'What do you mean?'

'Are you English, or German, or nothing? I'm a nothing. I used to think I was English but I'm a nothing.'

'I used to think that I was German,' I said. 'At least I used to think that my German friends thought I was a Berliner, which is even better. Then one day I was playing cards with Lisl and an old man named Koch, and they just took it for granted that I was an Englishman and had never been anything else. I was hurt.'

'But you wanted it both ways, darling. You wanted your English friends to treat you like an Englishman, while your German friends thought of you as one of them.'

'I suppose I did.'

'My parents are Hungarian but I've never been to Hungary. I grew up in England and always thought of myself as one hundred per cent English. I was a super-patriot. Being English was all I had to hang on to. I learned all those wonderful Shakespeare speeches about England and chided anyone who said a word against the Queen or wouldn't stand up for the National Anthem. Then one day one of the girls at school told me the truth about myself.'

'Truth?'

'You Hungarians, she said. All the other girls were there watching us, I wasn't going to let it go. She knew that. I told her I was born in England. She said, if you were born in an orange box, would that make you an orange? The other girls laughed. I cried all night.'

'My poor love.'

'I'm a nothing. It doesn't matter. I'm used to the idea now.'

'Here's to us nothings,' I said holding the last of my Armagnac aloft before drinking it.

'We'll miss dinner unless you hurry,' she said. 'Go and have a shower.'

There was no breakfast room of course. In this sort of French hotel there never is. And unlike Gloria I don't like eating food in bed. Thus she was propped up in bed, the tray balanced on her thighs, and I was halfway through my second cup of coffee, and eating Gloria's second brioche – 'You are a fool, darling. You've had two already' – when the phone rang.

I knew it would be the Winter woman. No one else knew where I was. Contrary to regulations I'd not left a contact number at the office. People who left overseas contact numbers were likely to find themselves answering questions about where they'd been and why.

'This is Ingrid Winter. Mama is feeling rather fit today. She wonders if you'd like to join us for lunch.'

'Thank you: I would.' Gloria had used the extra earpiece that all French phones have, and was waving a hand, in case her violently shaking head escaped my attention. 'But Miss Kent has an appointment in Cannes. She could drop me and pick me up, if you'd suggest convenient times.'

'Eleven and three,' said the daughter without hesitation. The Winter family seemed to have answers ready for everything.

Gloria dropped me at the gate a few minutes early. It was better that way when dealing with Germans. 'So! Exactly on time,' said Ingrid Winter as she opened the door to me. It was a statement of warm approval. We went through the same formalities as before, talking about the weather as I gave her my coat, but today she proved far more affable. 'Let me close the door quickly: that yellow dust gets everywhere when the wind is from the south. The Sirocco. It's hard to believe that the sand could be blown all the way from the Sahara isn't it?'

'Yes,' I said.

She locked my raincoat away in a closet painted with big orange flowers. 'My mother is a very old lady, Mr Samson.' I said yes, of course she was, and then Ingrid Winter looked at me as if to convey some special meaning, apprehension almost. Then she said, 'A very old lady.' She paused. 'Komm!'

With that she turned and walked not into the drawing room we'd used the previous afternoon but along a tiled corridor, hung with old engravings of ancient German cities, to a room at the back.

It had not always been a bedroom of course. Like Lisl she'd had a downstairs room converted to her use. Few people of Inge Winter's age wanted to go upstairs to bed.

She was not in bed. She was wearing the sort of grey woollen dress provided to poor patients in State hospitals, and sitting in a large angular armchair with a heavy cashmere shawl draped round her thin shoulders. 'Sit down,' she told me. 'Do you want a drink of any sort?'

'No thank you,' I said. Well, now I understood Ingrid's fears. This wasn't a bedroom it was a shrine. It wasn't simply that Inge Winter had surrounded herself with pictures and mementoes of times past – many old people do that – it was the ones she'd chosen that provided the surprise. The top of a large side-table was crowded with framed photos; the sort of collection that actors and actresses seem to need to reassure themselves of the undying affection that their colleagues have promised them. But these were not film stars.

The large silver-framed photo of Adolf Hitler had been carefully placed in a commanding position. I'd seen such photos before: it was one of the sepia-toned official portraits by Hoffmann that Hitler had given to visiting dignitaries or old comrades. But this one was not just perfunctorily signed with the scratchy little abbreviated signature normally seen on such likenesses. This was carefully autographed with greetings to Herr and Frau Winter. It was not the only picture of Hitler. There was a shiny press photo of a handsome middle-aged couple standing with Hitler and a big dog on a terrace, with high snow-capped mountains in the background. Berchtesgaden probably, the Berghof. Prewar because Hitler was not in uniform. He was wearing a light-coloured suit, one hand stretched towards the dog as if about to stroke it. The woman was a rather beautiful Inge Winter, with long shiny hair and wearing the angular padded fashions of the nineteen thirties. The man – presumably Herr Winter – slightly too plump for his dark pinstripe suit, had been caught with his mouth half-open so that he looked surprised and slightly ridiculous. But perhaps that was a small price to pay for being thus recorded consorting with the Fuhrer. I couldn't bring my eyes away from the collection of pictures. Here were signed photos of Josef Goebbels with his wife and all the children; greetings from a black uniformed blank-faced Himmler; a broadly smiling, soft focused and carefully retouched Herman Göring; and a flamboyantly inscribed picture of Fritz Esser, with whom Göring faced the judges at Nuremberg. The Winters had found welcome in the very top echelons of Nazi society. So where did that put her sister Lisl?

'People usually do nowadays,' said the old woman. There's far too much drinking.' Without giving me much of a chance to answer she reached over for one of the pictures. Holding it in her hand, she looked at her daughter and said in rapid German. 'Leave us alone, Ingrid. You can call us when lunch is ready.'

'Yes, Mama.'

When I said how pleased I was that she'd spared time to see me again, I automatically continued in German.

The old woman's face lit up in a way that I wouldn't have thought possible. 'Such beautiful German… You are German?'

'I think I am,' I said. 'But my German friends seem doubtful.'

'You are a Berliner?' She was still holding the photo but seemed to have forgotten about it.

'I grew up there.'

'I hear you speak and I am drinking a glass of champagne. If only my daughter didn't have that dreadful Bavarian growl. Why didn't you tell me yesterday? Oh, how splendid that my daughter made me ask you back today.'

'Your daughter made you ask me?'

'She thinks I am being too Prussian about the house,' she smiled grimly, as one Prussian to another. 'She thinks I should let Lisl give it to the wretched Jew, if that's what she wants to do. Poor Lisl was always the simpleton of the family. That's why she married that piano player.' It was a relief to hear her speaking German instead of her uncertain English with its terrible accent, the sort of accent people only acquire when they come to a language late in life. I suppose that's how I spoke French. But Inge Winter's German was – apart from a few dated words and expressions – as clear and as fresh as if she'd come from Berlin yesterday.