Konrad was standing near the door of the arrival lounge, leaning on his walking stick as she had expected. She walked towards him through the blur of German voices, and when he caught sight of her he came to meet her.
“Hullo,” he said, and she saw that his large face looked worn out and somehow skimpy. He did not embrace her, as he normally did, but only smiled at her formally and shook her hand. She was at once apprehensive.
“How is Mama?” she asked.
He said, “Exactly the same.” Then he told her flatly that Mama was in a coma and had been ever since she had been found on Saturday morning and that there had been some difficulty in treating her because for a long time no one knew what she had taken. “I cabled Max this morning,” he said.
She said, “Shall we go to the hospital?”
He shook his head. “There’s no point, I’ve just come from there.”
Then he turned and walked towards his car, slightly ahead of her, in spite of his bad back and his walking stick, as though he wanted to get away from her. She hurried after him in the sunshine, more and more distressed.
“What do the doctors say?” she asked, just to make him look round, and he said wearily, “The same. They simply can’t tell,” and walked on.
It was all much worse than anything she had imagined. She had thought he might blame her for not having written to Mama, but not to the extent of wanting nothing to do with her. She was appalled at the thought of coping with all the horrors to come alone, without his support. (If only Richard were here, she thought, but cut the thought off quickly, since it was no use.)
When he reached the car, she caught up with him and faced him before he could put the key in the lock.
“It was because of me, wasn’t it?” she said. “Because I hadn’t written?”
He lowered the hand with the key in it and looked back at her, utterly astonished.
“It would certainly be a good idea if you wrote to your mother more often,” he said, “and if your brother did too. But that is not the reason why she tried to kill herself.”
“Then why?”
There was a pause. He looked away from her, over her right shoulder, as though he had suddenly seen someone he knew in the distance. Then he said stiffly, “She had grounds to believe that I was no longer faithful to her.”
Her first reaction was, impossible, he’s making it up. He was saying it to comfort her, so that she shouldn’t blame herself if Mama died. For heaven’s sake, she thought, at their age! Well, she supposed that if she had ever thought about it, she would have assumed that Mama’s relationship with him had not been entirely platonic. But this!
Very carefully, she said, “Are you in love with someone else?”
He gave a sort of snort of “No!” and then said in the same stiff voice as before, “I had an affair.”
“An affair?”
“It was nothing.” He was almost shouting with impatience. “A girl in my office. Nothing.”
She tried to think of a reply to this but couldn’t. She felt completely out of her depth and climbed into the car in silence.
“You’ll want some lunch.”
He seemed so relieved to have got the bit about the affair off his chest that she thought it must really be true.
As he started the car, he said, “I want to make your stay here as pleasant as possible. In the circumstances. I know it’s what your mother would wish. If possible even like a little holiday. I know you didn’t get away in the summer.”
For God’s sake, she thought.
He made a gesture of impatience. “I understand, of course, that you’d give anything not to be here but at home with Richard. I only meant that when you’re not at the hospital – and at the moment there is not much you can do there – you should have as pleasant a time as can be arranged.”
He glanced at her from behind the steering wheel and she nodded, since he seemed so anxious for her to agree.
“Well,” he said, “we may as well start by going somewhere pleasant for lunch.”
The restaurant was set among the pine trees of the Grunewald, a popular place for family outings, and on this fine Sunday it was packed. Some people were even drinking at small tables outside, their overcoats well-buttoned against the chilly air.
“Do you remember this place?” he asked.
She had already had a faint sense of recognition – something about the shape of the building, the colour of the stone.
“I think I may have come here sometimes with my parents. Not to eat, just for a drink.”
He smiled. “Himbeersaft.”
“That’s right.” Raspberry juice, of course. That’s what German children always drank.
Inside, the dining room was steaming up with the breath of many good eaters, their coats hung in rows against the brown panelled walls, and mounted above them, two pairs of antlers and a picture of a hunter with a gun. Their voices were loud and comfortable above the clinking of their knives and forks, and Anna found herself both moved and yet suspicious as always, at the sound of the Berlin accents so familiar from her childhood.
“This thing with your mother has been going on for nearly three weeks,” said Konrad in English, and the voices with their complicated associations faded into the background. “That’s how long she had known.”
“How did she find out?”
“I told her.”
Why? she thought, and as though he had heard her, he went on, “We live in a very narrow circle. I was afraid she might hear from someone else.”
“But if you don’t really love this woman – if it’s all over?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You know what mother is like. She said that things could never again be right between us. She said she’d had to start again too many times in her life, she’d had enough, that you and Max were grown up and no longer needed her—” He waved his hand to indicate all the other things Mama had said and which Anna could only too easily imagine. “She’s been talking about killing herself for nearly three weeks.”
But he hadn’t actually said that it was all over between himself and the other woman.
“The affair, of course, is finished,” he said.
When the food arrived, he said, “We’ll go to the hospital after lunch. Then you can see your mother and perhaps talk to one of the doctors. In the meantime, tell me about yourself and Richard.”
She told him about Richard’s serial, about the flat and about her new job.
“Does this mean that you’ll eventually become a writer?”
“Like Richard, you mean?”
“Or like your father.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?” he asked almost impatiently.
She tried to explain. “I don’t know if I’d be good enough. Till now I’ve really only tinkered with other people’s plays. I’ve never done anything of my own.”
“I could imagine you being a good writer.” But he added at once, “Of course I know