‘Engaged in one of your tactical deals, are you?’ Laura said with a smile.

‘No, I’d just like an uninterrupted evening at home.’

It was not to be.

‘It’s Marianne, for you Laura,’ Jeremy said when he returned, ‘and she didn’t chat to me like she usually does. She said there’s been a death in the family.’

Chapter Twelve

Once again the clan gathered for a funeral in Manchester. Since Judaic law decrees burial of the dead without delay, not all of Harry Klein’s relatives were able to be present.

His daughter, Kate, had by chance been visiting her parents when Harry suffered his second and fatal seizure, and it was she who supported her mother at the graveside.

Howard, beside the rabbi, had in his eyes an expression that caused Marianne to wonder if he was tracing his father’s end backward to the night he and she returned from Germany without Ben.

What, though, had the time between then and his drawing his last breath been for Harry but a living death? There are those able to come to terms with severe disablement, but Marianne’s brother had not been one of them. Instead he had tortured himself and those who loved him.

But what a good man the real Harry was. He did not deserve to be going to his grave without having seen his only grandson again, Marianne reflected with sorrow as the simple coffin customary in her religion was lowered to its resting place.

Her Uncle Nat’s face looked paper white. But this was the cemetery in which all the elders of the family were buried, where he too would one day lie. She had not seen him for some time and was affected by his increased frailty.

The woman who had briefly revitalized him had not been replaced by another, and he had since achieved the English literature degree to which he had aspired. What did he do with his time now? Alone in that echoing house with Bridie, who would surely have retired to her native Ireland were it not for her loyalty to him.

My grandmother, thought Marianne, would have suggested to Leona that she take her father to live with her and Frank. Sarah wouldn’t have paused to consider if that arrangement would work and would doubtless have succeeded in contriving it.

While Howard recited the solemn Kaddish prayer for his father, it struck Marianne that since Sarah’s death she had come to truly know her. How often have I asked myself what my grandmother would have done and been led to examine the consequences of some of her manipulating?

Who but she had influenced David and Nathan, each in their turn, to put practical matters before love in their choice of a wife? That David and Miriam had not married was in its way tragic. And Nathan’s life with Rebecca equally so.