He offered a ringed hand. ‘Disgraceful of me! On such an occasion too! I must blame too much wine at dinner … and the music, you hear it? So reminding, the old songs. Of course not to you, I know. I apologize, but this one is charming, no? “Ein Lied geht um die Welt”, such memories. I was a little younger than you are now. Come! They will think that I am flirting.’ He took her cold hand and they walked together towards the candle-lit group which was laughing at one of the dogs begging elegantly for a sugar crystal.

She moved away from the tiled stove against which she had been leaning and stood in the centre of her childhood room. ‘Adieu,’ she said aloud and pulled the suitable dress over her head, threw it across a chair, rummaged in the battered hold-all, stuffed the packet of Deutschmarks at the bottom, found her airplane slide, pinned it in her hair.

A whirring of wheels and weights behind her; the little bird sprang from his rustic house. ‘Cuckoo!’ The door snapped shut behind him. She hunted about in her bag for the Gauloises, lit one, took the packet to the high wooden bed and sat down staring at her feet swinging above the polished boards of the floor. Barley-fields and the prodding stork; sweet peas and Mamma’s pale eyes, the music loitering behind the visions, candlelight on the still terrace, Horst’s quiet kindness; ‘We are not little grey mice’; the red glow of a cigar coming towards her, the Café de Paris. Guilt. Her eyes started to brim with tears, she checked them, cleared her throat, took a long expert pull at her cigarette, patted the plastic airplane. ‘Fantastic!’ she said. ‘Fantastic!’

Chapter Four

At half past five Cuckoo awoke and snapped open her eyes like a china-doll. An instant wakening: no gentle drift from blessed sleep to comfortable awareness, but a sudden arrival into the morning. She lay perfectly still in the shadowy room, the early light glimmering through the cracks in the shutters, fanning above the gathered head of the curtains.

She had, it appeared, not moved at all during the night and lay now as calm and straight as a Crusader’s lady on her tomb; save that her eyes were open and her arm in a sling and she felt altogether far too comfortable, cosseted, warm and alive for such an analogy. Alive being, without doubt, the operative word. One arm relaxed at her side, the other lightly across her breast, two feet neat white cones beneath the unruffled sheet. Refreshed, relaxed, aware.