Cover

Dedication

In memory of my mother

Epigraph

‘The evil that men do

lives after them…’

Julius Caesar

Part One

1982

Chapter One

Marianne was browsing through her family album, a sentimental pastime in which she rarely indulged, but not unfitting today.

An early-morning telephone call had wakened her and she had afterwards come downstairs to make some tea. Wrapped in the cosy old dressing gown she could not bring herself to throw away, as if doing so would denude her of a comforting bit of the past, she was now curled up on the living-room sofa, only the hissing of the gas fire impinging upon the silence.

She had known before picking up the receiver that the caller was her Uncle Nat, wanting to share with her his anxiety lest anything mar the family event due to take place this afternoon. The sole remaining elder of the clan, its one-time black sheep was incongruously proving himself capable of wearing the patriarchal mantle. But Marianne wished he would choose someone other than herself with whom to confer about family matters.

‘Supposing the out-of-towners who haven’t yet arrived don’t get to Manchester in time?’ he had said on the phone. ‘They shouldn’t have left their travelling until today, and that includes your son and your brother, Marianne!’

Outside Marianne’s window the back lawn stretched pristine white, the poplars at the far end ghostly figures against a leaden sky. Her uncle’s fear of a last minute hitch had materialized as an overnight snowfall, and she imagined him now pacing the floor in his big house, with nobody but the ageing Irishwoman who looked after him for company.

Bridie, though, is like one of the family, Marianne’s thoughts meandered on while her fingers turned the pages of the album. She had been with Uncle Nat’s branch of it since her teens and Marianne’s childhood.

A snapshot of herself in uniform reminded Marianne that she had left home, via the women’s services, at the age of eighteen, never to return. What a rebel I must have seemed! The more so, she reflected, when she had subsequently married out of the faith in the days when, for a Jewish family, there was no worse disgrace.

The man for whom love had caused Marianne to do so had, a few years later, elected to convert. And, she thought poignantly, was now buried in the cemetery where the in-laws who had not wanted him lay, his death the last in a series of family bereavements in the first two years of the eighties.

Marianne had still not accustomed herself to her grandmother no longer being there. To not being telephoned at least thrice daily by her mother. To Uncle David and Aunt Miriam too being gone.

But those of whom she had just been thinking were old people. Hardest of all for her to accept was her husband’s being cut down in his prime.