What right had Moira to deprive A.P. of the warming memories that would accompany his contemporaries in the family through their lives? Stop it! Marianne ordered herself. She could not, however, forget her impression of Moira’s family. The stiff-upper-lip Lord Kyverdale, and her ladyship carefully forgetting that she was once a chorus girl.

As if by tacit consent, they did not visit Marianne, nor she them. What have we in common other than a grandson? An only grandchild for each. Marianne’s recollection of Martin’s wedding reception was of a champagne-sipping crowd in one of England’s stately homes. Denuded of people it would echo with silence. So formal were the Kyverdales, whenever Marianne envisaged them they were seated at either end of the vast table at which she had only once dined, both resplendent in evening dress.

The memories A.P. would accumulate from his mother’s family would be the opposite of warming, Marianne thought, listening to an exchange now taking place between him and Bessie. A.P. plainly wasn’t enjoying it, but would look back on it with humour when he grew up.

‘If you’ll sit beside me at the table, you can share this lovely big Haggadah my daddy has bought for me,’ Bessie was pleading.

‘No, thanks,’ said A.P.

‘You don’t like me, do you?’

‘But I have to put up with you because you’re my cousin,’ he replied with schoolboy callousness.

‘What do I have to do to make you like me, A.P.?’

Marianne was then diverted by Jake’s coming to chat with her.

‘How’s the writer of the family?’

‘She’s enjoying the hospitality of our entrepreneur,’ Marianne answered in kind.

‘I’m stuck with that nomenclature, aren’t I?’ he said with a laugh.

‘You must blame your wife for that. It was the reply she gave her mother when Shirley asked what you do. If I hadn’t already met you, I’d have expected you to be a portly gent with a big cigar!’

‘Hardly Laura’s style.’

But nor are you, Marianne silently replied. Laura’s taste in men had in the past ranged from the arty to the sophisticated. In her youth, though, she had hung around with pop musicians, including a guitarist who wore pink velvet suits. It had taken Sarah Sandberg a long time to recover from the shock of meeting him.

But unlike the rest of the family elders, Sarah had never given up hope of Laura’s eventually settling down with what she had termed ‘a nice Jewish husband’. She would surely have approved of Jake Bornstein.

‘To tell you the truth, Marianne,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what a gorgeous creature like Laura is doing married to me.’