‘In that case,’ I said – and I said it in North London and in South – ‘I’ll go to neither.’

I have to say that I was disappointed in Rabika’s attitude. ‘You’ve been got at,’ she accused me. And for the first time since I’d known and revered her I decided that I didn’t like the sag of sun-burnt flesh that swung from her upper arm after all. But then I was going in for misogyny, as I’ve said, as a consequence of having loosened my grip on guilt.

As the days went by the general level of sportsmanship dropped dramatically. Rabika snuggled up to me. She even referred, with wild laughter in her eyes and a bubble of the old mockery on her lips, to the time I’d leaned her over the sink in my parents’ bathroom. Was she trying to tell me that if I went to her wedding and not the other person’s she would let me lean her some more? Back in Finchley, Menashe dropped dark hints about setting me up in business. He kept leaving his wallet around for me to see also. But it was my mother who introduced the roughest tactics. ‘In fact,’ she sat me down one afternoon and told me, ‘your duties and obligations are not equal in the way you think they are. It does you great credit, Barney – and Menashe and I have both commented on it – that you are trying so hard to show scrupulous fairness both to me and to your father, but you ought now to know – I hope you are ready for this, Barney – that your father – here, have some more tea – is not your father.’

Why did every conversation with my mother remind me of some other conversation I’d had with her at some other time and in some other place? ‘My father’s not my father?’ I repeated, and the question sounded so familiar to me that I wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised to hear myself repeating it.