Sea Music

Is this it? This barrister could be any middle-class English girl. Yet the one thing he needs to know Hans cannot possibly give him. He looks out of the window at the rain blowing sideways, obscuring his view, trapping him with ghosts that are rising like whispers out of the dark edges of the room.

The past is suddenly crowding in from all directions. In the long nights alone now he feels the horror of being overtaken by memories he believed he had firmly buried.

Chapter 11 (#ulink_72b7a459-1508-5a7c-a4dd-20049d141f62)

Dancing against Martha’s closed eyelids, the sun. Light and bobbing colours, patterns and floaters. A thrush in the garden sings and sings. The rain has stopped and the smell of cut grass comes in the window on a faint breeze.

In a moment Mama, or Hanna, their maid, will call up the stairs to make sure she is awake. Hanna, who is not much older than Marta, gets very cross with her because she will lie there ignoring Mama’s calls.

Hanna is a thin, obedient girl, who comes from a religiously observant Jewish family who vaguely disapprove of the Oweski family. Papa says they are so poor it is no wonder little Hanna has no sense of humour.

Marta loves these mornings. She has secretly been out in the garden in the first light, running in bare feet across the deliciously cold wet grass.

She likes to lie without moving, her face in pale yellow sunshine, daydreaming. She loves the dancing colours behind her closed lids and the safeness of opening her eyes again to familiar background noises, the sounds of a household waking up. Marta would like to be a child for ever and as she thinks this she remembers … she remembers with a jolt and her eyes fly open.

Fly open to an unfamiliar room of beige walls and white paint work. Beyond the long windows, lawns stretch into glossy-leafed shrubs and old fir trees that form a wall of green.

Martha sits up quickly, then, suddenly dizzy, hangs on to the edge of the bed for a moment. She goes slowly to the door and listens. Hearing nothing, she turns the handle and goes out into a large flagstone hall that leads into a drawing room filled with hot afternoon sun, which has bleached, over the years, all the covers and cushions to a uniform beige.

No one is there, but in a corner of the room a television flickers with images. Martha looks out into a musty geranium-smelling conservatory but cannot see her parents or Hanna. She swallows a slow-rising panic that they have all been taken from her while she slept in this place she does not remember coming to.

She pads on small bare feet to the French windows and looks out into the garden. She can hear voices now. A man and a girl are planting something near the cherry tree. She has no idea who they are.

Confused, desperately searching her mind for a clue to anchor herself here, Martha turns back inside to the flickering movements of the small screen, which has the sound turned off. She sees columns and columns of people moving in a mass along a road. Walking, hobbling, being pulled on carts or tractors. A great wash, a tide of human misery, dragging themselves onwards to safety, moving like robots in stunned bewilderment and fear.

The camera pans in on haunted faces and Martha, transfixed, is back, back with the fear and the smell, and the movement like an endless surge of water. Vast masses of human beings being herded, displaced and hated, to a fixed end. She crumples to the floor, watching. Remembering.

She rocks for Mama, for Papa, for poor serious little Hanna, for all those she loves, her eyes glued to the small flickering screen.

An old man is suddenly beside her, calling her name. The television is abruptly switched off. He bends and helps her to her feet, sits her in a chair, talking, talking in that gentle loving voice she recognises. Martha stares at him. It is Fred. Of course. It is Fred. This house is her home.

She smiles at him, closes her eyes with utter, utter relief, relaxes. She is Martha Tremain, an Englishwoman.

Barnaby takes Lucy to the garden centre to buy primroses for Abi’s grave. Little else will grow under the cherry tree. They buy six cream primroses, and a white cyclamen for Martha.

Barnaby looks at seed packets, wondering if he should buy earth so that Martha can plant seeds in trays in the conservatory. The greenhouse is now irremediable, having collapsed inward on itself, burying seed trays, pots, faded baskets of plant food and all things dumped there over the years. Vine and nettles have all but obscured where it lies.

Barnaby keeps meaning to do something about it, but time and tiredness, or perhaps a depression that he knows will descend if he starts looking too closely at all that needs doing, defeat him every time.

Lucy has wandered away and he finds her looking at the water plants.

‘Be nice to clear the pool, wouldn’t it? I loved the lilies and those water buttercup things that used to grow there.’

They both look down, thinking of how the garden once was. Lucy says suddenly: ‘Barnaby, Gran left Poland in 1940, didn’t she?’

