Barbara laughed then. ‘Maybe not.’

‘When is your birthday?’

‘The twenty-fourth of February.’

Nurse Hoffmann was not pregnant, Dora knew, or if she had been, it was early days. Was that why Hoffmann had disappeared? It would make sense, before she showed. Dora lifted her blouse away from her neck, waved it so the breeze came through.

‘Perhaps you were a big baby,’ she said. No baby was big in the war, but Barbara wouldn’t know that. She was sure Hoffmann had left in March 1944. Cold. Windy too. What was it the English say? March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. It had been windy, standing outside for the Appell in the driving, biting rain.

‘That woman, the one whose photograph I first showed you,’ Barbara said. ‘Are you sure you don’t know her?’

‘I’ve told you,’ Dora said. Snapped. ‘No.’

‘Perhaps she was a friend of my mother’s. Please think.’

‘Why are you dredging up the past?’ Dora said. ‘Why are you doing it? Why are you really doing it?’

Barbara sat back in the chair, ran her finger round the rim of the flute so it sang like a glass harp.

‘It’s been difficult for my generation of Germans,’ she said. ‘To live in the shadow of the war, with parents refusing to admit what happened. We took on their guilt.’

‘You can’t be blamed for the past.’

‘No, but we are responsible for the future. We need to account for what went on, before we can forge ahead. That doesn’t start in the archive. It starts at home.’

‘But why is this woman important to you?’

‘Because I have this crazy feeling,’ Barbara said, ‘since I found the photographs, that perhaps my mother isn’t even my mother.’

‘She brought you up. Cared for you. That’s a mother.’

‘Perhaps she adopted me.’

‘Still your mother. Besides, she would have told you.’

‘She lied about the war. Why shouldn’t she lie about that? Women of her generation often lied about adopting a child.’

‘Do you not have a birth certificate?’

‘Only a replacement,’ Barbara said. ‘My mother said that all her papers were lost in the war, the originals, and the archives were bombed. She could have made anything up.’ She breathed in. ‘I think that woman might know. Perhaps my mother kidnapped me.’

Dora laughed, a short nervous tee. ‘Your father isn’t your father, your mother isn’t your mother. You’re not who you think you are. Goodness me, you don’t think you’re making too much of this? The English have an expression for that, making a mountain out of a molehill. Do you know it?’

‘I’m serious,’ Barbara said.

‘Enough.’ Dora’s voice was firm.

‘But the Nazis did,’ Barbara went on. ‘They kidnapped babies. Little blond, blue-eyed babies. To bring up as Aryans.’

‘This is nonsense,’ Dora said.

The wine was making Barbara talkative.