The Persistence of Love

If ever Sidney had a normal day ahead of him, Monday 18 October 1976 was most likely to be it. He was due to celebrate the early-morning communion to commemorate the life of St Luke; there was a Chapter meeting with the dean at nine o’clock and a reception for a visiting missionary at midday. Then there would be soup for lunch with some of Hildegard’s home-made German bread. In the afternoon he had to take a trip out to Upwell to discuss a vacancy in the parish of St Peter’s, with its fine thirteenth-century church, angel roof and Georgian galleries, and then he would be back in time for evensong, the supervision of Anna’s homework, an early supper and a night of television: Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, Dave Allen and I, Claudius (although he would probably have to fight Hildegard about the latter, as there was a documentary on the 1956 Hungarian uprising which he was sure she would prefer).

He had set his alarm for 6.15 a.m. but rose before it went off and took care to go about his ablutions as quietly as possible. Hildegard had seemed very tired over the last few weeks and he wanted her to get as much sleep as she could. It was still dark as he moved about the house, made a pot of tea, showered, shaved and got dressed. He didn’t drink the tea himself, believing the old rule that the first food and drink to touch his lips should be the bread and wine of communion, but left a cup by his sleeping wife, hoping its aroma would gently wake her.

He let Byron out for his morning constitutional and left home just as the Today programme was starting. There had been a revaluation of the German mark, the prime minister was calling for a national discussion of the country’s education system and there were demonstrations in Shanghai denouncing Chairman Mao’s wife for nagging her husband to death. He would look forward to telling the family about that when he got home. He smiled as he imagined Hildegard’s face and her lifted eyebrow.

There were some twenty people in the congregation, most of them regulars, and his doctor, Michael Robinson, was amongst them, together with a couple of newcomers who, he hoped, did not have troublesome issues that he was expected to solve. As his career in crime had developed, Sidney had become increasingly wary of strangers.

‘Almighty God,’ he began, ‘you called Luke the physician, whose praise is in the gospel, to be an evangelist and physician of the soul: by the grace of the Spirit and through the wholesome medicine of the gospel, give your Church the same love and power to heal; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.’

They were in the Lady Chapel, his favourite part of the cathedral, and the sun rose as the service progressed. There was something particularly purifying, he thought, about this place and that light. It was humbling to witness the quiet faith of the Christians in his care, sitting with grace and in silence, spending time away from the troubles of the world in order to contemplate them all the more.

Having shared the peace and given his blessing, Sidney returned to Canonry House at a quarter to eight. There he found that neither his wife nor his daughter were up. He called to tell Anna the time and received a grumpily mumbled ‘I know’, and then climbed up the stairs and returned to his bedroom. The lights were still off.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ he asked.

‘Terrible headache,’ said Hildegard.

‘Have you had your tea? Can I get you anything? Have you had an aspirin?’

‘I think it’s a migraine. Very bad. Can you take Anna?’

‘Of course. Would you like more tea? When is your first lesson?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Do you want me to cancel it for you?’

‘It’ll be all right.’

‘I’ll look after Anna.’

‘Thank you.’

Sidney went downstairs and sorted out the orange juice, the toast and the cornflakes. He called his daughter once more and received an even grumpier answer. Was he going to have to drag her out of her room himself? He couldn’t understand why it was like this every day. Hildegard had stuck a To Do list on the fridge: ‘Anna’s Grade V pieces, dry-cleaning, Boots, Cutlacks, Edis, Sugar Puffs, peanut butter, travel agent, Trudi letter.’

Sidney wondered what she wanted to see a travel agent about. Had her sister asked her to return to Germany? Was their mother not well? Had he been told everything he needed to know?

Anna entered the kitchen. She hadn’t brushed her hair or put on her school tie. Sidney asked where her satchel and blazer were. She couldn’t say.

‘Do you want me to look for them?’

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘She’s not feeling very well.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Headache.’

‘I’ve got a headache too.’

Anna poured out the cornflakes. Milk. Sugar. She sniffed loudly. Sidney decided not to ask where her handkerchief was.

‘Are you taking me?’

‘I will if you perk up a bit.’

‘It’s too early.’ She began to munch at her cornflakes.

Sidney had got to that stage with his daughter when he had to extract information by using as few words as possible. ‘Is it history today?’

‘Maths. Science. First thing. I hate them.’

‘But you like history. You do have it on a Monday, don’t you?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Well,’ said Sidney, ‘I look forward to detailed discussions with you on the Dissolution of the Monasteries when you get home.’

‘You’ll be lucky.’

He left the kitchen and searched for the car keys on the hall table. ‘In fact, I just can’t wait,’ he muttered, thinking that if this was the onset of teenage angst he was not sure he could survive the next few years of it.

Were all adolescents like this? At times Anna could still be sweet to him but then, even if nothing particularly dramatic or upsetting had happened, she would change into a sullen, self-obsessive with whom it was impossible to live without argument. She was going to be thirteen in December but she never seemed to inhabit her biological age, preferring to veer between three-year extremes either side. Sometimes she behaved like a charming, ten-year-old Daddy’s little girl, but then there were moments when she could pass for an obviously chippy fifteen- or even sixteen-year-old. Sidney could never predict which daughter he was going to get.

They drove through the morning traffic out of Infirmary Lane and up Back Hill (why was it always impossible to turn right here during the rush hour?), passing the High Street, Market Square and Babie Care, the shop in which they had bought Anna’s first clothes. The first hint of light that had illuminated the Lady Chapel had now been obliterated by cloud. Spits of rain fell on the windscreen. Sidney knew that if he said anything it would only annoy his daughter and so he turned on the radio. A reporter from Rome was saying that a group of bagpipers had celebrated the canonisation of a new Scottish saint, the blessed John Ogilvie, who had been hanged at Glasgow Cross in 1615. The next item told of a thirty-two-year-old Cambridge man who had been killed at a stock-car destruction derby at the weekend and there were calls for the sport to be banned.

Anna leant forward and switched to Radio One. Noel Edmonds was playing ‘Disco Duck’ by Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots. She turned it off. Was she going to be like her cousin Louis? Perhaps, one day, she would run away too.

‘Thought you enjoyed that kind of thing?’ Sidney asked as he pulled up some fifty yards from the school. He knew he was being provocative but thought a bit of teasing might encourage a response.

‘You must be out of your mind. Are you picking me up?’

‘Probably. One of us will. Have you got everything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Please don’t expect me to come all the way back with anything you’ve forgotten. Your mother will blame me for not having checked properly.’

‘I won’t. Thanks, Dad.’ She hesitated before opening the car door. ‘I’m sorry. I’m in a mood.’

‘That’s all right, Anna. I still love you.’ She could be so disarming, but Sidney knew that he could not risk an attempt at an affectionate goodbye kiss. That would be embarrassing.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘I don’t always like you, but I still love you.’

‘Ditto.’

Anna almost smiled, opened the car door, got out, slammed it shut and walked away without a look back. She had already seen her friend Sophie.

Sidney waited as the lollipop lady escorted the juniors across the road. She gave him a wave and he tooted his horn. Other drivers took this to be a gesture of impatience and hooted back at him. Honestly, Sidney thought, I am just being friendly.

He drove slowly back through town, trying to remember if they had enough aspirin in the house and if he should alert the school to the fact that Hildegard might not be in today, but he didn’t want to speak for her (that never went down well). As he was held up by yet more traffic, he wondered if a staggered system of school and office opening times would ease the congestion. Someone in the council should think of that, he decided. Perhaps he might even come up with a proper suggestion himself? That would be something practical he could do for the community. Traffic calming. It was an unlikely additional career.

He arrived home just before nine and hoped that there might be time for a quick cup of coffee with Hildegard before he saw the dean and Chapter. He would just have to make sure that he didn’t complain about Anna as that generally descended into an argument about who might be most to blame for her pre-teen behaviour. I wonder where she gets it from.

He unlocked the front door and Byron padded towards him hoping for food, a walk, company. The house was as he had left it. There was no sign that Hildegard had done anything at all. He wondered if she was still resting. It was unlike her, but then she wasn’t often ill.

He walked up the stairs. Their bedroom was in darkness, but there was enough light to see through the gaps in the curtains. Hildegard was lying on her side, turned toward Sidney’s space in the bed, her left arm reaching over to where he would have been, her right against her hip. He sat down and touched her shoulder, careful not to wake her from sleep but concerned to know whether she was all right.

‘My darling . . .’ he asked.

There was no response.

He turned on the bedside light.

Her tea remained untouched.

He moved the light down to the floor lest it was too bright and disturbed Hildegard’s headache.

He touched his wife’s hair and her face and felt her cold hand.

Now he could tell that she was not breathing. But he could not admit the dread that rushed in to him. It was the gap between the firing of the bullet and its arrival, the sound wave travelling faster than the impact. This was what he had always feared and yet never quite imagined: the heart-stop before the silence; the completion of a concert before the applause; the recognition of an ending.

He felt for a pulse in her wrist and neck. There was none. He lay down in the darkness and held his wife in silence. That left arm. Had she been reaching out for him to find that he wasn’t there? Had she known that she was dying? Was her last moment of awareness one of finding him absent yet again? How much pain had she been in? At what point had she lost consciousness?

He remembered the times in their marriage that he had lain awake just like this, either unable to sleep or just before getting up, listening to Hildegard’s breathing, matching her rhythm, wanting to breathe in synchronicity. Sometimes he had found it too loud and he had even accused her of snoring, only to be informed that he was the one that made all the noise at night. Once he was told he sounded like an elephant and Sidney had asked his wife if she had ever actually heard an elephant snore.

He readjusted his position and looked at her still, pale face, the grey-blonde hair that curled behind her left ear, the hole where her earring should be. A word came to him. Limbo. Perhaps that was where she was, halfway between this world and the next. It was as if he could still see her, in the distance, at the far end of a field but could no longer be sure if it was her. If she could tell him one more thing, say one more sentence, give him one final thought to remember her by, he wondered what it would be. Would it be in English or German, profound or light, said with her serious face, which meant she could not be contradicted, or that loving expression which told Sidney that she already knew he wouldn’t take any notice of what she was saying?

Outside he heard traffic, birdsong – was that a blackbird? The cathedral clock struck the quarter-hour. They would have started their meeting at the Deanery. ‘Typical Sidney,’ one of them would be complaining, ‘always late.’ Another would blame it on ‘one of his intrigues’. Then they would laugh. There had been so many.

But none of those intrigues were what this was.

He should get help, he knew, but then if other people came he would have to admit the truth. Witnesses would only tell him that this was not a dream.

He needed water but was not sure he could walk. He did not want to get up; to get up would be to lose this moment. To get up would let the world in.

He did not know how long it took him to get to the telephone. He managed to ask for the doctor. Yes, it was urgent.

He couldn’t decide what to do while he waited; whether to walk or stand or sit. There didn’t seem to be much point in anything. Once he had left the bedroom he didn’t want to return. That would only prove to him what had happened, that he hadn’t dreamt it. There could be no miracle here, no empty room, no return to life. But he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Nothing that he did now could make any meaningful difference to anything that was about to happen.

It was going to be their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Last year it had been ivory. He looked at the keys on the piano and wondered if it would ever be played in the same way again.

He thought about when and how he would tell Anna. He could hardly wait until he picked her up from school that afternoon. But how could he spare her the worst of this?

The telephone rang and he did not answer it. What could he say? It was probably the dean’s secretary wondering where he was. Perhaps it would have been easier to let her know straightaway. Then she could have told everyone for him.

He was just about to go back upstairs and see Hildegard once more (perhaps he had made a mistake, perhaps she was in a coma, perhaps he should have called an ambulance instead?) when the doorbell rang.

It was Michael Robinson. He said he was sorry. He asked Sidney if he was sure. He climbed the stairs. He entered the bedroom. He checked for vital signs of life.

There were none.

‘When do you think this happened?’

