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launched into a theatrical anecdote involving a deaf woman, her second husband and a dog. ‘That’s amazing, so what did he do?’ Pam sparkled right on cue and Meg tightened the grip around her arm. My father caught my eye and made a private face and I tried offering my grandmother the bread basket.
    Eventually Pam backed off towards the ladies’. There was a silence while we caught our breath and, under the guise of ordering more wine, I slipped away to find her. ‘Pam, I’m so sorry.’ Her feet were just visible below the toilet door.
    ‘It’s fine, I’m rather enjoying myself,’ she shouted above the flush, and came out to join me. ‘You didn’t say your father had an accent.’ She was twisting her head and fluffing up her hair.
    ‘He doesn’t.’
    ‘He does, quite strong.’
    I was indignant. ‘They left Germany when he was seven years old!’ And with a last trail of fingers through our hair we went back to join the table.
    ‘Sarah!’ Meg stretched out a hand as if we’d been gone for hours, but instead of me she pulled Pam down beside her. My father raised his eyes at me and, having little choice, I sat down opposite him.
    ‘Who is this?’ My grandmother looked at me confused, and my father, lowering his voice, said very firmly, ‘This is Sarah.’
    Meg winked at her and tousled Pam’s streaky head. ‘She does look like you, Mrs Linder, don’t you think?’
    ‘No thank you.’ My father waved away more wine.
    ‘So, write down your address,’ Meg ordered, ‘and I’ll see what I can do about those introductions.’
    Pam looked at me and shrugged, and, unable to think of what else to do, I handed her a pen.
    A week or so later Pam brought a letter in to college. ‘It would be better if you didn’t come and visit us again,’ it said in Meg’s big, bouncing hand, ‘as your grandmother seemed upset by meeting you after so long. You do look so very like her, you see.’
    And my father, when I told him, had to agree. ‘Well, you do look like my mother, it’s true.’ And neither of us mentioned that the letter had been meant for Pam.

Chapter 5
    Fräulein Milner, the new governess, was a woman of twenty-two with long hands and pale, lifeless hair. She trembled when confronted with the contorted fury of Bina’s tearstained face, but insisted privately that she would win the children round. On the first morning she sat them comfortably at the round table in the nursery, in good winter light from the window, and attempted to teach them how to knit. She gave them each a set of wooden needles and a ball of thick white cotton, holding her hands up like the conductor of an orchestra, and with forced cheerfulness began: ‘Into the wood goes the huntsman . . .’ She slipped the needle into the first stitch. ‘Round the tree goes the dog.’ She wound a loop of cotton. ‘Out pops the rabbit.’ The needles clicked. ‘And off they all go.’ She moved on to the next stitch. Bina stared at her with undisguised disdain, while Martha, tangling up her needles in the line of casting on, began to cry. Eva sailed both needles across the room and watched them land in the fur of a rug. Millie, as the children had already named her, ignored this turn of events. ‘Into the wood,’ she continued on a new row, and more quietly, ‘Round the tree . . .’ until, with half a white face flannel to her credit, she had calmed herself into a new authority.
    A month later Fräulein Milner handed in her notice. The reason she gave was her mother, who had been taken suddenly ill, she told Marianna, yet the actual reason was not the unruliness of the children but a spiteful streak she found they brought out in her. She had always liked to think of herself as a soft, amusing woman, her sunny disposition making up for her obvious lack of looks, but now when she washed at night and glanced up at her face in the oval mirror she saw a meanness in her mousy eyes, and a hard thin glint around her mouth.
    After three more