I stopped Sharon here. Apart from the suggestion that I had been behaving like a fascist towards my own unconscious or whatever part of me I had dredged that monstrous creation, Tommy, out of, all that Sharon read was familiar to me. It was only a few days since, to please Sharon, I had subjected myself to these indignities, and I still retained a sort of dull, anaesthetized recollection of the experience, much as if I had woken sooner and less oblivious than I would have liked on the morning after a drunken party. Only I knew I hadn’t been to any party. ‘I know all that,’ I said, ‘can I put it down the sink now?’

But Sharon wasn’t dismayed by my lack of enthusiasm. ‘You haven’t heard the last paragraph yet,’ she told me, launching straight into it.

Our researches have since established that on Saturday, August 9, 1856, a woman named Martha Brown was publicly hanged from a scaffold outside Dorchester prison. Her crime was the murder of her husband.

She wore for her execution a simple and light black silk gown. A crowd of several thousand people turned up, as the case had enjoyed much notoriety and there had not been a hanging here for many years. It was, as Tommy clearly remembered, a rainy day.

[2]

‘Don’t you think that that’s amazing?’

I wasn’t prepared to make even the pretence of considering it. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Then how do you explain it?’

‘Do I have to explain it? I can’t explain how water comes up and waits for me in my pipes but that doesn’t mean I have to be amazed every time I turn on the tap.’

Sharon might have been the one without the university degree but I could see she was not going to let me get away with that. ‘Plumbing can be explained scientifically.’

‘Not by me it can’t, Sharon. By me nothing can be explained scientifically.’ This wasn’t rhetoric; for all that I consider myself to be a realist I have always possessed a very dim sense of how things operate. Perhaps it’s Jewish. In the household I was brought up in you rang an electrical contractor when you wanted a plug fixing. So I wasn’t exaggerating when I said to Sharon, ‘I don’t even understand how a mirror works.’

She helped me out. ‘Refraction.’