Knowing Anna

by Sarah Meyrick

  Stephen might be a bit . . . well . . . pompous was probably the only word, but Anna had been very fond of him. They’d enjoyed a strong, if unlikely, friendship. He’d introduced her to opera. Not William’s scene, mind you, and certainly not Theo’s. But good old Theo, hadn’t minded a bit when William had asked if it would be very bad form for him to treat Anna and Stephen to an evening at Glyndebourne. And Stephen was undoubtedly a man of integrity. Deeply prayerful. And kind. No idea he was homosexual, till that young fellow turned up the other night. Perhaps that’s why Theo had been so relaxed about another man escorting his wife to the opera! William’s innocence on that score had caused Ruth no end of amusement.

  Natural choice to conduct Anna’s funeral, of course. William could remember next to nothing of the service, though everyone said it had been spot on. He’d remembered everyone’s names, involved the children and so forth. Encouraged tears and laughter. Lots of music. And this week, William couldn’t but notice the effort Stephen was making with each of the pilgrims. The lengths he went to reach out to Theo, who all too often responded like a bear with a sore head. Undeterred, he worked his way round the group, while they walked, and again over meals, but in such a natural way that people scarcely knew it was happening. And he’d clearly put a great deal of thought into his reflections. He was doing his best to take the pilgrims on a spiritual and emotional journey, as well as a physical one.

  William closed his eyes as Father Stephen drew the prayers to an end.

  ‘God bless you today

  The earth beneath your feet,

  The path on which you tread,

  The work of your hand and mind,

  The things which you desire.

  And when the day is over,

  God bless you at your rest. Amen.

  ‘Now, friends,’ he continued. ‘Today’s silence. Yesterday our word of the day was “weeping”. That was a tough one.’ Father Stephen’s gaze swept around the group, to be met with nods and murmurs of assent. ‘I’m sorry if that was painful. Pain is a huge part of the journey at the moment. So today, can I suggest we turn our thoughts in a different, happier direction? How would it be if we think about giving thanks? Thankfulness is so important. St Paul wrote to the Ephesians, encouraging them to “give thanks always for all things unto God the Father”. Being thankful doesn’t make the hurt go away, but I think what it can do is to help us to come at it from a new angle.

  ‘I’m sure we all want to give thanks for Anna, and her part in our lives. But are there other things we can give thanks for, I wonder? Small everyday miracles, maybe. The sun rising. Food in our shops and enough money to buy it. Clean water coming out of the tap. As the psalmist says, “Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.” Shall we give it a try?’

  It was almost as if Father Stephen had a hotline to his own soul, thought William. Had he been able to tell he was praying, trying to find comfort in the memory of good things?

  He kissed Ruth goodbye – she was heading into Rochester in search of a laundrette and food for supper – and whispered, ‘We have so much to be thankful for.’ She had smiled bravely back at him, and then left without another word, raising a hand in a half wave, half salute. He watched her go, and worried for her, the habit of a lifetime. He hoped she wouldn’t get lost in Rochester. She’d never been there, as far as he knew. Her map-reading was somewhat haphazard, not that she’d admit it. As was her driving, when she had a lot on her mind. Still. She would cope. Be fine. Had all afternoon to sort things out.

  Now. To the task in hand. Thankfulness. He suddenly remembered a song from the 1970s. How did it go? ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful, One, Two, Three’ . . . Not his cup of tea, but their neighbour’s son used to play it, too loudly, one hot summer when all the windows were open. Ruth, sleep-deprived from nursing Thomas, had grumbled about the intrusion. But when James and Anna had started joining in with the lyrics every time the long-haired young man blasted out the record, the song had morphed into a family joke. As for the reasons . . . the original lyrics mentioned porridge oats, yellow socks, the Bolshoi Theatre and wine. Among a number of other unmentionables that he was rather glad the children hadn’t picked up. It had become a game making up their own lyrics. Sunny weather. Ice cream. Swimming. Chocolate biscuits (Mummy). Gin and tonic (Daddy). The Famous Five (James). Prokofiev (Anna, precocious, who’d just discovered Peter and the Wolf).

