‘Some of the things I’ve heard about Marianne when she was young imply that she was what you might call before her time.’

Nathan laughed. ‘Independent was always the word for her.’

But it’s my uncomplicated granddaughter who’s ended up a Reform rebbetzin, he reflected, eyeing Carla affectionately as she put David into his car seat and buckled the belt.

Nathan had heard she was making a good job of her congregational duties. She was the sort to whom it came naturally to lend herself to what her choice of husband requires of her. An old-fashioned girl, and there weren’t too many of them around. Sensible too, and this was Nathan’s opportunity to get her impression of what was going on at Laura’s.

‘When did what’s happened to Bessie begin?’ he asked her.

‘The dieting? Or what Alan and I think it’s all about?’

‘You’ve discussed it between you, have you?’

‘Everything concerning everyone gets discussed in our family, Grandpa.’

‘It always did,’ he said dryly, ‘and often behind the person concerned’s back! Whenever my ears burned I knew why, and now it’s Laura’s turn again, which it hasn’t been since her marriage. It once occurred to me that a family is a web of intrigue.’ And at the time Nathan had viewed Sarah as the mother spider, enmeshing those over whom she ruled.

When had he had that thought? On a train. On the way back from London after lending himself to Marianne’s marrying out – secretly marrying out, and he the sole family representative at her wedding. What was that, he reflected in retrospect, but my showing them I wouldn’t let them do to her what they’d done to me? Something I didn’t then have the guts to express in words.

‘But in addition to yours, Marianne’s is the opinion we all value,’ Carla went on.

And given the past, what a joke that was.

‘Marianne doesn’t know if she’s coming or going at the moment,’ Carla told him, ‘what with one thing and another I don’t know when she finds time to work. Or to see the boyfriend none of us has met.’

Once the family met him, Marianne’s private life would be private no more, and Nathan didn’t blame her for keeping it so as long as she could.

‘You still haven’t answered my question about Bessie,’ he said to Carla.

‘I can’t tell you anything definite, Grandpa. But Alan and I do have our theories.’

Carla halted in a line of vehicles held up at the traffic lights on Golders Green Road. ‘Sorry to bring you this roundabout route to Laura’s, but she asked me to pick up some pickled brisket from Bloom’s.’