"Can I help you?"she barked.

"I've come to see Mrs Lillian Brown."

She consulted her list. "Are you family?"

"A cousin. Once removed." Well, I could have been.

"Would you sign in please? Room twenty-three."

She pressed the b.u.t.ton that opened the sliding door. And in I went-into the muted realm of the pink carpet, the sickly chemical air, the rows of closed doors from behind which, from time to time, a television blared eerily. On the other side of the corridor was the long plate-gla.s.s sliding door which gave on to the courtyard with its square of gra.s.s and four benches, now all damp with rain. A demented bleeper sounded constantly in the background, reminding the absent staff that behind one of these closed doors, someone desperately needed help.

I knocked on the door of number twenty-three. There was no reply so I pushed it open. The room was small and overheated, with a terrible deathly smell. A ma.s.sive television set, volume on at full blast, dominated the room, so it took me a moment to notice the tiny figure lying motionless on the bed.

"Mrs Brown?"

There was no reply. I shouted louder, "Mrs Brown? Lillian?"

I tiptoed over to the bed. She was lying there with her eyes closed. Her hand, I saw, was clutched round the bleeper on its cable. I couldn't tell whether she was breathing.

I backed out and let the door close behind me. My chest was thumping. A fat woman in a pink corporate uniform was coming down the corridor.

"In here," I said.

"Are you Mrs Brown's niece?" She seemed to be unaware of the bleeping alarm.

"Actually, I'm..."

"I hope you're not smuggling cigarettes." She scrutinised me fiercely.

"Oh, no. Nothing like that."

"Because last home I worked at, someone give an old lady a f.a.g and some matches, and it all went up in flames."

"Oh, dear. Was anyone hurt?"

"We was saved by a dog."

"Really?"

"A mongrel," she snorted. "And then they tried to smuggle in a gearbox."

"A gearbox? What for?"

"Beats me. Anyhow, matron got rid of it. Said it weren't hygienic." Her face softened for a moment. "It were a shame really, poor old man. Still, 'e got 'is revenge." She chortled. "Anyhow, we don't allow that sort of thing in 'ere. We got rules."

"Er...I think this lady needs some help..."

But she'd already vanished up the corridor. As I watched the door close behind her, I noticed there was now someone sitting out on one of the benches in the courtyard in the rain, a solitary hunched figure wearing a powder-blue dressing gown and matching peep-toe slippers, puffing away at a cigarette. It was the bonker lady.

I banged on the window and waved. She looked up and waved back. But when I slid open the door and went out to join her in the courtyard, she put on a sulky face.

"You never brought me cigs."

"I did," I lied. "You weren't there."

She sniffed as though she knew it wasn't true.

"Are yer lookin' for 'er? Yer pal?"

"Mrs Shapiro. Yes."

"She's in solitary. She int allaared visitors."

"Why not?"

"Bin a naughty gel, ent she?"

"Why? What's she done?"

She stubbed our her cigarette on the path and threw the b.u.t.t into the middle of the lawn, where there was already quite a scattering.

"It's what she ent done. She won't sign the Powah. Keeps refusin'. Bonkers, if yer ask me. They won't let 'er aht till she signs it."

"Do you know which room she's in?"

The rain had almost stopped. She pulled a cigarette packet out of her dressing-gown pocket and looked inside. There were only two left.

"Yer won't forget me cigs next time, will yer?"

"No. I promise."

She placed one of the cigarettes between her lips and let it rest there for a few moments, savouring the antic.i.p.ation, before she took the box of matches from the other pocket.

"Twen'y-seven."

"Thanks."

"If she in't there, she'll be watchin' telly in twen'y-three. That's my room. They all watch telly in there."

"Isn't there a day room?"

"Yeh, there is. But the telly's c.r.a.p."

Mrs Shapiro's room was just as small as the other one, and just as hot, but the smell was more sickly than deathly, and there was no television. She looked dreadful. She was lying on her bed, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. Her hair was wild and matted, the silver line now a highway, her skin loose and baggy, folding in deep yellowy wrinkles around her mouth and chin.

"Mrs Shapiro?"

"Georgine?"

She struggled to her feet groggily and stared at me.

"How are you?" I hugged her. She seemed so frail, like a bird. All bones.

"Thenk Gott you come."

"I'm sorry I didn't come before. I tried, but they wouldn't let me in."

"Did you bring me cigarettes?"

"Sorry. I forgot."

"Never mind. Good you heff come, Georgine. I do not want to die in here!"

She sat down on the edge of the bed and immediately started to cry, her skinny shoulders shaking. How small and bent she seemed. I sat beside her, stroking her back until the sobs turned to sniffles. Then I pa.s.sed her a tissue.

"We've got to get you home. But I don't know how."

"Too much guards in this place. Like in prison." She blew her nose, then opened up the tissue to examine the snot. It had a horrible greenish colour. "How are my dear cats?"

"They're fine. Waiting for you. I've got some young men staying there, looking after them. Fixing the house up." I saw the look of alarm on her face. "Don't worry. As soon as you're ready to come home, they'll leave."

The smell in the room was making me feel faint. I stood up and opened a window. The soupy overheated air stirred, and we could hear the traffic on the Lea Bridge Road, and voices of children playing somewhere nearby. Mrs Shapiro took a deep breath, and her eyes seemed to brighten a bit.

"Thenk you, darlink." She squeezed my hand, studying me with her wrinkled eyes. "You looking better Georgine. Nice lipstick. Nice scarf. You got a new husband yet?"

"Not yet."

"Maybe soon I will heff a new husband." She smiled archly to see the look of surprise cross my face. "Nicky is saying he wants to marry mit me."

"Mr Wolfe?"

I gasped. The scheming devil! I remembered how fluttery she'd been when he'd sat in her kitchen plying her with sherry.

