‘Welcome home, dear girl,’ he said gruffly, his arms closing around her. ‘You’ve been absent for far too long.’

His tweed jacket was rough against her cheek and smelled of cigar smoke. Overcoming the desire never to lift her head from it again she looked up at him, saying thickly, ‘It’s wonderful to be home, Papa.’ Tears sparkled on her eyelashes. ‘Berthold would have come with me if he could, but he has vast responsibilities now. Josef does a very great deal, but there are some things only Berthold can sign and some people it would be inappropriate for Josef to meet without Berthold also being there.’

‘Well, of course there are, Vicky,’ he said as the stationmaster and the station’s one and only porter carried the luggage out to the waiting motorcar. ‘Berthold is now responsible for one of the biggest industrial enterprises in Germany and we’ll talk of how he’s coping as head of the House of Remer a little later on. For now I want to say hello to my grandson.’

He walked over to where Max’s nanny was standing and gently eased the shawl away from Max’s sleeping face.

For a few seconds he was silent and then he said emotionally, ‘My, but he’s a grand little boy, Vicky. He has your mother’s eyes and my nose. Keep bringing him to Shuttleworth Hall every year and I promise you I’ll make a Yorkshireman of him.’

Minutes later they were all in a magnificent motorcar adorned by a mascot on its radiator, a silver figure of a woman looking as if she was about to take flight.

‘She’s called the Spirit of Ecstasy,’ Vicky’s father said to Paul as he drove along the winding lanes skirting the glistening River Ure.

Vicky thought the silver figure beautifully named. She gave a deep contented sigh. She was home. For the next few weeks she wouldn’t be living in a vast mansion in the most glittering, sophisticated city in Europe. She would be living in the home built by her grandfather, a substantial country house built of mellow stone, honey-coloured woods and soft grey slate. Instead of streets jammed with motorcars and horse-drawn carriages and controlled by white-gloved, spike-helmeted policemen carrying sabres, there would be the pleasurable bustle of village life in Little Ridding and the rolling calm of the surrounding Yorkshire countryside. Countryside that was among the most beautiful in the world.

Later that evening, when she had read a bedtime story to Paul and seen Max settled into the nursery that had once been hers, she stood at the window and looked out over the gardens. Her father’s dogs, Harry, a Yorkshire terrier, and Coco and Charlie, two cocker spaniels, were asleep on the terrace. The heat of the day still hung in the air and her father’s roses gleamed milkily pale in the blue-spangled dusk. She could hear birds gathering for the night and the sound of the river as it flowed over its rock-strewn bed. Her throat ached with the beauty of it all. How, when she loved being at Shuttleworth Hall so much, was she ever going to truly think of Berlin as being her home?