‘I was only out for half an hour.’

‘Was she awake when you left her?’

Sidney explained. He then asked if Hildegard had been worried about anything. Was there anything she hadn’t told him? Did the doctor know something he didn’t?

‘A migraine, you say? Was her sight all right?’

‘I don’t know. It was still dark in the room.’

‘She didn’t want any light?’

‘She said it was too bright. Should I have guessed? Should I have done something more? What do you think, Michael?’

‘It sounds like a stroke or an aneurysm. These things can come out of the blue.’

‘Had there been symptoms? She didn’t tell me anything.’

‘Your wife said that she had been finding things exhausting and quite stressful, but I put that down to her time of life. She wasn’t depressed. Her blood pressure was nothing to be alarmed about, but her thyroid was underactive and we organised some medication. You’ll know about that.’

Sidney did.

‘But these things happen and you can’t prepare for them. One cannot call it natural causes. Perhaps it is more like fate or bad luck. It’s random. Even if you had acted immediately, before Anna went to school, I’m not sure that we could have done very much. It was already too late. So please – and listen to me – don’t blame yourself. Don’t ever do that.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘Don’t. Does anyone else know?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Would you like my help?’

‘I don’t know what to do. I have to tell Anna first.’

‘I’ll sort out a medical certificate. You’ll need that for the registry office.’

‘Will there be a postmortem?’

‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Why do you ask?’

‘Don’t they have them in cases of sudden death?’

‘And in unusual or suspicious circumstances. But I am both glad and afraid to say that there is nothing unusual about this, Sidney. This is just life and death.’

They telephoned the undertaker and Nigel Martin promised to be there as soon as he could. He would be discreet. He had an unmarked ambulance.

The doctor asked if they should pray. Sidney was not sure he could do that. Michael said that he would speak the words for him. He always carried a pocket prayer book.

Go forth upon thy journey from this world, O Christian soul.

He waited with Sidney for the undertaker.

Nigel Martin had his wife with him. He thought that it was probably better if a woman made Hildegard ready for ‘the move’ unless Sidney wanted to do it himself.

Sidney did not think he could. He felt guilty but he was also unsure whether the person in the bedroom was that of his wife or merely an inanimate object, a vessel emptied of meaning. Even though her body remained there, implacably present, she had already left. The flesh and blood that he had loved and cherished was redefined as a corpse.

Mrs Martin found Hildegard’s Chinese silk nightdress, her best gift from Sidney, and her hairbrush on the dressing table. She asked about the underwear drawer, the bathroom and where she could find soap and flannels. Sidney was not to worry. She was used to this kind of thing. It was probably easier if he left the room and let her do what had to be done.

Nigel told him about the Chapel of Rest. That would be the best place for Anna to see her mother, he said. They would make it nice for her. There would be candles. He just needed a couple of hours and then Hildegard would be ready.

It was time to go to his daughter. As a priest Sidney knew how to break bad news; to sit a person down, speak calmly, trying to reassure them that this tragedy of a death, either random or expected, was not the destruction of hope and happiness, but part of the natural order. If the bereaved collapsed in grief, he would hold them, speak quietly and allow time for sorrow. Then he would pray with them, offer practical help and a prompt return, fulfilling his duty and his obligations. He would come, he promised, at any time.

But on all those previous occasions he had been playing a part. He had been ‘being a priest’. Now that it was his daughter, this was the real thing.

He got into the car once more. He remembered that this was a metaphor he sometimes used to explain to children the difference between the body and the soul. Imagine the body as a car, he would say, and the soul as the driver. When the driver no longer needs the car he gets out, leaving it empty, just as the soul leaves the body.

Anna was probably too old for the idea. It would just be one of Dad’s stories. He wondered if she had ever heard it before.

It had turned into one of those dank grey days that marked the grip of autumn; a concentrated swarm of clouds passed behind the stark trees, hurrying the light. The garden birch tree creaked in the wind, a white polythene bag tangled in its branches.

At the school Sidney tried to explain what had happened to the headmistress and, even though the words didn’t quite come out right, she seemed to understand everything he was saying. He imagined Michael Robinson had warned her.

‘Take my room,’ she said. ‘Have it for as long as you need. I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed.’

Anna had to be removed from a history lesson. They were studying Henry VIII, the break with Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

‘Have I done something wrong?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Then what are you doing here? Why have you come to see me?’

‘It’s your mother.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know how to tell you this, my darling.’

‘What’s happened, Dad?’

He took his daughter’s hand. ‘She’s died.’

The words were out of his mouth. Now it was true all over again.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t believe it either. She didn’t wake up.’

‘She did. You said she had a headache.’

‘I know, but . . .’

‘Have you been lying to me? Did you know before I went to school? Is that why you took me?’

‘She said it was a headache.’

‘Is that all? How can people die of a headache?’

‘I’m not sure. The doctor said . . .’

Sidney was unable to maintain eye contact with his daughter. But then, every time he turned away, he couldn’t help but notice the incongruity of the office in which they sat. They were surrounded by images of academic success and sporting achievement, with smiles, trophies, handshakes and congratulation.

There, and alone, Sidney and Anna had been abandoned to confront this terrible setback, hardly knowing what to say, terrified of upsetting each other still further.

‘Why didn’t you come and get me first?’

‘I don’t know, Anna. I had to send for the doctor. I’m sorry.’

‘Can I see her? Can I come home now? Is that why you’re here?’

‘She’s . . . she’s . . .’

‘Where is she?’

‘I think she’s . . .’

‘Are you lying, Dad? Has someone killed her?’

‘No, not at all. Nothing like that.’

‘Then why has this happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

His daughter was almost a stranger, his own and yet not his own, growing away from him in her green school blazer and black skirt, her hair in need of a wash, the first breakout of spots on her chin, and with one of her shoelaces undone – her mother would have nagged her about that. What could he do to help her through the forthcoming adolescent world of anxiety and accusation?

‘Is it your fault?’ Anna asked.

‘It’s no one’s fault.’

‘Can we go now, Dad? Can we see her?’

‘I’m not sure they’ll be ready.’

‘Who’s “they”?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Please Dad, I want to go there now.’

They left the school and everyone else in lessons, some of the pupils staring out of the window as if they had already been told, and drove back home.

To think that this morning Sidney had seen himself as the new controller of traffic-calming in this town. He looked at the other drivers, cars, people on bicycles and mopeds getting in the way, young mothers with prams on the pavement, dogs who weren’t on proper leads drifting into the verges, and he was filled with intense fury. How could everyday life continue like this? Why were people still shopping, with their bags and trolleys, their impatient concerns and their pointless hurrying? Who were they all?

Sidney was so distracted he was not sure if he could remember how to drive. What were all the other cars doing on the road? They were all in the way.

He realised that he was going in the wrong direction. He had automatically taken the route to Canonry House. They had almost arrived by the time Anna reminded him. What was he doing?

He tried to remember how to get to the funeral parlour. He had been there often enough. Up Back Hill, straight on into Lynn Road, right into Nutholt Lane, left into New Barns Road, left into Deacons Lane just before the cemetery. It wasn’t that hard.

He braked at a red light. At least he remembered to do that. But what was the point of traffic lights? Why were they holding him up? Was this a deliberate attempt to keep him from his wife?

They weren’t quite ready. The undertaker sat Anna down and told her what to expect: the dark room, the casket (he didn’t say coffin), the white silk lining, the candles. She would see her mother and yet, at the same time, the body was not as her mother had once been. Anna shouldn’t be surprised or alarmed, because Hildegard was at peace: that was why they called it a Chapel of Rest; her vital spirit had passed on.

‘Like a car without a driver?’ she asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘Can I see her, then?’

After twenty minutes she was shown into a small vaulted room at the back that smelt of bleach and air freshener. The coffin was raised and so, on entering the room, it wasn’t immediately possible to see who was in it. This was, Sidney supposed, to give people time to adjust to the atmosphere, to delay the inevitable.

Hildegard was in the Chinese nightdress, her ash-blonde hair had been swept back and she wore a necklace of pearls that Sidney hadn’t remembered providing. He had forgotten about earrings. He would have to go back home and get some. She looked like a dead bride.

At first Anna was scared to go near, frightened of the stillness. She was wearing her uniform. Somehow it didn’t seem right, as if her mother’s death was some kind of school project.

She leant over to see and her breathing changed. It was somewhere between a sigh and a great exhalation, an involuntary attempt to breathe life back into her mother.

My breath is your breath. You gave me life. Let me give it back to you.

She touched her mother’s cheek. It was over made-up with a blusher Hildegard would never have used, covering the yellowing skin beneath. The undertaker had warned her about the cold but Anna shrank at the sensation. She stroked her mother’s hand with her right hand. She started to cry but couldn’t finish. Instead, she fainted.

Sidney just missed her as she fell to the floor.

When Anna came round she said she couldn’t move. She wanted to stay there for ever, alone with her mother.

The undertaker brought her a glass of water. She wanted to wait until her mother started to breathe again, she said. If they stayed long enough, and if they prayed hard enough, surely they could force a miracle?

They remained for another hour until there was nothing left to do or say. Anna thought it was wrong to leave. Sidney promised his daughter she could return whenever she liked.

How long would her mother be there? He didn’t know, he couldn’t be sure, a week perhaps.

They drove home. Could Sidney get his daughter something to eat? No, she couldn’t face anything. She felt sick. She went up to her room and closed the door.

Sidney put the kettle on. This was the start of all the things that he had to do alone since Hildegard had died: the first time he made a cup of tea for one, the first night he went to bed on his own, the first Christmas without her name on the cards or her place by his side. It was the beginning of imaginary rather than real conversations.

He knew he had to inform his family, Hildegard’s sister Trudi (she would tell her mother in Leipzig), Geordie, Amanda, Leonard, Malcolm and Helena.

He phoned his sister first. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.

‘Please don’t make me repeat it.’

‘Hildegard’s dead? But how?’

How many more times was he going to have to say this? Already he imagined social situations, services, receptions, parties.

I see you haven’t brought your wife.

That’s because she’s dead.

Jennifer said that she would tell as many people as possible, even Amanda if he liked.

Yes, he did want that.

The only person he should ring, she said, was their father. He would need to hear the news from Sidney directly. Then she and the Church could do the rest, although he should also telephone Leonard, he had always been such a friend, and Geordie just in case.

‘Just in case what?’

‘You know.’

‘No, Jennifer, I don’t know.’

‘Just in case anyone thinks there’s anything odd about it.’

‘Why would they think that?’

‘She’s so young.’

‘People die young.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You think . . .’

‘I don’t think anything, Sidney. Other people do.’

‘Are you saying that it’s possible this might be treated as something suspicious?’

‘You’ve been involved in a lot of difficult situations. You don’t want people to think . . .’

‘Oh, let them think it.’

Sidney put the phone down. As soon as he did so it rang again. It didn’t stop ringing. He couldn’t ignore it. The news was out.

Sophie’s mother arrived. ‘We tried phoning but we couldn’t get through. The headmistress told us. So kind of her. Such a shock. We didn’t even know Hildegard had been ill.’

‘She hadn’t. The doctor thinks it was an aneurysm.’ And then, because Sophie’s mother appeared not to know what that was, he explained. ‘A brain haemorrhage. It’s more common than people think.’

Was he now saying all this lest she think him a murderer?

‘Do you want us to look after Anna for a night or two?’ Sophie’s mother asked. ‘It’s no trouble.’

‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

‘Sophie will go up and ask, won’t you, Sophie?’

Sidney had forgotten that her daughter was by her side. Sophie shook his hand and looked him in the eye. She said she was sorry. He wondered if her parents had told her that was what she had to do. They could even have rehearsed it.

‘You know the way.’

They remained in the hall. Sophie’s mother was dressed with country practicality: a floral headscarf, Barbour gilet, jeans and flat rubber-soled shoes. The visit was an unexpected addition to the many chores of her day but it was one that she was sure to take in her stride.

