Читать книгу A Small Person Far Away - Judith Kerr - Страница 6

The rug was exactly the right red – not too orange and not too purple, but that lovely glowing shade between the two which was so difficult to find. It would look marvellous in the dining room.

“I’d like it, please,” said Anna. Clearly it was her lucky day.

She glanced at her reflection in a glass-fronted showcase full of table linen as the assistant led her to his desk. Her green coat – not passed on to her by friends but bought by herself – hung easily from her shoulders. The printed silk scarf, the well-cut dark hair and the reasonably confident expression were all in keeping with the status of the store around her. A well-heeled young Englishwoman out shopping. Well, she thought, nowadays I suppose that’s what I am.

While she wrote out a cheque and the assistant copied her name and address for the rug’s delivery, she imagined telling Richard about it. It would make their flat almost complete. All that was needed now were little things like cushions and lampshades, and perhaps, if Richard finished his script soon, they would be able to choose those together.

She became aware of the assistant hesitating over her name on the cheque.

“Excuse me asking, madam,” he said, “but is that any relation to the gentleman who writes for television?”

“My husband,” she said and felt the usual fatuous, self-congratulatory grin spread over her face as she said it. Ridiculous, she thought. I should be used to it by now.

“Really?” The assistant’s face was pink with pleasure. “I must tell the wife. We watch all his plays, you know. Wherever does he get his ideas from, madam? Do you help him at all with his writing?”

Anna laughed. “No,” she said. “He helps me.”

“Really? Do you write as well then?”

Why did I ever start on this? she thought. “I work in television,” she said. “But mostly I just rewrite little bits of other people’s plays. And if I get stuck, I ask my husband when I get home.”

The assistant, after considering this, rightly dismissed it. “When that big serial of his was on last year,” he said, “the wife and I stayed home for it every Saturday night. So did just about everyone else our way. It was so exciting – not like anything we’d ever seen.”

Anna nodded and smiled. It had been Richard’s first great success.

“We got married on the strength of that,” she said.

She remembered the register office in Chelsea, next to the foot clinic. Richard’s parents down from the north of England, Mama over from Berlin, their own friends from the BBC, cousin Otto passing out at the reception and saying it was the heat, but it had really been the champagne. And the taxi coming and Richard and herself driving off and leaving them all behind.

“It was quite exciting for us too,” she said.

When she walked out of the store into Tottenham Court Road, the world exploded into noise and light. A new building was going up next door and the sunshine trembled with the din of pneumatic drills. One of the workmen had taken off his shirt in spite of the October chill and winked at her as she passed. Behind him the last remains of a bombed building, scraps of wallpaper still adhering to the bricks and plaster, crumbled to a bulldozer. Soon there would be no bomb damage at all left visible in London. And about time too, she thought, eleven years after the war.

She crossed the road to get away from the noise. Here the shops were more or less unchanged – shabby and haphazard, selling things you could not imagine anyone wanting to buy. The Woolworth’s, too, was much as she remembered it. She had come here with Mama when they had first arrived in England as refugees from Hitler, and Mama had bought herself a pair of silk stockings for a shilling. Later when Papa could no longer earn any money, Mama had been reduced to buying the stockings one at a time for sixpence, and even though they were supposed to be all the same colour, they had never quite matched.

“If only, just once, I could buy myself two stockings together,” she had cried.

And now here was Anna buying expensive rugs, and Mama earning dollars back in Germany, as though none of the hardships had ever happened. Only Papa had not lived to see everything change.

For a moment she considered trying to find the boarding house somewhere nearby which had been her first English home, but decided against it. It had been bombed during the Blitz and would probably be unrecognizable anyway. Once she had tried to show Richard the other boarding house in Putney where they had moved after the bomb, but had found it replaced by three skimpy family dwellings with identical treeless lawns and crazy-paving. The only thing that had been the same was the bench at the end of the street where Papa had sometimes sat in the sun with his pipe. He had eked out the tobacco with dried leaves and rose petals, and for lunch he had eaten bread toasted over the gas ring and spread with exactly one seventh of a jar of fish paste. If only he could have lived to see all this, thought Anna, as she passed a wine shop crammed with bottles – how he would have enjoyed it.

Oxford Street was bustling with Saturday shoppers. Should she walk through to Liberty’s for a look at their lamps? But a number 73 bus stopped just as she was passing and she jumped on, climbed to the top deck and sat with the sun warming her face, visualizing the new rug in their tiny dining room and planning what to wear to go out that evening, while the bus made its slow way through the traffic.

