Sea Music

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.’