Uncle Nat was a good and respected physician, but his compassion and his clever mind had ensured that, not the vocational calling that had led his friend, Lou, and his nephew Ronald to study medicine. Uncle Nat had hoped to read the classics, and Marianne’s mother had told her that his teachers at the Manchester Grammar School had considered him Oxbridge material.

No, my mum wouldn’t have put it that way, Marianne thought reminiscently. What did Esther Klein know from that composite word and the dreaming spires it conjured up?

A more prosaic woman than Esther would, even in her day, have been hard to find. The conversation Marianne was recalling had taken place in her mother’s kitchen and she could still see her mum, immaculate as always, though she had been cooking all morning and was then frying fishballs, carefully turning them in the pan of sizzling oil.

Even when she grew old, Esther had continued taking pride in her appearance. A streak of vanity at odds with her personality, Marianne the author thought objectively. Marianne the daughter found that her eyes had misted with the remembrance.

She left her study and went to take a shower, her mind still engaged by family matters – perhaps because this was the Passover Eve and she had still not accustomed herself to celebrating the Festival minus those whose presence had dominated the family Seder tables of the past.

Her Uncle David was notable among them, his glasses slipping down his nose as he read aloud from the Haggadah, and woe betide the child who allowed his or her attention to wander! Time was when Marianne’s grandfather, Abraham Sandberg, had conducted the proceedings, his shoulders stooped from his early-immigrant years in a sweatshop, the foul air and the steam from the pressing iron he had wielded responsible for the diseased lungs that had precipitated his end.

In her swish 1980s bathroom, it was hard for Marianne to believe that from such penurious beginnings the comfortably off clan of which she was part had sprung. And with each succeeding generation, it would be the more difficult – if the beneficiaries of their forebears’ blood, sweat and tears bothered to think about it, which Marianne doubted. Few had granddads like David, whose taking Laura to see the ‘ancestral home’ in the old Strangeways ghetto had shaken her rigid and done a lot for her character.

With Abraham Sandberg’s death, his mantle had fallen upon David’s shoulders, and how strange it had at first seemed to see Uncle David seated in Abraham’s chair at the head of the big table in Sarah’s dining room.

Sarah’s response to Marianne’s communicating that feeling to her was a gentle reproof, and that cameo from the past too now returned to her – herself, a young mother, nursing her baby. And Sarah wearing a grey dress with a white collar to which the little Russian brooch was pinned.