Three

Max had a sister, but it was a fact he would rather forget. This puzzled Rhiannon. Not that he didn’t love Inge, he tried to explain, not that she hadn’t been there for him when they had had to grow up quickly when their mother died – he’d been only twelve – it was just, well, complicated. The more reticent he became the more Rhiannon had the urge to press him. She was curious to know what his early life had been like and why he was the way he was. She had met Inge only twice and then on formal family occasions in Travemünde.

In Britain there was little need for Max to involve Rhiannon in his family, but in Berlin it was a different matter. Inge had offered – more out of a sense of duty than affection, Max remarked sardonically – to put them up until they found somewhere to stay. Rhiannon was eager to take up the invitation. He was not. As a compromise they agreed to pay Inge and her husband a visit.

They lived in Neukölln, a working-class area in the south-west of the city. At Rathaus Neukölln Max and Rhiannon got down in a square of decaying neo-Gothic facades. A gaggle of ill-fed, bedraggled children were playing in the gutter. Rhiannon noticed that some of them were not wearing shoes. Two trams creaked and rattled past each other over intermeshing tracks. They crossed into Spatzenstrasse. The apartment was on the third floor of a concrete block of flats.

‘It’s you!’ exclaimed Inge when she opened the door to them. Surprise mingled with confusion on her face. ‘Why didn’t you call to let me know you were coming?’

‘I sent a card from London.’

‘That was days ago. You didn’t call.’

‘Well, here we are. Are you going to invite us in?’

Rhiannon was shocked by the sharpness of the exchange. Weren’t they at least pleased to see each other? She said nothing but followed Inge as she ushered them into the sitting room where husband Hans grunted a greeting from behind his copy ofder Angriff,a Nazi paper. He put the newspaper to one side and shook hands with them, as civility demanded. He, too, seemed taken aback by their presence.

‘It’s good you came now,’ Inge altered her tone. ‘Anna is having an afternoon nap. That gives us a bit of time.’

Rhiannon glanced around. The rooms were crammed with furniture and spotlessly clean, the Dresden dolls and rococo ornaments lined up on the sideboard while on another dresser photos of Hans Fichte and his kinsfolk stared back, stiff and unsmiling. A photo of Anna had been added. With a plait above her head and a plump, open little face, she was just like her mother. Rhiannon bent over the picture. ‘What a lovely photo! You must be so proud of her.’

​Inge gave a little smile. She tidied her already tidy bun and invited them to sit at the table before going off to the kitchen to make coffee.

Since the funeral of Max’s father Rhiannon had made an effort to keep up with Inge, but Inge did not answer her letters. She claimed, in a cursive note inside her Christmas card, to be too caught up with Anna, who was a toddler now. Until recently Hans had refused to have a telephone installed. When Max had told Rhiannon not to bother writing she c