He told her he had a friend called Anna who’d invited them for coffee.

‘What could I say, Dora? Of course we must go.’

She lived round the corner, in Maresfield Gardens. He’d shown Dora a map.

‘One hundred metres, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Give or take.’

Dora had slipped her hand under Uncle Otto’s arm and he’d gripped it tight, patting it as they’d walked from their home to hers, you are safe, Doralein. I won’t let go. Dora, with her strawberry-blonde curls, Utility courts and Natural Rose lipstick, and he in his tweed jacket and Royal College tie, more English than the English. She was sure people were looking at her, would recognise her. She kept her eyes to the ground, but their gaze seemed to bore into her, There she goes. That’s her.

It was a warm day and she hadn’t needed a coat, but the leaves on the plane trees were turning orange. Was it September? October, perhaps?

Anna took her out into her garden and Dora was too scared to resist. She gave her a pair of secateurs and taught her how to deadhead the roses.

‘So the plant thinks it must flower again.’ She spoke English with a stronger accent than Dora. ‘To compensate. To renew. The body does that too.’ She added, ‘And the mind. Compensates. Genius is a form of renewal, did you know that? It often comes from suffering.’

They snipped the dead roses and the dahlias and asters and the red-hot pokers and the Japanese anemones.

‘It’s a defence,’ Anna said. ‘A way of coping with trauma.’

She wasn’t sure what Anna was talking about but found the rhythm of the flowers and the precision of their cuts soothing.

‘I’m a city girl,’ Anna went on. ‘Like you. But when I come out here at the end of the day, I am restored. Look.’ She pointed to a moss-drenched birdbath that stood in the middle of the lawn. A great tit was splashing in the water. ‘The bird knows no stress. Has no memories, no anxieties. Only instincts. Lucky him.’

They went indoors and sat on sofas in the sitting room which overlooked the garden. The maid brought the coffee in a silver pot and placed it on the table with a plate of thin wafer biscuits.

Sometimes, Dora thought, those events were far away, as if they were disconnected from her. They languished in hazy forms on the flats of her mind. At those times, she wondered if they had even happened. Then they would return, like the tail of a storm and whip her to the ground.

That December, Uncle Otto bought a garden fork and a spade and gave them to her as a present. ‘To take your mind off things.’