Outside Selfridges people were staring up at the brightly coloured plaster figure which was being hoisted into place above the main entrance. “Come and see Uncle Holly and his grotto of dwarfs,” read posters in every window. Heavens, she thought, they’re getting ready for Christmas already.

In Hyde Park, clearly making for Speakers’ Corner, a small procession moved briskly under the thinning plane trees. Its members carried handmade placards with “Russians out of Hungary” on them, and one had mounted that morning’s newspaper on a piece of cardboard. It showed a photograph of Russian tanks under the headline “Ring of Steel round Budapest”. Most of them looked like students, but a few elderly people in dark old-fashioned clothes were probably Hungarian refugees. One of them, a man in a shabby coat with a pale, clever face reminded Anna of Papa.

At Knightsbridge the traffic thinned a little, and as the bus rolled past Kensington Gardens, she could see the leaves floating down from the trees on to the grass below, where groups of school children, urged on by their teachers, were playing football and rounders.

She got off at the bottom of Kensington Church Street and set off on her way home through the tree-lined residential streets at the foot of Campden Hill. Here there were almost no cars and few people. Cooking smells wafted across shrubby front gardens. A baby slept in its pram. Cats dozed on walls and pavements, and the falling leaves were everywhere. One drifted down quite close to her. She stretched up and caught it in midair. That means more luck, she thought, remembering a childhood superstition. For a moment she held it in her hand. Then she loosened her fingers and watched it spiral down to mingle with the others on the ground.

The block of flats where she and Richard lived was brand-new, and as soon as she could see it from the corner of the street, she automatically started to hurry. This always happened: she knew it was silly after being married for more than a year, but she still did it. She ran across the road, up the stone steps and along the red brick terrace so thick with leaves that she almost slipped. Outside the porter’s flat below, the porter was talking to a boy on a bicycle. He waved when he saw her and called something that she did not catch, but she was in too much of a rush to stop. The lift was not there and, rather than wait for it, she ran up the two flights of stairs, opened the door with her key, and there was Richard.

He was sitting at his typewriter, much as she had left him hours earlier. There was a neat stack of paper on the table before him and a collection of crumpled pages overflowing from the wastepaper basket onto the floor. Behind him in the tiny living room she could see their new striped sofa, the little red chair she had bought the previous week, and the curtains made from material designed by herself in her art school days. The vivid colours set off his dark hair and pale, restless face as he frowned at the paper, typing furiously with two fingers.

Normally she would not have interrupted him, but she felt too happy to wait. She let him get to the end of a line. Then she said, “It’s lovely out. I’ve been all over town. And I’ve found a rug for the dining room.”

“Really?” He came back slowly from whatever world he had been writing about.

“And the man in the shop had seen all your plays on the telly and practically asked me for my autograph when he found out I was married to you.”

He smiled. “There’s fame!”

“Are you right in the middle of something?”

She saw him glance at the page in his typewriter and resign himself to abandoning it for the present. “I suppose it’s lunch time. Anyway, I’ve got quite a bit done.” He stood up and stretched. “What’s the rug like? Is it the right red?”

She was beginning to describe it to him when the door bell rang, “…exactly what we were looking for,” she said, and opened the door to find the porter outside.

“Telegram,” he said and handed it over. It was for her. She knew it must be good news, for it was that sort of a day, and opened it quickly. And then, for a moment, everything seemed to stop.

For some strange reason she could see Richard quite clearly with part of her mind, even though her eyes were on the print. She heard him say, “What is it?” and after what seemed like an enormous gap of time of which she could later remember nothing but which could not really have lasted more than a few seconds, she pushed it into his hand.

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “Mama is never ill.”

He spread it on the table and she read it again, hoping that she had got it wrong the first time.

“YOUR MOTHER SERIOUSLY ILL WITH PNEUMONIA STOP YOUR PRESENCE MAY BE NEEDED STOP PLEASE BOOK PROVISIONAL FLIGHT TOMORROW STOP WILL TELEPHONE NINE O’CLOCK TONIGHT.”

It was signed Konrad.

“All she’s ever had is ‘flu,” said Anna. She felt that if she tried hard enough, she would be able to disprove the whole thing. She said, “I don’t want to go to Berlin.”

