They are sitting on the sofa. Outside they can see the white mass of the apple blossom, tinted pale orange by the street lamps.
They are silent. Dorothea reads a letter, hands it to Pandora without comment; then another. Pandora reads intently.
After a while Dorothea sits back. She is allowing Pandora to read these letters, she says, because she trusts her. But she does not want anyone else to read them. Why should they know about these private emotions? She does not want the world to gloat over her parents’ inner lives.
Pandora has changed lately. Her clothes have become dark, discreetly elegant. She is to be interviewed shortly for a job on a national paper.
‘Yours is an admirable point of view,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think it’s realistic. When Michael Holroyd published his life of Lytton Strachey a year or two ago it changed everything: biography is not the same any more. Now people want to know everything about the subject, and it’s because we realise that sexuality is central to people’s personalities. It can’t be concealed.’
‘But do we need fully to understand the person, to delve into all their secrets?’ As though unconsciously, her mother closes her hands over the papers in her lap. ‘Can’t we let people rest in peace?’
‘That’s a limited point of view,’ replies Pandora, pulling the bracelet off her wrist and dropping it on the table. ‘If we believe in truth and history then we must not flinch from the difficult aspects of the past. That’s what the Germans do, they try to forget the Second World War. If one of my German relations was a Nazi, I would need to know. Concealment is never healthy.’
Dorothea does not reply. She reaches over to Pandora, pulls the letter she is holding out of her hands, ties the string round the bundle of letters, places the bundle back in the box, locks it.
‘What have I said?’
Her mother looks at Pandora defiantly. ‘There were many happy times, you know. If people have been happy together and then lose one another, memories of that happiness can make the pain even more bitter. But I think it’s better to recall the good times, and value them. When Mother and I were in England – beastly England, as I saw it – and she was with Julian, I often prayed we would go back to Berlin. I so wanted my parents to be together, and then they were. And there were many happy days in the Mommsenstraße, and at Salitz, and with my German granny.’ She walks back to the sofa, where Pandora is sitting. ‘Pandora, tell me truthfully, as you love your mother and she loves you – do you mean to write a book about Irene?’
‘Would you mind if I did?’
‘That would depend.’
Pandora avoids her mother’s eye. ‘I adored her, you know, and when I sit in her studio I feel she’s very close. It would be a loving biography.’
‘And how would you describe my father, whom you hardly knew?’
‘I’d listen to you, if you were willing to talk to me. I’d talk to Uncle Henry. . .’
‘Oh, Henry is not so interested in people, Henry is only interested in his business and his cars. If you want the truth, you must talk to me.’ She walks around the room, adjusts the flowers in a vase. ‘And to Sophia, I suppose.’