‘What long memories you and Leona have. That’s the sort of thing my daughter keeps saying to me. A younger person’s way of getting an oldster out of his rocking chair! But I intend getting out of mine for a few days. I’m coming to London to see Matthew.’

‘He’ll be thrilled to hear it – the rest of the family here, too, and I in particular am more than pleased.’ Laura was unable to maintain her cheerful tone. ‘Relieved would be a better word, Uncle Nat. I rang up to ask if you’d come and stay with me for a while. The truth is – well, I’m in the heck of a mess and it’s something even Marianne can’t help me sort out. My granddad once told me that you sometimes helped your patients in more ways than the physical.’

‘I never denied them a listening ear, if that’s what you mean, but tranquillizers have largely and regrettably taken over from that.’

‘Grandpa said you’d got to the bottom of why a little boy was stuttering and after you’d ticked off the parents he soon stopped it.’

Was Laura due for an eventual ticking-off from Uncle Nat? If so, she thought, I no doubt deserve it. She gave him a résumé of the nightmare situation in which she now found herself.

‘And you kept that from me?’

‘You haven’t been too well, have you?’

‘I’m much improved, and even if I weren’t, would I let you down?’

Chapter Five

Howard was writing his weekly letter to Matthew, to whom though they were raised in the same town he had not felt close when they were children. Nor did he now, but that made it nonetheless distressing that his cousin was slowly wasting away, that Matthew might no longer be alive when the hydrangea Howard could see through the window bloomed again.

A picture misted by time rose before him. Sabbath afternoon at his great-grandmother’s house, the highlight of the week for the family. Cakes and sandwiches on the tea-table. The adults all talking at once. His sister and Matthew’s together with their dolls. And Matthew watching Howard and Mark play cards behind the sofa, where Sarah Sandberg, for whom the Sabbath was sacrosanct, would not cast her eye upon the schoolboy sinners.

Mark and I, the twosome we were, never thought of asking Matthew to join in. Kids didn’t realize that exclusion could hurt and Matthew wasn’t the assertive sort. He had known too, as the adults did, that Howard and Mark felt more like brothers than second cousins.

Closer than some brothers, Howard thought now, given that my dad and Uncle Arnold had only the blood tie in common. But as if with a single mind, Howard and Mark had volunteered together to lend their strength to Israel’s fight for survival in the 1967 war.