Then she found she was sitting down with Richard beside her. His face was troubled and she thought illogically that she shouldn’t be distracting him in this way from his work. He tightened his arm round her shoulders.

“It’s only a provisional booking,” he said. “You may not need to go. By the time Konrad rings up, she may be better.”

Of course, she thought, of course. She tried to remember what Konrad was like. During the years Mama had known him he had always seemed ultra-responsible. Probably he would act even on the off-chance of trouble. By tonight Mama might be sitting up in bed, her blue eyes outraged. For heaven’s sake, Konrad, she would cry, why on earth did you cable the children?

“D’you suppose he’s cabled Max as well?” she asked. Max was her brother, at present in Greece.

Richard shook his head. “Goodness knows.” Then he said suddenly, “Would you like me to come with you?”

She was both touched and horrified. “Of course not. Not in the middle of your serial. Anyway, what could you do in Berlin?”

He made a face. “I wish I could speak German.”

“It isn’t that. But you know it would throw you completely to stop writing now. And Mama is my responsibility.”

“I suppose so.”

Eventually she rang Pan Am who were sympathetic when she explained the situation and said they would book her a seat. This seemed to make the whole thing more definite and she found herself suddenly close to tears.

“Come on,” said Richard, “You need a drink.” He poured her some of the whisky they normally kept for visitors and she gulped it down. “And food,” he said. By the time they had made sandwiches and coffee and were sitting down to eat them in the little living room, she felt better.

“But I still don’t understand it,” she said, clasping the hot mug for comfort. “Surely nowadays when people get pneumonia the doctors just fill them with penicillin? Unless the Germans haven’t got it yet.”

“They must have.”

“Anyway, the Americans would have it, and they’re the ones she works for. And how did she ever get pneumonia in the first place?”

Richard considered it. “Didn’t she say something about sailing in her last letter? Perhaps if they’d had an accident – if she’d got very wet and cold and hadn’t changed her clothes—”

“Konrad would make her.”

For a moment they shared a vision of Konrad, solid and dependable, and Mama laughing and shouting, “It’s only a bit of water.” She always said a bit of water – it was one of the few mistakes she made in English. But perhaps she and Konrad spoke German together when they were alone. It astonished Anna that she had no idea whether they did or not.

“I’ll see if I can find the letter,” she said and suddenly remembered something. “I don’t believe I ever answered it.”

“We haven’t had it that long, have we?”

“I don’t know.”

The letter, when she uncovered it, turned out to be like most of Mama’s – a fairly emphatic account of small successes in her work and social life. She had been chosen to go to Hanover for a few days in connection with her work, and she and Konrad had been invited to a Thanksgiving party by an American general. The only reference to sailing was that the weather was now too cold to do so, and that she and Konrad were playing a lot of bridge instead. It was exactly one month old.

“It doesn’t matter, love,” said Richard. “You’ll be talking to Konrad tonight and if it’s really serious you’ll see your mother tomorrow.”

“I know.” But it still worried her. “I kept meaning to write,” she said. “But with the flat and the new job—” Somehow she felt that a letter would have protected Mama from catching pneumonia.

“Well, no one can catch pneumonia from playing bridge,” said Richard. “Not even your mother,” and she laughed because it was true. Mama did everything to excess.

Suddenly, for no particular reason, she remembered Mama trying to buy her some boots when they had first come to England. Mama had walked her the whole length of Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road to Marble Arch and they had gone into every shoe shop on the way. Anna had soon noticed that the various branches of Dolcis, Lilley and Skinner and Mansfield all had the same stock, but Mama had remained convinced that somehow, somewhere, there might be lurking a pair of boots just fractionally better or cheaper than any of the rest. When at last they bought some similar to the very first pair they had seen, Mama had said, “Well, at least we know that we haven’t missed anything.”

Mama could never bear to miss anything, real or imaginary, from a cheaper pair of boots to a day in the sun.

“She’s a romantic,” said Anna. “She always has been. I suppose Papa was too, but in a different way.”

“What I’ve always found surprising is that she resented being a refugee so much more than he did,” said Richard. “At least from what you’ve told me. After all, as a writer he really lost everything. Money, a great reputation and the language he wrote in.” He looked troubled, as always when he talked about Papa. “I don’t know how one could go on after that.”

For a moment Anna saw Papa quite clearly in his shabby room, sitting at his rickety typewriter and smiling fondly, ironically, without a trace of self-pity. Reluctantly, she let the picture fade.

