Dovidl pulls up ten feet from the edge of the Head, leaving his engine running. ‘To keep us warm,’ he explains.

‘Turn it off,’ I insist, for safety’s sake.

Clambering into the back of the van, he produces a Thermos flask of scalding hot tea, two plastic mugs and a packet of home-baked biscuits, which he lays out methodically on a checked tablecloth, which he has spread on the plywood table.

‘ “God forbid you should die hungry,” is my wife’s motto.’ He grins, seeking male complicity.

‘She looks after you well,’ I reply.

‘I could lose a couple of pounds,’ he shrugs, ‘but so could you.’

We have nothing, after forty years, to say to one another.

‘You owe me an explanation,’ I state actuarily.

‘I am aware of that,’ he says, his bifocal glasses misted by tea, his eyes concealed from inquisition. We are locked in silence in a tin camper, unable to move on until confession has been extracted, and restitution made.

‘I owe you more than an explanation,’ he says after a while, his Guadagnini-rich voice thickened with winter phlegm. ‘The question is, where do I begin?’

Chapter 8

8

Time To Tell

The story he has to tell – and he is aching to tell it – rings with the acuity, excitement and self-mockery that I recognise as typically Dovidl. Some of his phraseology belongs to a former age, as if retrieved from a time-capsule, but there is nothing dusty about his tale. He speaks not in the heavy cadences of a rabbinic patriarch but in the breathless snatches of a lad on the make to whom each experience is a half-open door, inviting penetration. Some of his story sounds over-rehearsed, as if he has been held in custody for many years, waiting for his day in court. Other parts sound freshly awoken, as if the revelation that removed him from the real world is daily renewed. ‘I cannot tell you,’ he says, ‘how I have longed to tell someone about it.’

‘Your wife?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Your children?’

‘I thought some day, perhaps.’

How much can I believe? Given that one can never trust a traitor, I coat each phrase in suspicion and give him no encouragement to elaborate. Knowing the outcome, I am immune to suspense and scrutinise the details for inconsistency and dissimulation. But his account is so fervid that I find myself accepting, for want of counter-evidence, its impulsive logic. He has, after all, little left to hide and much to fear. For if he deceives me now, he will have denied himself the last chance to face the truth. And if he prevaricates, he knows that I can play havoc with his holy life by exposing him to the faithful as a philanderer and a thief. There is no love left between us. The only enduring bond is truth.