Filial loyalty – to him not her – rose in my chest. I longed for specificities. But how was I to get them? This had been a night for unexpected revelations sure enough, and unprecedented candour also – as I had been warned over the telephone, something very strange was going on – but that didn’t mean that the primitive decencies were not still operating. I couldn’t very well strike my own mother in her bedroom and demand that she explain to me, down to the last wheal and minor laceration, what she had in mind when she said my father was sadistic. I looked to Mr Flatman to see if he would help. I petitioned him with my eyes. Tell me what he did to her, I mutely pleaded. Did he simply strike her with his hands, or did he use the belts and latterly the braces which she bought him religiously every year on his birthday and for chanucah? Did he force other women on her, women whose names he could not remember – Lucetta, say, or Helga, or even Golda? And is that what your wife found irresistible about him? Is he at this very moment roping Rabika to a rented bed in Tooting? Does he compel her literally to piss with him in der zelber grib – in the selfsame pit?

Menashe Flatman read my mute but burning inquisitiveness impatiently. He looked at me as if I were a boy still. He made sweeping gesture with his hand, designed to take in the boudoir and its broken promises, and the three of us and our unbearable suffering. ‘This,’ he said, and his voice was so unsteady that he might have been standing on a hill overlooking Auschwitz. ‘This. Isn’t this the work of a sadist!’