Martin’s expression as he glanced at Abraham Patrick left Marianne in no doubt that this was a doubly emotional occasion for him. Though his own father was born a Christian, the strength of Martin’s Jewishness had never faltered, raised as he was in an atmosphere that had not pulled him two ways.

Marianne watched Martin straighten the threadbare yamulke on his son’s unruly red hair, both the little cap and the fiery colouring passed down by Marianne’s grandfather, Abraham Sandberg.

When Martin arrived in the world shortly after Abraham Sandberg departed it, Sarah had given Marianne the yamulke and told her to keep it for him. Martin, shabby though it was, had insisted upon wearing it for his Bar Mitzvah – a day on which Martin, still only thirteen, had indicated that family mattered to him.

That had to be why he had wanted his son to wear Abraham Sandberg’s yamulke today, as if doing so would bring home to the boy that the blood of the immigrant Jew Abraham flowed in his veins no less than that of his Catholic grandfather, Lord Kyverdale.

A title that Abraham Patrick would one day inherit. To which Sarah Sandberg had never accustomed herself, Marianne thought with a smile, and how would she have? A descendant who was one of England’s aristocracy still seemed to Marianne herself a far cry from the story Sarah had told of sailing to England on a herring boat.

Equally difficult, if in a different way, it must have been for Sarah to believe that one of her descendants had German blood in his veins. When Marianne’s nephew, Howard Klein, married the fräulein he had met on a ski-ing holiday, it was as if a thunderbolt had hit the family.

It would take more than the years that had since passed for the Holocaust to recede from the Jewish memory. Marianne could not bring herself to set foot in Germany, to rub shoulders with the nation which had perpetrated that barbarity, innocent though its post-war generations were.

Her brother Harry, whose son Howard was, had felt unable to show his face among the Jewish community, and his wife, Ann, had initially refused to meet her daughter-in-law. But before Howard returned from Munich with his bride, Sarah Sandberg, the arch-peacekeeper, had called the family together, counselling them to make the best of it since what was done could not be undone.

We didn’t yet know that Christina was pregnant, Marianne recalled, but my grandmother’s words to the family were probably those she used when Laura did what she did. Making the best of the unarguable and the inevitable was how Sarah had succeeded in holding the family together. How many such family conferences had Marianne, over the years, attended? And in her youth, there would have been some at which this or that of her numerous rebellious acts were discussed, and her parents advised how to deal with her.