Sea Music

‘Indeed I am.’ Barnaby sits tiredly in the armchair and looks at his parents fondly. All so normal. All calm and Sunday eveningish. If he closes his eyes for a moment he can almost believe he is twenty again and spending another soporific weekend with his parents, comforted by routine but restless to be away.

‘What’s Hattie cooking for supper, I wonder.’ Martha’s voice wavers against his closed eyelids. He opens them. His father is staring at his mother.

‘Hattie isn’t here any more. She died, didn’t she?’

Martha’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Oh dear, shouldn’t we have gone to the funeral? Shouldn’t we have sent flowers?’

Barnaby takes a long deep drink from his whisky glass. ‘Mum, Hattie retired about ten years ago, then sadly she died. You did send flowers, and you did go to the funeral, so that’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes, darling. Sometimes I forget things. How silly.’

‘I’m going to finish this drink, then I’ll start your supper. Cheers! Here’s to summer.’

‘Cheers, darling.’

‘Cheers, old chap.’

There is silence as they drink and watch him. A blackbird sets up a squawking in the cherry tree, which is about to explode into blossom.

‘Naughty, naughty Eric cat,’ Martha murmurs, and Barnaby smiles and begins to relax.

His mother gets up and wanders round the room. ‘I’m rather hungry, darling. I’ll just go out to the kitchen and tell Hattie to do us all an omelette.’

Barnaby sighs, gives up and gets to his feet. ‘I’ve just told you, Mum, Hattie is no longer here. It’s just me tonight. You’d like an omelette?’

‘Why isn’t she here? I didn’t give her the day off. It’s too bad.’

Moving to the door, Barnaby hears his voice rising, although he is trying hard not to let it. ‘Hattie is dead, Mother. Look, I’ll put the television on for you. I think it’s the Antiques Roadshow. Sit and watch that with Dad, and I’ll be back in a minute with your supper.’

As he closes the door he hears his mother say, ‘I didn’t know Hattie was dead, darling. When did she die?’

‘Oh, ages ago, M., ages ago,’ his father says. ‘Think I might have another drink.’

Barnaby stares into the middle of the fridge, fighting an aching tiredness. He cannot see any eggs and an overpowering depression suddenly overtakes him. He hears the front door open, then the glass inner door shut with a bang that makes him wince.

‘Hi, Barnes, it’s me,’ Lucy calls out unnecessarily. He hears her making a run for the kitchen to see him alone before Martha hears her and dances out of the sitting room to see her beloved granddaughter

‘Help me, Lucy. What on earth can I give them for supper? The fridge seems empty.’

Lucy claps her hands over her mouth. ‘Oh, bugger, I forgot. I told Mrs Biddulph I would do the shopping. She will get things she likes and Gran and Grandpa hate.’

She opens the door of the freezer and pulls out fishfingers and chips with a flourish. ‘Here we are! Gran loves them.’

Barnaby looks doubtful. ‘She seems to live on them. I’m not sure your grandfather is so keen.’

‘Darling Barnes,’ Lucy says briskly, ‘they both ate a huge roast lunch. I keep telling you, honestly, they don’t need two cooked meals a day. You just make work for yourself.’

‘I know, bossyboots, but food is their one comfort and distraction. Look, there is some cheese at the back of the fridge; that will do for Fred.’

‘I’ll eat chips with Gran.’

Barnaby raises his eyebrows. ‘If I remember rightly, you too had a large Sunday lunch, or was I seeing things?’

Before Lucy can answer Martha flies in. ‘Lucy, Lucy, how lovely …’ She lifts her cheek up for her gangly granddaughter to kiss and Lucy hugs her.

‘Hi, Gran. I’m about to cook you fishfingers and chips. I’m going to pig out on the chips with you.’

‘Darling child, how lovely!’

Barnaby lays four trays out three times. Martha, longing to be helpful, promptly puts them away three times.

