‘May is a busy month in the garden,’ she said to Josef, who hadn’t a clue as to his sister-in-law’s secret love life. ‘It’s why Paul isn’t here. It’s the prime time of year for crossing roses and grafting onto rootstocks.’

At the thought of a grown man spending his time conveying pollen from one rose to another and then growing the resultant seed in the hope of producing a worthwhile new variety of rose, a trial and error process that required many thousands of cross-breedings and could take years, Josef raised his eyes to heaven.

Deeply grateful that his stepson had no German blood and that his being in Yorkshire throughout the war years had effectively put paid to Zelda’s earlier ambition that he be involved in the running of the steelworks, he seated himself in a wing chair near to one of the windows.

‘I’m going to see Kirchner today, in fact I should be with him now.’

The name of their leading banker immediately caught Zelda’s attention.

‘Why?’ she asked, crossing the room towards him. ‘We don’t have a problem, do we?’

He pinched the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb. ‘The repayments the government are demanding on the profits we made out of government loans during inflation are biting deeply and there are some old deals we still have to pay out on.’

‘And you think the Nazi Party would put an end to these kinds of demands?’

‘Yes. Hitler is on the right track. He wants an end to endless bureaucracy. He wants an end to unnecessary Socialist strikes. He knows who is to blame for all Germany’s troubles and he knows how to make Germany great again.’

She sat down on his knee, her face full of doubt. ‘But he’s such a rabble-rouser, darling. And his Nazi Party is such a little political party. Tinhorn is the word they’d use for it in the States.’

It was a remark he would have slapped down if it had come from anyone else.

He slid his arm around her waist. The perfume she had worn yesterday lingered on her skin, musky and exotic. Even more pleasurable was that after seventeen years of marriage she was still light enough to sit easily on his knee. Nearly every woman of the same age that he knew was built like a dray-horse. Zelda was as slender and supple as a scantily clad cabaret dancer.

‘You’re wrong, Liebling,’ he said without annoyance. ‘The Nazis will come to power sooner or later and when they do there will be no more House of Remer repayments, no fear of the Communist Party coming to power and taking over the factories, and no more being beholden to Jewish bankers, either.’

Aware of how hard he’d worked to ensure that the House of Remer was still one of Germany’s major steelworks, she kept to herself her thoughts that the Nazis were far too oddball an organization and far too socially unacceptable ever to come to power.