Sea Music

‘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, as I grew up and recognised the smallness, the limitations of their lives, that I grew bored and contemptuous. Maybe I was afraid I would grow up like them.

The train comes hurtling into the station and Anna gets in. She sits down and opens her briefcase. It is going to be a long day in court. She smiles suddenly at her reflection in the train window. She is far happier having an enormous caseload than maudlin and totally useless memories of her childhood.

Chapter 10 (#ulink_eb8d228b-24ec-57bd-be54-4294a6a3bfc5)

Berlin

He drives into the city early. It is a beautiful spring morning and the city unfolds in front of him, glittering and clean.

Inga’s travel bag lies on the passenger seat beside him with the last of her possessions. She has not wanted to return to the flat to collect them and has asked him to meet her before she starts work.

He drives along the Unter den Linden towards the Bauhaus Museum where she works. He had hoped to take her for coffee in Kreuzberg but she said she was too busy to leave the building.

He is not looking forward to this meeting. He hopes they can at least get back to the point of civilised friendship. They have mutual friends and he would like to establish an understanding to avoid embarrassment for everyone. Remembering her cold voice on the phone he thinks friendship, at this point, is unlikely.

He parks the car and carries her bag to the entrance. He has always liked the clear modern lines of the museum. It had risen from the ruins of post-war Berlin like a building newly washed.

Inga is standing watching him walking towards her. She is not smiling. He greets her with two kisses. Her back is stiff, her face cold.

‘How are you?’ he asks.

‘I’m just fine,’ she says evenly.

‘Are you sure that you don’t have time to have a coffee with me? The museum does not open for two hours.’

‘My hours are nothing to do with whether the museum is open or shut, but with the artefacts. As you know.’

‘Of course,’ he says, smiling, ‘I know. I would like to have coffee and talk for a few minutes, if you have the time.’

She hesitates. Sadness and the feeling he can still engender in her pass briefly across her face. It would be kinder if he just handed her bag to her and left, but something obstinate in him wants to leave this relationship tidy and finished. Without rancour.

She holds the door open for him, reluctantly. ‘Come in. I’ll make you a quick coffee.’

She fiddles with the filter machine in her office and he watches her. She is very pretty, he is very fond of her, yet he feels no regret. ‘Inga, I really do want you to be happy. You must have known, as I did, that if you got involved with a man much older than yourself this parting was inevitable?’

She pours his coffee and carries it over to him, places sugar and milk in front of him, but does not sit with him.

‘It was only inevitable when you decided that it was. I suddenly bored you with a need for something more from you. I stayed the course longer than most, so perhaps I should be flattered.’

He is surprised. ‘You made the decision to end our relationship.’

Inga laughs without humour. ‘You ended our relationship. Look, I understand. You are incapable of emotional commitment. You told yourself I left because I wanted children. This is not true. I am not overtly maternal. I left because I suddenly saw no future … Nothing was going to change.’

Her anger shows suddenly. ‘I deserve more. You are happy to be with me when you are a little lonely and equally happy to drop me when you are your normal self-sufficient self. Yes, we often had a very good time – you are an interesting and charming man to be with – but it was not enough. I wanted to live with you and you made it clear that you did not want me to. Too often you preferred to go away without me …’

She looks away, fiddles with her coffee cup. ‘You seem to need no one. I have some pride. I left because you were destroying my sense of self. I was losing confidence in myself and my work.’

She looks straight at him suddenly. ‘I pity you. To avoid the pain of loving, you miss the joy. Like so many of your generation, you are dishonest about your motives, in everything you do and in everything you did.’

They stare at each other. The coffee scalds his mouth. The words hang between them. Both their faces are shocked and angry. Like your generation. She has wanted to say this before to him, he can see that. It came out before she could stop it, startling her as much as him. Words that cannot be taken back. The meaning all too clear.

Silence hangs between them. He gets out of his chair and walks away towards the entrance. As he reaches the doors he hears her voice, softly this time.

‘I know that you wanted to draw a neat line under us today. So much easier when we meet in public. Neat lines are not always possible. Real life is messy and it hurts.’

He does not turn round, but moves steadily to his car. He does not see that she is crying as she watches his tall figure walk away from her. Ten years ago she was thirty-two. Young enough to be his daughter. She found him dangerous in an exciting and powerfully sexual way. He was a challenge she has lost. Her friends warned her. She knows him barely better now than she did ten years ago. She shuts the entrance door firmly so that she does not see him drive away.

The traffic is much heavier as he drives home. He taps the wheel impatiently as he sits trapped between two school buses, idly watching the people on the pavements, some hurrying, some stopping at the little Turkish café he used to wait in for Inga sometimes.

Your generation. His generation watched Berlin reborn from rubble. What the American and British bombers did not destroy, the Red Army finished. His generation watched as Berlin was carved up into four pieces … ‘YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR’ – the sign, which had you sweating in your sleep, that one wrong turning, one small error, would land you in the Eastern sector.

The traffic picks up speed and he breathes more easily as he heads out of town. Mutti moved sharply and wisely from her old family home in the east, ahead of the Red Army. She hated the British and American bombers, but she feared the oncoming Russians more.

He was sent back to Berlin at the end of the war with a medical unit. Berlin, about to fight for its life, left with only the old, the lame and children to defend it. Berlin had not been his childhood home as it had been Mutti’s but the devastation was still shocking. He thought that Berlin could never be rebuilt.

Reaching home, he parks and lets himself into the flat. He is angry with Inga for reminding him of the past, his age, and the fact that her generation and her children’s generation can never forgive or forget his. Because it is held in front of them, in books, films, or a left-wing challenge, by someone, somewhere, every single day. Her age group seem to have a monopoly on self-righteousness, while knowing nothing.

He lights a small cheroot and sees with a start that he has received the fax he has been waiting for. He has waited, restless, all week for Hans to get in touch. He tears the message off the machine.

What am I starting here? What am I doing?

Hans urged caution. Any hint of irrationality made him nervous. He left for London reluctant and tight-lipped. He knows only too well obsession can grow. Catch a glimpse, a smell, a memory and you want more. The past you buried always surfaces. Who said that to him? Suddenly, he needs to know what is shadow caused by faulty memory, and what is substance.

The fax is disappointingly brief; tells him little. The woman is, unsurprisingly, clever and ambitious. Hans lists her academic achievements at length. He details minutely the steady rise of her career. But there is little about her personal life. Is he doing this on purpose? Hans can find out how a man turns in his bed. How he makes love to his wife. What he eats for breakfast. He can find out anything he wishes to know. If he wants to …

This woman was born and brought up in the west of England. Head girl at some English boarding school. One brother. One child from a brief marriage to an Italian. Married for four years to Rudi Gerstein, a Swiss-German banker. She is an excellent linguist and so is her daughter.