At such moments memories of her grandmother returned to her and she would recall their private chats in Sarah’s kitchen, the heart of her home. Women like Sarah Sandberg, though, weren’t bred any more. Few nowadays displayed the single-minded devotion to what nature was said to have intended our purpose on earth to be. Instead we’ve sought and many of us achieved the equality with men for which we’re neither biologically nor emotionally equipped. The price is the conflicting priorities career women have to live with.

On the last day of February, Marianne finally heard from Simon. A typed message and without a signature in an envelope postmarked ‘Wellesley’. ‘Just to let you know I haven’t forgotten you.’

He had gone to ground at his sister’s, but who cared? She had better begin forgetting him. The nerve of the man!

Marianne resorted immediately to her personal therapy, burying herself in her work as she had after losing Ralph. She began editing the first draft of her new novel and by March was immersed in writing the manuscript she would deliver to her publisher.

As always her strict regime was interspersed with family crises. Matthew was briefly hospitalized yet again. Martin and Andy had a difference of opinion that seemed to herald the end of their long partnership and Marianne’s son spent two days at her flat discussing it with her. She was relieved when the matter was amicably settled and she able to resume work. No sooner had she done so than Ann called from Israel with a problem.

The Palestinian uprising, now said to be in the control of PLO agitators, had impelled Kate and her husband to throw in their lot with the militant West Bank settlers, with whose biblical views of Judaea and Samaria they agreed.

‘How can they take their kids where the violence is?’ Ann had said with feeling. ‘I’ve tried to dissuade them till I’m blue in the face. All Kate says is it’s up to me if I return to England or go with them.’

Ann had not returned to England to live alone. She could not have brought herself to live in Germany had Howard suggested it. In many ways, Marianne had reflected, Ann was a throwback to those previous generations. Without a husband and children, what would they have had to live for?

Having family on the West Bank was a disquieting thought, another anxiety at the back of Marianne’s mind, though her work remained at the forefront and she would have no trouble meeting her deadline.

She had told herself she could live without Simon. But not without a garden, and had expended money, and time on Sundays, on replacing the bushes injured beyond hope by the freak hurricane, splurging too on a flowering cherry and a quick-growing Russian vine for the patio wall.