Howard laughed. ‘You can take my word for it, Ben. Though Jake is not your blood relative, he became related to you when he married Laura.’

A qualification that rendered the little boy the more bemused, his expression denoted.

‘You haven’t forgotten how to speak English like we do,’ Marianne said to him with a smile. ‘I expected you to have a foreign accent.’

‘Now I see more of my daddy I get more practice,’ he replied, smiling up at Howard.

Marianne exchanged a glance with Laura. What more than that did Howard require to make his own uprooting from England worthwhile, and Karin was a bonus any man would value. She and Laura had hugged Ben when they arrived, such was their emotion.

For us it was a reunion with the kid we remember, Marianne thought. For him, though, we were strangers and he was entitled to back away from us.

Five years was a long time in a child’s life. But Ben was still the image of the great-grandfather dead before he was born. Marianne’s dad. On that account alone she would always feel drawn to him, but given his set-up could not expect it to be reciprocal. He would never, like Bessie sometimes did, pop in to say hallo to Marianne on his way home from school.

Nor, though Howard and Karin were to set up home in Munich, would he live with them, Marianne wagered. Howard would not go back on his decision not to try to part him from his mother.

She watched Ben join Karin’s children on a sofa beside the hearth, where they were seated playing what looked like the German version of Scrabble. The mellow afternoon had preceded a chilly April evening and a log fire lent cheer to the room, casting its glow upon the three small faces bent over the board game.

Tomorrow, Ben would become a stepbrother to Magda and Rudy. Would the time come when he would resent their living with his father, while he did not? If so, it would be one more heartache for a child for whom life had never gone smoothly.

‘Why not draw a family tree for Ben?’ she suggested to Howard. ‘Then he’ll know where he is with our lot!’

All three children glanced up at her, their expressions puzzled.

‘I should like please to know what type of tree is that,’ said Rudy.

‘Does our family in England have an orchard?’ Ben asked Howard.

Magda, two years her brother’s elder and as fair as he was dark, then wanted to know if it was perhaps an apple orchard, or did the trees bear pears like the one in her grandparents’ kitchen garden.

The adults were unable to hide their amusement.

‘They are laughing at my English,’ Magda said to Rudy, ‘and it is unfair. I am only nine and do not speak it often.’