing sticks in her mind. She was furious with her mother and threw herself at her, clutching at her legs in a rage that consumed her. That is all she can remember: not wanting to let go of those legs. She cannot remember a face or arms or a voice. Just those legs trying to get away from her.
Anna pushes the image away, stretches and takes a deep breath. She can hear Rudi moving about upstairs and she goes back to her desk. For heaven’s sake, she is supposed to be studying her brief. Berlin was a success, but exhausting. Now she is about to reconvene a complicated criminal injury case and she is tired. Her workload is frightening this year.
She goes into the kitchen and grinds coffee and puts the pot on the stove. Places her files and papers back into her briefcase. She will have coffee with Rudi, then grab a sandwich later.
Rudi comes in smelling of soap, and kisses her. ‘You seem to get up earlier and earlier. Two complicated cases at the same time. Are you worrying, darling?’
Anna smiles at him. ‘No, not really. I’ve got a good team. But so have they. I do need to be on the ball …’ She reaches out and touches his arm. ‘Sorry if I bored you last night. I just wanted to run it past you.’
‘You never bore me. And I do know a bit about insurance companies.’
‘Well, I am still sure they, or the airline, are stalling, playing for time, and I am not sure why. My client will certainly never walk again. They cannot avoid liability. I expected the usual initial derisory offer of compensation, which would be unacceptable. Instead of which they asked for four days’ grace to make inquiries about a matter “vital to the outcome of the case”.’
‘Which means?’
‘Which means, either they have discovered something which makes the airline culpable and they will pull out, or something that I have not been told that makes my client responsible, or partly responsible, for his injuries.’ Anna puts down her half-finished coffee. ‘Anyway, this morning I will find out. I must go.’ She gets up and kisses him. ‘Why are you smiling?’
‘At the glint in your eye. God help the opposition.’
Anna laughs. ‘I shouldn’t be too late home tonight.’
‘In that case,’ Rudi says, ‘I shall cook you something delicious and healthy.’
Anna holds his face to her for a moment. ‘Wonderful.’
By the time she leaves the house the pink sky has disappeared and grey clouds cover the whole of the sky. As Anna walks to the tube station she remembers a task she was set at school: What is your very first memory? On the blackboard the teacher wrote, ‘My very first memory is …’
Anna sat and sat in front of a blank sheet of paper. She was quite unable to pick up her pen. Eventually her teacher said, ‘Anna, come on, this is not like you. What’s the matter?’
Anna had gone white and begun to shake. She was not going to write. She was not going to. She could not think … beyond … before … behind … For the first time in her life she fainted. Fred came to collect her, took her straight home. For some reason he was cross with her teacher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Anna is only nine years old. I know she is bright, but I don’t want my daughter pressurised.’
‘It was not Mrs Poole’s fault,’ Anna said to him in the car. ‘Dad, I can’t remember anything before my nightmares. I didn’t want to write about my nightmares.’
Fred turned to look at her and for a terrible moment Anna thought he was going to cry. He tucked her up on the sofa and lit a fire in the afternoon. Martha, pregnant with Barnaby, sat with Anna by the fire, playing snakes and ladders, and then they baked scones together. That day I did not spoil … I must have been ill, Anna thinks wryly.
What was it I was afraid of remembering?
She flashes her season ticket, goes through the barrier and stands on the platform waiting for the tube. This is the worst bit. She has finally trained herself, with Rudi’s help, to use the underground. But she hates the gathering moment before the train whooshes in and people prepare to rush and push. She can cope this early in the day, but she would not dream of travelling during the rush hour.
I suppose, she thinks, my childhood must have been happy. It must have been later, as I grew up and recognised the smallness, the limitations of their lives, that I grew bored and contemptuous. Maybe I was afraid I would grow up like them.
The train comes hurtling into the station and Anna gets in. She sits down and opens her briefcase. It is going to be a long day in court. She smiles suddenly at her reflection in the train window. She is far happier having an enormous caseload than maudlin and totally useless memories of her childhood.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_eb8d228b-24ec-57bd-be54-4294a6a3bfc5)
Berlin
He drives into the city early. It is a beautiful spring morning and the city unfolds in front of him, glittering and clean.
Inga’s travel bag lies on the passenger seat beside him with the last of her possessions. She has not wanted to return to the flat to collect them and has asked him to meet her before she starts work.
He drives along the Unter den Linden towards the Bauhaus Museum where she works. He had hoped to take her for coffee in Kreuzberg but she said she was too busy to leave the building.
He is not looking forward to this meeting. He hopes they can at least get back to the point of civilised friendship. They have mutual friends and he would like to establish an understanding to avoid embarrassment for everyone. Remembering her cold voice on the phone he thinks friendship, at this point, is unlikely.
He parks the car and carries her bag to the entrance. He has always liked the clear modern lines of the museum. It had risen from the ruins of post-war Berlin like a building newly washed.
Inga is standing watching him walking towards her. She is not smiling. He greets her with two kisses. Her back is stiff, her face cold.
‘How are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m just fine,’ she says evenly.
‘Are you sure that you don’t have time to have a coffee with me? The museum does not open for two hours.’
‘My hours are nothing to do with whether the museum is open or shut, but with the artefacts. As you know.’
‘Of course,’ he says, smiling, ‘I know. I would like to have coffee and talk for a few minutes, if you have the time.’
She hesitates. Sadness and the feeling he can still engender in her pass briefly across her face. It would be kinder if he just handed her bag to her and left, but something obstinate in him wants to leave this relationship tidy and finished. Without rancour.
