Their eyes held, both of them thinking of the person he had hoped would be the mother of his children. Both of them thinking of Nancy.

‘She’s the only person in the family, apart from Adam, who won’t be at the wedding,’ Vicky said, the constant anxiety she felt for her daughter’s safety clear in her eyes.

‘I shall miss her not being here just as much as you will.’ Zelda stubbed out her barely smoked cigarette in a crystal ashtray. ‘The upside of her not being here, though, is that it will make things easier for Claus. Though I guess you’re glad that particular family love affair broke up, aren’t you?’

Vicky felt her heart contract. There were still so many issues between her and Zelda, all of them to do directly or indirectly with the House of Remer, that it sometimes seemed to her they would never be able to enjoy a reunion without tension of one kind or another surfacing.

‘Your son is a Nazi,’ she said steadily. ‘On that count alone I didn’t want to see Nancy marry him. As for her becoming the wife of the head of a steelworks that devotes itself to making weapons of war—I feel no differently about that now than I did when I first repudiated the steelworks, decades ago.’

Zelda raised a hand. ‘Pax, Vicky. I want a stress-free family wedding just as much as you do and under the circumstances—Berthold and Claus sporting lapel badges given to them personally by the Führer—it’s going to be hard enough to achieve without us falling out into the bargain. What do you say we crack open a bottle of champagne? Ilse may be depriving me of Max as a son-in-law, but she is at least marrying someone I like. It’s worth celebrating in a world where there’s pretty little else to celebrate.’

‘Wunderbar, Paul!’ Wearing a nip-waisted black jacket with a peplum and a vivid emerald-green swirling skirt, Lotti hurtled towards him down a second-floor corridor of the Schulenburg mansion. ‘Isn’t it marvellous that all of us are together like this?’

Paul, big and raw-boned and looking every inch an American, gave his easy, lopsided grin and opened his arms wide to give her a bear-like hug.

‘It certainly is,’ he said as she squeezed him so tightly she nearly robbed him of breath. ‘It reminds me of school holidays when we were children.’

‘Except Nancy isn’t with us.’ He was so tall to her diminutive five foot two inches that despite her teeteringly high heels she had to take a step backwards in order to look up into his face. ‘What is the latest news of her? The last we heard she was working in an army hospital in Barcelona.’

‘That was our last piece of news as well.’ He tucked her hand through the crook of his arm. ‘The heaviest fighting at the moment seems to be along the River Ebro in Catalonia. My geography’s a biz hazy, but I don’t think it’s near to Barcelona. Is your room on this floor or were you just noseying around to see who you could find?’