“It sounds odd,” she said, “but in a way I think he found it interesting. And of course it was hard for Mama because she had to cope with the practical things.”

When Papa could no longer earn any money, Mama had supported the family with a series of secretarial jobs. Though she had learned neither shorthand nor typing, she had still managed, somehow, to reproduce approximately what had been dictated to her. She had survived, but she had hated it. At night, in the bedroom which she and Anna shared in the Putney boarding house, she had talked of all the things she had hoped to do in her life and now might never do. Sometimes when she set out for her boring work in the mornings, she was filled with such rage and despair that they made a kind of aura round her. Anna remembered that one of her employers, a man with slicked-down hair who dealt in third-rate clothing, had sacked her because, he said, just being in the same room with her made him feel exhausted. Mama had come home and cried and Anna had felt helpless and guilty, as though she ought to have been able to do something about it.

“It’s such bad luck that this illness should have happened now,” she said to Richard. “Just when everything is so much better for her at last.”

She cleared away the lunch things while Richard picked at his script and then she looked out some clothes to pack, in case it should really be necessary for her to go to Berlin. For some reason the thought filled her with horror. Why? she thought. Why should I mind so much? She could not convince herself that Mama’s illness was really dangerous, so it wasn’t that. Rather it was a fear of going back. Back to Berlin? Back to Mama? Silly, she thought. It’s not as though they could keep me there.

When she returned to the living room, Richard was crumpling yet another page into the wastepaper basket.

“No good,” he said. “Real life is too distracting.” He looked at his watch. “What do you want to do till Konrad rings up?”

Something clicked in her memory. “Good heavens!” she cried. “We’re supposed to go to the Dillons. I’d totally forgotten. I’d better ring him quickly.”

“The Dillons? Oh,” he said. “Drinks with the boss.” He put out his hand as she reached for the telephone. “Don’t cancel it. You’ll have to tell him anyway if you go to Berlin.”

James Dillon was head of the BBC Drama Department and the invitation was to mark her promotion from editor to script writer.

“But we have to be here when Konrad rings.”

“It’s only a brisk walk. There’s plenty of time. Come on,” he said. “It’ll be better than sitting here and brooding.”

It was dark when they set out, and suddenly cold with a thin drizzle of rain. She pulled her coat tight about her and let Richard lead her through the network of quiet streets. Though Richard had met James Dillon’s family before, she had never been to their house. Her promotion had been James Dillons’ idea, but it was Richard who had originally encouraged her to write. When they had first met, he had read a short story she had written in between the paintings which she considered her real work. “This is good,” he had said. “You must do more.”

At first it had seemed like cheating, for though words came to her fairly easily (“Runs in the family,” Richard had said), she had set her heart on being a painter. But no one seemed eager to buy her pictures, whereas she had no trouble at all in landing a minor job in television. By the time she and Richard were married, she was editing plays, and now here she was, officially a script writer. It had all happened so quickly that she still thought of it as his world rather than hers. “I hope I can really do this job,” she said, and then, “What’s James Dillon’s wife like?”

“Nice,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

They were reaching the end of a narrow side street and became aware of many voices and footsteps ahead of them. As they turned into the brightness of Notting Hill Gate, they found themselves suddenly surrounded by a great crowd. In spite of the rain which had begun to fall in earnest, a mass of people blocked the pavement, overflowing into the gutter, and were moving slowly but determinedly all in the same direction. In the road beyond, two policemen were trying to keep a space between the crowd and the passing cars. For a moment Anna and Richard were swept along with the rest.

“Who are they?” said Richard, and then they saw, swaying in the darkness above them, the pale handwritten placards.

“It must be Hungary again,” said Anna. “I saw a procession in Hyde Park this morning.”

At that moment the crowd slowed to a stop, and simultaneously a noisy party emerged from a pub nearby, causing a congestion. One of them, a large drunken looking woman, almost tripped and swore loudly.

“What the hell’s this then?” she said, and another member of the group answered, “Bloody Hungary.”

A placard bearer near Anna, an elderly man in dark clothes, mistook this exchange for interest in his cause and turned towards them. “The Russians kill our people,” he explained with difficulty in a thick accent. “Many hundreds die each day. Please the English to help us…”

The woman stared incredulously. “Think we want another war?” she shouted. “I’m not having anyone drop bombs on my kids just for a lot of bloody foreigners!”