  Was that what this was about? A list of jaunty reasons to be cheerful? A Pollyanna-ish Glad Game, where you found something to smile about in every circumstance? (How his sisters had loved that book! If he remembered, Pollyanna had even carried on smiling when she was run over by a car. Edwardian sentimental clap-trap! Grace, the youngest, had been especially tedious about it, forever asking earnestly, ‘What would Pollyanna do if she were here?’ He must ask the adult Grace if she still took inspiration from her childhood heroine.)

  William rebelled against the idea of relentless good cheer. Too trite, surely. A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. Good to be appreciative of life, to be positive where possible. But true thankfulness . . . that entailed something deeper, more considered.

  He warily probed the scar tissue around his heart. He loved these silent hours. They were an oasis in the day. Only trouble was, if one indulged in too much introspection, there was a danger that one simply opened up old wounds. Wounds that were just beginning to heal and were better left alone. It was like that terrible temptation to pick a scab, when you were a boy, only to find the blood coursing down your knee and having to go back to Matron for another plaster.

  Anna. There was so much to be thankful for. That much was straightforward. From the day she was born and was first placed in his arms, he had adored her. Where James had fretted and cried, discombobulating him as a nervous first-time father, the infant Anna simply gazed up at him out of her dark blue eyes and he was smitten. She had her mother’s red hair, and a look of his own father (oh dear!) around the nose. Until that instant he had no idea how passionately he had wanted a daughter. While he loved James, and Tom, of course, when he came along, some elemental instinct rose up inside him when presented with his baby girl that saw him silently vowing to keep her safe for ever.

  Had he done that? No amount of paternal vigilance had prevented her death. But how could it? Regrets? Always regrets. Bound to be. Mainly that he’d spent so much of the children’s childhood away from home, working long hours, commuting. But – hand on heart – he was as sure as he could be that he and Ruth had given her as happy a childhood as possible. Security, you’d call it today. Materially, she was comfortable. Good education. Lots of opportunities. Enough money to pursue her interests. And above all else, most importantly, she knew she was loved. At the centre of her parents’ world. Rather different from his own upbringing. Endless cold vicarages, children seen and not heard, left to their own devices while Father went about his priestly business and Mother ran her committees and visited the sick.

  But that was a different era. For one thing, it was war-time, though he barely remembered that, apart from the day when he was three and a tall, frightening stranger with a beaky face suddenly appeared at home, and he was promptly ousted from his mother’s bed and banished to the nursery. Overnight, home became an alarming and uncertain place, with new rules that he struggled to understand. To begin with, he assumed that the visitor would leave and they could all go back to normal, eating supper with Mother in the kitchen and running about in the village with no shoes. Everyone kept telling him how pleased he must be to have his father home safely, but he could remember to this day the fear and bewilderment.

  Looking back, now, he could see how hard it must have been for his parents, too. How difficult to live through a terrible war, to adjust to peacetime. After their deaths, he and Grace found a box of letters their parents had exchanged while his father was away on army service. He’d served as a chaplain under Monty in the Western De
sert campaign, and later in Italy and Normandy. While his father wrote of derring-do on the battlefield and his own advances in the mission field, his mother wrote increasingly plaintive descriptions of the daily grind trying to feed six hungry children on war rations, and keep the house in some kind of running order. William was naughty today and tipped over his milk. Such a wicked waste, she wrote in one letter, causing him an agony of retrospective guilt.

  His father had not been an easy presence in the family. He was demanding, impatient and irascible, and after so many years in the army, uncomfortable in a household where the females outnumbered the males. He’d clearly been a bit of a rising star as an army chaplain. Now he missed both the company of the men he had served with and the heightened sense of importance that war brought to everything. In response, he poured his considerable energy into his work, and in his rare interactions with the children, ruled with an iron hand.

