Faith and Beauty by Jane Thynne Page B

the safe side, she did. She poked a strand of hair defensively beneath her cap.
    ‘She’s visiting her sister. She’s been gone for days. Would you like to leave a message?’
    Visiting her sister?
What was that supposed to mean? Angela only had one sister, and she, Clara, was standing right there on the doorstep. She knew for a fact that Gerald had no sisters. Yet it was inconceivable that Angela could have embarked on a trip to Berlin unannounced; her normal travelling requirements made the Queen of Sheba look casual. Angela was the last person to turn up in a foreign country without the most complicated advance arrangements about luggage and hotels, which usually changed several times. She liked to be met at the airport and lunched in the appropriate restaurants, which in Berlin meant the Esplanade and the Kaiserhof, before attending both the theatre and the opera. Unlike Clara, Angela never did anything on impulse, so it was unthinkable that she should have packed a suitcase and slipped away to Berlin without a word, as Clara had done all those years ago.
    Yet a second before she opened her mouth to protest, some deep, acquired caution prevented Clara from blurting out these objections and she divined a possible explanation. Angela’s excuse must have been dreamed up to cover some less innocent activity. The only explanation was that she was indulging in an illicit affair. Yet further questions would only give this maid something to gossip about.
    ‘Shall I tell her who called, miss?’ enquired the maid, offhandedly.
    ‘No. Thank you. It doesn’t matter.’
    Clara turned and made her way along Elizabeth Street, skirting around the workmen who were removing a set of wrought-iron railings, presumably for aeroplane manufacture. As she went, she tried to see her sister from this new, surprising perspective. Glamorous Angela, modelling Jean Patou in her brief dalliance as a fashion mannequin, had always been elegant and unflappable. She was a Vine to the ends of her racehorse-long legs and when their mother died, Angela was seamlessly co-opted into the circle of their father’s sister, Lady Laura Vine, and an endless round of society parties, tennis matches and charity events. She enthusiastically participated in their father’s Anglo-German Fellowship, and from everything Clara knew, was still fundraising for closer ties between Germany and England.
    In every respect Angela’s life could not be more different from Clara’s own, except one. Neither of them had got around to having children. Perhaps that was the reason. Maybe Angela was engaged in an affair because her marriage to Gerald Mortimer MP was already crumbling. If so it was sad, but given her brick-faced brother-in-law’s manner, not entirely surprising.
    Clara progressed up to Knightsbridge, past Harrods and along Piccadilly until, eventually, her steps took her to a Lyons Corner House on the Strand, where she drank two cups of tea and ate a bun pocked with currants and smeared with a dab of oily margarine. Then she retraced her route, skirted the soot-stained lions of Trafalgar Square and found herself outside the National Gallery.
    It was only when she was sitting on one of the leather benches, surrounded by glimmering gilt frames and blankly studying a painting in front of her, that she gave into her feelings. Major Grand believed that Leo had died and that Clara should consign his memory to the past.
I should forget Mr Quinn.
But how did anyone forget? In one way, it was treacherously easy. She thought of Leo’s face fading, like a photograph left out in the sun, until no image remained. If it blanked out entirely, she would have nothing but his words to resurrect him; just the letters he had written to her and the book of Rilke’s poetry that he gave her. Yet how could Leo be dead when her body still held the memory of him, pressed into every muscle and tendon? A wave of stubborn denial engulfed her. Why should she believe it? Just because someone