‘I know from when my father died that there are so many things you have to do. Register the death, tell people over and over again. You never know what it’s like until it happens to you. It’ll be hard for you to look after Anna at the same time. That’s why you need us.’

She was probably right. Some time away from home would spare his daughter the grim repetition of funeral preparation and his own desperate melancholy.

Sophie’s parents were kind, practical and rich. There were ponies, brothers, sisters, distractions (numerous pets and ballet lessons), and he was grateful for the offer even though he couldn’t decide if he understood his daughter well enough to know whether this was something she would want to do or not. Under normal circumstances he would have asked Hildegard.

‘I don’t want her to feel abandoned.’

‘We’ll make her feel safe.’

‘I don’t know what’s best.’

‘I brought you a lasagne.’

Sidney had not noticed that she was holding some Tupperware. Where had that come from? There was a Tesco polythene bag too.

‘You probably won’t want anything but you only have to heat it up. There’s a bottle of whisky as well. I know you probably shouldn’t but Giles said it might help. Not that anything will. I’m so sorry. You are ready for the fact that no one will know what to say? It’s normally you who provides the reassurance and now that it’s our turn I think we’ll all be guilty of letting you down.’

‘I think I’ll manage.’

‘Will you tell someone if you can’t?’

Her daughter came down the stairs with Anna. ‘Can we go now?’ she asked.

Finally alone, Sidney thought of his wife. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else: all the things they had said and not said, their cares and concerns, everything they had left unfinished.

He tried to think back to when they had first met – as if, by doing so, he could relive their lives. He remembered her first husband’s funeral and the strange desolate calm he had felt in her presence afterwards. She was dressed in widow’s black, her face partly obscured by a veil, and she wore no lipstick. It was as if all her feelings had been washed away. He had liked her guarded stillness, her mouth, her green eyes. Then, during the investigation into Stephen Staunton’s death, they had spoken more and started to call each other by their Christian names. Hildegard had wept, Sidney had held her and he had done what he could as a priest and a friend. Then she sold her house and her piano and returned to Germany. He had thought that he would never see her again.

But something would not let them separate – he couldn’t explain it, and Sidney had instinctively felt, not caring if it was true or not, that he would never be able to be himself if he remained far from her. So they had written and then he had gone to see her in West Germany. Afterwards, Hildegard had come back to Cambridge, seen him going about his detective work (a stupid investigation at Corpus – one Fellow electrocuting another in the bath), and she had forgiven him for the distraction because she too had decided that they were linked in a way that could not be dissolved.

In 1961, after Sidney had been arrested in the DDR, he remembered how they had tried to get back to the West just as the Berlin Wall was going up, and how they had found themselves avoiding the checkpoints and barricades by half-swimming and half-wading through the River Spree. Hildegard had suddenly turned to him and asked: ‘You do love me, don’t you? I have to know if there’s something worth living for.’

They had escaped through a park at night, found themselves in the English quarter and had gone to hear the Eric Dolphy Quintet. That was the day they had made love for the first time. It was all they could do to keep warm. It had been so inevitable they wondered why it had taken them so long.

When Sidney came back to Grantchester and told his friends that he was going to marry Hildegard, they had asked if this love was as secure as he thought it was. Did he want their advice? He had then told them all – yes, even Amanda – that this was secure, and he could not imagine ever being with anyone else. His love for Hildegard had an overwhelming sense of completeness that was like faith but more companionable. It was tender, honest, fragile, brave.

His friends had smiled and said that they hoped it was and they wished him well and he could still see the doubt in their eyes, but Sidney had no anxieties at all.

He remembered their autumn wedding in Grantchester, with the leaves of the trees mixing dark cherry and burnt orange, and Orlando Richards choosing the German music – ‘Also heilig ist der Tag’, ‘Bist du bei Mir’ – and Leonard Graham preaching and telling them (he, who knew nothing of such things at the time) that marriage was like a garden that needed to be tended, and Hildegard was the rose in that garden.

It was so long ago and, even though they had both been through the war, the beginning of their marriage had been a second innocence, when they had to learn both how to live with each other and how to love, differently and for each other. Sometimes Sidney had been scared of that love, he knew that now – frightened of its overwhelming intensity, fearing that if he lived entirely within it he would lose all sense of himself. And so, foolishly perhaps, he had been distracted by other things: by his work, his criminal investigations, his ambition, his love of novelty and his dread of boredom. How he regretted that now, the too many times he had absented himself from the only happiness he had ever known.

He could still feel the jolt of joy when Hildegard had told him that she was pregnant at last. He said that he owed her the world and she had replied – he could hear her saying it now, he could see her tearful eyes – ‘I don’t need the world, Sidney. I just need you.’ He remembered Anna’s birth and the drama when Abigail Redmond’s baby John was snatched from the hospital at the same time and how he had almost missed the whole thing in order to sort out someone else’s problems, and then had to wait, more fearfully than he had ever waited for anything in his life, by the side of a mother-in-law he had never quite known how to speak to, for the miracle of creation and his wife’s words when he entered her hospital room: ‘Meet Anna.’

Since then there had been trials and misunderstandings for which he had been so much to blame, vanities and self-indulgences. He thought of how much his wife had trusted him; how she had let him be free to go where sometimes he should not have gone, to find himself by being away from her, and how he had returned either wiser, chastened or filled with regret, knowing that surely, whatever happened, they would always love each other. He couldn’t imagine it being otherwise.

But now here it was, in the midst of an alternative loneliness he had never dared to imagine. Hildegard, too, had been free to go and now she had gone: into an infinity of absence.

What was left of all that they had shared? What made their love abiding? Sidney sought out the old reasons, the comforts that he had always given others; the fact that love remains: in memory, children and in our very identity. Now he would have to go on living – pretending, perhaps, that his wife was still alive, that she would come back home through the front door at any minute, for it was impossible to imagine anything other than that, even if it drove him mad, because he would rather be insane than cope with the desolation of solitude.

In his bedroom that night he noticed that Hildegard’s dressing gown was gone. The undertaker’s wife hadn’t removed that as well, had she? Perhaps it was in the laundry basket; but no, it couldn’t be: Anna must have taken it with her, just wanting the smell of her mother, the warmth of her skin, the tone of her voice.

In the subsequent days, people came round with soups, casseroles and simple suppers, anything Sidney or Anna could ‘just put in the oven’. The precentor’s wife was writing a recipe book, A Hundred Ways with Mince, and so she was quite in the swing of things, she said. All the troops were rallying round. Sidney only had to say what he wanted. Anything really, honestly, anything. It was no trouble.

Then bring me back my wife.

He remembered the Book of Lamentations: ‘Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow . . .’

But there was. There was Anna’s grief too. How was he to assuage that? What could he say to persuade her that this was fate, chance and nobody’s fault and there was nothing they could have done? How could he explain, in the language of faith, or in any language, that her mother had been taken too early, before she was ready, without her knowledge and with no time to prepare? Someone had said that it was ‘an easy death’ and that it was ‘the best way to go’, but not so soon. The fact that Hildegard was at peace, that she had died in her sleep, was insufficient consolation to those that remained and missed her and could find no way of ordering themselves without her, apart from attempting to live by her example, imagining that she was still with them.

She had stuck one of Anna’s old school projects to the fridge, an acrostic poem. ‘Describe me’.

Adventurous

Naughty

Nice

Artistic

Charming!

Happy

Amazing

Messy

Bouncy

Energetic

Radiant

Sparkling

Sidney had advised and preached before on the resilience of children but now that he had experienced such a loss himself it was hard not to think that everything he had ever said before had been a platitude. He would have to pray again, he knew, for guidance, help and humility, recognising that there was nothing he could do on his own. He needed the company of others: his friends, his colleagues, his daughter. Together they might eventually see this through, with patience, stoicism and an acknowledgement of the vanity of human wishes and the futility of earthly reward. Then life might yet have a purpose. But, for now, he wasn’t sure he could do that. For now, he craved solitude and the necessary selfishness of grief.

He sat at his desk in his study, unable to work or concentrate, and gave himself over to the memory of his wife. He thought of everything she had meant to him and how much he could remember. They had known each other for twenty-two years, been married for nearly fourteen, and perhaps he could spend the next twenty-two remembering her, reliving their marriage but differently, as if he had behaved in a better way, acknowledging everything she had done for him, all her goodness and all her faults. He would not worship her, making her a much-missed saint, as Thomas Hardy had done to his wife (‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’), but perhaps he would appreciate what he had been given in the first place: the fluke of their meeting and the depth of her love.

He imagined Hildegard standing in the doorway, smaller than usual because she had taken her shoes off, asking if he wanted a cup of tea or if, perhaps, he had already helped himself to something stronger?

He missed the way her voice dropped in tone when she spoke to him, as if their intimacy required a different register. He could still hear how she cut her laugh short, as if she had been caught enjoying herself when she should have been serious. He remembered her delight in Anna and her disbelief when either husband or daughter failed to behave in the way she had hoped, by being late, thoughtless, disrespectful, disobedient or unkind.

He missed her German; the way she sang Bach’s aria ‘Flösst, mein Heiland, flösst dein Namen’ as she crossed from room to room, getting out the decorations for the Christmas tree, the pewter moon and stars, the little hanging gingerbread house, the frosted lanterns. He could still hear her teaching Anna to count in German from an early age, singing her nursery rhymes and lullabies – ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’ – and he recalled the way the two of them would laugh at his attempts to join in when they sang, accusing him, so unfairly, of being tone deaf.

He remembered how, after the death of her first husband, he had first tried to show Hildegard his rudimentary German by repeating his two opening gambits, asking if she liked football (the question for men) and if she wanted to dance (the question for women). She had laughed at his pronunciation and his grammar but they had danced for a little moment in her front room all the same.

Had he known even then? he wondered. He was sure, now he said it to himself, that very first time; oh, at last, here you are, you are the person that I was meant to have found, thank God, thank you.

He thought of the long shadow of the war, of Hildegard’s bravery in coming to England and staying, her forgiveness and tolerance in the succeeding years and her acceptance of those who were still anti-German, only showing her nationality during World Cup football and by refusing to watch Dad’s Army, Colditz and Where Eagles Dare (even going to see The Sound of Music had been problematic). Her English became so fluent that people didn’t realise she was originally from Leipzig, but she still had trouble with certain aspects of pronunciation, bringing the letter ‘r’ to the front of her mouth when she was tired, so that words like ‘terrible’ became ‘te-ch-rible’, and ‘Thursday’ sounded as ‘Sssirstay’.

Sidney remembered how she only referred to him as ‘mein Lieber’ when she was cross with him; and how, on their last wedding anniversary, they had been too tired to make love.

Although she hated being teased, Hildegard insisted that she did have a sense of humour. She thought that it was funny to tell her favourite joke about a balloon with claustrophobia at every children’s party even though it could only be understood in German: ‘Ein Ballon sagt zum anderen: “Ich hab’ Platzangst.”’ He remembered the time she had laughed most, when he had told her his own joke about the English couple who adopted a German baby that said nothing until he was five years old. The new parents were very worried but little appeared to be wrong. Then, one day, the boy said: ‘This strudel is tepid.’ His mother shouted out with excitement: ‘Hans, you can speak! Why have you not spoken before?’ To which Hans replied: ‘Because up until now everything has been satisfactory.’

Sidney walked through the house and imagined his wife calling him as she opened the front door. Ich bin’s. It’s only me. He could still hear the sound of her keys landing on the hall table and remembered how he would get up from his desk and meet her as she came to find him. Da bin ich wieder. Here I am. Sometimes he closed his eyes and held out his arms as she approached so that he could simply feel the precision of her kiss on his lips – bin wieder da – before she took off her hat, coat and gloves and sought out the next task.