Just then the crowd began to move again and a gap opened between Anna and the kerb. “Come on,” said Richard and pushed her through. They ran across Notting Hill Gate in the increasingly heavy rain, then zig-zagged through dark side streets on the other side until they were standing outside a tall terraced house and Richard was ringing the bell. She only had time to take in an overgrown front garden with what looked like a pram under a tarpaulin, when the door was opened by a slight, pretty woman with untidy fair hair.

“Richard!” she cried. “And you must be Anna. I’m Elizabeth. How lovely – we’ve been longing to see you.”

She led the way through the narrow hall, edging with practised ease round a large balding teddy and a scooter leaning against the wall.

“Did you get caught up in the procession?” she called back as they followed her up the narrow stairs. “They’ve been demonstrating outside the Russian Embassy all day. Poor souls, much good may it do them.”

She suddenly darted sideways into a kitchen festooned with washing, where a small boy was eating cornflakes with a guinea pig squatting next to his dish.

“James thinks no one is going to lift a finger to help them. He thinks it’s Munich all over again,” she said as Anna and Richard caught up with her and, almost in the same breath to the little boy, “Darling, you won’t forget to put Patricia back in her cage, will you. Remember how upset you were when Daddy nearly trod on her.”

In the momentary silence while she snatched some ice cubes from the refrigerator into a glass bowl, the sound of two recorders, each playing a different tune and interspersed with wild childish giggles, drifted down from somewhere above.

“I’m afraid the girls are not really musical,” she said and added, “Of course no one wants a third world war.”

As they followed her out of the kitchen, Anna saw that the guinea pig was now slurping up cornflakes, its front paws in the dish, and the small boy called after them, “It wasn’t Patricia’s fault. Daddy should have looked!”

In the L-shaped drawing room next door James Dillon was waiting for them, his Roman emperor’s face incongruous above the old sweater he was wearing instead of his usual BBC pinstripes. He kissed Anna and put an arm round Richard’s shoulders, and when they were all settled with drinks, raised his glass.

“To you,” he said. “To Richard’s new serial which I’m sure will be as good as his first and to Anna’s new job.”

This was the cue she had nervously been waiting for. She said quickly, “I’m afraid I may not be able to start straight away,” and explained about Mama’s illness. The Dillons were immediately full of sympathy. James told her not to worry and to take as much time off as she liked and Elizabeth said, how awful for her but nowadays with penicillin pneumonia wasn’t nearly as serious as it used to be. Then she said, “But whatever is your mother doing in Berlin?”

James said, “It’s where you came from, isn’t it?” and Anna explained that Mama was translating documents for the American Occupation Force and that, yes, she and her family had lived in Berlin until they had had to flee from the Nazis when she was nine.

“I didn’t see any horrors,” she said quickly, alarmed by more sympathy in Elizabeth’s eyes. “My parents got us out before any of it happened. In fact, my brother and I rather enjoyed it. We lived in Switzerland and in France before we came here and we really liked all the different schools and different languages. But of course it was very hard for my parents, especially my father being a writer.”

“Terrible.” James shook his head, and Elizabeth asked, “And where is your father now?”

“Oh,” said Anna, “he died soon after the war.” She felt suddenly dangerously exposed. Something was rising up inside her and she began to talk very fast so as to keep it under. “He died in Hamburg,” she almost gabbled. “Actually it was very strange because he’d never been back to Germany since we left. But the British Control Commission asked him to write about the German theatre which was just starting up again. He’d been famous as a drama critic before Hitler, you see, and I think it was supposed to be good for German morale.”

She paused, but the Dillons were both looking at her, absorbed in the story, and she had to continue.

“They flew him over – he’d never flown, but he loved it. I don’t think he knew quite what to expect when he got there, but when he stepped off the plane, there were reporters and photographers waiting for him. And then a great lunch with speeches, and a tour of the city. And when he walked into the theatre that evening the audience stood up and applauded. I suppose it was all too much for him. Anyway—” She glanced at Richard, suddenly horribly unsure if she could go on. “He had a stroke and died a few weeks later. My mother was with him, but we… my brother and I…”

Richard put his hand over hers and said, “I’ve always been so sorry that I never knew him. Or read him. It seems he’s untranslatable,” and the Dillons, after James had refilled her glass, tactfully embarked on a discussion of translations in general and that of a recent French play in particular.

