But there was another and far more terrible interpretation of those signs. For was it not conceivable that a woman who could keep her suspicions to herself for a full twenty-eight years was capable of even greater wifely magnanimity and had taken to her own bosom the fruit of another’s guilty love? And could it not therefore be conceived that I was so conceived, not by she I called mother but by she I called Mrs Flatman? (The very she I had bent over the bathroom sink a mere hour or so before?) It was all horribly plausible. To save the young Rabika’s honour, to show her brave loyalty to her own erring husband, to try to get him to remember her name at last, she I called mother had progressively padded herself with cushions for six months while she I called Mrs Flatman had been secreted somewhere in the country. She wouldn’t have been the first Jewish girl to vanish for a while before turning up again looking well-cared for but thinner. There was a nursing home out there somewhere, probably under the supervision of Beth Din, that specialized in those sorts of breaks. Which one of them dangled me on her knee for the first months of my life and fed me – I don’t mean with strained peaches – I didn’t want to investigate. But I didn’t have to look far to find the person who removed all traces of Rabika from my birth certificate.

Yes, such a version of my distant past was possible and explained far more than I had ever wanted explaining. It didn’t tally only with the words in which my mother, that’s to say Mrs Fugleman, had voiced her concern about my father and my other mother. ‘I think there’s something between them,’ she had said, and that surely was not the way a woman naturally given to hyperbole and who had sacrificed the best years of her life to the rearing of their love-child would have put it. I took that as my consolation and went to bed on it in my old bedroom, the one from whose window I used to watch Mrs Flatman – that’s to say she I had never been able to call Rabika – frolic in her garden.

But not before I had done something to soothe my father’s wife. I bent over her and kissed her on the neck, like a good son. ‘Don’t jump to hasty conclusions,’ I told her. ‘And don’t concern yourself either way. Sexual fidelity is only a small favour between people. You have to be very pernickety to insist on it. As long as he gives you money and makes you laugh you don’t have anything to complain about.’

‘He doesn’t make me laugh.’

‘Ah, then it’s serious,’ I said.