Sea Music

Martha, leaning against Lucy, closes her eyes, pushes her old toes into the damp grass and for a moment the sharp cold sensation shoots her down the years to another place, another time. She smiles, savouring the birdsong, the flash of new-born, translucent yellow leaves, red flowering camellias, closed bud of cherry. She raises her face to the smell of spring, the first exciting promise of summer, to being young and full of hope, with the whole of life shimmering before her.

‘Gran?’ Lucy whispers after a while. ‘Don’t get cold.’

Martha opens her eyes, expecting to see Hanna, sent by Mama to bring her inside. But it is … it is …? ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘it is a little cold.’

Lucy bends and fits Martha’s small bent toes back into her shoe, and arm in arm they walk back to the house.

Fred is in the bathroom with the radio on and Lucy sits Martha on the bed and, fetching a towel, dries and gently rubs Martha’s feet warm again.

Martha places her hand on Lucy’s silky dark hair with the streaks of gold. ‘Darling, what would I do without you?’ she says. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this for me.’

Lucy looks up and says fiercely, ‘Gran, why not? All my life you have been here for me and now I am here for you.’

Lucy’s eyes fill with tears suddenly and so do Martha’s; for what has been between them and is now gone. Lucy longs to say, ‘Oh, Gran, I found something I wasn’t meant to in the loft. What really happened to you in the war?’ But she can’t. It’s too late. A few years ago, maybe. But not now. The Gran of her childhood is gone for ever, but the person she was is still here, burning with the same unquenchable spirit. Lucy takes Martha’s small hands and holds them to her cheeks for a moment, closing her eyes against her loss.

When she opens them, she says briskly, ‘Right, Gran, I’m afraid it’s woolly tights, passion-killer tweed skirt and shapeless warm sweater for you. You’ve done enough trolloping for one cold spring morning.’

Martha giggles. ‘Oh, darling, it’s so much more fun being a trollop.’

Fred, coming into the bedroom shaved and immaculate in tie and clean shirt, looks at the two women and the array of clothing on the bed and snorts at them.

‘If ever there were a couple of trollops, it’s you two.’

Outside in the garden, the very first bud on the cherry tree opens a fraction and NATO drops a bomb by mistake on a bridge full of Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo.

Chapter 13 (#ulink_c296d89e-e889-5d9c-adec-3a69f7ad98ed)

The rain has stopped and the Berlin night is quite still except for the muted sound of traffic out on the autobahn. He wakes in the dark and for a moment believes he is back in his childhood. He can smell the roses from his mother’s garden, but stronger still is the smell of horses and things he does not wish to remember. He can hear his heartbeat loud in the dark and the overpowering silence closes in on him. Why, after all these years, do the memories come flooding back? He has buried the past. He has buried it deep.

That was that life. This is another.

He can remember the first time he saw the little girl clearly. She had long, shiny black hair he wanted to touch. She was tiny, like a little doll, and she was afraid of horses. But she was not afraid of him.

Mutti was furious with his father. She did not want him to go into practice with a Jew, and she stood in the garden that day, unsmiling and icy. She called him to her and whispered loudly, ‘Ugh! How I hate the darkness of them.’

He pulled away from her. Kicked out at a garden chair because of the sickness in his stomach, and the gardener’s puppy lying underneath shot out with a squeal … I shiver at the memory of her eyes. Close my mind against the echo of her laugh.

All his childhood Mutti told him stories, terrible fairy stories of a race who ate their own babies, who were inferior, but a threat to all good Germans. After he met the little girl his heart told him something quite else.

How lonely they were, he and that fearless little girl. There were no other children nearby and only a hedge and a lawn between them. He defied Mutti, refused to think of her as Jewish. He and the girl were friends. They were friends.

Although he was older, she was the one with the imagination. They made small dens in the rambling garden on the edge of the forest, like nests, with old horse rugs and straw as linings against the cold and damp.

They always made more than one den to outwit Mutti. The girl seemed to know exactly where his mother would send the nurse or gardener to look for them, and where, in a tangle of dried fir branches, close under the branches of overhanging trees, grown-ups never ventured, if you stayed very quiet.

He was the practical one, carefully lining the small floor of their tree caves with layers of warmth. Pinching food from the kitchen and old coats from the hook in the stables so they would not freeze. Tying torn pieces of cloth to the trees so that they would know which way they had come.

