Sea Music. Sara MacDonald

thinks of Lucy. Lucy coming back to London is a very good thing. The cottage can be rented out at the going rate. Barnaby has steadfastly refused to take any rent from Lucy, and Anna is pretty sure she can afford it as she has been working in a hotel.

      It would not surprise Anna if Tristan has been living at the cottage at weekends or when he is on leave. Rudi stopped her asking Lucy, pointing out that it would have cost them far more to have her living in London and that his sons were subbed on their visits, so it was important to be fair.

      Anna let the matter drop. Rudi was right: she could be hard on Lucy. She shudders at the thought of what some of their friends and colleagues are going through, with children who sponge off their parents for as long as possible. Lucy has never asked for money; she has always been good about getting herself holiday jobs.

      The day is lightening. Anna slides down the bed, hoping to sleep again. She cannot put off going down to Cornwall for much longer. She will have to discuss plans for the future with Barnaby. She must think about arranging power of attorney so she can see how Fred and Martha are financially. Barnaby can be bloody awkward when he decides on a course of action.

      It would be much easier to have Rudi with her. Barnaby would find it more difficult to argue with her. Surely it is not because Rudi is German that Barnaby suggested she go down on her own? Fred was always too protective. She and Barnaby were always discouraged from discussing anything to do with the war in front of Martha.

      It must have been terrible for Martha to have to leave her family at a young age and flee to England, alone. But it was all such a long time ago now. Life has moved on.

      She has never thought about having Jewish blood. She is so fair, she has always identified with Germans and Northern Europeans, especially since she started lecturing. God alone knows what sort of throwback she is. Some Scandinavian ancestor Fred had in the family cupboard. She has that rare blonde hair that does not fade but stays a Nordic white. Anna has always been proud of her looks and a little vain, enjoying the attention she attracts.

      Lucy is olive-skinned and dark, although she highlights her hair now in thin streaks of blonde. Still gangly and colt-like, Lucy is like Martha, except in height. She has the same creamy coffee skin and shiny blue-black hair that gleams in the light. And like her father, of course. The same eyes, the same way of using her hands.

      Claudio was an Italian musician Anna had a short fling with and uncharacteristically got pregnant by. She briefly married him for form’s sake and they parted in a sad but friendly fashion before Lucy was born. The only thing he asked of Anna was that his child carried his name.

      Anna has absolutely no idea what happened to him. He just drifted completely out of her life, and it is something Lucy holds against her. ‘Everyone needs to know who they are,’ she will cry dramatically from time to time, but not very seriously.

      Barnaby has been Lucy’s father, brother and best friend. Lucy is pragmatic and inclined to make her own happiness. Anna has never felt close to her daughter, and perhaps one day she will try to find Claudio. When she has children of her own.

      Anna never intended to have children and Lucy was left with nannies for most of her childhood, or with Martha and Fred. Barnaby would whisk her away in the holidays, when he was on leave. He would take her to France or Italy with a girlfriend and spoil her atrociously.

      A surprise baby arrived at an awkward moment in Anna’s career. She was junior counsel and fiercely ambitious. She wanted to be one of the youngest women to take silk. In your thirties you had to make good or you were lost to the young, mostly men, coming up behind you. She became a Queen’s Counsel at thirty-six.

      Rudi is snoring gently and Anna is still wide awake. She likes the warmth of his body in the bed next to her. Comforting. Yet this vague but familiar unease still lingers, like a half-heard snatch of conversation blown in at an upstairs window.

      Anna’s heart starts to thump painfully again. ‘Oh God,’ she whispers into the coming day. ‘Don’t let me start these wretched nightmares again.’

      Barnaby sits on the battered old sofa in the conservatory, experiencing a tangible sense of timelessness, a brief lament for the years that have slid slyly by while his back was turned. If he closes his eyes he is once more that prep schoolboy curled up, dreading the end of the Easter holidays.

      He used to crouch in this peachy-smelling glasshouse listening to the birds at twilight while the destructive wind brought in scents of cherry blossom, of wallflowers, and dropped pittsoporum seeds. Early pollen filled his nostrils, making him sniff and sneeze as he lolled there as dusk came, making the trees luminous in the dark.

      He would listen to Fred read softly to his mother, his whisky glass perched precariously on the arm of the chair in Martha’s dressing room, which led directly through glass doors from the conservatory.

      T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen – sad and brilliant dead poets. All his life snatches of lines have popped into Barnaby’s head, and with those lines come the evocative smells that accompanied the words: sausages, flowers, cordite, dogs. House plants, whisky, dust, his own unwashed feet.

      As the rise and fall of his father’s voice soothed Martha’s headache and reached him just outside their room, loneliness would descend out of nowhere. There was a close intenseness between his parents that excluded him without their realising it.

      In bed, in the dark, a haunting, animal keening would penetrate the cobwebs of his sleep. A cry, a whisper. Hushed voices. In the morning, loss real and enduring breathed and moved behind quick smiles.

      Barnaby could not understand why his happy family life, full of love, did not make him feel as safe and secure as it should have done. Martha and Fred were never indifferent or uncaring. Warmth filled this house. Yet, Barnaby knew that the strength of what he felt was not imagined.

      His childhood felt as if he was following a snatch of song down a dusky corridor, only to find when he turned the corner there was only a vibration hovering in the night air, no singer held the trembling notes he heard. The feeling of loss was searing. He was sure that if he could only capture that lingering echo he would recognise the singer and the haunting song they sang. Then his feeling of carrying a weighty sadness might end. Instead of his parents disappearing into shadow, they would remain flesh and blood to him.

      Barnaby sensed a truth that was missing from their lives. A bewilderment of childhood where honesty is obscured, where secrets are kept.

      Standing, bleak on the station platform as he went back to school, he would wait for Martha to hug him to her again and again. Fred would bend and kiss him. Always. Barnaby would board the train, would hurry down the corridor to the school carriage and jostle to the window to catch sight of them. Each time he would will them to see him, Barnaby Tremain, eight and a half years old. Not just another white-faced little schoolboy in school cap and blazer identical to hundreds of others with their noses pressed to the window on the school train for Paddington.

      He knew they loved him, yet before the train even pulled out of the station they would turn once more to one another, their heads close together, walking away from him down the platform. His mother so thin and tiny. His father bent towards her, his left hand hovering protectively behind her back.

      They never turned for one last wave although he always waited, breath held with longing, leaning out of the carriage window to capture that last glimpse of them as the train hooted and sidled forward. But they never ever turned to wave.

      To them he had already gone. Their concentration was on one another. Barnaby would pull in his head before a master caught him, and collapse into his seat, concentrating on pulling his socks up, on not blubbing.

      He always, always wanted to shout to his parents’ disappearing backs, ‘I’m still here. I haven’t gone yet. I’m still here.’

      Barnaby, sitting on the long-faded sofa, drinking his own whisky, whispers to himself now, ‘I’m still here.’

      For it feels sometimes that the piercing echo of his parents’ secret song still hovers in the flickering shadows