Marianne willed herself to stem the association of the past with the present that had dogged her since she stepped off the plane, but did not succeed in putting from her mind that the homely woman whose kitchen this was had once been a flaxen-haired girl in the wildly cheering crowds for whom their Führer had replaced God, and his ravings become their creed.

‘Please to sit down, Mrs Dean,’ Lisl said. ‘May I offer you some refreshment?’

‘No, thank you.’ Had that sounded as brusque to Frau Schmidt as it had to Marianne?

‘This is for all concerned the difficult situation,’ Lisl said as if she had divined Marianne’s thoughts. ‘And it is possible that we shall not know the outcome today.’

With that, she changed the subject. ‘I have seen in paperback some of your books here.’

‘In English, or in German?’ Marianne asked politely.

‘I believe in both languages.’

‘And you speak mine as well as your daughter does.’

‘I had, like Christina, the excellent education,’ Lisl replied, while noting Marianne’s black leather trousers, that would have made her own hips look like the back of a leather armchair.

‘But my English speaking,’ Lisl went on, ‘it was how you would call rusty, and was much improved by talking with your nephew.’

They had heard Christina and Howard enter the living room and shut the door, and Lisl was suddenly unable to hide her distress. ‘My heart it is breaking for them—’

‘Mine, too, Frau Schmidt.’

They abandoned their attempt to make conversation and sat listening to the tick of the grandfather clock, and Marianne thought, the hell with what her people did to mine. Right now we’re just two middle-aged women wishing we could put things right for the young couple in the next room.

It had taken but one glance at the girl he loved for Howard to think it impossible that there would not be a reconciliation.

The moment they were alone he had taken Christina in his arms, what they felt for each other no less strong now than it had always been. How, then, could something so impersonal come between them?

‘Please don’t do this to us, Christina,’ he pleaded.

They were seated on the sofa, the last of the day’s wintry sunlight enhancing the sheen of Christina’s hair. Serving too to emphasize her pallor and the weariness circling her eyes.

Not for the first time Howard silently cursed the ghost of the past, whose presence had haunted his marriage from the day he and Christina set up home in Manchester.

Once they were man and wife, the family had kept their feelings to themselves, counselled no doubt by Sarah Sandberg, who wisely had welcomed an outsider rather than alienate one of her own.