As she slid her arms around his waist, he thought of the danger his secret activities constantly put her in and of how staunchly she stood by him. An earlier plot to kill Hitler had already failed and he and his fellow conspirators were on the verge of carrying out another attempt. If this one failed and if this time his name and the names of others in the conspiracy became known, it would be the death penalty not only for him, but possibly for her also. And still she gave him her unstinting support. Though she failed to see it as such, it was courage of a high order.

‘It’s over,’ he said as the hum of the bombers overhead began to fade away and the sound of flak guns became more and more intermittent.

‘Thank God.’ Her soft, smoky voice was unsteady with relief. Keeping her arms around his waist, she raised her face to his. ‘Whenever there is a raid, I can’t help wondering if Hugo is one of the pilots and of how he must feel if he is. Of how truly terrible it must be for him, dropping bombs on a city that he’s always regarded as a second home, a city that his father and so many of the rest of his family are living in.’

‘I suspect he’s a fighter pilot, darling,’ he said, trying to spare her the nightmare of her thoughts. ‘He’ll be flying a Hurricane or a Spitfire, not a bomber.’

She didn’t say anything, for thinking of her cousin in the cockpit of a fighter plane was almost as bad as imagining him at the controls of a bomber.

Trying to focus her thoughts on something other than Hugo she looked around at the mirrors and pictures that had crashed to the floor. ‘Let’s clear up the worst of this mess before we leave for the restaurant. It’s not fair to leave it for Dorie to do.’

Dorie was their live-in maid, who was out for the evening and who, hopefully, had been in an air raid shelter for the last hour and a half.

‘Pour us both a steadying Martini,’ he said, picking up one of the picture frames and shaking the broken glass from it, ‘this job won’t take long.’

*

Once at the restaurant he found it hard to keep his mind focused on the dinner-table conversation, amusing and interesting as it was. He even found it hard to appreciate the food, which was even more of a pity, because Horscher’s was one of the finest restaurants in Berlin—and one miraculously free of food-rationing restrictions.

Aware that serious topics were unlikely to be raised because the Radcliffs were too bowled over at being out on the town in the company of a film star—which, with two films under her belt and another one due out in a month’s time, was what Ilse now very definitely was—Nicholas pondered on the meeting he was due to have the next evening with Max.