She holds the door open for him, reluctantly. ‘Come in. I’ll make you a quick coffee.’
She fiddles with the filter machine in her office and he watches her. She is very pretty, he is very fond of her, yet he feels no regret. ‘Inga, I really do want you to be happy. You must have known, as I did, that if you got involved with a man much older than yourself this parting was inevitable?’
She pours his coffee and carries it over to him, places sugar and milk in front of him, but does not sit with him.
‘It was only inevitable when you decided that it was. I suddenly bored you with a need for something more from you. I stayed the course longer than most, so perhaps I should be flattered.’
He is surprised. ‘You made the decision to end our relationship.’
Inga laughs without humour. ‘You ended our relationship. Look, I understand. You are incapable of emotional commitment. You told yourself I left because I wanted children. This is not true. I am not overtly maternal. I left because I suddenly saw no future … Nothing was going to change.’
Her anger shows suddenly. ‘I deserve more. You are happy to be with me when you are a little lonely and equally happy to drop me when you are your normal self-sufficient self. Yes, we often had a very good time – you are an interesting and charming man to be with – but it was not enough. I wanted to live with you and you made it clear that you did not want me to. Too often you preferred to go away without me …’
She looks away, fiddles with her coffee cup. ‘You seem to need no one. I have some pride. I left because you were destroying my sense of self. I was losing confidence in myself and my work.’
She looks straight at him suddenly. ‘I pity you. To avoid the pain of loving, you miss the joy. Like so many of your generation, you are dishonest about your motives, in everything you do and in everything you did.’
They stare at each other. The coffee scalds his mouth. The words hang between them. Both their faces are shocked and angry. Like your generation. She has wanted to say this before to him, he can see that. It came out before she could stop it, startling her as much as him. Words that cannot be taken back. The meaning all too clear.
Silence hangs between them. He gets out of his chair and walks away towards the entrance. As he reaches the doors he hears her voice, softly this time.
‘I know that you wanted to draw a neat line under us today. So much easier when we meet in public. Neat lines are not always possible. Real life is messy and it hurts.’
He does not turn round, but moves steadily to his car. He does not see that she is crying as she watches his tall figure walk away from her. Ten years ago she was thirty-two. Young enough to be his daughter. She found him dangerous in an exciting and powerfully sexual way. He was a challenge she has lost. Her friends warned her. She knows him barely better now than she did ten years ago. She shuts the entrance door firmly so that she does not see him drive away.
The traffic is much heavier as he drives home. He taps the wheel impatiently as he sits trapped between two school buses, idly watching the people on the pavements, some hurrying, some stopping at the little Turkish café he used to wait in for Inga sometimes.
Your generation. His generation watched Berlin reborn from rubble. What the American and British bombers did not destroy, the Red Army finished. His generation watched as Berlin was carved up into four pieces … ‘YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR’ – the sign, which had you sweating in your sleep, that one wrong turning, one small error, would land you in the Eastern sector.
The traffic picks up speed and he breathes more easily as he heads out of town. Mutti moved sharply and wisely from her old family home in the east, ahead of the Red Army. She hated the British and American bombers, but she feared the oncoming Russians more.
He was sent back to Berlin at the end of the war with a medical unit. Berlin, about to fight for its life, left with only the old, the lame and children to defend it. Berlin had not been his childhood home as it had been Mutti’s but the devastation was still shocking. He thought that Berlin could never be rebuilt.
Reaching home, he parks and lets himself into the flat. He is angry with Inga for reminding him of the past, his age, and the fact that her generation and her children’s generation can never forgive or forget his. Because it is held in front of them, in books, films, or a left-wing challenge, by someone, somewhere, every single day. Her age group seem to have a monopoly on self-righteousness, while knowing nothing.
He lights a small cheroot and sees with a start that he has received the fax he has been waiting for. He has waited, restless, all week for Hans to get in touch. He tears the message off the machine.
What am I starting here? What am I doing?
Hans urged caution. Any hint of irrationality made him nervous. He left for London reluctant and tight-lipped. He knows only too well obsession can grow. Catch a glimpse, a smell, a memory and you want more. The past you buried always surfaces. Who said that to him? Suddenly, he needs to know what is shadow caused by faulty memory, and what is substance.
The fax is disappointingly brief; tells him little. The woman is, unsurprisingly, clever and ambitious. Hans lists her academic achievements at length. He details minutely the steady rise of her career. But there is little about her personal life. Is he doing this on purpose? Hans can find out how a man turns in his bed. How he makes love to his wife. What he eats for breakfast. He can find out anything he wishes to know. If he wants to …
This woman was born and brought up in the west of England. Head girl at some English boarding school. One brother. One child from a brief marriage to an Italian. Married for four years to Rudi Gerstein, a Swiss-German banker. She is an excellent linguist and so is her daughter.
Is this it? This barrister could be any middle-class English girl. Yet the one thing he needs to know Hans cannot possibly give him. He looks out of the window at the rain blowing sideways, obscuring his view, trapping him with ghosts that are rising like whispers out of the dark edges of the room.
The past is suddenly crowding in from all directions. In the long nights alone now he feels the horror of being overtaken by memories he believed he had firmly buried.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_72b7a459-1508-5a7c-a4dd-20049d141f62)
Dancing against Martha’s closed eyelids, the sun. Light and bobbing colours, patterns and floaters. A thrush in the garden sings and sings. The rain has stopped and the smell of cut grass comes in the window on a faint breeze.
