She arrived early at the crematorium on the damp, pale morning of the funeral, and we talked for a while in the cloister outside the chapel. In my early twenties I’d interviewed for a job with her. She ran a small publishing company that specialized in social science, European fiction, and Holocaust memoirs (her husband had been a camp survivor). On my way to the interview I’d prepared clever things to say about Herbert Marcuse and Primo Levi, but she was more interested in my typing speed. She didn’t offer me a job, but she sent me to an editor at another firm, who eventually hired me, so I’d always felt indebted to her. I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral, almost twenty years earlier.

“You’ve lost your hair,” she said. “Still at least you haven’t swollen up like me. I can hardly walk these days.” Having always been rather thin and wiry, she’d grown stout and short-breathed, and leaned with both hands on a metal stick.

“But you’re still publishing books,” I said. “That’s the important thing!”

“Is it? Yes, I suppose it is.” She frowned, and then added darkly: “When people let me.”

I had a pretty good idea what she was referring to, but I felt I should make a show of ignorance.

“What does that mean?”

She gave me a searching look. She’d always had a reputation for shrewdness, and for having her ear to the ground. Still, it seemed unlikely she could have known I knew anything about Julia Gault’s memoir, much less that I’d become Marco Rosedale’s confidant.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s always nonsense of one sort or another going on in the book world, as I’m sure you know. How are you? I’m sorry about your mother. I shall miss her. She had her ways, but I was fond of her, on the whole. I certainly didn’t expect to outlive her. She always seemed so youthful. And of course she was considered a great beauty. Well, we all have to go.”

I knew her—knew her generation’s spiky honesty—well enough to know she was being affectionate, in her own way.

An usher opened the chapel and I went in with my siblings to check that everything was in order, directing Renata to a waiting room. She shuffled off, but reappeared back in the chapel a minute later, looking upset.