Time and again, I replayed that moment until the film wore out its sprockets. What if I had insisted on going along in the cab? Might I have saved him from abduction, madness, murder even? The notion that he might have deliberately absconded was still too vicious to contemplate, and I had never seen a vicious side to him. Minor flaws I saw in abundance; motiveless treachery was surely beyond him.

But, then, my view of him had always been blinkered by adoration. He was the light that made my dullness shine, the beam that revealed my best qualities. I depended on him to validate my usefulness and he on me (he said) to mediate with the rest of the human race. We were indivisible, or so he gave me to believe.

Suddenly, we were divided, without cause or warning. When he failed to show up for his magnificent début, I flung myself into managing chaos and staving off catastrophe. It was weeks before I began to grasp that part of me, the better part, had been amputated and my future stretched ahead into a purposeless void. I have searched ever since for him, for me, for the life that died that night.

Chapter 4

4

Time Bandit

First impressions can mislead, but my image of Dovidl never altered in the twelve years that I knew him. The sight that springs to mind is the first I saw of him, marching up to our front door as if he owned the house, if not the whole street. It was a sweltering Sunday in August 1939 and we were stuck at home in St John’s Wood. Our annual fortnight in Normandy had been cancelled because war was imminent. Parliament had been recalled. Gas-masks were being distributed, tested, drilled. Holiday suitcases were emptied and repacked for evacuation. Sandbags were stacked on street corners and letter boxes were being painted in camouflage colours of green, brown and yellow, their tops coated in a chemical dye that was supposed to detect gas attacks. Barrage balloons sailed in the sky. Trenches were dug in Hyde Park (little did we know they were intended as mass civilian graves); Primrose Hill park was ploughed up and replanted with vegetables. A corrugated shelter was cobbled together by a handyman at the bottom of our garden and covered with the regulation eighteen inches of earth. Blackout curtains were hung on all windows, their panes sticky-taped against blast. The local shops ran out of glue and brown paper. Our domestics, Florrie and Martha, were adizz with excitement. My parents walked around with heads bowed and furrowed brows. I was bored beyond distraction.