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when Richard was anywhere near, because Mama’s voice was so loud.
    It was silly because Richard was quite able to take care of himself. But she had been grateful to Konrad for steering Mama away from dangerous subjects. As soon as Mama got started on literature or drama (she tended, in any case, only to quote Papa’s views, and not always correctly) he had looked at her with his nice, ugly smile and said, “It’s no use talking about these things in my presence. You know perfectly well that I’m illiterate.”
    The plane tilted to one side. Anna could see Berlin, suddenly close, above the wing, and the airport beyond it. We’ll be down in a minute, she thought, and all at once she felt frightened.
    What would Konrad tell her? Would he blame her for not having written to Mama for so long? Did he even know why Mama had taken the overdose? And how would she find Mama? Conscious? In an oxygen tent? In a coma?
    As the ground came towards her, it was like the first time she’d jumped off the high diving board at school. I’m going into it, she thought. Nothing can stop it now. She saw with regret that there was not even a veil of cloud to delay her. The sky was clear, the midday sun blazed down on the grass and tarmac of the airport as it rushed up towards her, then the wheels touched, they roared briefly along the runway and stopped with a shudder. There was nothing to be done. She was there.
    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