She still sometimes played the ‘if’ game, wondering how her life would have been with Samuel. If he had asked her. If she had said yes. If. She was thirteen when he was introduced to her as someone ‘Daddy knew in the war’. A man with black brilliantined hair, lounging against the window frame in the front room. Thin, pale, a rather prominent Adam’s apple. Not a really handsome man. But something in his gaze had disturbed her. She didn’t know what it was, what to call it, but when she thought about it afterwards, she decided that he was the first man to have looked at her as a woman rather than as a child, and that there was a generosity in it, a chivalry, which even after nearly fifty years she had not quite recovered from.

His people had been in the diamond business in Amsterdam. Jews from old Spain. Seraphic? When the Nazis came they sent his parents, uncles, cousins and two sisters to the camps in Poland. Samuel had hidden like the little Frank girl, though he was luckier, of course. Got out. Came to England in a fishing boat. Six months later he went back. Helped to organize escape routes for aircrew until they caught him. After the liberation Queen Wilhelmina gave him a medal that he kept loose in the pocket of his suit jacket with his lighter and cigarettes.

She was eighteen when they met again. Nineteen before they became lovers. He was at the embassy in London then, Hyde Park Gate, and came down at weekends on the train from Paddington, and she would go with her father to meet him, terrified in case he had got off at some quite different station with his coat over his arm and his little case, and smiled at some other girl. Her father called him ‘the best sort of Jew’. He must have guessed what was going on but he never said anything. People didn’t in those days.

Was Samuel still alive? If so he’d be almost eighty, which she found impossible to imagine. She’d seen his name in The Times once. Part of a UN delegation to somewhere, so he must have had some success. Become somebody.