Despite everything, the rifts and resentments and disagreements, the family had in Sarah’s time shared their troubles, major and minor, as though what affected any one of them affected all. But would they continue to stand by each other now Sarah was gone?

Marianne shared a glance with her Uncle Nat across the synagogue aisle as the stained glass window, through which wintry sunlight was now filtering, was finally unveiled.

Neither could have known how uncannily Marianne’s thoughts at that moment echoed Nathan’s hopes.

Chapter Three

Lizzie, once the domestic pillar of David’s household, had emerged from retirement for the afternoon to help Bridie serve tea to the family and stood with her in Nathan’s spacious hall, greeting each of them as they stepped in from the cold, mindful to wipe the snow off their feet before doing so lest they receive a scolding from the two elderly women who were to them institutions.

Hearing the congratulatory Mazeltov trip from their tongues as they shook hands with everyone seemed as natural as Lizzie’s taking Shirley’s mink to hang it up for her, and Bridie’s allowing Leona to hang up her own coat – tweed, not fur, since Leona and Frank were conservationists. Nor would their income from the neighbourhood law practice they ran together have allowed fur to feature in Leona’s wardrobe.

Leona, whom Bridie had not spoiled as Lizzie had Shirley, would not have let the kindly Irishwoman wait upon her and reflected, as she went to warm her hands by the log fire, that childhood sets the pattern for the rest of one’s life.

Here in this house she had spent her own young years. The adored only child of a still handsome man and a beautiful woman. Unaware, until they began using her as a go-between, of the emotional undercurrents which as she grew older had become unbearable.

Would she have married Frank, had it not been an acceptable way of escape? I could have done worse, she thought eyeing her brother-in-law. Lucky that Henry didn’t want me!

How many women had Henry lived with and scrounged from, since the days when Leona had thought herself madly in love with him, but had not let him know it? And many were the scrapes he had since got himself into, and Leona and Frank got him out of. Including, she recalled, the time he got involved in Danny the Red’s student uprising in Paris, in 1968, though he was by then years older than its participants.

Leona had on that occasion gone with Frank to get Henry out of jail. What a source of anxiety he had been to his grandfather, and still was to Frank.