"I was thinking he would be for you the perfect husband, Georgine. But you heff showed a little interest. So maybe this is an opportunity for me." Her smile now was coyly flirtatious. She had cheered up considerably. "What you think? Should I marry my Nicky?"

"Does he know how old you are?"

"I tolt him I was sixty-one." She caught my eye and giggled. "I am too notty for you, Georgine, isn't it?"

"You are a bit naughty, Mrs Shapiro."

"Why get ready for the grave? It will catch you soon enough anyway, isn't it? Why not to enjoy the moment as it flies." She flapped her hands like birds' wings. "You know Goethe?"

I shook my head. Then I thought of something.

"Maybe it's because..." I remembered his intake of breath on the phone. "I told him you had a son."

A son who would inherit her estate. Unless, of course, she remarried.

She looked at me sharply. "How you know about this son?"

"The social worker told me. Mrs Goodney."

She stopped. I pretended to be looking out of the window. Go on, go on! I was silently willing her, but she went quiet.

After a few moments, she said, "Ach, this woman. All she thinks about is how to shvindel me. I told her I heff a son because she was wanting me to sign the Power of Returning. I said my son will be returning. He will heff the house."

"But he's not your son, is he?" I said gentry.

There was a pause. "Not mine. No."

"So who was his mother?"

She sighed. "This whole megillah megillah is too long for you. You will be falling asleep before I tell it." is too long for you. You will be falling asleep before I tell it."

"But tell me anyway."

"It was the other one. Naomi Shapiro."

Little by little, I drew it out of her. Her real name was Ella Wechsler, she said, p.r.o.nouncing it carefully, as though not quite sure it belonged to her. She was born in 1925 in Hamburg. I calculated that would make her eighty-one. Her family was Jewish, but of the pick and mix variety. Speck but no sausages. Sabbath and Sunday. Christmas as well as Hanukkah-not that all this made any difference to the n.a.z.is, when the time came. Her father, Otto Wechsler, ran a successful printing business; her mother, Hannah, was a pianist; her two older sisters, Martina and Lisabet, were students. Their house, a solid four-storey villa in the Grindel Quarter, was a hanging-out place for musicians, artists, heartbroken lovers, dreamers, travellers arriving or departing, four cats, and a German maid called Dotty. There was always coffee mit schlagsahne, always music and conversation going on. She chuckled.

"We were better at being German than the Germans. I thought this life was normal. I did not know such happiness was not permitted to Jews, Georgine. I did not know what it means to be a Jew until Herr Hitler told me."

But by 1938, Hitler's message was loud and clear-clear enough for the family to realise they had to get out of Germany before things got worse.

"You see in that time Hitler was thinking only how to clear out the Jewish people from Germany. The plan for exterminations came after."

The Wechslers-Ella, Martina, Lisabet, and their parents, fled to London. Ella was nearly thirteen years old, Martina was seventeen, Lisabet twenty. In 1938 the Wechslers had been able to bribe their way out of Germany, but England did not hold out her arms in welcome. The 1905 Aliens Act meant that they could only come to Britain if they already had a job to come to.

"Even the English they did not want us. Too many Jews were running away from pogroms in Poland, Russia, Ukrainia. Everybody thought it was a big sport to chase the Jews, isn't it?"

Through a cousin on his mother's side, Otto Wechsler had managed to secure a job in a print shop on Whitechapel Road-it was a huge ancient Heidelberg press which he coaxed back into life. The owner, Mr Gribb, was a widower from Elizavetgrad who had changed his name from Gribovitch when his family fled the pogroms in 1881. Hannah Wechsler became his housekeeper. Lisabet worked in a bakery. Martina trained as a nurse. Ella went to the Jewish school in Stepney.

They lived in a poky two-roomed flat above the print shop ("Everything we touched was bleck from the ink") in the heart of the East End Jewish community, and they counted themselves blessed.

They received coded letters via Switzerland from their family describing the impact of the Nuremberg Laws, the enforced wearing of yellow stars, the terror of Kristallnacht, the expropriation of businesses, the expulsion from the professions (Cousin Berndt turned out of his surgery and made to sweep leaves in the park), the public humiliations, the increasingly ugly a.s.saults in the streets (Uncle Frank's front teeth broken by a cheering, jeering gang of schoolboys). Actions that an individual would find morally repugnant became amusing when there was a crowd cheering you on. Then the ma.s.s transportations started, and the letters stopped.

I felt the tremor in Mrs Shapiro's shoulders, the long catch of her breath. We were still sitting side by side on the bed. The light had faded in the window, and the roar of traffic outside intensified with the onset of rush hour. But we were in a different world.

"Tell me about Artem. When did you meet him?"

"In 1944 he arrived in London. In the spring. Eyes crazy like a madman. Still asking if they had seen his sister."

Skeletal, louse-ridden, hollow-eyed, he'd fetched up at the Newcastle docks on a British merchant ship that had snuck out from Gothenburg with a cargo of b.u.t.ter and ball bearings. The Seaman's Mission had taken him in and he was pa.s.sed on, via Jewish relief organisations, to the flat in Whitechapel Road. He stayed with them for a year, helping to run the printing press and sleeping on a camp bed at the back of the workshop. He was clever with his hands. He didn't say much-he spoke Russian and only a few phrases of German and English-but his silence, brooding and mysterious, seemed to the girls to speak volumes. In his spare time, he started to make a violin. Lisabet, Martina and Ella watched him working with the fretsaw and the glue, his head bowed over the workbench, a thin self-rolled cigarette hanging from his lip, humming to himself. By then, Ella was eighteen, Martina was twenty-three and Lisabet twenty-six. All of them were a bit in love with him and a bit in awe of him.

"Did he finish the violin?"