Lotti, heavily enveloped in a miscellaneous collection of jumpers, cardigans, a far too-large military greatcoat that had once belonged to one of Nicholas’s friends and with a headscarf tied turban-like over her hair, knew she was coming off badly in comparison. She took a drink of the so-called coffee, wishing her mother had served it in a mug and not a bone-china coffee cup. A mug she would have been able to warm her hands around.

‘I thought that after Vati died you would leave the city, taking everything that was valuable with you. Nearly everyone else who has the choice has evacuated it. Even moving only as far west as Wannsee or Potsdam has to be safer than remaining here, especially now the Russians are so near to the city.’

She saw her mother flinch and knew that it wasn’t because she had spoken of Russians, but because she had spoken of her father. Though she and Ilse had grieved for him, it had been nothing on the scale of their mother’s grief. ‘No one,’ she had said at the funeral, looking like a carved effigy, her face heavily veiled, ‘will ever know just how much your father loved me and of how much he gave up for me.’

‘The only thing I ever knew Vati to give up were the steelworks,’ Ilse had said to her afterwards, ‘and he did that because he wanted Claus to inherit them sooner rather than later, didn’t he? I can’t see that it had anything whatever to do with Mutti.’

Lotti hadn’t been able to see that it had, either. Her private opinion had always been that the handing over of the House of Remer to Claus had been something that had deeply distressed her mother, rather than being something she had wanted.

In normal circumstances, her mother’s remark might have been one she would have discussed with Claus, but though Claus had attended the funeral, her conversation with him had been stilted. He had looked like a man under the strain of keeping a colossal secret and, considering his many close contacts within the Nazi hierarchy, she had not wanted to speculate as to what his secret was. Ilse had barely exchanged two words with him, either. It had been only months after Nicholas’s arrest and subsequent execution and she had still been like a woman locked in ice. For reasons over and above their father’s death it had not been a happy occasion and neither she nor Ilse had seen Claus since.

‘I’d like you to do something for me,’ Zelda said, breaking in on her thoughts. ‘I want you to take Berthold with you when you go back to Ilse’s. It was Claus’s idea that he live here, but I can’t endure it a moment longer. It was bad enough when your father was alive, but now your father is dead it’s impossible. It’s like looking after a child. He has no grasp of what is happening. He wanders the streets when air raids are in progress. He complains constantly at not having things like coffee and sugar and chocolate as if I were depriving him of them through spite. And he annoys me. He always has and now he’s become so prematurely senile, he annoys me even more.’