Chapter 7

Still Alive

The house is as Peter Stemp has described it, dark and narrow, extended rearwards to provide extra bedrooms. It feels overcrowded yet uncramped, the corridor and staircase bare of clutter. The smells intermingle; it is impossible to tell at a sniff what is being cooked among the myriad human emanations, but the effect is not malodorous. The house feels at ease with itself.

Its master leads me down three short steps into a congested front room, with an upright piano in one corner and tightly packed glass-fronted bookcases around two walls. His library consists, at a glance, entirely of Talmudic tomes and commentaries. There is not one book with non-Hebrew letters on the spine, let alone a music shelf with lovingly leatherbound albums of favourite pieces. The room is a den of religious studies and I feel as intrusive within it as a carnivore before the Buddha.

Dovidl gives me a high-backed chair beside the gas fire that Peter used to light on Sabbath. He calls, ‘Mama!’ to summon someone, presumably his wife. He has, typically, stolen the initiative and left me lagging in his slipstream.

‘What do you mean you have been expecting me?’ I demand wintrily.

He picks up a newspaper from the outsized dining table. ‘Look here in the Telegraph.’ He points. ‘The Simmonds Award given to my former Shabbes-goy, Peter. I thought you might recognise his rubato – and that Peter wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. Did you ever know a teenage boy who could keep a secret?’

‘I could,’ I declare.

‘You were different,’ affirms Dovidl. ‘We were different . . . Anyhow, I saw you were in the area and thought you might drop in, so I arranged to be home tonight. Normally I teach late at the yeshiva.’ He makes it sound so simple, as if no other explanation might conceivably be required.

A woman in her late forties enters the room, a dozen years younger than Dovidl but prematurely stooped, perhaps from many pregnancies. Her cheeks are lined, her lips chapped. I cannot discern more of her disposition since her forehead is covered to the eyebrows by a headcloth and her eyes religiously refuse to engage with mine. Her husband, by open contrast, seems unaffectedly happy.

‘Mama,’ says Dovidl, ‘this is Mr Martin Simmonds, from the family I stayed with in London during the war.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mrs Rapo – Katzenberg,’ I greet her, rising and extending a hand. Mama keeps her hands pointing downwards at her sides. I remember that ultra-orthodox women avoid touching men – even, at certain times of the month, their own husbands. She registers my presence with a nod of her makeshift bonnet.