The hall was empty of people. A letter from Germany was waiting in the rack, the dog lead hung on a hook over Hildegard’s wellington boots, just by the walking stick that she had bought in order to be ‘a proper English countrywoman’.

Sidney followed his imaginary wife into the kitchen and couldn’t decide whether to make himself a cup of tea or pour out a drink of something stronger but settled on the speed of a glass of water as he remembered Hildegard singing as she cooked, with Anna shelling the peas or folding the almond mixture for Leipziger Lerche into the brown mixing bowl. He could see his wife turning to smile and asking him to lay the table, insisting on linen napkins even though it meant more washing and ironing. At breakfast she would always express surprise that he still ate his boiled eggs the wrong way round, with the big end at the top, because even though he would get the full flavour first, it meant there would only be white for the last spoonful and the meal would culminate in disappointment. If he ate them in the correct way, she insisted, with the little end at the top, then the experience would be one of continuous improvement. That was how a meal should be, she explained. It was like a piece of music, a three-part sonata; and she never did trust her husband to time eggs, roast meat so that it cooked through as it rested, or prepare red cabbage in the proper German way.

Finally she had given up on his foibles, just as he had decided not to contradict her when she told him, in one of her frequent battles to lose weight after the traditional Christmas excess of goose, Stöllen, Zimsterne and Lebkuchen, that potatoes were not fattening. It was just the butter that was the trouble, and black bread didn’t really count towards calories either and dark chocolate was perfectly acceptable as a dessert for those on a diet. At the same time, Sidney was grateful, although he had never quite said it enough, that his wife never complained when they went to meals with parishioners and Hildegard was given the English cuisine she could not stand: eggs in aspic, devilled kidneys, cauliflower cheese, bloody rare beef and banana fritters.

He took his glass of water through to the living room and looked at the only picture they had of Hildegard’s father, taken at a communist rally in 1932, the year before he was shot dead. It was next to the mantel clock her mother had sent them shortly after they were married and Hildegard’s first ever gift to him: a porcelain figurine of a girl feeding chickens. There was a reel of white cotton on the floor by the sofa with a pair of scissors and her little raffia sewing basket. What had she been about to do, Sidney wondered, sew on a button or patch a skirt, and what could have taken her away from the task?

He placed the glass of water on a coaster and sat down at the piano. He couldn’t decide whether to play a note or not. He looked down at the keys and wished he had learned. Then perhaps he could have practised his grief. He could hear Hildegard playing, swearing whenever she went wrong – Mist, verdammt, meine Güte – before setting off on a long stretch of a Bach partita or a Schubert impromptu and then stopping again – Das kann doch nicht so schwer sein – wishing her fingers could work faster and were more precise – hoping, just once, that she could see a piece through to her satisfaction. At the treble end of the piano was a half-squeezed tube of handcream, a decorated lacquer box containing gold and silver stars for her pupils’ music, worn-down pencils, a rubber, a sharpener and a metronome. He could hear her calling out encouragement, sometimes playing along two octaves higher, insisting on practice and repetition, breaking the music down into sections and then building it up again, like a swimmer emerging from a dive and heading out into open sea.

He left the room and remembered his wife’s tread on the stairs as she came up to bed, carrying Horlicks or hot chocolate, placing it by his side and then making a final check on Anna before the top light went out and she reached to hold his hand in hers. Then they would turn into their comfortable sleeping arrangement, she on her left side and he on his stomach (what she laughingly called his ‘royal position’ that took up more than half the space), and fall asleep.

Now Sidney sat on the bed in his daughter’s room, surrounded by rag dolls, teddies and stuffed animals. On the wall were posters of horses and ponies, and a childhood painting of a clown. He remembered his daughter’s favourite joke when she was a little girl. (What did the crocodile say when he was eating a clown? ‘This tastes funny.’) On the chest of drawers was the Black Forest weather house she had been given several Christmases ago, a photograph of her in the front row of the school netball team and the record player they had bought for her eleventh birthday. It had last played Black and Blue by the Rolling Stones. Her cousin Louis had given it to her. Next to it were copies of Jackie magazine, Anna’s wild-flower press and pony books, recent homework with a drawing of a house and the rooms marked in French, and a pink comb and brush, a tug of blonde hair still attached. He remembered Hildegard patiently untangling it at the end of summer, before they went down to see his parents. The next time, he would have to do it.

Sidney looked at her favourite felt rabbit resting on the pillow and discovered her mother’s dressing gown hidden beneath it.

He went through to the bathroom and saw the items the family shared: the Imperial Leather soap, the Johnson’s baby shampoo that Anna complained about using because she was no longer a baby, the Colgate toothpaste and the three brushes in a mug: blue, green and pink. He opened the cupboards to look through cosmetics he had never bothered to find out about; foundation and concealer, Pond’s cold cream, several types of lipstick, bottles of Shalimar, 4711 and a new perfume that he knew Hildegard loved: Diorella. There was a razor and cream for shaved legs, tampons, pills for an underactive thyroid and a box of blood-pressure tablets.

He hadn’t discovered enough about Hildegard’s health, her feelings about Rolfe, her fears about the future, Anna, their marriage, old age. He had thought he had understood his wife better than anyone but now he began to question whether he had known her at all. How much of her character remained elusive? Did she deliberately keep things from him or had he lacked curiosity?

He knew that she was fond of Rolfe, and he trusted what she told him, that it was nothing more than affectionate friendship. Sidney had those kinds of friendship himself, not least with Amanda, but why had Hildegard needed to see another man in the first place and what could he offer that Sidney could not? Even though he had wanted their love to be complete, perhaps it was not and he had failed her. But what more could he have done and how could he have made her happier?

Was she happy?

He thought so, content enough, in as much as any human being can ever be free from pain and anxiety. She had never really complained. She had not run off with Rolfe or fled to Germany, not that the simple act of staying was enough to justify her continuing affections – perhaps she was doing so only for Anna – but then Sidney remembered what Hildegard had written on his birthday card earlier that year: ‘if ever beauty I did see, which I desired and got, ’twas but a dream of thee’.

He opened the wardrobe in their bedroom and started to go through his wife’s clothes, divided simply into winter and summer: everyday suits in navy, grey and cream; the hats for church and funerals; the all-purpose knee-length black dress with the square neckline and the three-quarter sleeves; her favourite blouses with the Peter Pan collars and the long pleated skirts that she once said she was too old to wear. He found the midnight-blue satin ballgown she had once worn for the Lord Mayor’s Christmas party and then said she hated; and there amidst the wobbly hangers holding slips and shawls was the famous floral summer dress that Sidney had not liked enough and, when challenged, had made the disastrous observation that it looked as if his wife was wearing ‘half the garden’.

There were dresses, tops, shirts and trousers he was sure that he had never seen before; a white blazer, a duck-egg-blue cotton smock, a pale-brown trench coat. Below, on a shoe rack, were the lace-up walking shoes Hildegard wore around town, burgundy mules, a pair of ankle-strap stilettos, tan leather slides, ballet flats and Dr Scholl’s summer sandals. They were leaning against a hard-sided suitcase that looked new even though they had had it for years. Sidney sensed once more the regret that he hadn’t taken his wife abroad more often, he hadn’t earned enough, he hadn’t appreciated her.

He remembered her getting up in the mornings, often before him, putting her clothes on in the dark and then coming back and changing them in the light because she had not been able to tell if her tights were blue or black and, besides, the outfit didn’t work and it was safer to wear what she always wore. Perhaps there should be a uniform for piano teachers and clergy wives, she had once suggested, and Sidney had said there might as well be one, since the pressure to conform to the norms of polite society was still rife.

He sat on the bed and studied the chest of drawers that contained his wife’s underwear, tights, gloves, scarves and jewellery. Underneath a framed print of Vermeer’s View of Delft were framed photographs of their marriage, of Anna’s first day at school, of a holiday on Rügen Island. They were propped up in front of her purse, yesterday’s earrings, and a book that she was in the middle of reading: Heinrich Böll’s The Train Was on Time. Inside, marking her place, was a postcard: ‘Ich bin so froh, Du hattest Zeit mich zu besuchen. Mit lieben Grüßen, Dein Rolfe.’

So glad you had the time to see me?

When had that been?

And ‘Dein Rolfe’ – ‘Your Rolfe’?

It had to be said that the man was persistent.

Had Sidney loved his wife enough? What was ‘enough’? If love could be measured, he thought, surely it did not count as love? His affection should be indefinable, unfathomable, unaccountable, beyond measure. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .

Now that it was gone there was nothing left to count.

He could try, he thought, to resume a normal life as priest and father – indeed he would have to – but he would only be occupying a part, like an actor unable to remember his lines.

That night, Sidney lay down on the right of the bed, keeping his wife’s side empty, and then, when he could stand it no more, he turned over and onto it, lying across it, stomach down, as if smothering her absence, the obliteration of desire.

He thought he could hear her voice, telling him she was still with him, but it was only the wind.

Ich bin bei dir.

The next morning, he went to register the death at the Old School House in Market Street: Hildegard Annaliese Chambers, formerly Staunton, née Leber, born Leipzig 15 June 1923, died Ely 18 October 1976.

It was a day of bright, low sun, the kind of weather, he remembered, that they had had at their wedding. He looked at the last leaves on a sycamore tree outside the registry office and imagined they were either birds or dead souls, waiting to fall into limbo, their grip on the branch of life too frail to hold on for much longer.

When Anna returned home from school – she wanted to go, it would stop her thinking only of Hildegard – she asked her father why, if they thanked God after Louis had come back safely, they didn’t blame him for taking her mother away. ‘He’ was either active in the world or he wasn’t.

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Do you understand it, Dad?’

‘I think prayer is a way of trying to understand.’

‘But what if there’s no answer? How can God “explain” this? Mum wasn’t old.’

‘I think that’s why people pray. It is a form of hope.’

‘Even if they are deluded?’

‘It’s not only that. It’s both a way of making sense of the world and a form of submitting; of saying that we cannot know everything. We have to acknowledge our weaknesses, our fallibilities, and understand that not everything revolves around us.’

‘Then I’ll try.’

‘And what will you pray for?’

‘For Mum. I’m going to write her a letter. The funeral director suggested it. Then we can put it in her coffin.’

‘What are you going to say?’

‘All the things I never said to her when she was alive. I’d like you not to read it, Dad. I’d like it to be just between us.’

‘I understand.’

They began to make tea and toast. Anna liked crunchy peanut butter; Sidney preferred honey. He only just stopped himself from pulling down a third mug for his wife. They hadn’t decided what to have for supper.

‘What shall we do about your mother’s wedding ring?’ he asked.

‘Did they take it off?’

‘The undertakers did in case we wanted to keep it. Mothers often give them to their daughters. You can wear it on your right hand.’

‘I’m too young.’

‘You won’t be young for ever.’

‘You should have it, Dad.’

‘Then I’ll keep it for you.’

‘Unless you’d like Mum to be buried with it?’

‘I don’t know, Anna. There are so many decisions to be made and there isn’t enough time.’

‘You never discussed this?’

‘I didn’t think your mother was going to die.’

‘Ever?’

‘If I thought about it too much I was worried it would happen.’

‘That’s a selfish way of thinking, isn’t it?’

Anna said the words sadly but they still sounded more hostile than perhaps she had intended.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Sidney replied. ‘But then I’m not sure that there is any other way. We can’t always help our thoughts.’

‘We can try to stop them. Bad thoughts. Not let them rise.’

‘Or not act on them.’

‘Did you ever ask Mum about Rolfe?’

‘Yes, I did. But let’s not discuss that now.’ Sidney could not help himself. ‘Did you?’

‘You told me not to.’

‘I don’t remember doing that.’

‘You did.’

‘And did you obey?’

‘I hate him, Dad. And I hated her for seeing him. I never knew why she needed him as a friend. And I hated you for seeming not to care.’

‘I did care, Anna. I thought if I showed how much I minded then it would make everything worse.’

