Sharon had come to the bottom of the stairs. ‘So you at least concede that just because you’re Jewish it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a future.’

‘Sharon, I never …’

‘Or a past?’

‘Sharon …’

‘And you at least admit that there are some things that you don’t have the answers to?’

‘Sharon, I have never claimed …’

‘Then when can I tell my mother?’

If I’d had the answer to that I’d have given it to her.

[2]

As it happened, it wasn’t her mother that got told. It was mine. And it was me that told her. I went to her to find out, among other things, whether there had been any irregularities in the family’s immediate past, and she needed to know why I needed to know.

‘Did any of my grandmothers or great-grandmothers spend any time in or around Dorset?’ I had enquired.

It was a price my mother paid for living, imaginatively, at a very high level of personal drama, that the most innocent question would set going in her a train of the most horrible imaginings. ‘My God, why do you ask?’ she urged me to tell her.

And since the reality could only pale by the side of the foreboding, I told her.