“What will you think of next?” Gus shook her head.

I looked around the room, now bathed in midday sunlight. “Where’s Liam?”

“Sleeping like a baby,” Gus said. “We played with him and then put him down for his morning nap. He’s such fun now. We love his laugh. Sid kept balancing a matchbox on her nose and then letting it fall.”

Sid laughed. “It didn’t fail to amuse him for a good half hour.”

“Babies are wonderful, aren’t they?” I said. “I was thinking last night about how uncomplicated life is for them. As long as they are warm and fed and have someone they trust near them then nothing else matters.” I fought back an unwelcome surge of emotion. After what we had just gone through tears were liable to resurface too often. Having prided myself on being such a strong woman I couldn’t abide this show of weakness. Instead I turned my attention to the paintings. The one that now lay on the sofa was of the young girl with haunted dark eyes.

“I particularly noticed this one when I packed them up,” I said. “It’s quite good, isn’t it? Sad, but well-done.”

“It’s one of Maxim’s,” Sid said.

“Who?” Mary asked.

“My cousin. Maxim Noah.”

“Ah yes, you spoke of him, I remember now,” Mary said. “You say you just discovered him living in Paris?”

“It was rather fortuitous,” Sid said. “Right before I left, my mother wrote to tell me we had relatives in Paris and asked me to look them up. I went around several synagogues but I couldn’t find any Goldfarbs who could have been related. Then I was at a poetry reading and was chatting to this most attractive young Jewish man. We started talking about families and when he said that his mother was a Goldfarb and her father had come from Eastern Europe when she was a small child I started asking questions. And it turned out that his grandfather had had a falling out with his brother. One had gone to New York, one stayed in Paris. And the brother’s name was Nathan, which was my grandfather’s name. Wasn’t that an amazing coincidence? So we concluded we were long-lost cousins. He lives in a shack on Montmartre. Horribly primitive, but I think he’ll make his name as a painter very soon. I plan to take some of his pictures to New York and maybe bring him over some time and hold a showing for him.”

“How interesting,” Mary said. She bent over the painting, then sat back on the sofa again. “Yes, I think his work does show some promise. When all is well again I’d like to meet him.”