Did that happen in old age? Thinking more and more about the past? She’d have to ask at the bridge club. Do you all reminisce too? She was doing a lot of it these days. But apart from Charles, who else could she remember with? And even then, what could she say? Do you remember sleeping in a bed with white sheets again? He wouldn’t know what she was talking about.

She straightened up, studied the bush, looked towards the house as if expecting Uncle Otto to be waving at her from the window. He never asked her what happened in the war.

‘You’ll tell me,’ he’d said. ‘In your own time.’

Dora had never told him. She hadn’t the words. She hadn’t a story, and couldn’t borrow one either. There was nothing in the Bible, or Dante, nothing in Dostoevsky, or Goethe that she could point to, it was like this. Who wrote about what happened to women in war, apart from Berthold Brecht? She was no Mother Courage, and what had happened to Dora was not part of that version of war either.

She hadn’t slept in those early days when she’d first come back. She startled at every sound. Lay rigid in fear until she thought her head would crack with the weight and pain of it. Every creak and groan of the house was a footstep closing in, a soldier-in-waiting. To sleep, perchance to dream. She daren’t dream. She put off the moment of sleeping, made sure she had everything around her, counted her books each night, her shoes and stockings. She made sure her underwear was in order, felt in the drawer that nothing was missing, that the soap in its wrapping paper was still tucked in her box at the bottom of her wardrobe. That was her talisman. She had to lock the front door, and check it twice before she went to bed, make sure the windows were shut and fastened, even though the summer air was hot and stifling. Uncle Otto put a bolt on her bedroom door.

‘No one can get in now, Doralein. You can sleep securely.’

He prescribed her barbiturates.

Night terrors. She wanted to build a wall between day and night, between what happened before 1943 and what happened after, to keep the barbarians at the gate. She tried to put that baby out of her mind, too, but it crowded in sometimes, the soft smell of it, the touch of the slippery skin. It hadn’t even cried.