There is surely a lack of natural human compassion in a host who clears away Sunday breakfast at 10.30. Fiona's father did not think so. 'I've been up helping to feed the horses since six-thirty this morning. I was exercising my best hunter before breakfast.'

He was wearing riding breeches, polished boots, yellow cashmere roll-neck and a checked hacking jacket that fitted his slightly plump figure to perfection. I noticed his attire because he'd caught me in the breakfast room getting the last dry scrapings of scrambled egg from a dish on the electric hot plate while I was barefoot and clad in an ancient dressing gown and pyjamas. 'You're not thinking of taking that plate of oddments' – he came closer to see the two shrivelled rashers and four wrinkled mushrooms that were under the flakes of egg – 'up to the bedroom?'

'As a matter of fact, I am,' I told him.

'No, no, no.' He said it with the sort of finality that doubtless ended all boardroom discussion. 'My good wife will never have food in the bedrooms.'

Plate in hand, I continued to the door. 'I'm not taking it up there for your wife,' I said. 'It's for me.'

That very early encounter with Mr Kimber-Hutchinson blighted any filial bond that might otherwise have blossomed. But at that time the idea of marrying Fiona had not formed in my mind and the prospect of seeing Mr David Kimber-Hutchinson ever again seemed mercifully remote.

'My God, man. You've not even shaved!' he shouted after me as I went upstairs with my breakfast.

'You provoke him,' Fiona said when I told her about my encounter. She was in my bed, having put on her frilly nightdress, waiting to share the booty from the breakfast table.

'How can you say that?' I argued. 'I speak only when he speaks to me, and then only to make polite conversation.'

'You hypocrite! You know very well that you deliberately provoke him. You ask him all those wide-eyed innocent questions about making profits from cheap labour.'

'Only because he keeps saying he's a socialist,' I said. 'And don't take that second piece of bacon: one each.'

'You beast. You know I hate mushrooms.' She licked her fingers. 'You're no better, darling. What do you ever do that makes you more of a socialist than Daddy?'

'I'm not a socialist,' I said. 'I'm a fascist. I keep telling you that but you never listen.'

'Daddy has his own sort of socialist ideas,' said Fiona.

'He refuses to do business with the French, loathes the Americans, never employs Jews, thinks all Arabs are crooked, and the only Russian he likes is Tchaikovsky. Where is the brotherhood of man?'

'A lot of that tirade was directed at me,' said Fiona. 'Daddy's been angry ever since I got a reference from old Silas Gaunt. That's Mother's side of the family and Daddy's feuding with them.'

'I see.'

'When I hear my father going on as he did last night at dinner, I feel like joining the Communist Party, don't you?'

'No. I feel like suggesting your father join it.'

'No, seriously, darling.'

'The Communist Party?'

'You know what I mean: workers of the world unite and all that. Daddy pays lip service to the idea of socialism but he never does anything about it.'

'You wouldn't escape him by joining the CP,' I said. 'Your father would write out a cheque and buy it. And then he'd sell off its sports field as office sites.'

'Come back to bed,' said Fiona. 'Now that we've missed breakfast, there's nothing to get up for.'

Fiona rarely mentioned her father's politics – and was vague about her own beliefs. Political conversation at the dinner table usually had her staring vacantly into space, or prompted her to start a conversation about children or sewing or hairdressers. Sometimes I wondered if she was really interested in her job in the Department or if she just stayed there to keep an eye on me.

'We're about to land, old boy,' said the Brigadier. 'Make sure your seat belt is fastened.'

The plane was over Berlin now. I could see the jagged shape of the Wall as the pilot turned on to finals for the approach to RAF Gatow, the onetime Luftwaffe training college. Its runway ends abruptly at the Wall, except that here the 'Wall' is a wire-mesh fence and a sandy patch that intelligence reports say has been left without mines and obstacles in case the day should come when units of the adjoining Russian Army's tank depot would roll through it to take Berlin-Gatow with its runways intact and electronics undamaged.

Did you ever say hello to a girl you almost married long ago? Did she smile the same captivating smile, and give your arm a hug in a gesture you'd almost forgotten? Did the wrinkles as she smiled make you wonder what marvellous times you'd missed? That's how I felt about Berlin every time I came back here.

Lisl Hennig's hotel, just off Kantstrasse, in the Western Sector, was unchanged. No one had tried to repair or repaint the facade pockmarked by Red Army shell splinters in 1945. The imposing doorway, alongside an optician's shop, opened onto the same grandiose marble staircase. The patched carpet, its red now a faded brown, led up to the 'salon' where Lisl was always to be found. List's mother had chosen the heavy oak furniture from Wertheim's department store at Alexanderplatz in the days before Hitler. And long before the grand old house became this shabby hotel.

'Hello, darling,' said Lisl as though I'd seen her only yesterday. She was old, a huge woman who overflowed from the armchair, her red silk dress emphasizing every bulge so that she looked like molten lava pouring down a steep hillside. 'You look tired, darling. You're working too hard.'

There had been few changes made in this 'salon' since Lisl was a child in a house with five servants. There were photos on every side: sepia family groups in ebony frames, faded celebrities of the thirties. Actresses with long cigarette holders, writers under big-brimmed hats, glossy film stars from the UFA studios, carefully retouched prima donnas of the State Opera, artists of the Dada movement, trapeze performers from the Wintergarten and nightclub singers from long-vanished clip joints. All of them signed with the sort of florid guarantees of enduring love that are the ephemera of show business.

Lisl's late husband was there, dressed in the white-tie outfit he wore to play Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic the night the Führer was in the audience. There were no photos of the bent little cripple who ended his days playing for Trinkgeld in a broken-down bar in Rankestrasse.

Some of these photos were of family friends; those who came to Lisl's salon in the thirties and the forties when it was a place to meet the rich and famous, and those who came in the fifties to meet men with tinned food and work permits. There were modern pictures too, of long-term residents who endured the trials and tribulations: uncertain hot water and the noise of the central heating, and the phone messages that were forgotten and letters that were never delivered, and the bathroom lights that did not work. Such loyal clients were invited into Lisl's cramped little office for a glass of sherry when they settled the bill. And their photos were enshrined there over the cash box.

'You look terrible, darling,' she said.

'I'm fine, Tante Lisl,' I said. 'Can you find a room for me?'

She switched on another light. A large plant in an art-nouveau pot cast a sudden spiky shadow on the ugly brown wallpaper, She turned to see me better, and part of her pearl necklace disappeared into a roll of fatty muscle. 'There will always be a room for you, Liebchen. Give me a kiss.'

But I had already leaned over to give her a kiss. It was a necessary ritual. She had been calling me Liebchen and demanding kisses since before I could walk. 'So nothing changes, Lisl,' I said.