‘Do you think Mum was punishing you for Amanda?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘She wanted an Amanda of her own.’

‘No, she had me.’

‘But she didn’t.’

‘She did, Anna. And she liked Amanda.’

‘Not all the time.’

‘When did she say that?’

‘She was annoyed. When you went to that art auction and Amanda bought that stupid painting.’

‘She didn’t tell me.’

‘You were supposed to know, Dad. You were meant to guess. You think you are so sensitive to every situation and you couldn’t even tell if your own wife was happy or not.’

‘That’s not fair, Anna. That’s absolutely not fair.’

‘I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean . . . I . . .’

Sidney started to cry. He knew he shouldn’t. Not in front of his daughter. Not at a time like this.

‘I’m sorry, Dad, I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

What was he doing? Why did he have to collapse like this rather than look after her? Who was the child now?

Anna held on to her father and told him he was going to be all right. It had to be. There was no other choice.

Then she ran out of hope. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Love each other,’ said Sidney. ‘No matter what.’

Later that evening, the doorbell rang. Sidney did not want to answer but felt he had to. Everyone knew he was in. Where else would he go? In any case, it could only be another well-wisher, a parishioner bringing flowers, steak and kidney pudding or baked goods in Tupperware. He and Anna had so many reusable containers they could have opened a shop.

It was Vanessa Morgan offering her help.

‘I didn’t know you were back.’

‘The dean telephoned. I know I may not be the right person.’

‘I don’t think anybody is. Come in.’

She held out her hand. Sidney shook it. What was this woman doing here?

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sidney. ‘Everyone is. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘I’ll make it.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘I thought I could do things for you,’ Miss Morgan went on, ‘let people know about the funeral, for example; organise the reception afterwards if you want one. You can’t be telling everyone about everything yourself. You need some protection.’

‘From what?’

‘Other people’s kindness. After my mother died, I found their compassion so tiring, but I couldn’t say anything because it would have seemed ungrateful. Unchristian even.’

‘I think I know what you mean.’

‘People want to talk about their losses too; everyone who came to me ended up talking about their own experience of death, what it meant to them and how it had affected them. My loss gave them permission to relive their bereavement. And, look, I’m doing the same to you now. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ said Sidney. ‘It’s helpful.’

‘I’m not sure it is. I also wanted to make it up to you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘For being horrible.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘I was. I was arrogant. I think I must also have been jealous. I thought you had an easy charm and now I know that it wasn’t that easy after all. You were performing.’

‘You have to keep cheerful.’

‘I had a bit of a breakdown, if I’m honest . . .’

‘I think I knew.’

Why was this woman telling him now?

‘But my faith helped me through as it should help you too, although there’s no guarantee of that. You’re either resilient or you’re not. Sometimes you just have to give in to it all.’

‘It’s too much to think about.’

‘You don’t have to think about it.’

‘I can’t think of anything else.’

All Sidney wanted to do was lie face down on the bed he had shared with his wife and smother himself with her loss.

Hildegard’s sister Trudi came for the funeral. She was on her own. Her husband had to look after their children in Berlin; her mother was too infirm to make the trip.

Sidney found it hard to cope with a woman who was an echo of his wife and yet, at the same time, not like Hildegard at all. She was more serious, careful with emotion, as if she didn’t quite trust it not to reveal too much about herself, preferring instead to keep active enough to disguise any vulnerability.

She showed Anna how to make pumpernickel, proper German bread that was rich and dense and slightly sour, with an aroma of fennel and caraway seeds. As she did so, she told her niece stories from her mother’s childhood: their first party game (Schokoladenessen, in which Hildegard had definitely cheated), their grandmother standing in her best apron and teaching them exactly how to make Leipziger Lerche, their first boyfriends (not Günter, as Anna had thought, but Ulli, who was Jewish and had got out of the country just in time) and even Hildegard’s first husband, Stephen Staunton.

Anna was surprised how casually this was mentioned. ‘I only found out recently that Mum had been married before.’

‘I don’t think children have to know everything about their parents.’

‘I think I should know something.’

‘He was Irish. She wanted to leave Germany after the war and he took her away. He might as well have had a white horse. She was very excited and he was so charming. Dark hair. Strong, how do you say, jaw? Like a movie star. Your mother loved him as best she could, but he drank too much and he was unfaithful and then one of his lovers killed him.’

‘What?’

‘I assumed you knew that.’

There was a silence, filled only with the sound of their preparation. The two of them began to stir three different flours in a bowl, wholewheat, rye and strong white, before scooping out a third of it and then adding the bran, the caraway and the fennel seeds, salt and finely chopped shallot. Why did family truths come out like this, Anna wondered, and how much more was there to know?

Trudi added two different mixtures, one of yeast and one of molasses, into the bowl and asked Anna to fold everything together as best she could. ‘Your parents were protecting you.’

‘I don’t like it when other people know more about my family than I do. What do you mean, “one of his lovers”? There were more than one?’

‘I think so. But it was a long time ago. And it was how your father met your mother. So good things came in the end. Like you.’

‘I’m not sure I’m a good thing.’

‘You’re the best thing. Believe me.’

‘And I don’t like secrets.’

‘You don’t have any of your own?’

‘Yes. But I know what they are.’

Trudi fetched a damp tea towel to cover the bowl and left the bread mixture to rise for thirty minutes. If the conversation went on like this, they were going to have a good punch-down when the dough was ready.

‘We all need secrets,’ she said, ‘although I’m not sure your mother believed in them. If I asked her anything directly she’d always tell me. She said it was why she never wanted to go back to the East. There, the difference between what you know and don’t know makes you vulnerable. Power is knowledge. But my sister believed that if you lived openly, you had nothing to fear.’

‘Do you think she loved Rolfe?’

‘Are you asking me what I think you’re asking?’

Anna put down her wooden spoon. ‘And will you tell me the truth if I ask?’

Trudi started to clear away the packets, seeds and scales. ‘It was friendship. Nothing more.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I would have known, Anna. I’m her sister. She felt sorry for him. She knew he adored her and she was flattered. It also amused her that Rolfe annoyed your father so much. It was a way of getting him to pay attention.’

‘A game.’

‘Perhaps. I do the same with my husband. It’s nice for a woman to feel she’s still attractive. It doesn’t happen so often these days.’

‘It’s embarrassing.’

‘I think you’ll feel differently when you’re my age. Kinder, Küche, Kirche. Your mother was very good at all of that.’

‘Only one child.’

‘But what a child!’ said Trudi, kissing her niece on the forehead. She moved the bowl by the oven. ‘We need to leave this in a warm place. Perhaps we could make a cake too? I thought about an Eierlikör Torte. Your father would like that but I’m not sure if you can get all the ingredients in England. Do you have any eggnog?’

‘Women bring him cake all the time.’

‘They’re being kind.’

‘Do you like Amanda?’ Anna asked.

‘I’m not sure. Do you?’

‘She’s always been very kind to me. She’s my godmother. Sometimes she tries too hard to be my friend. I don’t always like it but I feel sorry for her. Dad says she’s made a mess of her life.’

‘Your mother liked her.’

‘She did?’

‘Why would she not?’

‘Perhaps she was jealous.’

‘No, she always knew your father loved her best. She never doubted that, even when he was difficult to live with.’

‘She told you he was?’

‘She didn’t need to tell me. I can see for myself. You only have to spend five minutes with Sidney to understand that he’s not the saint everyone thinks he is.’

‘I thought it was me.’

‘We all know. We just let him think he’s wonderful. He’s not.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘He’s a very good man. But we all have our flaws. And that’s a good thing. Otherwise we’d be impossible.’

‘I don’t know, Aunt Trudi. My dad’s not bad at being impossible.’

Sidney knew that he had to be brave in front of his daughter but everything he did or thought reminded him of his wife.

Cecilia Richards came from Cambridge with a cottage pie. Trudi said they were coping, they didn’t need any more food, they could manage perfectly well, she and Miss Morgan were sorting everything out between them, but Cecilia insisted that Sidney would want to talk to someone who had also experienced sudden death.

She had lost her beloved over ten years ago – murdered by mistake, they had meant to kill someone else – and she had been left on her own with a young child: Charlie. He had been six years old at the time.

If Sidney wanted to talk to someone who had already been through it all, then Cecilia said that she would be happy to listen. People were very kind at first, she said, very sweet, but they couldn’t ever understand and then they had to get back to their normal lives. They returned to that everyday place where the bereaved were no longer welcome. It wasn’t their fault, she said, it wasn’t anyone’s, but somehow the grief-stricken were no longer allowed in. They could never be normal again.

Her husband, Orlando, had arranged all the music at Sidney and Hildegard’s wedding. Now she offered suggestions, if Sidney wanted, for the funeral. Bach obviously – ‘O Welt, ich muss dich lassen’, ‘O world, I now must leave thee’ – Mozart probably, or a bit of Brahms, such as ‘How lovely are thy dwellings’. There was even a seventeenth-century German song by Paul Fleming: ‘An Anna aus der Ferne’ – ‘To Anna from afar’.

‘I think that might be a bit much.’

‘There’s no such thing as too much grief, Sidney.’

‘But we have to continue with our lives. Hildegard would have wanted that. Although sometimes I can hear her telling me off, complaining that we never gave her this much attention when she was alive.’

‘I still talk to Orlando. I imagine him by my side.’

‘How is Charlie?’

‘Seventeen now. Taller than you. He’s in his last year at school. He wants to be a cricketer but he still keeps up with his music. Do you remember how, at Orlando’s funeral, someone had given him a set of comedy beards and moustaches and he couldn’t stop putting them on, pretending to be different guests each time? He kept going up to people and interrupting their conversations. I told him to stop but now it’s the only thing anyone remembers about the funeral; a little six-year-old boy and his moustaches. You have to let your children find their own way of grieving and then, amazingly, I can never quite believe how, they recover more quickly than you do; or at least they find a better way of not showing it.’

After her husband’s death Cecilia said that she had been to see a bereavement counsellor who had told her to concentrate on three words: tears, talk and time. They had read the Book of Lamentations together. There was, she said, a liturgy of grief, and that repetition was a form of cure. Sidney shouldn’t feel guilty if he wanted to go over everything that had happened again and again. She would be happy to listen at any time.

He asked if she wanted to stay for supper but Cecilia said no, she really had to be getting back, and she shouldn’t intrude – what would his sister-in-law say?

‘I don’t think you need to worry about her.’

‘It must be hard.’

‘She’s very different to Hildegard. I think we’re having some ham and potatoes with red cabbage. Anna is staying the night with her friend Sophie. I might suggest we try some of your cottage pie instead.’

‘And leave the ham? That’s not going to go down well.’

‘I can have it at lunchtime tomorrow. I’ve stopped minding what people think because I no longer seem to have any opinion on anything at all. But I’d like something hot. I feel so cold all the time. Do you think it’s grief?’

And so, that evening, Trudi heated up the cottage pie and her brother-in-law checked as he started to eat to see if it contained baked beans. It had been the start of a stupid argument several years ago when he had offered to make Hildegard a Monday-night dinner and he had added baked beans to the filling (as his mother always did because it pleased them all and bulked out the meat for the five of them). But his wife said the base was too liquid and that it tasted ‘all wrong’. Why couldn’t Sidney follow the recipe she had left? Then he had lost his temper and said that if all his wife could find to complain about was the fact that he had added baked beans to a cottage pie there couldn’t be much wrong with him and then she had shouted back that this was only the beginning of all the things that were wrong with their marriage, the tiniest tip of an enormous iceberg of Sidney’s faults, and they had gone on, arguing and arguing, until Hildegard had suddenly burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of what they were both saying.

‘Which other couple,’ she had said, ‘argues so much about baked beans?’

Now he missed even that. But he could not fall apart. He decided to seek out Geordie and have a drink with him, even if talking to his friend made him collapse all the more.

