‘Well, it’s taken us till now to become a real family,’ Laura replied, ‘and I’d like us to stay together for as long as possible. Jake, too. Edinburgh would be Janis’s alternative, and that’s a long way away.’

‘You’ll still have two kids at home.’

‘But Jeremy doesn’t hit it off too well with Bessie, as you may have noticed! And she absolutely adores him, poor pet.’

Marianne said with a laugh, ‘That could be why he’s always so rude to her. My grandson too looks pained when Bessie tries to tag along with him and Jeremy.’

‘Sending Jeremy to A.P.’s school was a good idea of yours,’ said Laura. ‘He settled down in this country much more easily than Janis did and it has to be his friendship with A.P. that helped him do so.’

Though Jeremy was now sixteen, and A.P. a year his junior, they were in the same class and had become inseparable companions.

‘Janis has lots of friends now though,’ said Marianne, ‘and, I gather, plenty of outside interests.’

‘Which Jake and I are hoping won’t result in her getting bad grades in her crucial exams,’ said Laura.

‘You don’t take too many assignments away from home any more, do you?’ Marianne said after a pause.

‘My family is more important to me,’ Laura replied. ‘And I bet you didn’t think that could happen.’

‘Did you?’

‘No, as a matter of fact. But it has and I’m happy, Marianne.’

Marianne glanced at one of Laura’s photographic studies that lent additional charm to the spacious, white-walled room. It was one that had won Laura a photographer-of-the-year award, its setting a harbourside on which some fishermen were untangling their silvery catch from the net.

‘I’ve always liked your black and white pictures best,’ Marianne said, ‘and the ones you called throwouts and let me have, when you and Jake moved house, have been much admired.’

The town house that David had bought for Laura when Bessie was born could not comfortably accommodate her new family and Jake had found and refurbished their present home, a three-storey Edwardian villa overlooking Hampstead Heath, where property was at a premium, however decaying, and snapped up the moment it came on the market.

‘My mum wanted to make the soup and the knedlach,’ Laura said irrelevantly, ‘but I wouldn’t let her. This is my home and I wanted to cook the meal for the Seder.’

Before Laura’s marriage, chicken broth and matzo balls had not featured in her preoccupations, thought Marianne. It was as if Jake had waved a wand over her and hey presto! The woman she was had metamorphosed into someone Marianne barely recognized.