One word too many from either of us, Leona thought now, and the life we’ve built together could collapse like a house of cards, though it was a good deal more solid than that. Since childhood, Frank was to Leona her best friend and that hadn’t changed.

She was taking the casseroled chicken from the oven, assailed by déjà vu. How many years had slipped by since she and Frank stood gazing down at the kitchen floor awash with gravy, and swimming in it amid chunks of broken pyrex, the special dinner Leona had cooked because Henry was coming?

Disappointment laced with shame, when Henry called to say he wasn’t coming, was responsible for Leona’s forgetting to use the oven cloth and dropping the hot dish from her burned fingers. And while the mess was being cleared up, the fraught conversation had somehow led to Frank’s saying what he had tonight.

When everyone at the Seder table finally had their meal before them, Ann delivered her second shock of the evening.

‘I’ve made up my mind to put Harry in a nursing home. I’ve had enough.’

‘That’s what I am to her,’ Harry told Sybil. ‘A burden that has to be put somewhere.’

Sybil eyed Ann reproachfully. ‘How can you do that to your husband?’

‘Your two dropped dead, I believe. If you’d had my experience you’d have done what I’m going to without thinking twice.’

Again Sybil appealed to Nathan. ‘That’s no way for her to speak to the lady who could be her future aunt.’

‘Ann is overwrought, my dear,’ he replied, patting her hand.

And adding nothing to contradict her estimation of her own status, Leona noted.

‘However, I think Ann’s intention is a good idea,’ Nathan declared.

Harry’s response was, ‘Living – if you can call my existence that – where I’d get the nursing without the pity would suit me fine!’

Howard, unduly silent throughout the evening, let fly at his father. ‘Mum is the one who should be pitied, but I wouldn’t expect the man you’ve become to see it that way!’

He calmed down and smiled at Sybil. ‘Please excuse what this Seder night has turned into—’

‘If she’s hoping to marry into the family, she’ll get used to hearing shouting matches,’ said Ann.

‘What’s the betting,’ said Leona, ‘that there’s one going on right now in London?’

‘If they’re trying to put me off, they won’t succeed, Nat,’ purred Sybil, ‘and I don’t think I’ve mentioned to you that I’ve always fancied living in Bournemouth.’

Leona envisaged her father sitting on a bench on Bournemouth’s East Cliff, whiling away the time with other senior citizens. To what else but that was this crafty creature leading him by the nose? The going to seed that Ronald had feared would surely ensue.