  No, he and Ruth had been blessed to bring up their family in a different age. There was something to be thankful for. Peacetime, prosperity. Hard to appreciate, perhaps, if you hadn’t lived through it. All this talk of austerity today – hah! People had no idea! They should try the 1950s for size. Plenty of jubilation when peace was declared, but then the really hard work started, rebuilding a nation. All those lives lost. Families fractured, cities bombed, houses mere rubble. Rationing that continued far longer than anyone had ever believed possible. Unspeakable horror stories that emerged. Prisoners of war. Concentration camps. Untold evil.

  So much to be thankful for. What else? Ruth, his own dear heart. His fine sons. Anna, his beautiful, lovely, warm-hearted Anna. She’d been a wonderful daughter in so many ways. They had shared a love of books, a sense of the absurd, a great deal of laughter. He’d been so utterly delighted that she’d been blessed with the gift of music, though he constantly admonished himself against the temptation to fulfil his own thwarted hopes through his daughter. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but notice her early efforts blossom and flower. He tried not to assume too much, to begin with. He thought she was musical, of course, but as Ruth often pointed out he was a little inclined to think that everything Anna undertook was miraculous.

  ‘No, really!’ He laughed as he tried to defend himself. ‘Really, Ruth. I think this is something special. Trust my instincts on this one. I know she’s only eight, but she’s got talent. Her ear’s so good. I think she needs her own lessons, not these shared sessions she gets at school. Then maybe a better instrument.’ Ruth, lying baby Thomas on a muslin square over her shoulder to burp him, wordlessly raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Not yet,’ William pressed on. ‘In due course, I mean. Let me at least talk to her teacher.’

  He had done so, phoning Mrs Blake from the office one lunchtime and catching her, breathless and just about to hit the road on her way to her next class at a neighbouring school.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve phoned, Mr Meadows,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to get in touch. Anna’s been . . . well, a bit mischievous in class. She imitates the other children. Plays their mistakes back to me. Frighteningly accurately, as it happens. She’s clearly bored. Can I suggest she drops out of group lessons? I can recommend a friend of mine who I think would be a good teacher for her. But I should warn you, he turns down more pupils than he takes on. And he’s very particular. So it’ll take a good word from me, and then Anna will need to be on best behaviour if he’s prepared to meet her.’

  William read Anna the riot act about her behaviour (‘But Daddy, they’re all so slow . . .’) and she’d approached her trial lesson with Dominic Jenkins with the utmost seriousness. He lived half an hour’s drive away, and Ruth immediately protested about the impracticality. Unusually – for domestic matters were Ruth’s domain and not his – William held his ground, saying they should at least give the new teacher a go. He didn’t mention the eye-watering cost of the lessons. ‘After all, he may not take her on,’ he said.

  He took her to the trial himself, leaving work early especially to do so, on the grounds that Ruth had her hands full with James and the baby. Mr Jenkins lived in a tall, imposing house, and was tall and imposing himself. He was older than William had expected for some reason – sixty-ish? – wore gold half-moon glasses and looked severe. William asked if he should come in, to accompany her on the piano, but was instructed, politely but firmly, to wait in the hall. Half an hour later, Anna emerged with her eyes shining. ‘Please, Daddy. Please say I can come back?’

  Mr Jenkins had nodded imperceptibly at William, and consulted a beautiful, large red leather diary. ‘I can do Thursdays at 5 p.m., Anna. Does that suit?’

  Anna, unused to being consulted, turned wordlessly to her father.

  ‘That suits,’ said William. ‘Thank you. Very much.’

  After that, it was all systems go. Anna fell passionately in love with both Mr Jenkins and the cello. She worked her socks off with her practice, and before long asked if she could start proper lessons on the piano, too, ‘because Mr Jenkins says I need a second instrument.’

  What happiness her music brought him! Something else to be thankful for. And music had given Anna joy. Much more important, naturally. Joy and a livelihood. He’d been so proud of her – they both had – when she’d been accepted by the Guildhall. That marvellous quartet! Splendid concerts, all that international travel. Such an exciting time, your twenties, when adult life is just beginning. Shame, the way it ended. Mind you, he’d been glad to see the back of that frightful Laurence. Rotten fellow. He’d made Anna absolutely miserable. Not worthy of her. Not one bit. Such a relief when she saw the light. Theo on the other hand . . . Theo was a fine chap. The only man she’d ever brought home that he could contemplate as a son-in-law. He’d seen at once that this one was going to be different. She was happy in her skin with him. She glowed. Another thing to be thankful for. A happy marriage. Thank you, God. And for the children. All his grandchildren.

