Free Little Grey Mice by Brian Freemantle Page B

circles.’
    â€˜Thank God!’ said Ida.
    â€˜Will you tell me, if there is?’ said Elke.
    Ida considered the demand for several moments, again looking very directly and seriously at Elke. Then she said: ‘Yes, of course I’ll tell you.’
    Elke didn’t enjoy the lunch and didn’t think Ida had either, although at the end she insisted it was fun. They filled the time talking of Kissel and the children and Elke contributed as much as she considered she could about the Chancellery, but there was a strain that was more obvious to them both because it was so unusual for there to be any barrier at all. Elke’s feeling of unease, a disorientation, persisted throughout the afternoon and she was grateful that it was relatively quiet, with few telephone calls, no problems from the staff with the work they were assigned and only one request from Günther Werle. That was to arrange the visit of his wife to the health spa close to Munich.
    The fully recovered Poppi bustled around her when she got back to Kaufmannstrasse and she went through the greeting procedure before walking and feeding him. Now that she had lunched, the threatening quarter kilo precluded another meal that day. She decided to do Ursula’s bedroom first.
    It was not complete sentimentality preserving Ursula’s pink-washed room as she had, everything in place from the day the child had left to go to the institution. Ursula had come home twice, at Christmas and once for her birthday: during Elke’s holiday last year she’d tried to have the girl an entire week and managed four days before Ursula became distressed at the change and had to be returned to the surroundings and the professional care to which she had become accustomed.
    There was a bed with a duvet covered with brightly coloured fairy tale characters and over it a mobile of more fairy tale figures and stars and glittering shapes that Ursula had gazed at and seemed to like: certainly she’d gurgled and smiled and followed them with her eyes, when she’d been a baby. When Ursula visited now Elke removed the mobile, on the advice of Dr Schiller, because he thought it might prove dangerous. Perhaps keeping all the baby clothes and the dresses of those first years was nostalgic sentimentality. Like the fluffy-furred bear and the beaver toy with the bright red eyes, which also had to be removed during Ursula’s visits, against the risk of her picking the eyes off to eat, as if they were sweets. There was a music box in the shape of a gingerbread house, which played a Strauss waltz when the roof was lifted, and more picture books like those in Ursula’s room at the home near Marienfels.
    It was quite unnecessary for Elke to clean as she had the previous week and the week before that, but the practice was entrenched. She vacuumed and dusted and polished, not simply around the things but taking them down or moving them, with no short cuts. She remade the bed which did not need remaking and as she did so disturbed the mobile, which revolved briefly, tinkling: she stopped to watch and listen, remembering when it had hung over Ursula’s cot, not the bed. Ursula had liked it: recognized it and smiled at it. Elke was sure she had.
    The small dressing table was last. Again Elke removed everything on top, first dusting, then polishing. There wasn’t a lot to replace: the lace runner which stretched across its top, a hair brush and a hand mirror, and a pot-pourri dish that Elke regularly changed, and an empty bowl to hold the small things that girls collect, although Ursula had never collected small things like other girls. The china figure of a fawn was last. Elke stood staring at it, held by the reminiscence. It was very cheap and poorly made, the sort of trinket to be discarded the day after it had been picked up. They’d won it together, when Ursula was about nine: at a spring fair with sideshows and stalls. Elke had used a fishing rod with a