She was grateful for Richard’s hand and for not having to talk. She had not expected to be so upset. After all it had happened years ago. It was the thought of how it had happened, of course. She remembered Papa’s coffin draped with the Union Jack. Common practice, they had said for a British subject dying abroad. It had seemed strange, for Papa had never managed to speak English properly and had been a British subject only for the last year of his life. Then the icy hall where the German musicians had played Beethoven’s Seventh which Papa had loved so much, and the British soldiers who, together with Max and a local newspaperman, had helped to carry his coffin.

As Papa had planned.

If Mama died, it wouldn’t be like that. Anyway, Mama couldn’t die. She was too strong. Anna suddenly remembered with total clarity how Mama had looked when she and Max had arrived, stunned, in Hamburg.

“Bitte etwas Tee.” Tea in the hotel bedroom, the only warm place in the devastated city. Mama saying, “There is something I must tell you about Papa.”

As though anything else could possibly matter, Anna thought, apart from the fact that Papa was dead. Then Mama talking about how Papa had failed to recover from the effects of the stroke. But they knew that already. Something about German doctors. How you could get anything for a packet of cigarettes. What?? Anna had thought. What??

“He was paralysed and in pain. He felt he could no longer think as clearly as he wished. I’d always promised to help him if that happened.”

The sharp intake of breath from Max beside her. Mama’s eyes shifting minutely towards him.

“So I did what he asked. I helped him.”

She had said it in such matter of fact tones that even then Anna had not immediately understood.

“It was what he wanted.” Mama had stared at them both, white faced and steely.

Max had said in a forlorn voice, “But we never said goodbye to him.”

She could not remember what she herself had said. But she had known with complete certainty that what Mama had done was right.

She became aware of Richard looking at her. As usual, he knew what she was thinking. She sent him a reassuring look back and tried to listen to the conversation which seemed to have moved on from the French play to a discussion of its author. James Dillon said something witty and everyone laughed. Elizabeth, relaxed in her chair, brushed a strand of hair out of her face. She thought, I am the only person in this room to whom such things have happened. I don’t want to be. I want to belong here.

“Of course the French system of education…”

‘What was it like being a child in Paris?”

She realized that Elizabeth was addressing her.

“In Paris? Oh—” She made an effort and began to talk about her school, the teacher called Madame Socrate who had helped her learn French, the friends she had made, outings to the country and to celebrate the 14th July. “I loved it,” she said and found herself smiling.

“Of course you did.” James Dillon had risen and she saw that he was wearing his Head of Drama expression which she knew from the BBC. “Now here’s what we’re going to do. If your mother needs you, you’ll go and cope with whatever has to be done. And when you come back you’ll do that adaptation we talked about. But I’d like you also to think about writing something of your own.”

For the first time she was startled into total attention. “Of my own?”

“Why not? Needn’t be very long, but all your own work.” He raised his extravagant eyebrows. “Might be interesting.”

It was so good to think about coming back from Berlin rather than going away that she tried to stifle her doubts about writing something original.

“All right,” she said. “Though I’m not absolutely sure…”

“Think about it,” said James.

She was saved from having to say anything more by the arrival of the small boy with the guinea pig clutched to his chest. After being introduced, he wandered over to his mother and allowed himself to be hugged. Then he whispered in her ear, was told not to whisper and said loudly, “Can Patricia have a crisp?”

“I didn’t know she liked crisps,” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t know either.” His small face furrowed as he searched for the right word. “It’s an experiment,” he said precisely.

He was given a potato crisp from a dish and they all watched while the guinea pig sniffed it in a corner of the floor and finally decided to crunch it up.

“She likes it,” said the child, pleased.

“Go and get a saucer,” said Elizabeth. “Then you and Patricia can have some crisps all to yourselves.”

“All right.” He scooped up the guinea pig. “Come on, Patricia,” he said. “You’re going to have…” He hesitated, but as he got to the door they heard him say happily, “A banquet.”

In the quiet after he’d gone, Anna could hear the recorders, now both on the same tune, from the floor above.

“He’s got quite a vocabulary,” said Richard. “How old is he?”

“Six,” said Elizabeth. Clearly he was the apple of their eye.

“Loves words,” said James. “Been reading since he was four. Taken to writing stories now.”

