“Oh, you know, bits and pieces, stuff with the company.”
I expected Anna’s father to say something, but he just nodded, staring past me at something on the wall. He didn’t approve of my career, thought I had got lucky, as if making money was a magician’s trick.
It annoyed me that he thought we were extravagant. We put the money mostly into the house, a tall Georgian town house right at the top of Parliament Hill. There were new clothes, a car, but we weren’t jetting off to the Bahamas every week.
“Well, jobs aren’t easy to find these days, that’s for sure,” he said, as if I was unemployed, as if I was incapable of bringing any money home.
“And how about you, Anna? Your work, I mean,” he said stiffly, and it was unfathomable to me that they were father and daughter.
“Fine, yes,” Anna said, and I expected her to go on, to expand, but she didn’t. She was silent and stared at an African wood carving on the sideboard.
Before I met them, Anna had warned me about her parents. She said they were cold, strange and they had never been very close. The problem, she said, was that they loved Africa and their missionary work more than they did her. When times were good, they were like honeymooning lovers, and Anna felt like an appendage, a third wheel. When things were bad, when her father was away on one of his “trips,” her mother resented her, as if his insatiable lust for village girls was somehow Anna’s fault.
There was a story she told about Nairobi, which, no matter how she spun it, I could never understand. Her parents would sometimes take in girls from the parish, the destitute or the troubled. Anna was expected to wait on them, not just make them welcome—she was more than happy to do that—but serve them tea, turn down their beds, bring them a towel after they bathed. She understood, she said, the need to help the less fortunate. That had been drummed into her since she had been a child. But sometimes it was as if they were the daughters, she said, and not her.
That evening at Anna’s parents’, I huddled under a blanket in my room reading an old James Herriot novel. Even though we were now married—an impromptu wedding on a beach in Bali—we were still given separate bedrooms. The room was sparse: a bed, a bedside table and a Bible. There was no Wi-Fi or phone signal, just a single shelf full of old beige hardbacks, their titles worn away. Our sleeping arrangement was punishment, Anna thought, for our unplanned and unannounced wedding, a union that hadn’t been blessed by the church. That was the difference between them. My father couldn’t have been happier, thrilled by the surprise, telling us it was our wedding, we could do whatever we liked. Anna’s parents just smoldered.
I heard a soft knock at the door, and Anna came into the room, wearing her coat. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “We need to find a pub.”
We said we were just going for a quick evening stroll, but instead marched the two miles into the nearest town. The breeze on our faces had never felt so sweet. So intent on finding signs of life, we barely spoke as we speed-walked along the dark country road.
The little seaside town of Southwold was dead. Only the lighthouse seemed alive, incongruous and towering over the town, its beam of light dueling with the moon. All we could hear were our footsteps and the soft sound of the sea.
“Everything’s going to be closed, isn’t it?” I said.
“We’ve got to keep looking, we must,” Anna said, as we turned into yet another dark cobbled street.
Just as we were thinking about giving up, or trying to get a taxi to the next town, we turned the corner and light spilled out onto the street. A hotel that doubled as a pub.
As we opened the door, it was like easing ourselves into a steaming hot bath. We stood in the doorway and took it all in: the warm glow and chatter of the bar, the flicker and ping of the slot machines. In the corner, there was a loud group of locals wearing Christmas sweaters and Santa hats.
“What do you want?” I asked Anna at the bar, having to shout above the noise.
“A pint of something, and I think I’ll have a double of something.”
“A what?”
“A double. I’d like a double. A double measure of spirits.”
I started laughing. Anna didn’t drink a huge amount, and I had never seen her drink spirits.
“Er, okay. I’m just having a beer.”
“Very well,” Anna said, sounding a little like her father. She was looking at the optics above the bar. “Gin. I think I’ll have a gin.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “A beer and a gin.”
She nudged me. “But Rob, it has to be a double. Two of them in one glass.”
“Yep, I got it, sweetheart,” I said, smiling.
We sat at the bar, on two stools facing each other. Anna drank her gin down in one and winced a little, her cheeks flushing red. She let out a sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry,” she said, chasing the gin with her beer. “About them I mean. I realize it’s not easy.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
Anna shook her head. “It’s not fine actually. They’re so strange, the older they get. And the thing is, this is actually them being nice.”
“Really?” I said, nearly spitting out my lager.
“Really,” she said. “They just don’t like it here. In England, I mean.
