Despite these encomia, I liked Myrtle, whom I had not seen since my barmitzvah. She looked me square in the eye and did not simper or flirt, like the Beckys and Hannahs thrust on me at dinner-dances. Her name was unusual, taken from a Biblical plant which is waved on the festival of Tabernacles.

‘Mother kept trying to plant some in our garden,’ she smiled, ‘but it never took.’

‘Fragrant and resilient,’ I rhapsodised.

‘I should be so lucky.’ She laughed.

‘Better than Hyssop,’ I retorted.

‘You’re the first Jewish man I have met,’ she said, on our second date, ‘who is tall enough to look me in the eye and make intelligent conversation. The rest are either short and brainy or big and grob, like butchers’ boys. The aunts are terrified that I will marry a goy.’

‘Let me offer you a rational alternative,’ I proposed.

‘I have received more romantic proposals,’ she laughed.

‘I could drop on one knee,’ I said, ‘but then I wouldn’t be looking you in the eye any more.’

‘Keep that girl’s mind occupied,’ advised Mabel. ‘She’s the right one for you and she’ll be loyal to the death, but she won’t settle for charity work and shopping mornings like your poor mother. She needs a challenge. She speaks three languages fluently. She could do literary translations in her spare time.’

‘No wife of mine will ever work for a living,’ I huffed, in the manner of the time.

‘Don’t come all pompous with me, Martin,’ warned Mabel, ‘and don’t make me give you another piece of what-for. I’m too fond of you to keep telling you off. Just remember, the girl’s not a dolt. You must find something to keep her occupied.’

What Myrtle and I had in common was the hole in the centre of our lives. She, an only child, had recently lost her mother to cancer; I had lost a father and a best friend. She knew of my tragedies from the newspapers and I of hers from Aunt Mabel. There was not much more to tell, though we spent a long evening alone at Blenheim Terrace recounting grief histories. At the end I felt, as Othello did of Desdemona, that ‘She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, And I loved her that she did pity them.’

We decided to rebuild love from our ruins. A Freudian analyst would subsequently enlighten me that I had chosen Myrtle principally for the initial consonant of her name: the Ms of Mother, Mabel, Myrtle, Martin (self-love) evoked my infant ego nuzzling at the maternal nipple. I walked out of that session, roaring with mirth. I have read better theories in Woman’s Realm. Anyway, Myrtle was unmaternally small-breasted, even after childbirth.

We married at Bevis Marks, Britain’s oldest and loveliest synagogue, in a Sephardic ceremony conducted by the Haham, or Learned One, with candles borne by six choirboys walking backwards before the bride. ‘ “And he is like a bridegroom coming out of his wedding canopy,” ’ I heard old Jeffries intone, ‘ “rejoicing like a hero to run his course.” ’