Nathan’s, however, had begun with a built-in handicap; his love for the Gentile nurse he had met while a medical student. And a lifetime wasn’t long enough for Nathan to forget how David had castigated him when he found out about Mary.

He could still see himself sitting in David’s car, a puny youth, his brother already a married man, being told that if he wanted to kill his parents, marrying a shiksah was the way to do it.

The introduction to Rebecca was afterwards hastily arranged. And how mortifying it had remained for Nathan that he had been too weak to defy his big brother. A man who had himself married for money.

Raking up old coals will get you nowhere, Nathan told himself, absently watching Bridie take some cake dishes out of the sideboard and line them with paper doilies. But how could the floodgates of remembrance not open for him today? And the memory that had just returned to him accounted for his lifelong hostility towards David…

In his childhood, Nathan had idolized David. When the Sandbergs still lived in the Strangeways ghetto the possibility of one of her sons becoming a doctor could not have entered Sarah’s mind. How to make ends meet would have been her major preoccupation. But Nathan was then too young to have realized that. He alone of her four children had taken for granted that there would always be a meal for him on the table.

Then a day came when Nathan’s childhood illusion that all was well with his world was shattered. He had called at the Moritzes’ house on his way home from school, to borrow a book from Sigmund’s library, and had found Sigmund parcelling some books in order to sell them.

How incongruous it now seemed that so humble a home had housed that library. Goethe and Galsworthy, Dickens and Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, among the literary giants cheek by jowl with the works of the great philosophers, Nathan recalled, in a small room lined floor to ceiling with shelves built with Sigmund Moritz’s own hands.

Incongruous too was the friendship between Nathan’s parents and the Moritzes, so different were the cultures from which the two immigrant couples had sprung. Sarah and Abraham Sandberg were products of the insular background that Tsarist oppression had imposed upon Russian Jews; Sigmund and Rachel Moritz, he, though a tailor by trade, an intellectual, and she with the elegant refinement that had characterized the Viennese Jewesses no less when they settled in their new country.

Half of Sigmund’s library was now in Nathan’s study. The other half, packed in boxes in the attic, was awaiting the building of extra bookshelves.