Barnaby smiles. ‘Yes, she did. What made you suddenly ask that?’

‘I was just wondering if Mum was born here in Cornwall or in London. I always thought it was London, but I can’t remember anyone telling me that.’

‘It was definitely London. Martha and Fred lived there at the end of the war. They came down regularly, despite the journey, to stay in the cottage and check on the house, which was being built at that time.’

‘So … I know they met in London when Gramps was on leave, but when did they get married?’

‘I gather, very soon after they met. In the war people didn’t wait. They grabbed at happiness because no one knew what was going to happen next.’

‘So they would have been married in 1943?’

‘Yes. Why the sudden interest, darling?’ He looks at her closely. ‘Were you wondering if Anna was born before they were married?’

Lucy goes red. ‘It is just,’ she says quickly, ‘that when I was younger I used to ask questions about them meeting and although Gran always told me it was the best day of her life when she met Grandpa, neither of them seemed to like talking about that time, and Mum always seemed vague whenever I asked her things about London.’

Barnaby laughs. ‘I should think she was vague. She was a baby in London and very young when they moved here, Lucy. Can you remember anything much before you were four or five?’

Lucy thinks. ‘No, I suppose not,’ she says. ‘I think my first memory is either you taking me to a fair at night. Or getting smacked by Anna for locking that horrible au pair in a cupboard.’

‘You were, let me see, about four and a half when I took you to that fair. You hated every minute. You were coming down with a bug and the crowds bothered you. The horrible au pair, I’m not sure … five, maybe six.’

They make their way to the till. Barnaby grabs some small seed trays, two packets of Virginia stock and a small bag of compost.

‘For Martha?’ Lucy asks.

‘Yes, I thought it might be something for her to do.’

Back in the car, Barnaby says, ‘What you have got to remember, Lucy, is that Martha arrived in a strange country, younger than you are now, having left everyone she loved, to live with strangers. We have no idea of the conditions she left behind her. She had the rest of the war, frightened and lonely, to imagine what might be happening to her family. Knowing that they probably would not survive.’

Barnaby glances at Lucy as he drives. ‘I do not know what state of trauma she was in when she and Fred met. All I do know is that your grandfather never let Anna or me ask her questions about the war or about her life in Poland.’

‘I know. Anna told me she never knew anything about Martha’s childhood. I can understand about the years just before the war, but I can’t understand why Gran would not want to talk about her childhood if it was happy. I mean, everyone looks back on the happy bits of their lives, don’t they?’

‘When I was very young, Lucy, when I had fallen or had a temperature, she sometimes used to sing to me without knowing she was singing in Polish. As I listened, the sound always seemed to turn into a lament. She would stop suddenly and I would put my hand up to her face and she would hold it there, flat against her cheek, her own hand over it. Small as I was, I felt the enormity of her sadness without, of course, understanding why.’

Lucy swallows. Cannot speak.

Barnaby goes on, almost to himself. Lucy cannot ever remember him talking to her like this. ‘When I was growing up I longed to know; felt Anna and I would be enriched by knowing. We only had tiny snippets: a recipe, a childish game. Fred would tell both Anna and me that we only had the right to know the things Martha wanted to tell us. Maybe one day she would be able to speak of happy times in Poland. If not, we would have to understand.’

‘Now,’ Lucy says slowly, ‘even if she wanted to tell us anything, she can’t. It’s not fair for Gran to end up like this. God is cruel.’

‘Life is cruel, darling. I often think – I may be quite wrong, of course – that Anna might often be … tricky –’

‘Difficult, you mean, Barnes.’

‘Don’t interrupt me. Anna might often be … difficult because Martha and Fred must have been adapting to each other, to life after the war, to all that had happened to them both, when she was born. Even when I was a child I can remember them being very wrapped up in each other, very concerned for each other’s welfare.’

‘Were you lonely, then?’

‘All children are lonely sometimes. Our generation had a different relationship with their parents. Fred and Martha were the most loving of parents, but there was more distance between us than your generation has, on the whole, with their parents. Boarding school, as you know, accentuates that distance.’

They turn in the gates. It is early afternoon and Martha will be resting and Fred will be asleep under the paper. Mrs Biddulph will be listening to The Archers. As they pull up in front of the house, Lucy knows this is the time to ask Barnaby about the documents she found.