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I told her,” the old man grizzled in a voice slow but lucid. “Just like you should have told the boy years ago. He was perfectly capable of dealing with it at twelve. Don’t know why you had to wait until his sixteenth birthday. Anyway, where’s the cake? Rodney, get the cake.”
    â€œFor once in your life, father-in-law, will you piss off. Just this once.” His neck was inflamed and he was trembling.
    â€œEasy for you to say piss off,” staring at Rodney in a baleful way. “Didn’t fight the buggers. In battle. Bastards. Not like us.”
    He removed his panama, with its regimental hatband the colour of purple carbon, and fanned his face with it. Everyone knew what Milo Potter thought of the Germans. As an army doctor, he had fought against them in Egypt. Seen them blow up monasteries in Italy. Lost friends to them in the North Atlantic. The war continued to upset him.
    â€œDad, you’re a tiresome old baggage,” said his daughter, distressed. “That’s the past. We’re moving forward now.” She was trying not to cry and her face looked twisted with the effort. “Stay here,” to Peter, “I’m going to fetch your present.”
    Moments later a golden retriever puppy ran across the lawn.
    â€œShe’s called Honey,” said the woman who had orphaned him. Her eyes, still red, fastened on him and waited for his reaction, smiling gamefully.
    He looked at the puppy. Went inside.
    Twenty minutes later, Rosalind came into his room and found him sitting at the window, a book open on his lap.
    â€œTea’s ready.”
    â€œI’ll come in a moment.”
    â€œDoes that mean no Scrabble?”
    â€œWhat? No.” Then: “Just set it up. I’ll be right down.”
    She wanted to say something. “It’s brilliant!”
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œYour being German,” almost proudly, staring as though at a steaming dish of lamb shanks.
    He threw down the Malory. “It’s not brilliant. It’s not riveting. It’s not even interesting. It’s absurd. Everyone hates the Germans and so do I. So do you.”
    Rosalind hadn’t seen him crying since they were small children. She stared at him with eyes wide open and ran from the room. Only then did he look into the mirror, and look away.
    Outside on the lawn the palaver of tea. Of his stepfather’s distress. Of a cake sunk in the middle. His mother had forgotten to remove it from the oven and the disreputable heap lay on a green Tupperware plate, the 16 unlit candles like a bed of nails.
    â€œI still say you shouldn’t have gone to Leipzig,” his grandfather said crossly – and Peter understood Milo Potter’s lapsed attention towards his daughter, his grudging acceptance of her baskets of washed laundry, of the meals she brought to his spartan flat above the shoe-shop in Tisbury. The more she did for him the more he looked west, to Canada, where his two youngest daughters lived somewhere on the prairie. Viola and Ruth only came home for the big events, but he talked about them in a different voice. A voice in which his Lancashire accent all but disappeared. They wouldn’t have gone singing in Germany.
    She drew up her knees under her and started to saw. “Here, Dad,” she sighed. “Sink your teeth into this.”
    â€œWhat about the candles? He needs to blow out the candles.”
    â€œDon’t worry about the candles,” mumbled Peter. He caught a whiff of Rodney’s Patum Peperium. Already it smelled oddly different.
    â€œThen give that slice to the boy. It’s his birthday.”
    A quarter of a century later, Peter could still taste it. The mess of dense banana-flavoured sponge and the dreaded fizz of baking powder.
    Towards the end of the afternoon, Peter went into Rodney’s studio. The kind, jolly man he had, until now, called “Daddy” sat at a slanted desk making sketches for