‘How can I help, darling?’ she keeps saying to Lucy. Lucy brings her alive in a way even I cannot do, Barnaby thinks, in a way the young spark the old with their energy and cheerfulness.

They have supper on their knees in the sitting room. Barnaby sits next to Fred and shares his cheese and biscuits.

‘Barnaby and Gramps are both going to dream their heads off, darling, whereas you and I are merely going to get porky,’ Lucy whispers to Martha.

From across the room Fred looks at his tiny wife and his tall, skinny granddaughter sitting beside each other on the sofa.

‘I am extremely concerned,’ he says drily, ‘that my antique sofa is going to give way under all that weight.’

He regards them so seriously from over his half-moon glasses that they all burst out laughing.

Glimpses, Barnaby thinks, small, joyous glimpses of people you love, swinging back.

Chapter 2 (#ulink_a6996889-e190-5424-9be7-cd1eb3ba51a2)

A north-easterly wind blows in from the sea and hits the cottage head-on so that the small house shudders. The storm has gusted and rampaged around the coast for days, taking roofs and everything it can lift and hurling them around the gardens. It blows itself out in the first light of day and returns again at dusk. Trees bend and tear in the wind, their branches strewn across the road like broken limbs.

Lucy tosses and turns in the night to the mournful cry of curlews down on the estuary; wakes abruptly and lies anxious in the dark, feeling as if she is poised, waiting for some nebulous disaster that is edging her way.

She sits up, shivering. The church beyond the window looms out of the dark. The dawn sky is lightening to a faint pink above the gravestones which rise eerily up like small tors. She gets out of bed and pulls a pullover over her childlike pyjamas.

She misses the warmth of Abi jammed into her back. She goes downstairs to make some tea, switching on all the lights in the cottage. Carrying her tea back to bed she sits on the window seat in her bedroom, clutching the warm mug, listening to the wind begin to drop.

As a child she sat here so many times in the holidays, feeling relaxed and happy to be with her grandparents, listening to the church bells and the seabirds. Waiting for the first light when she could pull on shorts and T-shirt and run across the road, down the narrow path by the church to the beach.

When she was small, Fred and Martha still occasionally rented the cottage out, but when Fred retired he needed the spare room of the house for a study and they kept the cottage free for Barnaby or Anna and Lucy to stay in. If Lucy came alone she would sleep in Fred’s study. The room always smelt comfortingly of tobacco and leather, but the cottage was where she was happiest. It was like having her own den. She would walk with Anna or Barnaby across the garden to have breakfast with Martha and Fred at the round table in the conservatory surrounded by Martha’s geraniums.

Lucy and Tristan still often walk across the garden for breakfast, but it is Barnaby, not her grandparents, who cooks the bacon and makes the toast now.

Lucy suddenly longs for Tristan. Kosovo looms as foreign and unpredictable as another planet.

She jumps up. The only way to lift this mood will be to go out and walk. She pulls on jeans and two sweaters and makes her way downstairs again. Homer, who spends the nights with Lucy, opens one eye, but does not move. Lucy lets herself out, blowing across the road in the tail of the gale. She climbs the steps over the Cornish hedge into the silent and dark churchyard. She has never been afraid here; it is as familiar to her as Martha’s garden.

The sun is slow in rising and she is across the golf links and down on the beach before it emerges, a beautiful gilt curve, like the edge of a plate over the horizon. There is a high tide running and she sits on the rocks and watches the sun rise up, orange and gold over the harbour, glistening the surface of the water.

Lucy does not want to leave. This place, her grandparents and Barnaby have always been home. Now, suddenly and subtly over the past months, the responsibility has changed. The caring, the childlike dependence has shifted. Martha and Fred are slipping away from her into old age and the dread of one of them suddenly dying, of her not being here when it happens, feels unbearable. Lucy shivers despite her two sweaters. This anxiety is not just about her grandparents. It is about Tristan too. And the teaching job. And living in London on her own.