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Oona admired Patrice's novels and even toyed with the idea of authorising the book herself. After Oona's death, Patrice put the idea to various of the children (despite their age, their behaviour makes the noun particularly apt), but their opposition led her to abandon the idea of a full-scale Life in favour of a personal memoir, focusing on Oona's 14 years of widowhood.Oona was not a merry widow but a drunken one. Her loyalty to Charlie was unswerving and they remained lovers until he was well into his eighties. But her devotion to her husband led to the alienation of some of her eight children, particularly her favourite, Michael, who married the author of this account.Patrice was a natural choice to write her mother-in-law's life. They maintained close, if sometimes strained, relations long after she and Michael divorced. She gradually asserted her place until, by the time of her husband's death, she was both a respected matriarch and in control of a large financial empire. This did not prevent his sending her censorious letters concerning her frivolity (in 1942 she was Deb of the Year) or protesting bitterly when, in the company of her friends, Carol Marcus (later Saroyan, later still Matthau) and Gloria Vanderbilt, she journeyed to Hollywood.

There, she married a man three times her age and even more famous than her father: Charlie Chaplin. At first, neither Chaplin's staff nor his associates took her seriously and she was not even given control of her own home. Oona saw her father only half a dozen times after he abandoned his family when she was three. For O'Neill, genius seems to have been less an infinite capacity for taking pains than for evading responsibilities. The playwright showed less compassion for his descendants: on his deathbed, he "cursed his children and their offspring and the offspring to come.'' It's this curse, in the view of Patrice Chaplin, that her former mother-in-law, Oona O'Neill Chaplin, bore for the rest of her life. She remains, as VS Pritchett has said, "the detached observer of the comedy (in the sternest sense) which leaves us to make up our minds".

There can be little doubt, however, that this is her best novel since Heat and Dust.. In the dedication to Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill describes how his wife Carlotta's love enabled him to "write this play - write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones''. We may feel momentarily perplexed but, as those who have seen the Merchant Ivory films she has scripted will know, in Jhabvala's novels there are never any easy answers. They, and we, wait expectantly for some revelation, some tying up of fictional strands, but the Master's great message remains as obtuse as ever. The movement lives on in the "Head and Heart House" he and his zealous family and followers found in a New York brownstone. Her locations, too, are suffused in exotic atmosphere: a whiff of eau de cologne and cigars can evoke a Bombay club as intimately as do the Earl Grey tea and buttered crumpets that are used to convey Cynthia's Hampstead house.It is left to Graeme's and Baby's grandson, poor, crippled Henry, who appears to have been personally chosen by the Master - indeed, he appears to have been mysteriously and immaculately conceived by him - to inherit both the burden of his mission and his trunk-loads of papers written in different languages at cafe tables all over Europe, as well as something of his aura.