Sea Music. Sara MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter 9

      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, СКАЧАТЬ