The locket lay warm and heavy deep in her overcoat pocket. Katniss turned it over and over with her fingers, rhythmically. She took it out, pinged it open and looked at the people in the photograph. Young, both of them, the girl with her dark hair lifting in the breeze was laughing into the lens; the young man was looking at her intently. Both fizzed with energy and intelligence, youth and passion. My grandparents, she thought. Not dear old Mumsie, Welsh, fiery, socialist old Mumsie in her north London home, but Esther and David Everdeen. She put it back in her pocket.
After her father's death her mother had asked Katniss to help her to go through his papers and files. Amongst them had been a well stuffed manila envelope, addressed in an old typeface to Mrs Everdeen: Mumsie. Katniss had tipped the fragile paperwork out, and there it was; adoption papers, letters, all the extraordinary evidence of her mother's early life.
Her mother's lack of interest when Katniss found the papers, 'Such a long time ago, my dear, and Mumsie was my mother. No need to rake all that misery over again.' That, and her newness to all this, was tending to hit her in the throat. Why didn't her mother care? She welled up again. She was tired to the bone and unsettled, her certainties all shaken up. Perhaps her mother was right, all that misery. They had very nearly rowed about it all, very nearly. Was she just being intrusive and revelling in the misery of unknown people? Vicarious grief about people she had never known?
'Go if you must, but I don't think I want to know what happened to them. I was four, Katniss, four when I left. I've tried to live my life with joy, for them. I thought I owed it to them to be as happy as I could, not to dwell on their misery, to make Mumsie and you, and Dad happy, to try to live a life without guilt. Go if you must, just be very careful about what you may find, that's all.'
Her mother, Rachel, had left Germany on the Kindertransport, aged four, sent by her worried young parents. They had been making their plans to leave when fate had overtaken them. Mumsie knew they had died, but didn't know where, or what had happened to them after Rachel left. Her mother had been told her parents wouldn't be coming for her, had been told they had died when she was a little older, but had never tried to find out more about them. Katniss had asked if she could remember them at all. There was only one memory.
'We were walking along, by a riverbank I think, and they were swinging me as high as ever they could, one on either side. I remember squealing for more and being swung again and again. I felt completely safe.' Her mother had paused for a moment, patted her shoulder and moved into the kitchen, turning on the radio as she passed.
Katniss had travelled all day and most of the night to get to Kusseldorm, from St Pancras through France, into Germany, on from the big cities out to Kusseldorm. As the train drew into the city stations Katniss found herself thinking that all the old buildings must have been rebuilt after the war, they'd certainly been flattened during it. Her German was non-existent, so she was relying on everyone else speaking English. It made her feel child-like again; everyone spoke to her slowly, kindly and patiently, as if she had limited understanding, which is no more than the truth she thought. She had been advised to visit local registry offices in two districts, but had no joy at either, 'Everdeen? No we have nothing here about that family.' She'd been sent out to Eschborn, it seemed her family may have been country people.
'There are records stored there, it's a long way out of town, but a lot of the rural people's records are kept in the old town hall building. You could try, theirs might have survived.'
She had been bumping along in the bus, her head abruptly dropping as she fell asleep and snapping up again as she woke up for what seemed like ages. The sky was beginning to turn to a warm dusk when the bus driver, who had nodded when she told him her destination, swung out of his driver's cabin and pointed to the door. She smiled at him, got up, and stepped off the bus. It really was the countryside: a few buildings on a short street, beyond them rough-looking farmland, and grazing. 'Like the land time forgot,' she thought. She drifted along the street dreamily, relishing the sudden calm and tranquillity. She could see small holdings, smoke rising from chimneys, could smell wood burning, see a wooden church, with its white paint peeling, a baker's shop, with challah and bagels sitting polished in the window. A woman inside the shop, with her head tied up in a white scarf and an apron round her waist waved at her through the glass. She wandered over towards the fields and allotments. She picked out cabbages growing, green and purple, onions in burnished rows, looking like tiny Russian domes, something she thought must be pumpkin, and was just about to look back at the buildings to find the Town Hall, when a voice spoke from behind her.
'A beautiful evening,' it said. She faced towards the sound. It was the woman from the baker's. She had a warmly lit face framed by her scarf. Rounded pink cheeks, hazel eyes, Mrs Bun the baker Katniss thought; lovely. She was brushing flour off her hands with her apron. 'They'll be back soon,' she said, nodding towards the track which passed along by the river. Katniss turned, following her gesture. The sun was lower in the sky now, a soft apricot colour, reflecting brokenly in the river. The willows hung silkily over the water, and the weeds flowed endlessly up the stream. There was a reassuring wet, weedy smell.
In the distance Katniss could see a young couple walking towards them, the woman was wearing a white blouse and a striped cotton skirt, she had laced shoes and short socks. The man had a knitted V necked waistcoat over an open-necked white shirt, wide legged trousers, and a cap shoved onto the back of his head. They were a handsome couple, the girl's dark hair was lifting in the breeze, she was laughing, and the young man was looking intently at her; they counted and swung their daughter high between them. Lily could hear the delighted squealing of the child and the answering laughter of the father and mother as they swung their little girl in her bright skirt and jumper over and over again.
Katniss was laughing along with them but when she turned to smile at her friend the baker lady, the path was empty. She whirled back towards the young couple, shielding her eyes from the setting sun, the willows were soughing softly in the evening breeze, but there was no-one there, no sound of laughter, no young family, no squealing child.
Katniss took a quivering breath in, and laughed it out again shakily. There was a bench near her on the track and she sat on it, holding herself together with her arms. She felt deeply happy, weepy and shaken, but happy and safe and warm. She knew she wouldn't go to the Town Hall now, wouldn't try to find out how they had died, wouldn't search any more. There was a toot from the road, she looked round - there was the bus; the driver leaned out of his window and beckoned to her, she nodded to him, walked over and got in.
She took the same seat again, settled down, and looked out for a moment at the now suddenly busier street. People were bustling by, chatting into phones, checking the contents of purses, squinting into the sunset, tugging at children's hands. She felt in her pocket. The locket lay there, warm to her touch. She took it out of her pocket, wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand and fixed the chain round her neck, she held onto the locket for a moment, then let it drop into place against her skin.