‘It isn’t,’ said Matthew, ‘and if it wouldn’t embarrass you for me to say it – I shall anyway – Pete and I haven’t forgotten the friend you were to us then.’

‘I’d like to think I am still.’

‘That goes without saying,’ said Pete, ‘but the time we’re talking about was when gays were ostracized.’

Matthew glanced at his father. ‘By some we still are. The last time I had a conversation with my dad – and I can’t remember when that was – he said he couldn’t believe there was such a thing as a Jewish homosexual. And why did the exception to the rule have to be his son.’

Matthew allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Oh well! If he has to suffer me, I also have to suffer him is how I’ve come to look at it. Cheer up, Mum,’ he said to Lyn. ‘You and I still have each other, and I’m grateful for that.’

‘Can I please have your autographs on my new Haggadah, to prove to my friends that you really were at our Seder?’ Bessie called to Matthew and Pete.

They laughed and went to join her.

‘What Matthew just said – it’s how I feel, too,’ Lyn told Marianne. ‘With my husband living in cloud-cuckoo-land and my daughter shut away in a nunnery, it’s as if I have only Matthew left. If anything had come of Margaret’s friendship with that young surgeon, instead of her doing what she finally did, I might now be a grandmother. And he was a lovely man.’

‘But could you imagine Arnold with a Pakistani son-in-law?’

‘That could be why Margaret didn’t give him one. Not for Arnold’s sake, for Ravi’s. Arnold had avoided meeting him, when they came to England together for some medical conference. An ongoing situation like that, and it would have been, wouldn’t be pleasant for Ravi if he and Margaret had married.’

Lyn’s face crumpled with distress. ‘When I met him, Marianne – well, the way he looked at Margaret, and she at him – isn’t it terrible that because of Arnold, their love for each other has gone to waste? And I sometimes think that how Margaret has ended up is her way of paying her father back for being the man he is and its effect upon her and her brother.’

‘It would be best,’ Marianne replied, ‘for you to interpret Margaret’s joining the Holy Order she has as her finding comfort in her faith. How else are you to reconcile yourself to it? And we must hope it is the truth.’

‘I shall never reconcile myself to it. If only—’

Marianne cut Lyn short with a remembered saying. ‘If only we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.’