In the depth of winter, when it was too cold to play in the garden, they often hid in the little tack room in the stable block. It had a small fire, and they played board games or drew pictures or read. The groom and the stable boy used to warn them when Mutti was on the warpath.

His mother knew perfectly well he played with the girl and she hated it. He could not take her into the house when Mutti was home, and even when his mother was out or away, the girl was so nervous she jumped at every sound, hated being inside his house.

His mother could not ban the little girl from the house and garden. She could not stop them playing together or from being friends, because of his father. He adored the child. She amused him. He also admired her mother, who was gentle and extremely well read.

Mutti was much too clever to dislike the family openly or show her jealousy and prejudice in front of his father. She enjoyed the money and lifestyle that the new clinic engendered. Instead, she made life difficult for the children, and any social interaction beyond the polite interchanges between the two families impossible.

This was neither unusual nor a surprise. Initially, the two families knew exactly where they stood and the conventions were strictly adhered to, in front of her. Jewish families kept to their own, lived amongst each other, not with Poles or Germans. As far as Mutti was concerned it should stay that way. Behind her back, the boy visited the girl in her home and so did his father.

As the years went by Mutti’s jealousy of the girl and her mother, combined with her prejudice, became all-consuming, obsessive. Fuelled by politics, the papers, her friends, Polish and German, it seemed to his mother that she had waited all her life for the time that was coming.

As his father’s marriage disintegrated, as Poland began to prepare for war and indigenous Germans waited for their chance to seize coveted houses and jobs, as houses became empty and the trains overflowed with refugees fleeing while they could, his mother would beat him with his horsewhip for even talking to the girl.

He and the girl were like brother and sister. Until he changed schools. Until the company of his peers became more exciting. Until he began to understand the threat to the purity of the German race. Suddenly, they were children no longer and it was not possible to be friends.

He was a German. She was a Jew.

I shut her out. I shut out the memory of those haunting dark eyes. I shut out what I did and what I became. I close my eyes against the coming day, the boy I was. Against the sick endless knowledge of my own betrayal.

Chapter 14 (#ulink_33c589b8-4657-5757-ae64-169f0e60f121)

Kate found a small vegetarian hotel on the edge of the village. Her room faces the estuary and she opens her window wide to a thick airless afternoon. This will be fine until she can find somewhere to rent.

Away over the water purple clouds are amassing. There is going to be a storm and she is glad of it. Her head aches and she feels tense and vaguely apprehensive.

She thinks of Martha. Martha and Fred living in that one-storey, timeless house that holds the faint resonance of a colonial era.

Restless, she makes tea she does not really want, then throws herself on top of the bed and closes her eyes. She hears the first distant rumble of thunder start like a mumbled threat and with it the strange anxiety surfaces.

She thinks she knows the cause of it. Entering that house reminded her of Dora. The reminiscent smells of an old house, where long-faded curtains and fabrics of sofas and chairs hold still the nostalgic memories of childhood. And of hope. Another visit, one more chance of saying and doing the right thing.

She thinks about that freak London storm that sent her here, which woke her from a dream of such joy that she tried to cling on to it. She did not want to wake up in her aunt’s flat in the centre of London where any moment the dull roar of traffic would begin.

She lay listening to the violent wind isolating her in yet another city, and felt an overpowering dislocation and a longing to change the course her life had suddenly taken: regular employment, city salary, punishing hours.

She knew she should be grateful. She should be enjoying writing travel features. She should be glad of decent money. But she was homesick for India, for a job she had loved, for her friends. For the person she had thought Richard was.

The knowledge that she could never go back, never return to that place and time of happiness was a sharp pain under her ribs. It had ended so abruptly that Kate knew she would never take joy or fulfilment for granted again.

Her brother, Luke, had phoned to tell her that Dora was dying, the same week Richard’s wife had flown unexpectedly to Karachi to join him.

– I have to give it another try, Kate. I have a four-year-old child.

– Of course you do. I see that. I’ll stay in England. I won’t come back.

– It might be easier for us both. It would be awful to have you so near.

– Yes. I expect it would.

Kate stunned, in shock; Richard trying to keep the relief out of his voice.