‘Isn’t that what you did when you eloped with Jake?’ Marianne retorted.

‘I’ve never been the one in the family whom everyone relies on—’

‘And from now on, that person isn’t going to be me!’ Marianne slammed down the receiver and found that she was trembling.

Further telephone calls to her relatives almost reduced her to tears. Though not all rebuked her as Laura had, she was in every case the recipient of reproach. When finally she steeled herself to call Arnold and Lyn, it was he who answered the telephone.

‘Thanks for the expression of sympathy,’ he said to her. ‘But when it came to it, you weren’t there when I needed you. If we’d known where you were… but you made sure we didn’t.’

Martin arrived to find his mother drinking brandy and her husband looking on silently.

‘Laura let me know you’re back.’

‘There was no reply when I called you.’

‘I popped out to buy my Sunday morning bagels.’

‘And have you come here to say I’ve let the family down, Martin? Which is how I’ve been made to feel.’

Martin eyed the bottle at Marianne’s elbow. ‘Something had to account for your early morning tipple and now I know what. So you weren’t here for poor Matthew’s funeral, a lot of good it would have done him if you had been.’

‘But others were deprived of my moral support, for want of a better way of putting it! The one time I’m not where I’m needed everyone, in their own way, lets me have it. Even Alan seemed shocked that I’d gone away without leaving a phone number. What right has the family to take me for granted, Martin?’

‘If you want the truth, Mum, I have to say it’s your fault. When did my mother not bend over backward to be where she feels she is needed? I’ve sometimes thought you’d elected yourself to fill your grandmother’s shoes.’

‘If that’s how it appears, allow me to inform you that I was dragooned into it. First by Uncle Nat, and then by—’

‘The person you are,’ Martin cut in. ‘Learned your lesson now?’

‘Too true I have, and I’m thinking of doing what you once suggested Simon and I should do – pack our typewriters and go to live on a desert island.’

‘No need to ask me twice, hon, only Bermuda isn’t a desert island.’

Chapter Eighteen

Marianne’s decision to make her home in Bermuda was as if she had finally put her first marriage behind her. The flat in which she had, on her return there, expected to live out her years alone, redolent of her life with Ralph, was sold along with the furniture they had chosen together. Closing the door upon it for the last time had seemed to her a symbolic gesture.