Marianne hesitated to do so. Her cousin Shirley, not she, was the eldest of Sarah’s three granddaughters, but Sarah had left to Marianne the pieces she had valued most.

Marianne would not forget the day when Sarah’s treasure trove was opened. How Shirley, as materialistic as her father, David, had immediately put a monetary value on the pieces, scrutinizing each in turn as if she were a jeweller.

‘Don’t bother looking at the filigree brooch, or the garnet ring, Shirley,’ David had said. ‘They’re for Marianne.’

‘What do you mean, they’re for Marianne?’

The ensuing confrontation, for such it had felt, had taken place in Marianne’s mother’s flat, a week after Sarah was laid to rest. With my mum lying ill in the next room, Marianne recalled.

Uncle Nat, too, was present that afternoon, with his daughter Leona. But Leona had displayed no resentment about Marianne’s being left their grandmother’s most treasured jewellery. It was she who broke the silence that followed Shirley’s antagonistic words.

‘Marianne had a very special relationship with Grandma, and everyone in the family knows it.’

‘But I’ve never understood why,’ Shirley had replied. ‘And while Grandma was growing old and frail, where was Marianne? Living it up in London. You and I, though, were right here, doing our granddaughterly duty, no matter how inconvenient it sometimes was for us.’

‘Marianne had to live where her husband’s business was,’ Leona countered.

‘And if it hadn’t gone bust, she wouldn’t have returned to the bosom of the family,’ Shirley retorted, ‘which my dad’s generosity made possible.’

‘My asking Ralph to run the art gallery I was thinking of opening in Manchester was a business proposition,’ David interceded, and received a tight-lipped smile from his daughter.

Another silence followed, and Marianne glanced at the armchair her grandmother had occupied until she became bedfast. It was there that Sarah had sat when the family came from wherever life had scattered them, to celebrate with her on her ninety-ninth birthday.

It was the last happy occasion for which the entire clan had gathered. All had brought Sarah gifts, and the old lady had received them with the graciousness of a queen seated on her throne. Later, while the party went on around her, she had sat pensively fingering her little Russian brooch, as always pinned at her throat, and Marianne had wondered what she was thinking. If she was perhaps reliving her long years; remembering the bitter along with the sweet, which she had always referred to as the almonds and raisins of life.