It was a bloody bugger of a thing, Geordie said, but Sidney noticed how tactfully he avoided talking about God or fate. He had thought Cathy might have been the first to go, what with the cancer and everything, but she was on the mend, she’d had another check-up, it was all clear, yet now this had happened it proved that you couldn’t predict anything at all. Fate was like a dark cloud or a wolf in the road; there was always something waiting to get you if you ever relaxed and thought you had the business of life under control.

A wolf in the road? Sidney wondered if he had heard his friend correctly, and tried to picture death as a predator; not Father Time, but a beast with yellow eyes emerging suddenly out of a forest.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Geordie asked. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re not. I’ll keep prattling. You just let me know if you want anything.’

‘I don’t know what I want. Or I do, but it’s the one thing I can’t have. I don’t know whether I’ll ever stop wanting her or if this feeling will ever go away.’

‘It doesn’t have to go away. You will have to learn to live with it. I don’t know. I can’t imagine. But I can get you involved in a case to distract you when you’re ready. After the funeral, of course.’

‘Do you have something in mind?’

‘I’ve got plenty of things on the go. And with you around, Sidney, there’s always the unexpected.’

‘It’s just that neither of us ever thought the unexpected would turn out to be this.’

Sidney let Anna choose the coffin: light oak veneer, brass handles, a nameplate.

As well as her letter, she put in her book of pressed wild flowers and a photograph from her fifth birthday with her mother clapping her hands and laughing as her daughter blew out the candles on the cake. They decided on the flowers together; a wreath of white lilies for the coffin, and a posy of violets, freesias and gypsophila for Anna to hold.

It was All Souls’ Day. Sidney wanted to have the funeral in the Lady Chapel but the dean promised there would be too many people for that. Hildegard had been greatly loved. There were all her piano pupils, their parents, the cathedral congregation, the musical community, people from Germany. It had to be held in the nave.

Sidney didn’t think they needed a car and asked for the coffin to rest in front of the altar, raised high, with standing candles on either side, already in place as the congregation arrived. They came just before eleven thirty in the morning, in dark suits and winter coats, protecting themselves against the wind and rain outside and the first autumn chill within.

Sidney sat on the end of the front row, with Anna by his side, then Trudi, his parents, his sister Jennifer, Johnny, Louis and Dan, his brother Matt with yet another new girlfriend (Roxy?), and then behind them were Geordie and Cathy, Amanda, Leonard and Simon, Helena Mitchell – Malcolm was taking part in the service – and Cecilia Richards. Sidney had not checked if Rolfe von Arnim was there and thought briefly about how he would greet him afterwards but told himself very firmly not to consider such a thing now. His job was to look after Anna. He took her left hand as she clutched the special posy of violets in her right.

The dean stood under the great Octagon and announced that people were here today to express their sorrow, proclaim their faith, and give thanks for all they had received through the life of this, their friend, the dearly departed, whom they had known and loved from the very first time they had met her.

It was the same welcome Sidney had given so many times on behalf of others and the words were harder to receive than they ever had been to say.

‘O God, Lord of life and conqueror of death, our help in every time of trouble, comfort us who mourn, and give us grace, in the presence of death, to worship you, that we may have sure hope of eternal life and be enabled to put our whole trust in your goodness and mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

The opening sentences from the Book of Lamentations seemed irredeemably bleak, but Sidney knew that his wife would have wanted the darkness as much as the light, the old language, the tough heart of faith. He remembered Cecilia’s words: tears, talk and time.

The choir sang the ninetieth psalm, ‘Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations’, with the resonant admonitory line: ‘The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.’

Threescore years and ten. Hildegard had not even made it to fifty-four.

Jennifer read from 1 Corinthians 13, the choir sang ‘O Welt, ich muss dich lassen’ and Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’, and Malcolm took the prayers.

Leonard then gave the address, just as he had done at Sidney and Hildegard’s wedding. He remembered first meeting Hildegard, the welcome she had given him, and recalled how difficult it had been for her in Cambridge after the war.

He did not shy away from mentioning the death of her first husband, the suffering and sorrow that had followed, and the miraculous grace that came after her union with Sidney. Their wedding had been almost fifteen years ago, it had taken place on a glorious autumn afternoon and he had quoted Blake at the time: ‘I give you the end of a golden string. Only wind it into a ball. It will lead you in at heaven’s gate. Built in Jerusalem’s wall.’

He was convinced that Sidney and Hildegard still had that golden thread between them and that it could not be cut by death. Their love had made it unbreakable, and Anna was testament to that love. Anna was Hildegard’s gift to the world. Her continuation. The pearl on the golden string.

He asked the congregation to thank God for all that he had given them through his love, and to pray now, especially, for Hildegard; for her loyalties, her affection and her example. He suggested that they remember her whenever they heard the music of Bach or thought about things that made them laugh with delight, for she was a woman who, despite suffering and tragedy, was determined to make the best of things, wasting neither time nor life. If she had been taken too early then at least she had achieved so much while she lived, through her music, her family – here Leonard asked people to pray particularly for Anna – and her service to others.

After long labour there was rest, after toil there was peace. It was a life well spent and her reward was everlasting.

There were more prayers and a final blessing and the service finished, just as Sidney and Hildegard’s marriage service had ended, with ‘Now Thank We All Our God’ to the tune of ‘Nun danket’.

The committal took place in the burial ground outside the North Transept. The rain had eased slightly by the time the little family party emerged from the cathedral but the wind was still up. The undertakers removed the flowers from the top of the coffin and laid them by the side of the grave. Then they took up the cords with Sidney, Geordie, Leonard and Malcolm, and together they lowered the body into the grave.

The dean led the mourners:

‘Hildegard has fallen asleep in the peace of Christ.

We commit her, with faith and hope in everlasting life, to the loving mercy of our Father

And assist her with our prayers . . .’

Anna was given a special linen bag of soil. She threw the earth down onto the wooden coffin.

‘Eternal rest, grant to her, O Lord,’ said the dean.

To which the mourners all replied: ‘And let perpetual light shine upon her.’

The dean continued: ‘May her soul and the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.’

And then, at last, came the final ‘Amen’.

It was over. Anna held on to her posy for a moment longer, then knelt down and dropped it into the darkness below.

The rain started up once more.

They held the wake at Canonry House. Amanda had provided champagne and canapés to celebrate Hildegard’s life rather than mourn her death (she was solvent again, even rich, now that her inheritance had come through) and she was acting as the principal hostess, much to Miss Morgan’s disapproval. This was made manifest by the determined way in which an alternative option of tea and sandwiches was offered.

Sidney could not worry about all this. His mother sat in a chair, her memory already fading, wearing a black dress that had once been useful for cocktail parties but now only did for funerals. Alec Chambers began conversations with strangers, trying his best to be interested in what they were saying but gave up around the fourth sentence, unable to concentrate on anything other than his daughter-in-law’s death. Anna stuck with Sophie, disappearing upstairs, returning only to get more food and, it seemed from their behaviour, alcohol. Well, if they got drunk, Sidney thought, how could he blame them?

There were other conversations, repeated consolations: all such a shock, who could have foretold it, so young, such a lovely woman, I wish I’d gone to one of her concerts, there was so much I still wanted to talk to her about, poor little Anna – although she’s not so little now, is she – will you be all right do you think, is there anything I can do?

The only person who didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t speak to Sidney in a similar fashion was Rolfe von Arnim. But it was impossible to ignore him. He was wearing a trim dark suit, white shirt and a black tie and in his buttonhole was a pale-yellow rose and a cluster of red berries. He must have made it himself. It reminded Sidney of the sweet peas he had once given Hildegard and that made him angry all over again, and even more furious that he couldn’t show it: not now, not on this day.

‘I thought perhaps I shouldn’t have come,’ said Rolfe. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to say goodbye.’

‘You are as welcome as anyone else.’

‘I didn’t think you’d want me.’

This is not about you, Sidney wanted to say, but retained his politeness. ‘Hildegard was very fond of you.’

‘She was such an inspiration.’

‘She was to so many people.’

‘But especially to me. As a musician.’

‘Und auch als Deutscher!’ Trudi interrupted, taking Rolfe by the arm and leading him far, far, away. ‘Erzählen Sie mir doch bitte alles über meine Schwester. Ich habe sie in den letzen Jahren so wenig gesehen. Wir haben bestimmt sehr viel zu besprechen.’

She had all of Hildegard’s tact and directness. For the first time, Sidney thanked God she had come.

He went upstairs. He needed to go to the bathroom and then compose himself in his bedroom for a few moments – the crowd, the heat, the tension of the day. He was getting a headache, the first since his wife had died, and he thought then of the pain that had killed her, the swiftness of the attack. What if he were to die now too? He really wouldn’t mind.

As he came back out onto the landing he could hear Miss Morgan arguing with Amanda in the kitchen: Hildegard’s kitchen.

‘You are not the hostess,’ his volunteer housekeeper was saying, ‘and you shouldn’t pretend that you are.’

‘I’m not pretending to be anything.’

‘It’s embarrassing. Your presence here, Mrs Richardson, is not helping matters.’

‘Do you mean in the kitchen or with Sidney? I think I know what is helpful and what is not.’

There was a clatter of teacups, washing-up probably, and then Miss Morgan’s not-so-subtle mutter: ‘You have never been any good for him.’

‘How dare you say that? Sidney is my best friend.’

‘And how dare you dishonour his wife’s memory by showing off like this? Shame on you.’

Amanda began to leave but Anna stopped her in the doorway. ‘Don’t.’

Then she turned to Miss Morgan. ‘I know you are trying to help but please don’t speak to my godmother like that. She is my friend too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Miss Morgan replied. ‘I didn’t mean it. I was defending your mother.’

‘She doesn’t need defending. Everyone loved her.’

Sidney leant against the wall to steady himself. He closed his eyes and wondered if he might faint. Then he could fall down the stairs. Perhaps he might even kill himself. That, too, would be a good thing.

He heard his daughter coming up the stairs and felt her arm supporting him. ‘What’s wrong, Dad?’

He stopped, uncertain for a moment where he was or what he had done, guilty about his thoughts, his momentary desire for death.

‘You sound just like her,’ he said.

After everyone had gone home, Sidney and Anna returned to ‘normal life’, whatever that meant: school and the cathedral, home, work and holidays. Sidney thought of his soon-to-be teenage daughter and his responsibility over the next years as she tried to work out whether the woman she was becoming was the woman she actually wanted to be.

Anna tried her best to hide her grief in front of her father but it manifested itself in other ways, in an increasing lack of confidence, sometimes in silence and withdrawal, at other times in defensive attack. It was a quiet resentment that, although combative, was also fragile, as if she was pushing at the limits both of Sidney’s patience and her own self-confidence.

I don’t want any supper. My bedroom’s tidy enough. I don’t need to put anything away. There isn’t any washing-up in there. I like taking my socks off. I’ll pick them up later. I don’t have to do my geography. It’s not due until next Tuesday. Why are you always having a go at me?

There was the vegetarianism and the failure to recognise the connection between food intake and skin condition (a diet that seemed to consist entirely of tomato soup, peanut butter, white bread and Sugar Puffs was hardly going to help). Then there was the way Anna let her hair fall over face, her refusal to tuck in her school blouse, her strange attitude to personal hygiene – especially teeth cleaning – and her belief that walking around in boots with untied shoelaces was fashionable.

How had his little girl, once so eager to gather wild flowers, paint and draw and dance and roll down hills, turned into this?

In the past he had been expressly told by his wife not to comment on or react to any of his daughter’s provocations but to let her ‘find her own way’. It was important to know Anna’s secrets but not to let on that they knew, to allow her the privacy of secret rebellion. That was all very well, but how was he going to manage this on his own? He could hardly bear to talk to his daughter about sex and boyfriends and he wondered who might do that. Sophie’s mother? Her doctor? His sister? Jennifer was the safest option, but she didn’t have Hildegard’s ability to combine rigorous discipline with a sudden ability to let go, to throw it all away and abandon herself to the joy of the present moment.