In a moment Mama, or Hanna, their maid, will call up the stairs to make sure she is awake. Hanna, who is not much older than Marta, gets very cross with her because she will lie there ignoring Mama’s calls.
Hanna is a thin, obedient girl, who comes from a religiously observant Jewish family who vaguely disapprove of the Oweski family. Papa says they are so poor it is no wonder little Hanna has no sense of humour.
Marta loves these mornings. She has secretly been out in the garden in the first light, running in bare feet across the deliciously cold wet grass.
She likes to lie without moving, her face in pale yellow sunshine, daydreaming. She loves the dancing colours behind her closed lids and the safeness of opening her eyes again to familiar background noises, the sounds of a household waking up. Marta would like to be a child for ever and as she thinks this she remembers … she remembers with a jolt and her eyes fly open.
Fly open to an unfamiliar room of beige walls and white paint work. Beyond the long windows, lawns stretch into glossy-leafed shrubs and old fir trees that form a wall of green.
Martha sits up quickly, then, suddenly dizzy, hangs on to the edge of the bed for a moment. She goes slowly to the door and listens. Hearing nothing, she turns the handle and goes out into a large flagstone hall that leads into a drawing room filled with hot afternoon sun, which has bleached, over the years, all the covers and cushions to a uniform beige.
No one is there, but in a corner of the room a television flickers with images. Martha looks out into a musty geranium-smelling conservatory but cannot see her parents or Hanna. She swallows a slow-rising panic that they have all been taken from her while she slept in this place she does not remember coming to.
She pads on small bare feet to the French windows and looks out into the garden. She can hear voices now. A man and a girl are planting something near the cherry tree. She has no idea who they are.
Confused, desperately searching her mind for a clue to anchor herself here, Martha turns back inside to the flickering movements of the small screen, which has the sound turned off. She sees columns and columns of people moving in a mass along a road. Walking, hobbling, being pulled on carts or tractors. A great wash, a tide of human misery, dragging themselves onwards to safety, moving like robots in stunned bewilderment and fear.
The camera pans in on haunted faces and Martha, transfixed, is back, back with the fear and the smell, and the movement like an endless surge of water. Vast masses of human beings being herded, displaced and hated, to a fixed end. She crumples to the floor, watching. Remembering.
She rocks for Mama, for Papa, for poor serious little Hanna, for all those she loves, her eyes glued to the small flickering screen.
An old man is suddenly beside her, calling her name. The television is abruptly switched off. He bends and helps her to her feet, sits her in a chair, talking, talking in that gentle loving voice she recognises. Martha stares at him. It is Fred. Of course. It is Fred. This house is her home.
She smiles at him, closes her eyes with utter, utter relief, relaxes. She is Martha Tremain, an Englishwoman.
Barnaby takes Lucy to the garden centre to buy primroses for Abi’s grave. Little else will grow under the cherry tree. They buy six cream primroses, and a white cyclamen for Martha.
Barnaby looks at seed packets, wondering if he should buy earth so that Martha can plant seeds in trays in the conservatory. The greenhouse is now irremediable, having collapsed inward on itself, burying seed trays, pots, faded baskets of plant food and all things dumped there over the years. Vine and nettles have all but obscured where it lies.
Barnaby keeps meaning to do something about it, but time and tiredness, or perhaps a depression that he knows will descend if he starts looking too closely at all that needs doing, defeat him every time.
Lucy has wandered away and he finds her looking at the water plants.
‘Be nice to clear the pool, wouldn’t it? I loved the lilies and those water buttercup things that used to grow there.’
They both look down, thinking of how the garden once was. Lucy says suddenly: ‘Barnaby, Gran left Poland in 1940, didn’t she?’
Barnaby smiles. ‘Yes, she did. What made you suddenly ask that?’
‘I was just wondering if Mum was born here in Cornwall or in London. I always thought it was London, but I can’t remember anyone telling me that.’
‘It was definitely London. Martha and Fred lived there at the end of the war. They came down regularly, despite the journey, to stay in the cottage and check on the house, which was being built at that time.’
‘So … I know they met in London when Gramps was on leave, but when did they get married?’
‘I gather, very soon after they met. In the war people didn’t wait. They grabbed at happiness because no one knew what was going to happen next.’
‘So they would have been married in 1943?’
‘Yes. Why the sudden interest, darling?’ He looks at her closely. ‘Were you wondering if Anna was born before they were married?’
Lucy goes red. ‘It is just,’ she says quickly, ‘that when I was younger I used to ask questions about them meeting and although Gran always told me it was the best day of her life when she met Grandpa, neither of them seemed to like talking about that time, and Mum always seemed vague whenever I asked her things about London.’
Barnaby laughs. ‘I should think she was vague. She was a baby in London and very young when they moved here, Lucy. Can you remember anything much before you were four or five?’
Lucy thinks. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she says. ‘I think my first memory is either you taking me to a fair at night. Or getting smacked by Anna for locking that horrible au pair in a cupboard.’
‘You were, let me see, about four and a half when I took you to that fair. You hated every minute. You were coming down with a bug and the crowds bothered you. The horrible au pair, I’m not sure … five, maybe six.’
They make their way to the till. Barnaby grabs some small seed trays, two packets of Virginia stock and a small bag of compost.
‘For Martha?’ Lucy asks.
‘Yes, I thought it might be something for her to do.’
