Traffic was heavy and progress slow. A police convoy was escorting some visiting Arab potentate from Buckingham Palace to the serious business of shopping at Harrods, snarling up Knightsbridge in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Dovidl was in no hurry. As the Wellington Arch hazed into view, the sun came out again, tweaking the urban mood from moroseness to light. He felt, like London itself, suspended between glamorous past and uncharted future. No longer an imperial hub, not yet a cosmopolitan lure. Still pitted and pocked from recent trauma, never perhaps to acquire the astutely plotted magnificence of Paris, or Kreisler. He felt at one with London, for the last time in his life.

Looking over his shoulder, he found himself alone on the deck and sprawled his legs across the front seat. Securing the fiddle-case between his back and the wall of the bus, he closed his eyes contentedly for a moment, expecting to be alerted as the bus gathered speed.

He awoke to find the bus stationary and the engine dead. He was alone on the top deck, looking out over a grubby patch of common ringed by drab Victorian terraces. He shook his watch frantically: one o’clock, nothing to worry about. Where was he? He must have slept through the whole route and wound up at the end of the seventy-three line, which he recalled as being somewhere in nondescript north London, midway between the Arsenal and Spurs football stadia. Not to worry. All he had to do was wait for the next bus into town and he would be home by two, in plenty of time.

He stumbled down the winding staircase, fiddle-case in hand, and checked in with a gloomy bus inspector in a tin cabin, who told him the one-ten ‘up West’ had been cancelled ‘due to staff sickness’ but there should be another at one twenty-two. Lacking a book or score to browse he took a stroll in milky sunlight, relishing the mild adventure. He turned into Stoke Newington High Street and was assailed by a familiar smell. Salt pickles, untasted since Warsaw.

An open-fronted shop, the Egg Stores, was selling cucumbers from a barrel on the pavement. He bought one for a penny and ate it on the street, savouring the acrid rush of vinegar, the soft flesh trapped in tight skin. The genuine article, he happily concluded. Next door was Berkovits’s, purveying boiled gefilte fish, calf ’s-foot jelly, gedempte cabbage, chopped liver.

‘Try some?’ said Berkovits.

‘I’ve come out without my wallet,’ said Dovidl.

‘Try today,’ said the deli man, ‘buy tomorrow fresh for Shabbes .’