Sea Music. Sara MacDonald

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       Chapter 5

      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.’