Back in the car, Barnaby says, ‘What you have got to remember, Lucy, is that Martha arrived in a strange country, younger than you are now, having left everyone she loved, to live with strangers. We have no idea of the conditions she left behind her. She had the rest of the war, frightened and lonely, to imagine what might be happening to her family. Knowing that they probably would not survive.’
Barnaby glances at Lucy as he drives. ‘I do not know what state of trauma she was in when she and Fred met. All I do know is that your grandfather never let Anna or me ask her questions about the war or about her life in Poland.’
‘I know. Anna told me she never knew anything about Martha’s childhood. I can understand about the years just before the war, but I can’t understand why Gran would not want to talk about her childhood if it was happy. I mean, everyone looks back on the happy bits of their lives, don’t they?’
‘When I was very young, Lucy, when I had fallen or had a temperature, she sometimes used to sing to me without knowing she was singing in Polish. As I listened, the sound always seemed to turn into a lament. She would stop suddenly and I would put my hand up to her face and she would hold it there, flat against her cheek, her own hand over it. Small as I was, I felt the enormity of her sadness without, of course, understanding why.’
Lucy swallows. Cannot speak.
Barnaby goes on, almost to himself. Lucy cannot ever remember him talking to her like this. ‘When I was growing up I longed to know; felt Anna and I would be enriched by knowing. We only had tiny snippets: a recipe, a childish game. Fred would tell both Anna and me that we only had the right to know the things Martha wanted to tell us. Maybe one day she would be able to speak of happy times in Poland. If not, we would have to understand.’
‘Now,’ Lucy says slowly, ‘even if she wanted to tell us anything, she can’t. It’s not fair for Gran to end up like this. God is cruel.’
‘Life is cruel, darling. I often think – I may be quite wrong, of course – that Anna might often be … tricky –’
‘Difficult, you mean, Barnes.’
‘Don’t interrupt me. Anna might often be … difficult because Martha and Fred must have been adapting to each other, to life after the war, to all that had happened to them both, when she was born. Even when I was a child I can remember them being very wrapped up in each other, very concerned for each other’s welfare.’
‘Were you lonely, then?’
‘All children are lonely sometimes. Our generation had a different relationship with their parents. Fred and Martha were the most loving of parents, but there was more distance between us than your generation has, on the whole, with their parents. Boarding school, as you know, accentuates that distance.’
They turn in the gates. It is early afternoon and Martha will be resting and Fred will be asleep under the paper. Mrs Biddulph will be listening to The Archers. As they pull up in front of the house, Lucy knows this is the time to ask Barnaby about the documents she found.
She opens her mouth, and Barnaby says, suddenly, very quietly, ‘Maybe life is not so cruel. Martha, returning to her childlike state – maybe now she can remember happy times in Poland, memories she blocked because they were too painful to remember.’ He pulls the key out of the ignition and turns to Lucy. ‘Maybe the sadness now is mine and Fred’s, because we can remember her when she was young and bright and full of fun. I am so afraid I will forget how she once was.’
Barnaby’s face. The line of his mouth held in a loss he feels everyday and hides. Lucy leans forward and hugs him, her head pressed away, hard into his shoulder. For the first time she feels the sheer weight of his tiredness in caring for Martha and Fred, day in and day out, without reprieve.
‘I am so glad we talked,’ she says into his shirt.
‘So am I, darling.’ He kisses the top of her head. ‘Come on, let’s go and get some bread and cheese while everyone sleeps. Then we’ll put those primroses under the tree.’
As Lucy waters the primroses on Abi’s small grave she realises it is the first uninterrupted conversation she and Barnaby have had for ages. Mostly they are both too busy or too tired by the time Martha and Fred are in bed.
She thinks of her own father, whom she has never met. Anna does not even know where he is any more. Claudio Pedrazzini – she has a cloudy photograph of him standing squinting into the sun in Milan. She could bump into him and never even know. Barnaby says one day she will probably want to try to trace him. She has inherited none of his musical talent, but, so Anna says, much of his laid-back nature.
She wonders, as she presses the wet earth down over the roots, if he ever, in idle moments, thinks about her. She has been lucky; she has always had Barnaby.
Lucy walks across the garden to put the watering can back into the falling-down garage, full of ancient bicycles and rusty paint tins. She thinks that her first instinct in not telling Barnaby about the papers she found was right. Either Barnaby knows and it is some secret he thinks should be kept, or it would be one more thing about Martha to make him sad. It isn’t her business. It is Gran’s. If there is a secret, it is not hers to give away.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_a38cf500-d8b2-59fb-b047-fdeb35151b45)
Lucy, finishing her early shift at the hotel, drives slowly home. It is an amazingly beautiful morning with no clouds. Cold but clear. The trees are unfurling pale virgin leaves, like tiny fists. Spring is everywhere, and Tristan will soon be gone to a cold and hostile place where spring comes late.
She stops the car and fishes in her bag for her mobile phone. She gets out and goes to sit on the sea wall, watching a fast sea swell and crash on the rocks below her. After she and Barnaby talked about Martha she felt better, for a while. When she is busy, she can push away the image of that strange piece of paper in the brown envelope, but her mind keeps returning to it.
What else lies up there in the trunk? What other shock lies in that faded box? At first, she did not want to know. But as the days slip by and leaving for London gets closer, she feels torn between wanting a glimpse of something that might settle her anxiety, and a longing and equal dread of knowing the truth.
She has not told Tristan. It is not something she can discuss on the phone. Talking about it will make it real instead of lying like a dark place on the edge of her mind. Lucy wants to believe there is a simple explanation. She wants to believe everything is exactly as she has always been told all her life. The story of Gran’s arrival in England in the war. The romantic meeting and falling in love with Fred. A rushed war wedding before his leave ended. Anna’s birth at the end of the war.
