Before the lawyers of the family had time to utter, Marianne said quietly, ‘Oughtn’t the first consideration to be the possibility of a reconciliation? I was always under the impression that Howard loved his wife.’

‘Trust my sister the novelist to take a romantic attitude when common sense is called for!’ Harry snorted.

Again Howard banged on the table. ‘Of course I’m still in love with Christina. And if it weren’t for the bloody past we could’ve been happy ever after.’ He managed to calm down. ‘But there’s little chance of us getting together again. When I called Munich to speak to Christina – the day I received her letter – she refused to come to the phone and her father hung up on me,’ he said miserably. ‘I’ve tried several times since and the same thing happened.’

‘But don’t let it get you down,’ said Frank. ‘Leona and I are accustomed to encountering that sort of thing in the early stages of a marital separation, including the parental interference that sometimes goes with it—’

‘But none of us, thank God, is accustomed to dealing with Nazis!’ said Harry.

‘The Schmidts are not Nazis!’ Howard yelled at him. ‘Would I have married their daughter if that’s how they’d come over when I met them?’

‘But with Germans one can never be quite sure, and that’s the trouble,’ said Henry, unhelpfully.

Arnold then had his say, pompous as usual. ‘Nonsense, Henry. Utter nonsense, if I may say so. And if Britain had taken that attitude since the war, refused to trust Germany and Germans, we would now be the laughing stock of Europe.’

‘But that isn’t to say that there aren’t elements in Germany, as elsewhere, biding their time and laughing behind their hands,’ Henry countered. ‘If you’d like some evidence of that, Arnold, I’ll be pleased to ask one of my contacts to send it to you.’

‘I’m standing here with a broken heart and they’re discussing neo-Nazis!’ Howard exclaimed.

‘You do want Christina back then, no matter what?’ Marianne asked him.

His reply was brief and crisp. ‘It wouldn’t work, Marianne. She said in her letter she couldn’t live feeling herself an enemy in the camp.’

Poor Christina, thought Marianne. Try though the family had – even Harry and Ann – to be warm and natural towards her, an invisible barrier had remained. Would it have been any different with any Jewish family? Yet Howard had loved her enough to take that chance. And she had borne him a child.

‘I suppose my son is blaming us for this,’ Ann said while drying her eyes.

Howard went to kiss her. ‘No, Mum. I brought it on myself.’