‘I can’t see what motivation he’d have for setting light to the soup shop,’ said Dan. ‘Like I said, I’ve checked his record. He’s clean.’

‘I can’t either.’ I watched a group of twenty-somethings bundle out of a cab, all well-oiled and chatting loudly about their recent deals. Advertising executives, probably. Brokers at a push. ‘When we were growing up, my sister and I had a crush on him. He seemed so cool. And whenever we went into Rosa’s newsagent’s, he was always friendly and . . . nice.’

‘You’re kidding?’ Dan spun round. ‘You had a crush on him? You wait ’til I tell the team.’

I laughed. ‘It was a long time ago. I’d forgotten all about him until yesterday. Jasmina and I didn’t think of it like that at the time, but I guess that’s what it was. We were younger than him but he never seemed to look down on us.’

‘It’s interesting that Rosa has maintained a Jewish identity and lifestyle,’ Dan said. ‘I wonder how she feels about that not mattering to either of her children.’

I told him about Rosa’s parents being helped to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto by Christian Poles.

‘Ah. That makes sense,’ he said. ‘What about Tomasz though?’

‘Rosa seems to have adapted to life here. Maybe she doesn’t mind?’ I couldn’t help thinking about Mum and the difficulty she’d had adjusting when we arrived over from Sylhet in the eighties. How she’d clung, all her life, to Bangladeshi customs, to her mother tongue, and how anglicised she found me. ‘From what I see, it’s pretty common for things to change from one generation to the next. It depends on who people mix with and marry.’

We’d stopped now to get a takeaway coffee from a stand.

Dan passed a tenner to the barista and we shuffled along the pavement to wait for our drinks.

Mum was still on my mind. She’d barely changed since living in the UK. ‘I wonder why some people adapt and others don’t.’ I remembered the times Jasmina and I came home from school and found her in a ball on the floor, in the dark, beside the sofa. It was an image which had lodged in the folds of my memory. ‘My mother still doesn’t speak English. Key words but nothing more.’

Dan seemed surprised. He collected our drinks. ‘What about your dad?’