Читать книгу Sea Music - Sara MacDonald, Sara MacDonald - Страница 8

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.

Anna will be in London, but Lucy is certainly not going to let her mother know she is nervous and afraid of failing. Anna would tell her she has spent too long in Cornwall, and this is what happens when you drop out, even for a short time.

She can hear her mother’s voice and she grins suddenly, thinking of Tristan, who would say the same thing but in a different way.

‘You’re just in a panic because you got a bloody good job when you didn’t expect to, Lu. Come on, you didn’t do languages to wait on tables, did you?’

Lucy sighs and jumps off the rocks onto the sand. She is not accustomed to being melancholy and she turns slowly for home. Now she is up and wide awake she might as well sort out her things. She has accumulated so much crap. She will have to go up into the attic and see if there is any room to store all the childhood stuff she cannot bear to throw away.

Lucy climbs the ladder up to the attic and pushes open the hatch. She feels vaguely guilty, as if she is about to trespass. She should really have asked Barnaby before she came up here.

Using her torch Lucy finds the light switch on her left, and the dim bulb swings slightly, catching the dust. There is plenty of room up here. Most of the floor has been professionally boarded and Lucy wonders why her grandfather has always had a thing about people coming up here and falling through the ceiling.

The room smells of mice and dust and a world that no longer exists. There is an old gilt mirror, mottled, the frame rotting. Heavy, old-fashioned golf clubs. A box of little pewter mugs, relics of school cricket matches. A box of books. A huge grim picture of a fast-running grey sea. A faded, frayed hat with paper flowers. Leather suitcases neatly stacked one on top of another. Rolled carpets, a broken wicker chair, and a disintegrating box of crockery and vases.

Lucy swings the torch round in an arc and sees a hardboard partition to the left of the hatch opening. Big enough to house a water tank, it has been eaten by mice and is beginning to disintegrate. There is a crude door into it with a small latch.

She heaves herself over the ledge of the open hatch and crawls over to the door. She pulls it cautiously and it falls away, completely rotten round the hinges. Kneeling upright she drags it carefully away from the partition and pushes it aside. Shining her torch inside the darkness she sees an old school trunk. Nothing else. No water tank, no hidden electric wires or pipes.

Moving inside the hidden room, Lucy sees that over the years the trunk lid, with her grandfather’s initials on the top, has warped, and documents have slid to the floor below. A rusty padlock lies broken in the lock. Lucy pulls it out and opens the lid. Mice have been in and made nests; there are droppings and small mounds of eaten paper. On the top lie cardboard files of deeds and medical journals; letters in bundles, some stored in plastic files.

Lucy shines the torch downwards into the trunk and pokes about with her free hand. Why has Grandpa made a room to hide this trunk? Under her fingers Lucy suddenly sees a faded pink box nestling under letters and old documents, pushed carefully to the bottom of the trunk, underneath diaries and ancient ledgers.

She leans over and moves the bundles of letters carefully so that she can pull the box out and she places it on the floor beside her. The box is tied with colourless ribbon and the writing on the lid is faded and in Polish. Lucy’s fingers hover over it.

Gran’s box? Her heart is thumping. In that small second of hesitation Lucy’s intuition tells her she should stop and put the box back in its hiding place, yet she is already sliding off the ribbon and lifting the lid.

Letters. Browning letters in a foreign hand. A large envelope with typewritten German: Social Welfare Department of the Municipal Administration of Warsaw. It is not sealed. Lucy opens a creased and faded piece of paper within a small cardboard folder like an identity card.

The document is torn and flimsy, almost in pieces. This writing too is in German. It seems to be some sort of crude birth certificate: ‘Anna Esther … Born 8 February 1941, Warsaw, Poland.’ The surname is indecipherable, as if it has been rubbed out.

‘Mother. Marta Esther …’ ‘Oweska’ has been added later, obliterating the name underneath. ‘Father …’ The paper is watermarked and conveniently torn.

All that is left on the card in which the paper is folded is some sort of German official stamp and the date, 1943. The rest is illegible. What does it mean? Her mother was born in London in 1945. Gran and Grandpa have told her so. This piece of paper would make Anna four years older than she is. It does not make sense, and why have the surnames been rubbed out?

Lucy shivers. With shaking fingers, she pushes the documents away from her, back into the box. She does not want to know. She replaces the lid and puts them all back into the top of the trunk. Clumsily she moves away backwards, anxious to be out of the attic. There is nothing she can do about the rotten door.

She closes the hatch with a bang, pushes the ladder back to the ceiling and, blanking from her mind all possible implications, she runs across the garden to go and dress Martha before she starts her breakfast shift at the hotel.