But once I was out in the street I realised that I had felt another kind of pleasure also while Sharon’s photographs were on the table. I wished we’d been able to talk about them in more detail; I’d like to have heard what he thought her fairest features were and which attitudes he thought suited her best. And if he’d been just that little bit indelicate about her, if he’d pointed with some exactness, if he’d called things by their coarsest names, why I wouldn’t have minded that either, would I? For a moment I thought about going back into the shop. Then I considered stopping undesirables in the street and showing them what I was carrying in my breast pocket. Then I remembered Monty Frankel. You see I didn’t just want to impress him – I wanted to share something with him. I was offering him a little pact.

So I wasn’t at all prepared for the violence of his reaction when I finally forced him to take a look.

‘So this is the girl you say you love?’ he asked me, after a moment or two.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Does she know you’re showing these around?’

‘I’m not showing them around, Monty.’

‘Who else have you shown them to?’

‘Nobody.’

‘So why me?’ I noticed for the first time that there was a break in his voice and that there were tears in his eyes.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I shrugged.

‘So why me?’ he repeated. He was yelling at me now. ‘You think it’s safe with me, do you? You think it doesn’t count if I see them?’

I tried to explain that that wasn’t it at all. But he couldn’t hear me. He was cursing me in yiddish and he was crying. Then he threw the photographs at me – hard. And while I was on my knees collecting them he actually kicked me in the back.

Thereafter, whenever I met him he would shout ‘Fucking meshuggener!’ I began to avoid him but he would even shout it from the other side of the street. I had to stop taking the tube eventually because he would be waiting for me, in his ticket collector’s uniform, and I knew from experience that he wouldn’t think twice about showing a couple of hundred commuters what a fucking meshuggener looked like.

[5]