‘But are you saying that you would be willing not to have had your daughter for the sake of ridding humanity of this – whatever this condition is caused by?’

‘It would be painful to decide, of course, but if I had had that knowledge, if I had had that opportunity, I might well have made that choice. I would not wish to breed children for suffering. Who would?’

Jelly noticed Margareta, a stunning Scandinavian beauty, cast an anxious look at her own partially incapacitated mother. How strange, and sad, that Ebba seemed to give her support to this bizarre notion when in the past she had been so down to earth – indeed, a great feminist campaigner in the days of the suffragettes. ‘Awful things can happen to anybody,’ Jelly said. ‘Any of us could catch pneumonia, or fall and break something… ’

‘Imagine, Miss d’Arányi,’ said Lady Chiltington, her front teeth protuberant, ‘that perhaps, generations from now, with the appropriate practices, we can breed a human race with bones strong enough not to break when someone falls. Do you see? We must focus on what is best for humanity as a whole, don’t you think?’

Jelly thought of the Durham shipyard families, the ragged York children; bound up simply with surviving, nobody there would give such ideas a moment’s thought. As for what was best for humanity as a whole, no similar magnanimity was being offered to help them.

‘In a way,’ Adila cut in, ‘we are the product of an early form of such thinking.’

‘Ja-ha –?’ said Ebba.

‘Our grandfather married our grandmother partly because she was Jewish,’ Adila announced, loud and clear. ‘He thought the best way to stop discrimination against the Jews was for them to integrate, convert and marry non-Jews. So, here we are!’

Jelly cast around for her shawl. Her instinct was to take herself far away from this conversation – preferably home. She doubted that that story was true, for one thing; for another, she privately doubted the origin of their own ‘title’, wonderful though it sounded, and as all their relations now were dead or distant, it was impossible to check. Moreover she was far from confident that shouting about Jewish relatives in this company was wise. During her tour, attending dinners and receptions galore between journeys, she had been hearing remarks about how ridiculous it was to consider intervening with Germany ‘just to defend a bunch of Jews’, and once a reference to a distinguished scientist as a ‘Jewboy’. Einstein, discoverer of the Theory of Relativity, no less. Why should anyone care what his race was, what he looked like, where he came from? It was his mind that counted and if people couldn’t appreciate that, it said more about them than it did about him.