And yet I was unable to impress him with my success. You would have thought that someone who lived as he lived and worked where he worked could not fail to have been envious of the grand vistas that were opening out for me. Yet he seemed completely indifferent. It might have been the case that all the major events of his physical life had now taken place, but he had an inner existence too and he was busy with that. He read apocalyptic books, books about the deaths of kings and the decline of empires and the ultimate destruction of mankind. He knew by heart all the dates that the great prophets had fixed for the final floods and famines. He didn’t bother with stuff like The Scourge of the Swastika anymore; the Nazis and their concentration camps were just a small and passing phase of history, barely a ripple on the waters of the last cataclysm, only a trifle more significant than me, Barney Fugleman, with my new college scarf and my stories of student drinking parties. I could find no way to pierce his magisterial boredom towards me, and I suppose that that was partly why I insisted on showing him my photos of Sharon.

‘Why do you want me to see them?’ he asked.

‘Because she’s lovely.’

I remember that he scratched his face, a long raking movement, with his black nails. ‘There are lots of lovely girls,’ he said, and I wondered how he knew.

‘But I’m going out with this one. I’m probably going to marry her.’

‘All the more reason I don’t want to see them,’ he said. ‘I don’t like family photographs.’

But he needn’t have worried – family photographs were the last thing Sharon’s photographs were.

[4]

I had met Sharon a month or so earlier at a students’ union dance. She was just nineteen. She wasn’t a student herself but she went regularly to the union, partly because she liked dancing and partly because she liked to be close to learning. I couldn’t believe my good fortune that I had found someone who looked Jewish enough to please my parents and Brobdingnagian enough to please me. And Sharon was enraptured by being with a boy who could recite literature as he undressed her. (Actually, ‘undressed her’ doesn’t quite get it. It was more like an unveiling. I stood on a stool and pulled cords and clapped. If I’d bought champagne it would have been to smash against her side, not drink.) ‘O, my America, my Newfoundland,’ I declaimed, and she had to guess who I was quoting. We coupled, from the start, with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury by our bedside, allusively. ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair,’ I said. ‘Men may come and men may go,’ Sharon told me, ‘But I go on for ever.’