Kate too, and Howard could remember Mark’s granddad aiding and abetting them against their parents’ wishes. David had driven them to London, paid for their tickets, and put them on a plane with other youngsters who had dropped everything to do what they knew had to be done.

Planeloads of kids like us arrived from all over the world, Howard recalled, and our going there to take over essential jobs vacated by those mobilized for active service helped keep the wheels turning.

Only Howard and Kate, though, had come back, and she to tell the family she wanted to make her life in Israel with Aryeh, whom she had met and fallen in love with there.

Howard had not forgotten his parents’ reaction to their seventeen-year-old daughter’s decisiveness. Nor Sarah Sandberg’s saying it was God’s will that a new branch of the family take root in hallowed land. Well, words to that effect. When gripped by emotion Sarah had tended to wax lyrical. Like her legendary almonds and raisins, which Howard had thought amusing until he found himself tasting them.

What would Mark have said about my living in Germany? Would he too have been censorious? The lad I remember would not. But who could know, had Mark lived, that events wouldn’t have changed him as they had others in the family? You started out with only your genes dictating your personality, but life could turn you into someone you yourself barely recognized.

There was no guarantee that Howard and Mark, born on the same day, would still be thinking alike at the age of forty – a landmark Howard had passed last week, and as always on his birthday he had thought of Mark.

Did Kate ever think of Margaret, once her closest friend? Or had she firmly put from her mind the cousin whose adult path was so different from her own? The path perhaps, but in effect not the destination, Howard reflected – Margaret in a closed-order nunnery, and Kate living in one of Israel’s ultra-orthodox enclaves.

What Matthew and I now have in common is, for each of us it’s as if we no longer have a sister. Do my letters cheer him up? Or serve to remind him of how, when we were all kids, Mark and I had no time for him? But that didn’t stop him from writing to me when Mark died. By then, Matthew was a drama student in London.

Karin popped her head around the study door. ‘Supper will soon be ready, Howard. And we have an unexpected visitor.’

‘Be with you in a minute, darling—’

‘The visitor is Ben.’

Howard put down his pen and rose. ‘What is he doing here on a weekday? Is something wrong?’

‘From his expression I would say so. But he did not and I would advise you not to question him.’