‘There’s only ever been one woman for me,’ he said, ‘but by the time I realized I loved her she was my brother’s wife. I’ve spent my life staying away from you, Leona, lecturing for a pittance, in this country or that, burying myself in the political scene wherever – Heaven help the world, there is still no shortage of evils to fight – filling my time in the only way I know how. And kidding myself that I’d got over you.’

Leona was thankful that she was sitting down. Oh dear God…

‘When Frank got that virus on the eve of Carla’s wedding, and I let him down after promising I would give Carla away,’ Henry went on, ‘you no doubt thought me a callous bastard—’

She had.

‘I got as far as the airport, but I couldn’t bring myself to fly to Manchester and stand beside you under the chupah during the wedding ceremony. Stand in Frank’s place, when it’s where I yearned to be and still do. I had no intention of ever telling you this, Leona—’

‘And oh, how I wish you hadn’t,’ she replied. ‘You see, Henry, life has played on you and me one of its little jokes. And somehow that makes how I’ve spent so many years despising you – and myself for wanting you – now the more painful to bear.’

They looked at each other with the length of the room between them, in a silence fraught with a danger both recognized.

It was Henry who broke it. ‘We are going to have to forget that this conversation took place.’

‘But we never shall,’ Leona replied, ‘and in a way, what each of us now knows is comfort, if of the cold kind.’

‘If you were married to anyone but Frank—’

‘But we can’t do the dirty on your brother, can we? Nor on the loving husband Frank has been to me.’

Chapter Ten

Henry’s young guests were not due in Paris until later in the month and were meanwhile shedding some of their preconceptions of Germany.

Both A.P. and Jeremy had expected to experience the wariness and repugnance expressed by their elders. Instead, it was for them no different from arriving in any of the foreign countries they had visited on family holidays in the past.

‘There must be something wrong with me,’ said A.P. as they stood beside a carousel at Munich Airport, their eyes glued to the luggage whizzing towards them. ‘According to my gran, my skin should have prickled when I stepped off the plane on to German soil.’

‘It wasn’t soil, it was tarmac, and you can shake hands with me,’ said Jeremy.

‘I’m relieved to hear it. I thought it might be because I’m only half Jewish. I see my rucksack coming—’ He grabbed it. ‘And there’s yours, Jeremy—’