‘Oh!’ Dinah jumps to her feet. ‘Superficial and trivial?’ She’s as angry as if I’ve insulted her parents. She turns to David in appeal. ‘Can you hear her?’

David has the apprehensive expression of a man who’s just realised he’s walked into a wasp nest.

‘Listen to yourself! It’s not trivial what you do! The perfect fit, you call it, but there’s more to it than that. Look – you can even make ugly clothes fit. It’s not the point, to fit. What do you do?’

Her anger confuses me. I’m not sure what on earth I do at this very moment. It’s like the interview from hell. ‘I try to make people look good in their clothes.’

‘Look good? Nooo! Come here.’ She beckons me.

‘What?’

‘Come! Look at me!’

As I bend towards her she rubs her fingers roughly against my mouth, startling me. ‘Ow!’

She holds her hand in front of my eyes for me to see. Her fingers are red. ‘What’s that?’

‘Lipstick?’

‘Just lipstick?’

I nod.

‘Pah! Lucky I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. It’s not “just” anything. I’m going to tell you something important for you to understand. What does nineteen forty-five mean to you? David?’

Confused, he sits up in his plastic chair like a kid caught out by his teacher. ‘The year the war ended?’ he asks hesitantly, wondering, like me, where this inquisition is going.

‘Exactly. I was in a camp. The camp was Bergen-Belsen.’

My stomach contracts and my skin tightens, chills. Oh, Dinah. ‘I didn’t know.’

She glances at me and plays with her pearl earring. Her eyes soften. ‘How could you? I never talk about it. I wasn’t in there long, lucky for me. I was there for one winter.’ For a moment she’s distant; lost in thought.

The tick of the clock, Moss’s rasping breath.

‘It was long enough to starve, but by some miracle, not long enough to get sick.’ Her gaze returns to mine, intense and ageless. ‘Day after day we prayed for it to be over, you know? We prayed for the strength to carry on a little longer, not too far ahead, just for one more day because, you know, that’s what we were urging each other, we must go on a bit longer.’ She sighs deeply. ‘Always rumours, that Germany might be defeated tomorrow or the next day or the next month, if we can just hang on. And one day it was over.’

Dinah looks down and rubs her fingers distractedly, wiping my lipstick off them. Her lips tighten as she holds back her emotions.