Dinner was befittingly at the Dorchester, with Joe Loss’s band and all the trimmings. Half-way through the soup, I noticed an empty seat at the top table.

‘Who’s that for?’ I demanded. Mother counted heads and declared the place setting superfluous. ‘I’ll tell the caterer to remove it,’ she said.

‘No, leave it,’ I cried. ‘It might be there for a purpose.’ In my imagination, I saw Dovidl striding through the door in black tie and tails, elegant as ever, taking his rightful seat at my side. The vision was so unsettling that I could neither sleep that night, nor consummate the marriage.

Myrtle was gently understanding, and we came together contentedly in more relaxed circumstances on the French Riviera later that week. She returned from honeymoon pregnant with our first-born. We named him Mortimer after my father. A second son followed eighteen months later, but Myrtle haemorrhaged in childbirth and was advised to avoid having more babies. Mother asked us to call the boy Edwin, ‘a name I have always been fond of ’. We compromised on Edgar, less archaic and containing, covertly for me, the eh of Eli, the d of David and the ar of Rapoport, a memorial to the missing. As for the hard g in the middle, that was me – a stony consonant encased in phantasms of soft sounds.

The handsome young couple moved into the family home on Blenheim Terrace, converted the large kitchen and scullery basement into a swimming-pool and recreation area, leading out on to a re-landscaped garden that blurred memories of lonely boyhood. We settled into the nuclear routines of a bourgeois Jewish family, all terrors pushed to the past. I had my sanitised work, Myrtle her brilliance at bridge. Our spiritual dimension conformed to Anglo-Jewish norms. We attended synagogue eight or ten times a year, for high holy days, personal milestones and memorial prayers.

Cushioned by domesticity, my existence was ringed by a flat despair that stretched into a horizonless future. My life without the Friend was like the Tsarina’s after Rasputin’s murder, an empty wait for the inevitable. I slept fitfully, wakened by visions of Dovidl, dead in a ditch, captive in a cell, or wandering mad like Josef Hassid or King Lear around some Epsom heath. Myrtle would rise from our bed and lead me, shaking, into the boys’ room, waking little Edgar for a family cuddle that would calm me down, his fear-free respiration restoring the rhythm to my breathing. A string of shrinks, consulted over many years, failed to mend my sleep.

In the mornings I went into Simmonds’ depleted offices, dictated letters to the indispensable Miss Winter, departed for lunch, dealt with clients, dressed for the evening’s concert or opera, where Myrtle would usually join me. I was engaged in continuous self-sedation, averting my conscious thoughts from the caesura episode of Dovidl’s departure and the ensuing disaster. To think about it was to court the unthinkable.