Slowly I had packed up my studio. Its broken door was never repaired. But I felt I had to put the room in order. And I had to salvage something, something from that room, from my work. It was a long labour, picking and dusting, and laying down in piles, and sorting. I felt like a scavenger on a beach, a deserted, lost beach where a great tsunami had passed. Several mornings were spent this way before I felt I was finished.

And Jack’s wife Madeleine helped us find our apartment in New York when we arrived a few weeks after they did. It is she who told us about schools, who helped set the children up at school. Madeleine Benator rescued me in New York.

MY PARENTS WERE SHOCKED that we were leaving. Why so suddenly, my mother said. But she had learned not to ask.

Howard is very unhappy with the political situation, Mom, we just don’t want to live here anymore. I hear myself saying that, even now, and I remember my mother’s astounded face as she heard me.

We told my parents they would come and visit us, in New York, imagine that! But no one could muster excitement for that, or even an image, of how that would be.

I recently imagined them, the two of them, in a small hotel we would have found them on West End Avenue, around the corner. My mother’s pale dresses, her stockings, her handbags would have looked strange here, but perhaps in 1973 they wouldn’t have. This is what happens when you impose an old, frozen image of someone on a new, different place.

We would have taken them to a Broadway musical, how I can imagine my father’s face lit by the stage lights, entranced by a magical scene framed by the crimson-and-gold proscenium arch. He would have been seated next to my mother in the middle of the third row, because Howard would have got them only the best seats.

They would have been amazed to look out of our apartment window and glimpse the Hudson River through the trees, as Stephen or Helena, diligent schoolchildren, explained that following the river south just a few miles would lead you to the Statue of Liberty, and then, right then, the sea. And across that sea . . . a long way . . . was where they, where we, had come from. And millions of others besides.

My parents would have loved and been astonished by everything they saw.

But they never did visit us. They seemed to decline rapidly after we left, and to become old, at once. I was their only child, remember.

My uncle Bernard is the one who buried them, one after the other, and I remember again and again those phone calls with Bernard, and with his wife Elaine, the wire so crackly in those days, voices indistinct, as they spoke to us and let us know what was happening. It’s alright, Jacqueline, the doctor said there was no pain. No pain, Jacqueline.