She wants to go on believing this. Yet that small faded box was obviously not meant to be found, so why not burn the papers instead of hiding them? Lucy has thought about it a lot. It is hard, maybe impossible, to destroy your own or other people’s identity or possessions. After all, it is who you are.
Lucy knows she would have had to block her mind too if the people she loved had been left behind, killed in the war or perished in a concentration camp. So why is her mother’s birth registered in a German document dated 1941 with an identity card dated 1943?
Was Anna really born in Warsaw, not London? Is she really four years older than she thinks she is? Perhaps Martha came to London later. Perhaps Grandpa met her somewhere else and they had a baby before they were married. Maybe Martha and Anna had to have German papers to get to England. That would mean Grandpa …
Lucy shivers, suddenly afraid, as if Martha’s past is about to cast a great shadow over them and they will be swallowed in darkness. Like Barnaby, she hates secrets: they surface unexpectedly and hurt.
She dials Tristan, looking down on the waves, feeling the cold spray on her hands. She hates the thought of him going to a place full of hatred, American bombing and streams of refugees. She listens as the phone rings and rings, then Tristan’s breathless voice comes on the line.
‘It’s only me,’ she says. ‘I know it’s early, but I just wanted to hear your voice.’
‘Soppy tart … Phew … Hang on … got to get my breath back. Just got back from a run. Phhhew … It’s an amazing day here.’
‘It is here too. Huge sea.’
‘Are you OK, Luce?’
‘Yes. Just dreading you going. Tris, was it really necessary to flatten Belgrade?’
Tristan sighs. ‘Debatable. Luce, come on, I’m not taking off yet. We’ve got leave together before I go. This isn’t like you, my little ray of sunshine. Is there something you’re not telling me? Like you want to throw me over, not for a fisherman but, quelle horreur, a bleached and muscled surf guard?’
‘You wish!’ Lucy almost tells him what is worrying her, but it is not the time.
‘Luce, I have to go. I’ve got to shower and get into uniform. I’ll ring you later in the day. Be happy, sweetheart, it’s such a gorgeous day.’
Lucy drives home and parks in the drive. She sits for a moment looking across the lawn, listening to the morning birds. Gran’s garden is a spring garden and everything is poised to explode into colour. She shrugs her mood off, closes her mind. It is impossible to be unhappy on a morning like this.
Lucy lets herself into the house. Barnaby is dashing about with Martha’s tray and he looks relieved to see her.
‘Thank goodness, darling. Your gran has dressed herself for high summer and refuses to change into warmer clothes. She’s in the bathroom at the moment, very cross with me. Fred is having tea in bed until the bathroom is free and I have ten minutes to get over to St Michael’s for Holy Communion.’
Lucy grins at him. ‘You’ve also got marmalade on your cassock, Barnes. Did you tell me we haven’t got anyone coming in until later today?’
‘Oh, yes. Sorry, Lucy, it’s a training morning or something, I can’t quite remember. Kate is not coming until midday, but Mrs Biddulph has just rung to say she can relieve you at ten o’clock. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, it’s fine. What a pity, I’ll miss Kate again. I’m back at work at twelve o’clock. I’m dying to meet her. What’s she like?’
‘She’s … different – quietly capable, and she drives, thank God. I quailed a touch when I first saw her – nose ring, short spiky hair – but Martha and Fred did not bat an eyelid. Lovely face, rather like a young Audrey Hepburn. I might be wrong, but I’d say she was a bit overqualified to stay long term.’
Lucy raises an eyebrow at him ‘You noticed her then?’
Barnaby gathers up his books filled with small flaglike book marks. ‘Kate is not someone you can avoid noticing.’
Martha emerges from the bathroom, looking stunning in a mustard-yellow dress, a cream scarf and bare legs in tiny smart court shoes.
Lucy claps her hands. ‘Gran, you look beautiful, utterly beautiful!’
Martha smiles at her granddaughter. ‘Darling, thank you,’ she says graciously, throwing Barnaby a baleful look as he heads for the front door.
‘Bye. See you all later …’ Barnaby is out of the front door, galloping gratefully to his car.
Lucy giggles, suddenly deliciously happy again. ‘Tell you what, Gran, put this coat on … there … Now I want you to see your garden – it’s looking stunning – then you can tell me if you are warm enough in those clothes.’
She peers round the bedroom door at her grandfather while simultaneously helping Martha into her coat. ‘Gramps? Are you OK? Barnaby’s just left. Gran and I are just going to have a quick potter round the garden.’
Fred puts his tea cup down. ‘I’m fine, Lucy, thank you.’ He winks at her wryly. ‘I’m going to get up in five minutes. Take your gran up to the copse. The wood anemones are out under the trees … look splendid.’
Lucy and Martha walk across the damp grass. The early sun seems warm, but the wind from the sea is not. Martha holds her coat close as they turn towards the trees where the wood pigeons nest at the far end of the large, overgrown garden.
They both gasp at the sight of the great circular cloud of blue, white and gold lying under the spindly saplings and old sycamore trees. Lucy goes behind Martha to shield her from the cold wind and twines her arms around her neck.
‘Did you plant all those, Gran?’
‘No … Fred planted more and more each year until there was a great carpet of them, which grew and grew. So lovely. Oh, so lovely.’
