‘As you may remember, I had no option but to pretend ignorance of Moira’s undergoing therapy. It wasn’t until she switched to the group kind that she herself put me in the picture. It was then necessary for me to feign surprise. There’ve been times, Mum, when I’ve had cause to think I’d have made a good actor.’

And how hard it must have been for Marianne’s open and honest son to live the lengthy lie he had. The older he grew the more he looked like his father, but Ralph’s hair hadn’t turned grey before he was forty.

‘To complete the information Bill gave me,’ he went on, ‘after Moira said what she did about our family, one of the others accused her of having a guilt complex because she’d married out of her religion, and of blaming us for what she’d done.’

Marianne said wryly, ‘It strikes me that participating in group therapy could turn one into an amateur psychoanalyst.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Martin, ‘since learning to understand what ails yourself must surely lead to your delving into the behaviour of others. I imagine that’s what the participants are encouraged to do, that it helps to put their personal problems into perspective.’

‘Did Bill say that Moira accepts the accusation hurled at her as the truth?’

‘It’s still early days for that, Mum. But looking back, I’d say she’s lived with guilt on that account since our wedding day. If we’d married in church, things might have been different for her, but that she didn’t ask of me. It seems to me now that her excessive devoutness is her way of trying to make amends for her marriage not being sanctified.’

Marianne said after a pause, ‘But you haven’t lived with guilt because you married out, have you?’

‘Perhaps because you relieved me of it, by giving me your blessing. Moira never got that from her father, and he’s the one who counts in that family. Nor, needless to say, did she get it from her great-uncle, now a cardinal and not the first of the Kyverdales to wield that power. He wasn’t at our wedding, of course, and that could’ve been when what she had done first hit Moira.’

‘And you think how she feels towards our family is all tied up with her guilt?’

‘It has to be.’

‘Not necessarily. From what she said when we lunched together, it was plain that she finds us overwhelming, and pathologically so. She didn’t put it in the words I’m using, but my impression then was that Moira had to retreat lest we soak her up. It made me rethink the tragedy of Howard’s first marriage—’

‘Are you saying the family had that effect on Christina, too?’