Roberta Grieve

Song of Memories Roberta Grieve

Returning to her Moscow apartment one bitterly cold day in 1937, Natalie Fisher finds the place trashed and her family gone. Like so many in Stalin's Russia they have been arrested and probably killed. She has fallen in love with her second cousin Stephan, a talented violinist. She has just discovered she is pregnant and in despair goes to the British Embassy for help. There she meets diplomat, Lawrence Sinclair, who proposes marriage as the only way to get safely back to England. She accepts, convinced that Stephan is dead and worried for the future of her baby.

Back in England she tries to be a good wife to the much older and rather old-fashioned Lawrence and mother to daughter Stephanie. But after being injured when they are trapped in a bombed house, Lawrence discovers that he is not Stephanie's father and he and Natalie become estranged.

Over the years, Natalie finds consolation in her garden, her daughter and her piano, often playing an old Russian folk song - her 'song of memories'. Stephanie inherits Stephan's gift for music and dreams of being a concert pianist.

Meanwhile Stephan has survived incarceration in the Siberian gulag, escaping to America. After the war, he returns to England and, unable to continue his career as a violinist due to his sufferings in Siberia, he becomes a music teacher and composer.

Each holds on to the dream that the other has survived and that one day they will be reunited.