‘Everything is just coming out. Look at that yellow, and the pink there in the corner near that white prickly bush thing.’
Martha laughs. ‘Quince,’ she says. ‘I think.’ Then suddenly, ‘I don’t want this all dug up for vegetables.’
‘Gran, why ever should it be? Of course not.’
‘It happens.’ Martha shivers, and takes one foot out of her shoe and dips it in the long wet winter grass. Lucy opens her mouth to say she will get cold, then seeing Martha’s face, says nothing.
Martha, leaning against Lucy, closes her eyes, pushes her old toes into the damp grass and for a moment the sharp cold sensation shoots her down the years to another place, another time. She smiles, savouring the birdsong, the flash of new-born, translucent yellow leaves, red flowering camellias, closed bud of cherry. She raises her face to the smell of spring, the first exciting promise of summer, to being young and full of hope, with the whole of life shimmering before her.
‘Gran?’ Lucy whispers after a while. ‘Don’t get cold.’
Martha opens her eyes, expecting to see Hanna, sent by Mama to bring her inside. But it is … it is …? ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘it is a little cold.’
Lucy bends and fits Martha’s small bent toes back into her shoe, and arm in arm they walk back to the house.
Fred is in the bathroom with the radio on and Lucy sits Martha on the bed and, fetching a towel, dries and gently rubs Martha’s feet warm again.
Martha places her hand on Lucy’s silky dark hair with the streaks of gold. ‘Darling, what would I do without you?’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me.’
Lucy looks up and says fiercely, ‘Gran, why not? All my life you have been here for me and now I am here for you.’
Lucy’s eyes fill with tears suddenly and so do Martha’s; for what has been between them and is now gone. Lucy longs to say, ‘Oh, Gran, I found something I wasn’t meant to in the loft. What really happened to you in the war?’ But she can’t. It’s too late. A few years ago, maybe. But not now. The Gran of her childhood is gone for ever, but the person she was is still here, burning with the same unquenchable spirit. Lucy takes Martha’s small hands and holds them to her cheeks for a moment, closing her eyes against her loss.
When she opens them, she says briskly, ‘Right, Gran, I’m afraid it’s woolly tights, passion-killer tweed skirt and shapeless warm sweater for you. You’ve done enough trolloping for one cold spring morning.’
Martha giggles. ‘Oh, darling, it’s so much more fun being a trollop.’
Fred, coming into the bedroom shaved and immaculate in tie and clean shirt, looks at the two women and the array of clothing on the bed and snorts at them.
‘If ever there were a couple of trollops, it’s you two.’
Outside in the garden, the very first bud on the cherry tree opens a fraction and NATO drops a bomb by mistake on a bridge full of Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_c296d89e-e889-5d9c-adec-3a69f7ad98ed)
The rain has stopped and the Berlin night is quite still except for the muted sound of traffic out on the autobahn. He wakes in the dark and for a moment believes he is back in his childhood. He can smell the roses from his mother’s garden, but stronger still is the smell of horses and things he does not wish to remember. He can hear his heartbeat loud in the dark and the overpowering silence closes in on him. Why, after all these years, do the memories come flooding back? He has buried the past. He has buried it deep.
That was that life. This is another.
He can remember the first time he saw the little girl clearly. She had long, shiny black hair he wanted to touch. She was tiny, like a little doll, and she was afraid of horses. But she was not afraid of him.
Mutti was furious with his father. She did not want him to go into practice with a Jew, and she stood in the garden that day, unsmiling and icy. She called him to her and whispered loudly, ‘Ugh! How I hate the darkness of them.’
He pulled away from her. Kicked out at a garden chair because of the sickness in his stomach, and the gardener’s puppy lying underneath shot out with a squeal … I shiver at the memory of her eyes. Close my mind against the echo of her laugh.
All his childhood Mutti told him stories, terrible fairy stories of a race who ate their own babies, who were inferior, but a threat to all good Germans. After he met the little girl his heart told him something quite else.
How lonely they were, he and that fearless little girl. There were no other children nearby and only a hedge and a lawn between them. He defied Mutti, refused to think of her as Jewish. He and the girl were friends. They were friends.
Although he was older, she was the one with the imagination. They made small dens in the rambling garden on the edge of the forest, like nests, with old horse rugs and straw as linings against the cold and damp.
They always made more than one den to outwit Mutti. The girl seemed to know exactly where his mother would send the nurse or gardener to look for them, and where, in a tangle of dried fir branches, close under the branches of overhanging trees, grown-ups never ventured, if you stayed very quiet.
He was the practical one, carefully lining the small floor of their tree caves with layers of warmth. Pinching food from the kitchen and old coats from the hook in the stables so they would not freeze. Tying torn pieces of cloth to the trees so that they would know which way they had come.
In the depth of winter, when it was too cold to play in the garden, they often hid in the little tack room in the stable block. It had a small fire, and they played board games or drew pictures or read. The groom and the stable boy used to warn them when Mutti was on the warpath.
His mother knew perfectly well he played with the girl and she hated it. He could not take her into the house when Mutti was home, and even when his mother was out or away, the girl was so nervous she jumped at every sound, hated being inside his house.
His mother could not ban the little girl from the house and garden. She could not stop them playing together or from being friends, because of his father. He adored the child. She amused him. He also admired her mother, who was gentle and extremely well read.
Mutti was much too clever to dislike the family openly or show her jealousy and prejudice in front of his father. She enjoyed the money and lifestyle that the new clinic engendered. Instead, she made life difficult for the children, and any social interaction beyond the polite interchanges between the two families impossible.