He realised how much his wife had done and how she had protected him from the grind of everyday life; although how had she been able to do all this and teach and play the piano was something of a miracle, especially when Sidney had spent so much time away from her. She had once referred to his parenting as ‘the night shift’.

The greatest mystery was why God had allowed her to die; and how could Sidney live without the presence of someone he was used to speaking to every day? There was no piano, no singing, no conversation, no laughter, no admonition, no argument.

Even the silence was different. It was no longer companionable, bordered by the possibility of interruption, but a void without meaning. He was used to the silence of prayer, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. It included the meditative, a sense of apprehension, a spirit of waiting, but there was no point waiting for a dead wife.

Now he resented every minute that he had left her or wanted to be on his own or thought that he had better things to do. Why couldn’t he have listened to her and why could he not remember more? Perhaps he could go away somewhere and dwell in her memory, letting the moments come to him, recovering his past and healing his future?

He wondered, even, if he should give up being a priest. He remembered a bombed-out chapel in Italy, in wartime, when he had thought that he could not bear any more suffering. He had reached the limit of what a human soul could take and he had stopped everything and thrown himself before the ruined altar and asked for mercy. Then faith had somehow, he didn’t know how, returned to his soul, filling him with grace, giving him light and hope. Now he felt one great emptying, as if even the blood in his body was evaporating, his bones collapsing. How much longer would he be able to go on walking or stand upright? There was nothing to support or sustain him any more apart from his daughter. That, at least, was one thing he still knew he could not give up on. He might be able to give up on his faith, but he couldn’t abandon her.

He went to see the dean and they sat drinking whisky until Sidney wanted to close his eyes and fall asleep. Felix Carpenter spoke slowly and kindly (they, too, had their silences) and told him that sometimes you only see the light when you look up from the bottom of the well.

‘I don’t know if I can do that, Felix. Sometimes my head is so heavy I can hardly lift it. I know that sounds pathetic.’

‘If it is what you feel, how can it be pathetic?’

Sidney could not give up on faith because, like the light, it always came back from the night. It refused to give up on him.

‘Remember the vows you took at your ordination,’ said Felix. ‘You have been called and chosen and invested in the tradition of the laying-on of hands and the invocation of the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God. You have to persist.’

Sidney had once said the same thing to Leonard.

‘Our life is a testing ground, Sidney; we all walk in the valley of the shadow of death. Now you have been tested and asked to come back out into the light.’

‘I think I was prepared for anything but this.’

‘We are all cut flowers,’ said the dean.

Amanda drove up from London and took him down to Grantchester. She wanted to return to the place that he had always gone for respite when he was a vicar; a hillside view just off the Roman Road for Wandlebury Ring and the Iron Age forts of the Gog Magog Hills.

That’s what you sometimes had to do when you were unhappy, she said; go back to the place in your past when you were happiest.

It was Armistice Day. Sidney had kept the eleven o’clock silence that morning and remembered those who had lost their lives in war, dying far younger than either he or Hildegard. It made him feel guilty that he had not been more grateful for the joys he had known rather than sorrowful for the love he had lost.

They left Byron at home, since he was too old for long walks (he would surely be the next to go), and parked in a lay-by off the main road, allowing room for movement through a five-bar gate. They then made their way up a familiar muddy track scattered with gatherings of water that would freeze that night. Fieldfares and redwings circled in the sky. Already there was a mist in the lower field. It would be dark by a quarter past four. They wouldn’t have long.

They talked about all that had happened and how, when they had first come to this place, they couldn’t possibly have imagined that their lives would turn out this way. Amanda had broken off her engagement to Guy Hopkins, Sidney had hardly met Hildegard, and now here they were, both widowed and still in their fifties.

‘I’m sorry about the wake,’ Amanda said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The argument in the kitchen with Miss Morgan.’

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’

‘It reminded me of Mrs Maguire all over again. She’s very proprietorial.’

‘It’s good to have someone on hand.’

‘But you don’t even like her!’

‘I am grateful for her support.’

‘Anna was very kind. You had a funny turn. Was it the stress of the day?’

‘Probably. I don’t know, Amanda. The day passed in a daze. I could have fainted at any moment.’

‘I was worried that you were going to fall down the stairs.’

‘I think I wanted to.’

They walked on, the only sound coming from the voles, shrews and mice in the hedgerows and a squadron of jackdaws crying out in greeting and alarm, wheeling above them.

It was the kind of companionable silence that Sidney had almost forgotten, and then he said, idly, without really thinking what he was saying (perhaps it was just for something to say): ‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘They have them in comedies . . .’

‘What?’

‘Falling downstairs, the pratfall, the big farcical moment, and yet in real life people can die as a result. How do actors signal that it’s funny?’

‘I suppose it depends what comes before and after.’

‘Like life.’

‘No sermons, Sidney.’

‘At the moment, Amanda, I don’t know if I can ever preach again.’

‘Don’t say that.’

They approached a couple of male pheasants, past their moult and in feathered prime, pecking at the remains of some long-scattered seed and then abruptly taking off. Guns from a shooting party sounded in the distance. It was hard to tell if the birds, prey only to the perils of chance, were flying into their path or not.

‘Have they given you some time off?’ Amanda asked.

‘As long as I need. They don’t really mean that, of course.’

‘And what will you do?’

‘I don’t know. The important thing is to spend some time with Anna.’

‘If you need my help . . .’

‘It probably has to be the two of us.’

‘I meant money. If you want to go away. It must be terrible.’

‘It is.’

Sidney did not know what more he could say. He felt guilty now about being out and about with another woman, a guilt he would never have felt when his wife was alive.

‘I’m not sure whether I should tell you this . . .’ Amanda began.

‘You’ve started.’

‘Hildegard once asked me to look after you.’

‘Why? When?’

‘She said that she never worried too much because if anything ever happened to her, you would always have me. I told her that it was different, that we were different, but she said it didn’t matter. She knew that you would be all right.’

‘But I’m not all right.’

‘That’s what I told her.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That you would be lost without her.’

‘Well, here I am: lost.’

A three-quarter moon had appeared in the sky. Soon it would be dark. They turned and headed back to the car and then, just before they reached the lay-by, Amanda said she had an idea. Why didn’t Sidney and Anna take a short trip to Germany, father and daughter, just the two of them? They could go to Leipzig, perhaps, and Anna could see where her mother had been brought up, imagine the kind of life she had led and visit her grandmother. If he got on with it, they might even be able to see the Christmas markets. She was sure Anna would like that.

‘I don’t know. It would be quite an undertaking.’

‘When else would you do it? Take her away from Ely. Get her out of the house and its memories.’

‘I don’t know if she would want to come.’

‘She will if you make it all about her and her mother.’

Sidney thought about those times when he had visited Hildegard before they had married: in Berlin, in Hamburg, to see St Michael’s Church and the Trostbrücke, and Koblenz where they had taken a boat to Boppard and cruised through the Rhine Gorge to Rüdesheim. He remembered the Christmas markets in both East and West and how, when he and Hildegard had first started out in their marriage, and had so little money, they had given each other presents by rewrapping possessions they already had but had forgotten about.

Would Germany still be Germany without her? He couldn’t imagine it.

Amanda repeated that she would pay. ‘But let Anna decide.’

‘I’m sometimes amazed she’s my daughter. I can’t understand how we can exist together, how we talk or what we do or how I’ve had anything to do with her at all. Sometimes she’s an indelible part of me, at other times she’s a stranger. I don’t know what to make of her; and I am pretty sure she doesn’t know what to make of me either. When I’m at my lowest I think she would have preferred it if I was the one that had died.’

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘I don’t know. She was probably expecting it more than the death of her mother.’

‘She wouldn’t have wanted either of you to die. You’re being ridiculous, Sidney.’

‘I just don’t know her, Amanda.’

‘Then that’s why you need to go to Germany.’

Father and daughter flew to West Berlin and then, after over an hour at the border checking visas and passports (Sidney hoped that there wouldn’t be any paperwork that reminded the authorities of his brief arrest after a misunderstanding in 1961; he had never told Anna about it – perhaps now was the time?), they took the train to Leipzig and booked into two single rooms at the state-owned Hotel Deutschland on Augustusplatz.

Anna was unusually quiet once they had crossed into the GDR, taking in the change from West to East, the increasing numbers of soldiers and patrols, the political banners hanging from the public buildings and the murals glorifying the achievements of the workers under socialism. FÜR VORBILDLICHE LEISTUNGEN: Beste Einheit.

She was surprised by the industrial nature of the landscape, the chimneys that churned fumes up into a sky already filled with thick mist, heavy rain and fine dust from the carbo-chemical factories lining the railway track. In the distance, cranes lifted steel girders and prefabricated panels for functional apartment blocks that now replaced some of the finest architecture in Europe.

Sidney was determined that the trip should suit his daughter rather than himself and they confined their ecclesiastical tourism to two churches: St Thomas’s, where Bach had been cantor, and St Nicholas’s, which had a lively pastor prepared to share services with Catholics, knowing that the only chance of Christian survival in an atheist state was to unite.

They began with a visit to Hildegard’s mother in her worker’s apartment in Konradstraße. She was now in her late eighties and was distressed that she had lost a daughter before her time – why hadn’t God taken her instead? She would have been happy to go in Hildegard’s place, she was ready enough – but she was glad to see Anna. She was so like Hildegard.

‘Wie die Mutter so die Tochter.’

Sibilla Leber cradled her granddaughter’s face: ‘Du siehst wie ich aus! Oh, um wieder jung zu sein . . .’

She reiterated her socialist principles and hoped Anna would come to Leipzig to perfect her German and study at the university. It was the best place to build a well-developed personality, with excellent mental, physical and moral qualities and a class outlook rooted in the Marxist-Leninist world view. Only in the East could her granddaughter imbue herself with collective thoughts and actively contribute to the shaping of socialism. It was important, she said, to continue the family values of Glaube, Pflicht, Familie, Freundschaft und Freiheit vor allem: faith, duty, family, friendship and freedom above all.

Was Anna a good Christian?

Anna said that she hoped she was.

And a good socialist?

She wasn’t so sure about that.

‘Je stärker der Sozialismus, desto sicherer der Frieden,’ Sibilla Leber concluded. There was little point debating the matter.

They spent the next few days seeing Hildegard’s childhood home in Gustav-Mahlerstraße and her school in Manetstraße. Anna sat on a bench in the park by the Lutherkirche and rode on the carousel at the small fair where her mother had played as a child. At one point they passed Runde Ecke, the Stasi headquarters, but Sidney decided not yet to tell his daughter how he had been imprisoned there. Who knows, he thought, the Volkspolizei could even be following them.

Instead they walked round the modern university and then, just outside the Rathaus, they found the spot where Hildegard’s father had been shot by the Nazis. There was a memorial to him on the wall, accompanied by an inverted red triangle.

Hans Leber

Märtyrer: Held

7.4.1933

Es lebe der Kommunismus!

‘Long live communism,’ Anna translated. ‘To think Mum carried so much of that past in her memory. She never even talked about it.’

‘It was often hard to tell what went on in your mother’s head.’

‘But you knew, didn’t you, Dad?’

‘Not all the time. She liked to keep some things back. I think she hoped that there was a part of her I’d always be scared of.’

‘And were you?’

‘I was terrified.’

On their last evening, as they were walking through the Christmas market, and just as Sidney was about to launch into a bemused discussion of the non-Christian nature of the decorations on sale (folk figures, snowmen and festive workers), Anna asked: ‘Do you think you’ll ever marry again, Dad?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Not even Amanda? One day you might.’

Sidney snapped into concentration. ‘Amanda is divorced. I can’t marry a divorcee.’

‘What if you gave up being a priest?’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘But if you loved her, you could. Leonard stopped.’

