‘Ah! Norman, as in Conqueror. Will you take champagne? Frankly, after a bloody morning on a building-site champagne is essential from eleven until whenever.’

‘Champagne will be perfectly splendid. It is good of you to see me.’

He flicked fingers at some waiter who arrived to pour the wine.

‘I thought so too.’ He was smiling so there was no rebuke. Not that I would have, as Florence would say, given a fig. But I needed his goodwill, so he got thanked.

‘What can I do for you? I know nothing of your brother, you know. Years ago, yes. You have read the famous Agendas? So of course you know …’

‘I know. I equally know that you persuaded him to come to Bargemon. To get back to a … to a more seemly life. Right?’

‘Perfectly right. He is a good fellow. Wild, emotional, very vain, but he has a talent, I knew that. It needed to be contained, encouraged, given time to grow and develop. In Paris the … temptations, shall I say, were too great. Here he could breathe, start again. It took courage, you know? But …’ – the helpless shrug – ‘but the boy is now a man. If you grow old in the environment in which he thrived you die at forty.’

He was smiling at me, his glass held in a strong hand. I suppose I had expected someone in a blue suit. Or a black raincoat. A hat certainly. With a hooked nose and a bald head like a vulture. Aronovich was not at all like those fleeting images. Mid-fifties, possibly, but looked an early forty. A full, glossy head of black hair, a good face, brown eyes, a generous, but not slack, mouth, a firm nose, perhaps ‘fixed’, but altogether a good-looking man. He was tall and slim, in a pale blue shirt, his initials on his breastpocket, blue jeans, sneakers and a silver belt with a fat dollar coin for the buckle. He watched me as I took stock of him.

‘I don’t look like Fagin? Do I? Sometimes it worries me. But my mother was from Pisa, in Italy, my father from Cracow, I was born in the Argentine. We were very fortunate. And you’ – he leant with folded arms on the table – ‘are quite unlike James. It’s true. He was so fair! So different in complexion, he really could not be a brother to you –’ And then he stopped, and without altering his look he said, ‘One gets so confused with “was” and “is”. I should, I suppose, say James was so different from you that I would never imagine you were brothers at all.’

I had noted the change in tenses. Perhaps because, again, I was over-aware. But I suddenly liked him. He was easy, he was calm, he was not at all what I had thought he would be.