“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
