Free A Small Person Far Away by Judith Kerr

receiver and discovered that her mouth was full of biscuit. Swallowing frantically, she could hear a German voice at the other end ask with rising insistence, “Konrad? Konrad, are you all right? Are you all right, Konrad?”
    “Hullo,” she said through a mouthful of crumbs.
    “Hullo.” The voice – a woman’s – sounded put out. “Who is that, please?”
    She explained.
    “Oh, I see.” The voice became very business-like. “This is Dr Rabin’s secretary speaking. Could you tell me what time Dr Rabin left his flat, please? Only he is rather late for a meeting at his office.”
    Anna told her.
    “Oh, thank you, then he will soon be here.” There was a little pause, then the voice said, “I am sorry to have troubled you, but you understand, his colleagues were getting rather worried.”
    “Of course,” said Anna, and the voice rang off.
    She went back to her coffee in the kitchen and drank it slowly. That must have been her, she thought. The girl in his office. She had sounded quite young. Somehow, it had not occurred to her that she would still be there, working with him. It seemed to make everything more uncertain. Poor Mama, she thought. But another part of her examined the situation in terms of plot and thought angrily, how corny.
    When she had finished her coffee, she wandered round the flat. It was tidy, well furnished and impersonal. The curtains in the living room were almost exactly the same as the Goldblatts’ – obviously it was all American Army issue. There was a bookshelf with a few paperbacks, nearly all detective stories, and a desk with a framed snapshot of a middle-aged woman and two girls in their twenties – his wife and daughters she supposed. The woman was wearing a flowered dress with a home-made look. Her hair was swept back neatly into a bun and she had a sensible, faintly self-satisfied expression. A real German
Hausfrau
, thought Anna.
    The bedroom was not quite as tidy as the living room. Konrad must have had a bit of a rush getting up. The cupboard door was slightly open and inside it she could see one of Mama’s dresses among his suits. Her pale blue bathrobe hung beside his on the door and her hair brush lay on his dressing table. Next to it and half-surrounded by the cord of his electric shaver was a small glass dish in which nestled some of Mama’s beads, a safety pin and half a dozen hairgrips.
    She picked up the beads and ran them through her fingers. They were iridescent blue glass – Mama loved them and wore them all the time. Then she suddenly thought, but she doesn’t use hairgrips. Mama’s hair was short and curly. There was nothing to grip. Unless of course she had been washing her hair and had wanted to pin it in a particular way. That must be it, she thought. The fact that she had never seen Mama do this did not mean that it never happened. The hairgrips must be hers.
    All the same, as she went back into the living room, she felt suddenly very much alone. It occurred to her that she really knew very little about Konrad. After all, he had presumably abandoned his wife for Mama. Might he not be ready now to abandon Mama for someone else? And what would Mama do then, even if she got better? She relied on him so much, not only for his love but for his help. After years of trying to cope alone with the family’s practical problems (and though Mama was more practical than Papa, thought Anna, she was still unpractical by most people’s standards) she had found it almost incredible that Konrad should be prepared to look after her.
    “He is so good to me,” she had once told Anna. Anna had waited to hear in what way and Mama, too, had evidently found it difficult to describe. “Do you know,” she had said at last with a kind of awe, “he can even wrap parcels.”
    It was still raining, though not nearly so hard. Outside the window, across the road, she could see the wet roofs of other American blocks of flats, one of them Mama’s.
    She wondered what Mama had