By then their son was at Oxford and they had moved from their small flat to a spacious home in Hampstead, which Ralph had thought more suitable for entertaining the business friends he had rapidly accumulated.

Marianne could remember having to swallow her distaste for some of those whom he had brought home – men for whom money was their god, their wives seeming no more than the decorative appendages necessary to enhance their image. And Ralph’s expecting me to dress for the part, she recalled. In order not to let him down, she had gone out and bought herself some suitable outfits. And if Lyn were here now, Marianne would have said to her, ‘What makes you think you’re the only woman whose husband expects her to play a role?’ Wasn’t that, give or take the details, what being a wife meant? And if you loved your husband you did it even if it went against the grain.

As for Lyn’s saying that she couldn’t have known what Arnold would turn into – who did, when they and the object of their affection were young? You couldn’t know then what life would turn you yourself into, for it was life that did the changing: the opportunities of whatever kind that came your way, or didn’t, the lifts and the let-downs, the chance meetings that could dictate a twist in your path, with happy or catastrophic results.

Marianne glanced at Howard, who had not spoken a word since they boarded the plane. His chance meeting with a German girl on a ski-slope had, despite the opposition of both their families, led first to happiness and later to the catastrophe neither could have envisaged.

Had they lived on a desert island… Instead they had been prey to the outside influences love was not necessarily able to withstand. Marriages were not unknown to fall foul of in-law trouble. But this was different.

Marianne was aware that her own daughter-in-law felt an outsider in the family. But not in the way Christina did. As if she represented to her husband’s family the nation that had sent 6 million Jews to the gas chambers and crematoriums.

Marianne’s compassion for Christina had not, however, lessened her mixed feelings about going to Germany. Her efforts to apply logic to her repugnance had not succeeded.

Howard emerged from his thoughts and turned to smile at her. ‘I’m grateful to you for lending me moral support, Auntie Marianne.’

‘There’s no need to be. And I can’t remember when you last called me “Auntie”.’

‘Well, you’ve always been more like one of us, haven’t you?’

‘And what does that mean?’

Howard paused before replying, and Marianne noticed some grey amid the unruly red hair that he, like her grandson, had inherited from Abraham Sandberg. It seemed the private torment he and Christina had endured together had prematurely aged him.