This was neither unusual nor a surprise. Initially, the two families knew exactly where they stood and the conventions were strictly adhered to, in front of her. Jewish families kept to their own, lived amongst each other, not with Poles or Germans. As far as Mutti was concerned it should stay that way. Behind her back, the boy visited the girl in her home and so did his father.
As the years went by Mutti’s jealousy of the girl and her mother, combined with her prejudice, became all-consuming, obsessive. Fuelled by politics, the papers, her friends, Polish and German, it seemed to his mother that she had waited all her life for the time that was coming.
As his father’s marriage disintegrated, as Poland began to prepare for war and indigenous Germans waited for their chance to seize coveted houses and jobs, as houses became empty and the trains overflowed with refugees fleeing while they could, his mother would beat him with his horsewhip for even talking to the girl.
He and the girl were like brother and sister. Until he changed schools. Until the company of his peers became more exciting. Until he began to understand the threat to the purity of the German race. Suddenly, they were children no longer and it was not possible to be friends.
He was a German. She was a Jew.
I shut her out. I shut out the memory of those haunting dark eyes. I shut out what I did and what I became. I close my eyes against the coming day, the boy I was. Against the sick endless knowledge of my own betrayal.
Chapter 14 (#ulink_33c589b8-4657-5757-ae64-169f0e60f121)
Kate found a small vegetarian hotel on the edge of the village. Her room faces the estuary and she opens her window wide to a thick airless afternoon. This will be fine until she can find somewhere to rent.
Away over the water purple clouds are amassing. There is going to be a storm and she is glad of it. Her head aches and she feels tense and vaguely apprehensive.
She thinks of Martha. Martha and Fred living in that one-storey, timeless house that holds the faint resonance of a colonial era.
Restless, she makes tea she does not really want, then throws herself on top of the bed and closes her eyes. She hears the first distant rumble of thunder start like a mumbled threat and with it the strange anxiety surfaces.
She thinks she knows the cause of it. Entering that house reminded her of Dora. The reminiscent smells of an old house, where long-faded curtains and fabrics of sofas and chairs hold still the nostalgic memories of childhood. And of hope. Another visit, one more chance of saying and doing the right thing.
She thinks about that freak London storm that sent her here, which woke her from a dream of such joy that she tried to cling on to it. She did not want to wake up in her aunt’s flat in the centre of London where any moment the dull roar of traffic would begin.
She lay listening to the violent wind isolating her in yet another city, and felt an overpowering dislocation and a longing to change the course her life had suddenly taken: regular employment, city salary, punishing hours.
She knew she should be grateful. She should be enjoying writing travel features. She should be glad of decent money. But she was homesick for India, for a job she had loved, for her friends. For the person she had thought Richard was.
The knowledge that she could never go back, never return to that place and time of happiness was a sharp pain under her ribs. It had ended so abruptly that Kate knew she would never take joy or fulfilment for granted again.
Her brother, Luke, had phoned to tell her that Dora was dying, the same week Richard’s wife had flown unexpectedly to Karachi to join him.
– I have to give it another try, Kate. I have a four-year-old child.
– Of course you do. I see that. I’ll stay in England. I won’t come back.
– It might be easier for us both. It would be awful to have you so near.
– Yes. I expect it would.
Kate stunned, in shock; Richard trying to keep the relief out of his voice.
Later, when she could think straight, she realised Richard must have known for months that his wife was coming. An estranged wife does not travel thousands of miles with a small child, just hoping they will be welcome.
Kate gets off the bed, picks up her cooling tea and goes to the window. Why did Richard, thousands of miles away, after months of silence, decide to ring her at that particular moment, in the middle of a storm, his voice finally ending a life she could not let go of. Somehow she knew it would be him. Kate believes in karma.
– Kate, it’s me, Richard.
– Richard. Is something wrong?
– Darling Kate, I just needed to hear your voice. You don’t even sound surprised.
– No, I’m not surprised. Not in the least.
– Kate, you sound so … cold.
– Not cold, Richard. Sensible. It is what you wanted me to be, wasn’t it?
Silence, Then – You are angry with me. I’ve hurt you, Kate. I’m sorry.
Kate was not angry, she was furious.
– Richard, I lived and worked with you for two years. You told me your marriage was over. Definitely over. Your wife rings you out of the blue to announce her return, and you suddenly tell me you must try again for the sake of your child … And, oh, by the way, as you have to go back to England because your mother is dying, maybe, it is better, easier, if you don’t come back. Isn’t that how it was? Tell me if I have got it wrong!
– I thought you agreed it was the best thing, Kate. I thought I had to try once more …
– So why are you ringing me now?
– Because I miss you very much and because I don’t know if I can make this marriage work.
– I see. You want to keep all your options open, in case you get bored trying to piece together a relationship for the sake of your child?
– For heaven’s sake, Kate, you seem intent on twisting everything I say.
– No, Richard! I flew home because my mother was dying and suddenly things became very clear. I saw things as they really were, not as I wanted them to be. You never stopped for one moment to consider our relationship before you leapt back into your marriage. You never rang me once to see how I was or to find out if my mother had died …
Kate felt the tears behind her eyelids.
– I thought we were close friends, but I was only a stopgap. An aid worker passing through. Unimportant, or you would have told your wife that it was too late, you had met someone else who meant something to you. Anyway, anyway, it doesn’t matter.
– Of course it matters … Kate, please, I’m sorry, really sorry. I have made a big mistake …
– Tough.
