But the thing about Stanley Cohen, hard man or not, was that he could dance. Didn’t care who knew it. Didn’t care who saw. Friday and Saturday nights, he’d leave his mates to go to the horses and he’d be in the Brancroft – sometimes somewhere further afield – with his prized dancing shoes on and his hair thick with cream. Once, he’d said to Raymond that he’d watched too many of his friends trot off to Flanders and never come back to worry about what anyone else thought of him, so he was going to spend the rest of his days doing exactly as he pleased. And what pleased him was dancing with whoever would have him, whether they were twice his age or half, box stepping around the Brancroft or foxtrotting up and down the Palais. Raymond was there to watch. And if, on occasion, he noticed his father’s hands where they oughtn’t be, or got paid a few pennies to tell a little white lie to his mother, he saw nothing untoward in it. He would have done all of it, and more, just to be closer to his father.

‘I’m sorry, Ma,’ Raymond finally said. ‘I’ve been a lousy son.’

‘That you have.’ She looked sad. ‘But at least you know it.’

Raymond paused. An unspoken question had hung in the air between them, and he readied himself to ask it.

‘So . . . is he here then?’

At that moment the front door opened, a broken voice called out, ‘Ma!’, and into the kitchen bouldered a black-haired rake of a man, with the same sad almond eyes as Raymond, the same unruly dark hair, the same striking cheekbones that gave him the air of some matinee idol.

The figure stopped dead in the kitchen doorway. ‘Ray Cohen,’ he said, ‘as I live and breathe.’

For a moment the two men simply looked at one another, tension crackling in the air.

Then Raymond was lost in a chaos of arms as the new arrival threw himself around him, and his aunties and mother joined in too.

‘Welcome home, Artie,’ said Raymond, his voice lost in the crush. ‘It’s good to see you, little brother.’

*

Later, when the broiled chicken was ready to serve, Mrs Cohen asked Raymond to say some words for Stanley, dearly departed and gone from this world for three long years. Raymond hardly knew what to say, so long had he been away, but as they sat around the table he dredged up the memory of the time their father had taken his two boys down to the canal and they’d sat, together, on the towpath, fishing out old boots and suitcases with a rod Stanley’s own father had once owned.