  Of course, marriage and motherhood meant that her career took a bit of a back seat. Strictly speaking, it was the decision to leave the quartet that scuppered things. Not Theo’s fault in the slightest. Just the way it worked out. Love mattered. Selfishly, he couldn’t but be glad that her marriage had also brought Anna back home, a stone’s throw from Aston. And she had found her way into teaching, enjoyed it. Regular session work in London till the little ones came along. ‘I’m happy to wait and see what comes, Dad!’ she told him, the day she announced over Sunday lunch that she was pregnant for the second time. ‘I love being a mum, and teaching in between times. That’s more than enough to keep me out of mischief for now. There’ll be plenty of time to think about my career later on.’

  But there hadn’t been time. There wasn’t time afterwards, and now there never would be. How innocently hopeful Anna had been – they had all been – that day. He pictured them all sitting around the dining table at Aston, Beth at Anna’s side perched on a pile of Samuel Wesley organ voluntaries so that she could reach the table.

  ‘Should have warned me, old thing. I’d have put some champagne on ice!’

  ‘Ah, but if I’m not allowed a glass, what’s the point?’ she teased him, as she helped cut up the roast lamb on Beth’s plate. Across the table, Theo beamed with pride.

  ‘Well, here’s to you all anyway!’ said William, lifting his glass of Merlot. ‘We’re so delighted for you. Congratulations. Live long and prosper, darling girl!’

  To think that within two years the world would come crashing down around their ears. Thank goodness one didn’t know what was to come. How terrible to be able to see into the future. He thought of the Greek legend of Cassandra, King Priam’s daughter, cursed with the gift of prophecy. Not only was she burdened with the foreknowledge of terrible things to come, she was destined to be believed by no one. Treated as an outcast, a madwoman.

  A madwoman. If Anna had been born a generation or two earlier, might society have given her that label? The cruelty of it! Thank goodness there was greater understanding of mental illness these days. H
eavens above! He was sounding quite Pollyanna-ish himself now. I’m thankful that we didn’t know what was coming. I’m thankful that when my daughter had a nervous breakdown, people were not unkind.

  It was Anna’s collapse that dealt the true body-blow to her career as a performer. Not Laurence, not Theo, not moving to Farmleigh away from London and the serious action. After the funeral, Anna packed her cello into its case and drove over to Aston, turning up unexpectedly on a Sunday evening just as they were heading for bed. Ruth was in the bath when William heard a key turn in the lock downstairs.

  ‘I can’t bear it,’ she said, tears streaming down her face. ‘I simply can’t bear it. If it wasn’t for the bloody cello . . . and my self-centred obsession with it . . . What kind of mother doesn’t notice something like that? Not playing. Never again, never again.’

  William stared at her, quite at a loss. ‘Anna, my darling. You’re not making any sense,’ he said, and hugged her close. She sobbed, trembling uncontrollably in his arms.

  ‘All my fault. All my fault. If I’d had my eye on the ball . . .’

  ‘Darling, darling girl . . . Nobody’s fault. Certainly not yours. Come and sit down.’

  He put the kettle on to make a pot of tea, and poured her a small glass of brandy while the water came to the boil. She drained her glass in one and put it down hard on the table. ‘No tea, thanks, Dad. I’m beyond tea. Got to get back. But I need you to take Chuck. Can’t bear to have the bloody instrument in the house. Lock it away! I may need to sell it one day if I’m on my uppers.’

  And with that she marched out again, and before he could stop her she got into the car and drove away, leaving the cello sitting forlornly in the hall. She can’t mean it. She just can’t mean it, he thought. All her life, she’s expressed every emotion she’s ever felt through music. How can she just switch that off now? But Anna had meant it. For almost two years the cello stayed untouched in her childhood bedroom, the case unopened and gathering dust.