Sara MacDonald - Sea Music

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.