Love is a fast worker, especially first love, and so it was that, barely three months after being admitted into the sanatorium, I found myself in bed contemplating proposing marriage to my nurse. I could scarcely imagine how Father would react at the news! The instructions in his letter had been clear: I should not visit the farmhouse again unless it was an emergency, but I was past caring - and well enough to leave the hospital. I had been well enough for a couple of weeks, in fact, but had been loath to leave for fear of letting go of Anna. Now I knew she loved me, I made up my mind to propose to her and, if she agreed, journey out to see Father and tell him the news before taking her back to England.

All my dreams evaporated later that evening, however, when she came to visit me after her usual rounds. I was sitting up smoking a cigarette and I sensed the change in her the moment she entered the room.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Paul,’ she said, looking up at me with a strange panic flooding her eyes. ‘I am so sorry.’

I gestured for her to take a seat next to me. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ She was usually so controlled.

She walked into the room and closed the door, but didn’t move any nearer to the bed. ‘I have lied to you,’ she said simply.

‘What have you lied about?’ A cold feeling had begun creeping through me.

She looked down at her hands. ‘My name is not Anna Maleva,’ she said quietly. ‘My real name is Anna-Sonia Kuplin, and I am an agent of the Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del. Two months ago, I was instructed by my superior, a man in the DP camp at Burgdorf, to seduce you and recruit you to our cause.’

She seemed to be talking at me through a fog or a dream. I looked at my hands and was surprised to see they were shaking. I couldn’t seem to stop them. ‘Why?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Why ... were you asked to recruit me?’

She walked over to the bed and stood by the edge of it. ‘My superior wants to know about all my patients, but he was particularly interested in you,’ she said. ‘He knew of your father, and of his hatred for Communism. Your experience in intelligence and your youth were also seen as . . . attractive qualities. ’ She grimaced at this, but made herself continue. ‘I was told to work on the bitterness you feel against your father to persuade you to join us.’

The blood was rushing around my head, and my chest was heaving.

‘So all of this . . .’ I said, gesturing futilely at the room where we had spent so much of our time together in the previous weeks, where we had made love, even. ‘All of this was because you wanted me to spy for you?’