She piled the empty cups and plates onto the tray and took them into the kitchen. She hoped she’d stayed calm, looked indifferent. Maximilian List. Alive. He had a wife who looked after him. Children most likely. Grandchildren. Lucky him. He’d got away with it. Dora’s head tightened and she could feel her anger bubble. Did his conscience play tricks on him? Did he ever think about what he’d done? Did he ever think about her?

She placed the tray on the draining board, looked out over the garden to where Barbara sat, leaning back in her chair, chin in the air. Hoffmann’s daughter. She gripped the side of the sink. List’s daughter. Hoffmann and List. Dora’s war, shrunk to two people. Stretched by two people, as if she’d been on the rack and they had turned the wheel until her tendons tore and her bones broke. Her life in ghostly, ghastly tatters, while they lived out their days without a care. She had survived, Uncle Otto kept telling her that. Millions hadn’t. But numbers meant nothing when faces brought it home. Their child, their progeny, sitting butter-wouldn’t-melt in her garden.

Dora resented this woman for being alive, for being somebody else’s daughter. She would have liked a child, a daughter, like her. But List and Hoffmann had destroyed any chance of that.

Did Barbara know anything? If her mother had lied about her father, and about being in Jersey, what else had she lied about? Barbara must have a birth certificate, or had she forged that, too? Lost in the bombing. Born in the countryside. No records. It was so terrible here in Germany. Nobody thought about ordinary people. Been widowed by it? Poor me. I had to bring my daughter up all by myself. She could see Nurse Hoffmann now, with her plain, round face and little mouth, weeping, My boyfriend leaves for Germany soon. She left not long after. Perhaps List took her with him. They made no secret of their affair, Hoffmann and List, that was for sure. Mein Liebling. My darling. Those words had stung Dora like a hornet.

Barbara was coming towards the house. Slim, elegant, a professional woman. Perhaps she had List’s physique, his brains. Daughters often took after their fathers. The sins of the fathers. She wanted to be repulsed by her, but there was an innocence about Barbara and Dora believed her when she said her mother never spoke of the war. Not many people spoke about the war in Britain, and they were on the winning side. Too busy putting it behind them, moving on.

Even the victims, Jews who’d escaped before the war. Others who’d survived the camps. Why me? What more could have been done? Survivor’s guilt, that’s what Uncle Otto called it.

‘But I lied,’ Dora said to him once.