Sea Music. Sara MacDonald

      She takes her mobile phone from her bag and telephones Alice, her clerk. They chat for a moment about the case, then Anna asks her to return her client’s savings minus a derisory amount for her fee, and to tell him that legal aid had covered the costs. That small, rather pathetic man, without an ounce of malice or bitterness, has lost his wife, his house and every penny he possessed.

      Before she rings off, she checks on her morning mail and her appointments for the following day. She has an unusual meeting in the afternoon with the CPS, who want her advice on the possibility of prosecuting an old Nazi living on a housing estate in Dorset.

      Anna stretches tiredly, feeling herself coming down from the high she always gets when she wins a case. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the flash of a cherry tree about to explode into blossom and is reminded suddenly of Martha’s garden. She wants to take Rudi down to Cornwall so he can see it in the spring. Like a lot of Germans he has romantic notions of the west coast.

      Barnaby seems to be making rather a meal of looking after Martha and Fred. After all he does have outside help, and he has Lucy. Cornwall is too far away for Anna to see Martha and Fred as much as she would like. Holidays have to be planned like a military campaign.

      Not wanting to dwell on her parents’ senility, Anna hastily picks up her mobile phone again to speak to Rudi. His secretary tells her he has just left for the theatre. Anna leans back in the slow moving taxi and closes her eyes.

      She still has trouble believing her luck in her late and happy marriage. Rudi, a financial consultant for a Swiss bank, works long hours himself, so accepts her workload and ambition as perfectly normal.

      As a child, Anna felt Martha and Fred’s disapproval if she was too competitive. She had learnt that to be openly ambitious at home was considered pushy. Not very nice. It was not that her parents ever articulated this sentiment, it was something she instinctively knew.

      In the long nights away at boarding school she would sometimes day-dream she had been adopted or sent home with the wrong family at birth. She would lie imagining Fred’s wealthy, sophisticated family somewhere out there in the dark, wilds of Yorkshire, beyond the windows, longing to meet her, so alienated did she so often feel in the holidays, with Martha and Fred and saintly little Barnaby.

      Her parents bent over backwards to appease her, and she had felt furious with them for being so patient, so bloody understanding. She felt her power, the sheer force of her own personality at a very young age.

      She would get a surge of satisfaction in knowing Martha and Fred would do almost anything to pacify her, keep her sweet, because the alternative would be a pervading atmosphere that upset the whole household.

      Yet imposing her will on her parents brought her a sharp loneliness and sense of loss. All through her childhood she had looked for something to anchor her to Martha and Fred, to the place where she lived.

      Later, as a teenager, her fantasy changed and she would search in her mind now for a figure who would immediately recognise that she was far cleverer than these very average parents living in their insular, West Country world.

      This person – usually in her daydreams a young and handsome man – would whisk her away from total obscurity in the country to her rightful position, centre stage. Like the place she effortlessly occupied all her school life.

      Yet, something in her ached for the place Barnaby held in her parents’ hearts. Martha and Fred told her continually how proud they were of her, but Anna was sure they wished her kinder, gentler, other than she was. They seemed as puzzled at the way she had turned out, as she herself was.

      Coming home from school in the holidays, Anna would immediately see Barnaby and be consumed by a frightening rage of jealousy of this placid baby, this good small boy, who had had her parents’ undivided attention while she had been away.

      She would spend the holidays slyly making him cry. After he too left home for boarding school and she started university she still verbally bullied him. Once he was steeped in the timeless and barbaric ways of public school, he never told, never blabbed. There was something wet but intransigent in Barnaby that still irritated her to death.

      As the taxi filters out of the traffic, Anna sees Rudi waiting for her outside the theatre. He waves, his face lighting up when he sees her. His eyes dwelling on her face. He moves forward to pay the taxi as she gets out. She feels the familiar surge of excitement and pleasure in him.

      They met at a conference in Zurich. After a seminar she had given she overheard him muttering appreciative and complimentary remarks about her to a colleague, not realising she was fluent in German and understood every word.

      Rudi had told her that he had been so bowled over by that beautiful English barrister, it had been like walking into a door. She was giving a series of lectures to clever, noisy delegates that weekend and it had been a challenge to keep them engrossed and silent.

      They strolled through the parks of the city together. They went to the opera, talked of their failed marriages, their work and themselves. For the whole of that weekend Anna spoke only German and it was a strangely liberating feeling. She felt comfortable in her skin, in the country, and with Rudi. It had been like waking from a long, lonely sleep. That weekend was also the beginning of a successful international lecture she was establishing as a consultant. Rudi was seconded to the Swiss Bank in London the following year and he took a lease on a flat in Chiswick. His sons flew out regularly for holidays. They were adolescent and enjoyed London and all it had to offer, so they were polite to Anna. She found them much easier to handle than Lucy, who had always been an enigma.

      Anna and Rudi married a year later, when their respective children had got used to the idea. Lucy begged to leave her Dorset boarding school and go down to live with Barnaby and her grandparents. She wanted to take her A levels at a sixth-form college.

      After talking to her headmistress, Anna eventually agreed. Both she and Rudi tried to persuade Lucy to stay in London, believing that the standard of teaching would be higher, but Lucy was adamant. She did not want to live in the flat with Rudi, Anna, and Rudi’s visiting children.

      Anna was not surprised. Anything or anybody Anna liked, Lucy would dislike on principle. However, the flat was too small for three teenage children, and the thought of having Rudi to herself, except for his sons’ visits, had been a huge relief. Lucy got surprisingly good A levels. She was as happy with Barnaby, Martha and Fred as Anna felt distanced and irritated by them.

      Anna feels a sudden relief that Lucy is now adult. Life is so much easier. As Rudi bends to kiss her, she thinks how lucky she is. Rudi, having fulfilled most of his own ambitions, opted to forgo promotion and coast happily towards retirement in London to be with her. Anna knows she is happier than she has ever been.

      Anna shakes hands with Rudi’s Swiss guests and they make their way to the bar. Rudi’s hand hovers courteously at the small of her back. It reminds Anna of the way Fred walked beside Martha, and she is touched. Somehow, it makes her feel secure, for Fred has been as constant to Martha as the changing seasons.

       Chapter 4

      Evensong is over and Lucy is helping Barnaby put Martha to bed. Fred is perfectly capable of managing himself, but he cannot manage Martha any more and it upsets him. Her grandparents have single beds now, near enough to touch, to hold hands in the night, but not to disturb each other’s sleep.

      Martha always goes to bed first and Lucy will sit and hold her hands, check her hot-water bottle, give her her pills, talk to her and marvel at her still-beautiful face. Martha has always worn pretty linen nightdresses, and somehow, once she is in bed she relaxes, her face loses its anxious look and smoothes into a tiny unlined child’s face. Suddenly coherent, she will tell Lucy long rambling tales of building this house, of starting the garden from scratch. Of meeting Fred in London. Of love at first sight.

      Fred will appear out of the bathroom, bathed and immaculate in pyjamas