‘All I can say to that, Laura, is one expressive word. Kids!’

Laura added an adjective. ‘Bloody kids! Even when they grow up they’re not out of your hair—’

Jake strode towards the stairs.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘To give Janis what she deserves. How dare she destroy Kurt and leave us to pick up the pieces like she did!’

Laura took his hand and led him back to the kitchen. ‘Pour me a brandy, would you? And have one yourself. The bottle’s on the counter; I used a drop in the sauce for the chops.’

Jake stemmed his anger and did as he was bid.

‘I shall never make that special sauce again,’ said Laura, removing the unfinished meal from the table. ‘It will always remind me of this. Like I haven’t been able to look at chocolate truffles since the terrible night we both remember. They were what Jeremy was noshing and Bessie in the bathroom throwing up when we got back from Berlin.’

‘Jeremy is now the only one of the three who hasn’t put us through the mill,’ said Jake.

‘But his day will no doubt come. Nor is there any guarantee that what Bessie’s put us through in her childhood will be her one-off contribution to what we’re discussing.

‘I’m coming to think, Jake, that picking up the pieces is one of the things parents are for. Janis, though, has staked her claim to freedom, to put it mildly. She must be allowed to get on with it, learn from her own mistakes like I had to. You of course, darling, never made any!’

‘I certainly didn’t make one when I married you.’

They took their drinks into the living room and sat together in shared and silent contemplation, unaware that their daughter lay on her bed consumed by sorrow, the familiar objects of her girlhood all around her and the future seeming a vacuum stretching endlessly ahead.

Chapter Sixteen

In the aftermath of Janis’s charade, Marianne thought her own thoughts and maintained a philosophical veneer that belied her apprehension as to what would now become of the girl who had wrought sudden and drastic change to her own life as well as to Kurt’s.

The news of the broken engagement had reverberated on the family grapevine in person and by telephone, the manner of Janis’s ending a romance that had seemed written in the stars as incredible to all as her having done so.

Weeks later the family was still trying to fathom what would always remain for them a mystery – how had the girl they knew changed out of recognition as if overnight? By then, both Janis and Kurt had written their final examinations, he afterwards departing immediately for Vienna, and she to Paris where Henry Moritz was still based and had, of course, offered her the makeshift accommodation to which all his young relatives and friends were welcome.