‘I didn’t know you spoke German,’ he said finally. She heard betrayal there, fear. She leaned forward on the range, her back to him, its heat seeping into her body.

‘Yes.’ She had no choice now, she had to tell him. ‘You trusted me, just now,’ she said. ‘Can I trust you?’

He looked at her, eyes level and suspicious. She took a breath, wait a moment.

‘I’m German,’ she said. ‘And Jewish.’

She heard him breathe in, a sharp huhhhh. He had not been expecting to hear that, she could tell.

‘I thought you were Swedish,’ he said. He was frowning, his lips tight in a snarl.

‘Does that make a difference?’ she said.

She’d met them, in London, two-faced liberals who hated Jews.

It was a beat before he spoke. What did that tell her?

‘No,’ he said.

‘You hesitated.’

‘Because I was thinking,’ he said. ‘If I were German. Or Jewish, would I tell a lie too?’

Are you sure? That’s why?

‘It’s not brave,’ Dora said. ‘Or honourable. But I don’t want to be rounded up. Sent away. Treated like a slave. Like these poor men. Or worse. Who knows what they’re doing, the Nazis?’

She could feel the anger grow inside her, bitterness, too.

‘But you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know what went on in Germany, before the war. Not to Jews. That was never talked about here. It was never in the papers.’ Except the Jewish ones, and the Communist ones, but who listened to Bolsheviks? Jewish Bolsheviks?

‘No,’ he said. ‘So tell me.’

‘They humiliated us,’ she went on. ‘Isolated us. Took our businesses. Our livelihoods. Like they did with the Jews here, in Jersey.’

He was sitting at the table, listening. He looked chastened, confused. She couldn’t stop, not now. It had been bottled up for too long.

‘They threw me out of school. I had no right, they said, to education. I wanted to be a doctor, like my father, but they threw me out of school with nothing. I was top of my class. Said I wasn’t worth it. They wouldn’t spend money on Jews.’ She paused. ‘There were rumours about camps. They locked the troublemakers in camps.’ She paused, blew through her lips. ‘And Jews. Such camps. The stories. People dying.’

He pushed himself up from the table, walked over and pulled her close.

‘I would never betray you,’ he said.

Did she believe him? He had hesitated, one beat.

‘Nor me you,’ she said. Easy words, easy words. How strong would she be?

He squeezed her close, took her hand, led her back to the table.

‘If you’ve kept a secret from me, then I’ve kept this one from you,’ he said. ‘A few of us do what we can against the Germans. We don’t do much, we can’t do much. We have no weapons, no support. Nowhere to hide.’

‘We?’