‘We didn’t always have enough to eat,’ she went on. ‘So I was often hungry. I shared my mother’s bed for years, and we shared an apartment with another family. I was about seven when we got our own place. That’s when I started school. The afternoon shift. It fitted with my mother’s work. My mother talked about the bombing, but of course, I don’t remember that. I wasn’t born. Why do you ask?’ She paused. ‘You never went back to Germany after the war?’

There was no guile in Barbara’s face. Of course. She assumed Dora had been in Jersey with the occupiers, that she was German. She could lie again. Actually, I’m Swedish. She didn’t have the energy. And why? She wouldn’t fool Barbara.

‘No,’ Dora said. She would give nothing away. ‘I chose to stay.’ She pulled the cushion from behind her, pummelled the feather stuffing into shape, tucked it into the small of her back.

‘This is a nice room,’ Barbara said.

‘It has memories.’

Uncle Otto’s old medical books were still on the bookshelves, his Kienzle clock on the mantelpiece. He’d only brought what he could carry with him when he left Germany and although the clock no longer worked, it was a reminder of his house in Dresden, along with the Bauhaus rug which he’d rolled up and carried under his arm. Of course, Barbara would be noting all of it.

‘Tell me,’ Dora said. ‘Why were you so anxious to meet me? You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.’

‘After my mother died,’ Barbara said, ‘I found the photographs. I didn’t know why she had never shown me them. She never talked about the war.’

‘Perhaps that’s why,’ Dora said. ‘It was difficult, for that generation.’

‘Perhaps,’ Barbara said. ‘But it set me thinking. I knew my mother had been a nurse in the war. She told me she never left Germany. Seeing those photographs, taken in Jersey, made me curious. Then suspicious.’ She paused, added, ‘I think she lied.’

Dora wished she’d listened to her cautious half, have nothing to do with this woman again. Barbara was rubbing memories, stirring their genie, and they were rushing out too fast.

‘So I went there, to try and find out,’ Barbara was saying. ‘Silly, I know. But it mattered to me in a way I can’t explain. I’m sorry.’ She sniffed, delved into her handbag for a tissue. She is persistent, Dora thought, consistent too. But she was warming to this younger woman, less inclined to think ill of her.