There is Death in Venice but Jomier has read it and anyway the novella is about Germans and Poles, not Venetians; he thinks he is more likely to get under the skin of Italians living on the Gulf of Venice by reading Svevo rather than Thomas Mann. Jomier had also been attracted to Senilità by its title but is disconcerted to discover that the hero Emilio is only forty. Is forty the old sixty just as sixty is the new forty? Jomier reads on to find out but is only on page 32 when Judith finishes The Blind Assassin and suggests walking out into the city. Jomier is now used to the speed with which Judith reads novels. He is both impressed and dismayed by the way she finishes one and starts another without pause for breath. Jomier sees this as a kind of promiscuity: surely a reader who has been moved or stimulated by a work of literature should reflect for a while on what she has just read? However, he agrees about a walk. It is foolish to be in Venice and spend the few hours of daylight reading novels in a hotel. They dress. They step out. There is a pale wintry sun. They stroll towards the Rialto Bridge.

‘How was the novel?’ Jomier asks Judith.

‘Not one of her best.’ Judith takes his arm. She likes taking his arm and squeezing it. Jomier likes his arm to be taken and squeezed. Mostly. Sometimes he feels the gesture is proprietorial rather than loving. More a clipping of a leash on to a collar than a caress.

‘It’s about relationships within a family . . .’ Judith is talking about the novel by Margaret Atwood.

‘Often problematic,’ says Jomier.

‘You’ve told me very little about your family,’ says Judith.

‘There’s not much to say,’ says Jomier.

‘I don’t believe that,’ says Judith. ‘There’s always something to say.’

‘Well,’ says Jomier, ‘I had a father who was a civil servant who never made the grade he felt he deserved so became embittered and deliberately dull.’

‘What does that mean – deliberately dull?’

‘He read a great deal and loved music but talked only about the trivia of domestic life.’

‘Was he happy with your mother?’

Jomier shrugs. ‘Hard to tell. They never quarrelled. It might have been better if they did. I sometimes think he felt . . .’ Jomier hesitates.

Judith prompts him: ‘Felt what?’

‘That he had let her down . . . by not making the grade.’

‘She would like to have been Lady Jomier?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was she nice to you?’

‘In her fashion.’

‘What was her fashion?’

‘I was her project. She wanted me to succeed where my father had failed.’

‘Was she affectionate?’

Again, Jomier hesitates. He feels uncomfortable talking about his parents. ‘Not as such. She thought any overt expression of feeling was vulgar.’

‘You didn’t feel loved?’

‘She regarded love as something given. You did not need to show it.’

‘No hugs?’