Sara MacDonald - Sea Music

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.

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.