While she and Lyn sipped their tea in thoughtful silence, remembrance of two little girls playing on the rug in Sarah’s parlour returned to Marianne. Margaret and Harry’s daughter, Kate, dressing their dolls. Marianne glanced at Kate, who had flown in from Tel Aviv last week and was now deep in conversation with her mother, on her head the kerchief that singled her out as an ultra-orthodox Jewess. How more different could the lives of Marianne’s two nieces have been?

Thanks to Kate, there was now an Israeli branch of the family. And visiting Kate and her children was a source of joy for Harry and Ann, compensation in some measure for the blow that Howard’s marriage was to them.

Marianne was noting that Kate was not partaking of the spread, lest it was not truly kosher, when Lyn interrupted her musing.

‘How do you suppose I feel about neither of my children being at the ceremony?’

‘My grandmother wouldn’t have considered it more important than the sick babies Margaret is nursing,’ Marianne replied, ‘and I seem to recall her having a lot of respect for Matthew’s always honouring his professional code that the show must go on. He couldn’t have got here from Australia and back there in time for curtain up tomorrow night, could he?’

‘That alters nothing for me.’

Lyn’s forlorn expression said more than words. She and Arnold had had no luck with their children, and Marianne was filled with compassion for her. Though theirs too was a mixed marriage, they had not subjected Matthew and Margaret to an emotional tug-o’war. Instead, they had agreed to follow their own religions, allowing their children to participate fully in both.

Nevertheless, on a personal level that was for Matthew and Margaret the religious vacuum on which Marianne had mused a few hours ago. She could remember, when Chanukah and Christmas coincided, seeing the candles lit in the menorah on Lyn and Arnold’s mantelpiece and a Christmas tree ablaze with coloured lights in a corner of the room. Each represented an exciting festival for children, and Matthew and Margaret had enjoyed both. But Marianne recalled thinking that the day would come when it seeped through to them that one was their mum’s festival and the other their dad’s. That they themselves were not part of what either stood for.

Though Margaret had seemed a self-contained child, even her parents could not have suspected that beneath her quiet exterior was an intensity of feeling which must eventually find expression. When finally she had opted for her mother’s religion, the family was not surprised. Arnold’s parliamentary obligations had led to his renting a pied-à-terre in Westminster, largely removing him from his children’s lives. From Lyn’s too, and that was still the case. He had never yet failed to be returned to Parliament.

Matthew was now the family atheist, and Marianne had thought that decision an act of cynicism that included paying his parents back for leaving it to him to decide. Nor had she blamed him. Wasn’t it hard enough, sometimes, not to doubt the Faith that was unquestionably your own?