‘He’s different.’

‘But the principle is the same.’

Anna had begun to pursue subjects with the same determination as her mother. Her father didn’t know whether to be proud or annoyed.

‘I really don’t think that situation will arise,’ he continued. ‘Is there anything you want to take home with you?’ He picked up some little wooden figures of children going to school in their best winter coats and bobble hats. ‘These are nice, don’t you think?’

His daughter said nothing but waited until he looked at her.

‘I have no plans to marry again, Anna.’

‘Then promise me that you won’t.’

‘I don’t think that’s fair.’

‘Why not?’

‘What if you get married yourself, Anna, and I live to be a hundred and I’m left on my own? You don’t want to be looking after me when you’ve got a husband and children.’

‘I will. I’ll look after you for ever, Dad.’

Why this new kindness? Sidney wondered. This is what his daughter could do to him. In the midst of her infuriating refusal to leave a subject alone, she could open his heart and let it bleed with love.

‘That’s very kind. And I will love you for ever, too.’

‘As much as you loved Mum?’

And there she was, back on the attack again. Why couldn’t she just let it go?

‘Yes,’ said Sidney, ‘as much as I loved your mother.’

‘And no one else?’

‘No one else.’

‘You promise?’

‘I promise that I will never love anyone as I loved Hildegard.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘It is, Anna. I can’t predict what is going to happen to either of us. We know that nothing will ever be the same again. But don’t hold me to ransom. I loved your mother more than anyone. And then you came along. And I loved the two of you more than anyone. That is all I can do and all I will ever do.’

‘You can promise me that?’

‘Yes, I can easily promise you that. Now, what about some supper?’

He took his daughter into an arcade and downstairs into a basement restaurant, hoping that a difference in location would lead to a change of subject.

‘You know what they say? “If you haven’t been to Auerbach’s Keller then you haven’t been to Leipzig.” I just hope the food’s all right.’

The restaurant was filled with locals drinking wine and Nordhäuser Doppelkorn as waiters dressed in red waistcoats explained what was off and what was on the menu. Anna’s vegetarianism was surely going to cause a few problems in a land of stout meat-eating, but she finally found her way towards a cream of mushroom soup followed by a vegetable stew with peas, carrots and dumplings. Sidney conformed to local expectations with jellied meat followed by medallions of pork, beef and lamb served up with savoy cabbage.

He noticed that the restaurant also offered Leipziger Lerche and wondered if his daughter would mention it. When the waitress came – brusque and determined not to be overawed by bourgeois Westerners – Anna ordered in German and asked for a dollop of cream. Sidney said he would have the same and they wondered out loud if they could be ‘as good as Mum’s’.

‘They might even be better,’ he added.

‘Don’t say that!’

‘She can’t hear us.’

‘Perhaps she can? It’s funny. I’ve never seen the words written down. I always thought they were spelled with an “s”. Mum always used to say “Lersche”, the same way people here pronounce the town “Leipshig”.’

‘It’s the Saxon accent. Your mother prided herself on her Hochdeutsch but there were a few words that always gave away where she came from. She never forgot her roots.’

‘Then I’m glad we’ve tried to find them.’

When the cakes arrived, warm on a plate and accompanied by extraordinarily expensive coffee (the country was in the middle of a shortage), Anna was surprised to discover a cherry at the bottom of each one.

‘That’s weird.’

‘Your mother always preferred apricots. You know that when they were first made they were filled with meat? In fact, they were made with larks and roasted with herbs and eggs.’

‘The birds?’

‘Hildegard said there used to be thousands of larks in Leipzig but the practice of killing them was outlawed in the nineteenth century. The cherry is supposed to represent the heart of the bird, but your mother couldn’t bear to think of that. She loved they way they sang in high summer. So she used apricots instead.’

‘She never told me.’

‘I think she imagined that, with you being a vegetarian, it might put you off.’

‘No, it makes me approve of them all the more. These are good. I like the glazed topping but I still prefer Mum’s.’

‘She’d be glad. To be better than a Leipzig baker . . .’

‘I do like to think she can hear us, Dad.’

‘Then I’m sure she’d approve of our conversation.’

‘I find it comforting to think of her watching over us.’

She finished her plate and smiled at her father. It was the first sign of cheerfulness since her mother’s death. Sidney didn’t know what to do or say. He realised that he could not predict his daughter’s behaviour at all.

‘Thank you for bringing me here,’ she said. ‘I feel I know her better now.’

When they returned home, Sidney noticed that one of the letters in the Christmas post had come from 10 Downing Street. What on earth could the prime minister want – apart from to wish him a happy Christmas? Surely James Callaghan couldn’t have written to every clergyman in the country? He wasn’t that desperate for votes.

He opened the envelope and discovered that he had been offered a new job. The Queen would be honoured, the letter said, if Sidney were to accept a position as the next Bishop of Peterborough.

Was this supposed to be some kind of silver lining in his cloud of despair? Why him? And why now?

He went to see the dean. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and just after evensong. The anthem had been ‘If ye love me, keep my commandments’.

‘Did you know about this?’ Sidney asked.

‘The archbishop did mention it.’

‘And are you responsible?’

‘I may have put in a word.’

‘Why?’

‘We all think you’d make a fine bishop, Sidney. And, who knows, you might even enjoy it.’

‘But all that responsibility! I’m not sure I’m up to it.’

‘If you thought you were born for the role you probably wouldn’t be very good at doing it.’

‘It means being in the public eye all the time.’

‘I thought you didn’t mind a bit of attention? Keeping a low profile, Sidney, has never been one of your strong points.’

‘But this is different. Being a bishop is like being in some kind of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.’

‘And you don’t think you’re in one already?’

‘Seriously, Felix. I’ve seen what happens to clergy who climb the greasy pole. They are so used to preaching and making speeches that they become pompous without noticing. Their voices get louder; as does their laughter. They seek to dominate rooms. They exist solely on a diet of Coronation chicken and buffet suppers. I can’t believe that God is calling me to do this.’

‘You’ve always thought that you were a better detective than a priest. Now’s your chance to prove the opposite.’

‘I’d have to give up on the detection.’

‘You would. And that might be a good thing. We all think you’ve done your bit. Think of the episcopate as a replacement for all that drama.’

‘As I think I’ve made clear, Felix, I don’t need anything dramatic.’

‘I rather think you do, Sidney. Remember that for all our faith and ceremony we are only a hop, skip and a jump away from the theatre. You’d have a staff, cope and mitre, even a rather impressive amethyst ring.’

‘I’m not convinced.’

‘And there’d be plenty of support: a chaplain, a secretary, a chauffeur. The Bishop’s Palace is rather fine . . .’

‘I sometimes think that the higher up the Church of England you go the further you get from Jesus . . .’

‘. . . Victorian Gothic, but some of the old abbot’s house from the thirteenth century survives, if I recall correctly: a lovely undercroft, decorated columns, a good garden. It even has its own “heaven chamber” with rather fine vaulting. You could be there in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. They have great plans, I gather. Lunch in the Bishop’s Palace, perhaps. That would be nice for Anna.’

‘She’d miss her friends.’

‘You could keep her at school in Ely for the time being. And you’d have more money – seven or eight thousand a year.’

‘Anyone would think you were trying to get rid of me.’

‘Nonsense. I only want you to make use of your talents. A man needs to be stretched.’

‘I’d have to ask Anna.’

‘She won’t be keen, but children are resilient.’

‘She’s got her O levels soon enough. I don’t like to think of her moving school.’

‘She could board.’

‘I don’t want to be apart from her.’

‘But maybe she needs to be apart from you. Find her own way in life.’

‘I know. Eventually.’

‘You have to let them go, Sidney.’

‘It’s too soon.’

‘It’s always too soon.’

‘Do you think people would expect me to marry again?’

‘Not soon. And probably not a divorcee.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how impossible it would be to live with anyone other than Hildegard.’

Without asking, the dean poured out a couple of stiff whiskies. ‘You know, Sidney, when I was seeing the archbishop at Lambeth to talk about all of this, I had to wait outside his study for a little while. He was seeing some Orthodox patriarch. So I took some time to look at the paintings of the previous incumbents in the Great Hall. There are whole corridors of them leading to the guard room and the chapel.

‘I particularly liked the one of Tait. His portrait is almost full length, and it’s the saddest I have ever seen. He was the first Scottish archbishop. It was 1868. Earlier in his life, when he moved from Carlisle to be Bishop of London, they asked him to do so in the same year that he lost all five of his daughters to scarlet fever: five children in five weeks. And yet he thanked God for the blessings they had brought him over the previous ten years and for all the sweet memories of their little lives. His face has such pain; but it also shows compassion.

‘I think that if I ever felt bereft, or that life was impossible, he’s the man I’d most like to talk to. I know he would understand without ever having to say very much. And yet he must have wondered if he could do the job or if life would be the same after all that suffering. He lost his wife and son too. Apart from his sister, he was quite alone when he died; and yet he was a great archbishop, a bringer of people together, a pacifier. When he went back to his old school for a prize-giving or some such ceremony, he told the boys: “I hope and believe that you are going forth into life, not to seek the applause which depends on the fleeting breath of your fellow-men, nor that success which ends only in this life, but that you will remember that another Eye besides that of man is upon you, and that a higher approbation is to be won than that of your fellow-creatures.”’

‘We have to be more than ourselves.’

‘Will you think about it, Sidney? Promise me that.’

‘I’ll try. And will you pray for me, Felix?’

‘I do so every day.’

Sidney walked back to Canonry House wondering what on earth he was going to do, how he would talk to Anna and in what way their lives might change. There was a heaviness in the air, and yet, at the same time, the atmosphere was brittle and inconsistent. Soon it would rain.

He remembered Anna’s birth. How quickly she had grown up and how much he had missed. Would he neglect her even more if he became a bishop, or would he be able to devote more time to being both a priest and a father? He certainly couldn’t do any more detective work. He would have to give that up anyway. It was ridiculous to keep on doing it and, in any case, Geordie would be retiring in a few more years and he couldn’t work with anyone other than him. No one else would have the patience.

He would probably miss the drama, the search for justice and the need for solutions. The world of faith and doubt was more continually ambiguous; the quest for meaning more intellectually complex. He would also have to devote himself more wholeheartedly to a life of prayer and responsibility, both in the Church and in the home, and then he could use all that he had learned to comfort the afflicted, support the weak and further the common good.

The dean’s words about Archbishop Tait had moved him very much. He should try now, once more, to lead as exemplary a life as he could, eschewing the heroic vanity of his criminal investigations. Other people could do that. That’s what policemen were for. Let them do their jobs and Sidney could do his.

Well, at least it was one thing decided, he thought to himself, glad that he had avoided the forthcoming shower. No more investigation. He wouldn’t have to worry about that kind of distraction. He would tell his daughter that he had given up on all that running round the country trying to solve impossible crimes. Now he would have more time for her. And then, after he had told her this, they would discuss her schooling and her future. Only after he had done that would he raise the possibility of becoming a bishop.

He wondered if Anna might even like the idea, perhaps even be proud of him, but then he thought he could hear Hildegard’s voice in his head counselling caution and humility.

‘Be careful, mein Lieber.’

He was getting ahead of himself. He needed to rethink everything from Anna’s point of view and present it as such.

He turned the corner into Infirmary Lane with a renewed sense of purpose. This was something to get on with, he decided. He would emerge from the shadow of his wife’s death with a new sense of direction and he would lead a different life.

‘No more criminal investigation,’ he repeated to himself. ‘That’s enough.’

He saw a figure outside his front door, a man who had forgotten his umbrella, waiting with his mackintosh half over his head as the rain started. It was Geordie. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘I need your help.’

‘Haven’t you got anyone else?’

‘No, Sidney. You’re the only man who can sort this out.’

‘What is it?’

‘Have you got time for a quick pint?’