– Can I at least fly home and talk to you?
– No. It’s much too late, for me, anyway. Just for once, think about someone else. Your wife and child. Make your marriage work. After all, it was important enough six months ago to end our life together. I hope it all works out. No! I don’t want to hear any more. I am going to put the phone down …
She felt Marjorie’s arms round her shoulders as her heart jumped painfully.
– Well done, favourite niece.
– I’m your only niece.
– True.
Marjorie threw two books of maps onto the table between them.
– Where is it going to be this time? Which country?
– You old witch. England. For a bit anyway.
They placed the map on the floor. – Close your eyes and point.
– Have I told you, you are absolutely my favourite aunt?
– I am your only aunt.
Marjorie turned the map round. Kate closed her eyes and randomly stabbed her finger somewhere. She expected to land in the sea, but when she opened her eyes her finger was right on the toe of Cornwall.
– Very apt, Marjorie murmured. – All the nuts land in the toe.
Now Kate gets off the bed and goes to the window. How do you ever know you have done the right thing? She is drawn to caring for strangers, when she could not reach her own mother in any meaningful way.
She is about to become peripheral, drawn into lives that have nothing to do with her. People living, not with actual death, but loss, all the same. A small sneaky death of the mind. Is this too soon after Dora?
Against the backdrop of purple sky a fisherman in waders digs for eels, seemingly oblivious to the coming storm. The tall figure of a girl walks slowly along the foreshore with an elderly-looking dog. Her dark hair, streaked with random blonde strands, is caught up in a slide. She is young, coltlike, with an innocent elegance. She wears a cropped black T-shirt with bare midriff and white cut-off jeans. She stops on the shingle, looking up the estuary, out to where white waves are gathering on an incoming tide. Seabirds wheel in the wind over her head and curlews swoop low, calling out, flying inland against the coming storm. How bleak and lonely it is out there, the weather turns so capricious, changing quickly and suddenly.
The girl stands very still for a long time, and something in the slight and vulnerable figure catches at Kate. She knows suddenly it is a leave-taking, a long silent goodbye. Sadness starts up inside her, a strange pull at her heart. The girl must be Lucy; Kate recognises the dog.
It is as if she is watching a small private lament. As if she is watching herself grieving for something she cannot change.
Kate stands at the window like a sentinel, as motionless as the girl below her silhouetted against that violent collecting sky. Another rumble in the distance, far away over the sea, and a flurry of fat raindrops lands in gusts against the window.
The girl moves slowly, the dog gathers its legs and jerks upright after her and they disappear slowly together round the point, leaving Kate watching the empty foreshore.
Chapter 15 (#ulink_9622a3d5-01a9-57e8-b199-7ccc89f00dd8)
Berlin
He sits in his flat studying a street map of London. He stares down at the tiny row of houses where Hans has told him the woman lives. He circles the house, the law courts and her chambers in the city with a soft lead pencil.
He makes another little circle on his English map, right down in the toe of England where the woman grew up. Far from London, but London is not far from Berlin, London is only a few hours away.
He pours coffee, then goes to open the glass doors and sits on the small balcony. If he took up Scheffell’s offer he would have a valid reason for going to London. A two-week seminar would be good for him, keep his hand in, stop his brain from atrophying.
He looks across the swathe of park in front of him to the city glinting below. The faint roar of muffled traffic comes to him from the autobahn. He thinks of his working life, the years flying by too quickly, the time so easily taken for granted. That time when you are young and single-minded. Striving to get to the top of your profession. Strands of a life gathered up in careful calculated threads. Career, travel and women. In that order. Each thread separate, unless he wished it otherwise.
Academically fulfilling years. Exciting. Because of the power. Every surgeon becomes aware of the seductive power in his hands, the thrill of learning, teaching, becoming expert. Healing tired, diseased and broken bones. Mending, stapling together, piecing like an intricate jigsaw smashed limbs. Devising new ways of operating and post-operative care. Becoming eminent. All this, behind him.
Every doctor, at some time, abuses that aura of godlike status. Not necessarily with his hands as he heals, but with his heart, as he so casually picks up and discards the people who pass through his life.
Women, you mean. He sips his coffee and watches the wind get up, filling the air with pollen. Is it not amazing the euphemisms one uses to delude oneself? A third party detachment. A collective every and we to distance ourselves from our own responsibility.
I have spent my life distancing myself. How many women, young or old, professionally and personally, have I hurt by my actions? Theatre nurses berated for a simple mistake. Patients and young doctors sycophantic to avoid my sarcastic tongue.
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Sara MacDonald
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A beautifully written novel with great emotional appeal, of family secrets and wartime heritage, set in Cornwall, London and Warsaw.The house and the cottage overlooking the sea, on the corner of the big estate, was home to three generations of the Tremain family. Fred Tremain, the country doctor who – with his wife, Martha, for whose sake he had become estranged from his family – came first to this beloved corner of England: Anna, the difficult, determined older child, now a highly successful solicitor; and Barnaby, the easy-going second child, now a vicar to the parish: and the beloved granddaughter, Lucy. It is she whose discoveries of family papers, hidden in the old cottage, brings to light the first of the wartime secrets and begins the process of questioning so many old fears and hatreds, and unlocking the way to new relationships and new loves.Sara Macdonald has created a wonderful range of characters, depicted with great tenderness and understanding, against a background of the human price paid for the upheavals caused by prejudice, violence and wars today and yesterday. A wonderful novel for all the fans of Anita Shreve and Rosamund Pilcher.