‘My father used to say it was the food of angels.’ Stick with food, Dora thought, it’s neutral, safe.

‘My mother said something similar,’ Barbara said.

‘Was she nice, your mother?’

Barbara’s smile faded and it was a while before she spoke again. Says it all, Dora thought. She had touched a nerve.

‘To be honest,’ Barbara said, ‘I didn’t get on with her. I couldn’t wait to leave home. Perhaps that’s why I studied languages, to be sure of getting away. What about your mother?’

‘I never knew her,’ Dora said. ‘She died when I was born. My father mothered me, and I adored him.’

‘You’re lucky,’ Barbara said.

‘I think so,’ Dora said. How had they moved to sharing such intimacies? She nodded towards the asparagus. ‘You can’t buy this in England. Only the insipid green varieties that the English prefer. Where did you find it?’

‘My friend teaches at the German School in Richmond,’ Barbara said. She said it in German, Deutsche Schule. ‘Her mother lives in Hanover and brought some over.’

Dora entered the sitting room and put the vase on the coffee table. She indicated the sofa, Please make yourself comfortable, and sat in the chair opposite, the one she used every evening to read or watch television. The sun showed up the motes of dust in the air. The armrests, Dora noted, were grubby.

‘And you?’ Dora said. ‘Where were you brought up?’

‘In Hamburg,’ Barbara said.

‘That was bombed, was it not? Like London.’

Barbara nodded. There was a stiffening in the atmosphere. Uncle Otto had a friend, a German like himself, Jewish, a businessman, who’d returned to Germany after the war, working for the British, taking stock of the industry that had survived. They’d listened to his stories, the flattening of Hamburg.

‘What was it like?’ Dora said. ‘Growing up there after the war?’

Barbara laughed. ‘I didn’t know any different,’ she said. ‘We played in the bombsites, can you believe? We were told not to pick up anything metal. I was a sickly baby, my mother said. She said she couldn’t feed me properly, I didn’t thrive. She sold a silver bangle to pay for photos of me, in case I didn’t make it, so she could remember me.’ Her face grew serious and she paused, running her finger in the seam of the piping of the armrest. Dora was about to ask her to stop doing that, when Barbara looked up and began again.