“Most of them about Patricia,” giggled Elizabeth. “I bet you didn’t know guinea pigs can pilot aeroplanes.” She stopped as the child reappeared and helped him fill a saucer with crisps. Then she was struck by a thought. “I do find it absolutely extraordinary,” she said to Anna, “that when you were his age you were speaking nothing but German. Can you still speak it?”

“A bit,” said Anna. “I’ve forgotten a lot of it.”

Elizabeth handed the child the saucer. “This lady has forgotten nearly all the words she knew when she was your age, can you imagine?” she said. “And she’s learned a whole lot of new ones instead.”

He stared at Anna in disbelief. Then he said, “I wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t what?” asked his father.

“Forget.” He saw everyone looking at him and took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t forget the words I know. Even if – even if I learned a million trillion new words. I’d always remember.”

“Well, it would only be if you went to a place where no one spoke English,” said James. “And you’re not going to do that, are you?”

“I’d still remember,” said the child.

His father smiled. “Would you?”

“I’d remember Patricia.” He pressed the guinea pig hard to his small chest. “And what’s more,” he said triumphantly, “I’d remember her in English!”

Everyone laughed. Richard got up and said they must leave, but before they could do so there was a noise on the landing and a girl of about nine appeared, lugging a large impassive baby in her arms.

“He wants his supper,” she announced, and a slightly younger girl following behind her shouted, “And so do I!” They both dissolved into giggles and Anna found herself being introduced to them while at the same time saying her farewells to their parents. In the confusion the baby was dumped on the floor with the guinea pig until Elizabeth picked it up again and it began with great concentration to suck the end of her sleeve.

James saw Anna and Richard to the door. “Best of luck,” he said through the children’s shouted goodbyes. “And think about what I said.”

Anna was left with the picture of Elizabeth standing at the top of the stairs and smiling with the baby in her arms.

“I told you she was nice,” said Richard as they started on their walk back.

She nodded. The rain had stopped but it must have lasted some time, for the pavements were sodden.

“I wonder if I could really write something of my own,” she said. “It’d be interesting to try. If I do have to go to Mama, I don’t suppose I’d have to be away very long.”

“Probably just a few days.”

Notting Hill Gate was deserted. The demonstrators, no doubt discouraged by the downpour, had all gone home. A torn placard lying in a puddle was the only sign that they had ever been there.

“You know what I really hate about going to Berlin?” said Anna, picking her way round it. “I know it’s stupid, but I’m frightened the Russians might suddenly close in and take it over and then I’d be trapped. They couldn’t, could they?”

He shook his head. “It would mean war with America.”

“I know. But it still frightens me.”

“Were you very frightened when you escaped from Germany?”

“That’s what’s so silly. I never realized till much later what it had been about. In fact, I remember making some idiotic remark at the frontier and Mama having to shut me up. Mama made it all seem quite normal.” They trudged along among the puddles. “I wish at least I’d answered her letter,” she said.

Once back in the flat, she became very practical. “We’d better make a list,” she said, “of all the things that have to be seen to, like the rug being delivered. And what are you going to eat while I’m away? I could cook something tonight for you to warm up.”

She made the list and decided about the food, and by the time Konrad’s call was due she felt ready to cope with anything he might say. Sitting by the telephone, she rehearsed the various things she wanted to ask him and waited. He came through punctually at nine o’clock. There was a jumble of German voices and then his, reassuringly calm.

“How is Mama?” she asked.

“Her condition is unchanged,” he said and then in what was obviously a prepared speech, “I think it is right that you should come tomorrow. I think that one of her relatives should be here.”

“Of course,” she said. She told him the number of her flight and he said that he would meet it.

Richard, listening beside her, said, “What about Max? Has he told him?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “What about Max?”

Konrad said that he had not yet cabled Max – that must mean that there was no immediate danger, thought Anna – but that he would do so if necessary in the morning. Then he said in his concerned refugee voice, “My dear, I hope you’re not too upset by this. I’m sorry to have to break up the family. With luck it won’t be for long.”

She had forgotten that he always referred to Richard and herself as the family. It was friendly and comforting and she suddenly felt much better.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Richard sends his love.” There was something more she wanted to ask him, but she had trouble remembering what it was. “Oh yes,” she said. “How did Mama ever develop pneumonia in the first place?”

There was a silence, so that at first she thought he had not heard. Then his voice answered, and even through the distortion of long distance she could tell that it sounded quite different.

“I’m sorry,” he said flatly. “But your mother took an overdose of sleeping pills.”