‘It’s me,’ Lotti said, kissing him on the cheek. ‘Lotti. I’ve come to see how the two of you are. Eva tells me you’ve begun butterfly-hunting again.’

His eyes brightened and Lotti wondered if anyone else in the whole of Berlin had spent the war as oblivious to its horrors as her uncle had. The scurrying down to the local shelter during air raids had annoyed him intensely, but he had never seemed aware that he risked incineration, or that fellow Berliners were being incinerated in their thousands.

It was the same when the city had fallen to the Russians. The only Russian to have crossed Berthold and Bertha’s doorstep was a soldier still in his teens who, when Bertha offered him a cup of mint tea, declined politely, helped himself to a clock that had taken his fancy and, the clock under one arm, a Kalashnikov under the other, had disappeared, carefully closing the door behind him.

‘There are lots of butterflies on ground where houses once stood,’ Berthold said now as Bertha began making tea for the three of them. ‘Buddleia grows there easily and butterflies love buddleia.’

Lotti prayed for patience, wondering how Eva endured Berthold’s inanities when her days were spent in a medical centre treating the injuries of women who had suffered gang rapes, women who desperately needed an abortion as a result of rape, and raped women who had been infected with venereal disease.

‘There is still no news of Claus,’ she said, trying to turn the conversation to something pertinent. ‘Hester is now spending all day, every day, making inquiries at all the Allied headquarters. None of them is willing to release names of captured war criminals, and that he has been captured we know from some of the Russian women who are still living within the precincts of the Spandau factory. They say they’re staying there until they’re given a chance of testifying as to how he saved their lives.’

‘Hester?’ Berthold blinked. ‘Isn’t Hester the Jewish girl?’

Lotti gritted her teeth. ‘Yes—and she’s also your daughter-in-law. If Claus is ever traced, it will only be because of her Herculean efforts.’

Berthold wasn’t interested in Herculean efforts. ‘I found a Marbled Skipper the other day,’ he said, only really interested in talking about butterflies. ‘At least, I think it’s a Marbled Skipper. Would you like to see it?’

‘Only the fact that he’s family—and more especially that he’s Max’s father—enables me to keep my patience when I’m with him,’ she said to Eva that evening when they met up for a precurfew drink. ‘The war might as well not have happened, Berlin might as well not be in ruins. It all passes Berthold by.’

‘It passes my mother by as well,’ Eva said with a weary grin. ‘They are both suffering from premature senility, and in a way it’s a blessing. The world may have become a disaster zone for millions, but they’ve been spared much awareness of it.’

She tilted her head a little to one side, eyeing Lotti curiously. ‘What’s troubling you, Lotti?’ she asked, concerned. ‘There are times when you look more strained now than you did when the bombing was at its height. What’s the matter?’