‘I cannot sit shiva until I have proof they are dead,’ said Dovidl didactically. He turned away when the minister began muttering the traditional verse, asking God to comfort him among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. The formulas of faith yielded no consolation.

It fell to my father to mourn by proxy. At seven fifteen next morning, and every morning for the next year, I heard the front door click as Mortimer Simmonds, a man unmarked by religious fervour, went to synagogue to recite kaddish for a man he had met only once, for his unknown wife, for their infant daughters and for heaven alone knew how many unnamed others. I joined him on Sundays, saying a silent kaddish of my own for Dr Steiner and Irish Kevin, who had no one left to mourn them. Dovidl refused to set foot in synagogue, even on high holy days, for to pray would be to admit the possibility of hope, and he had shut the door firmly on the principle of hope.

Doors closing, doors opening punctuated my nights and ruined my sleep. Father’s exit for morning prayers was the last of a nocturnal run of clickings and lockings and swishings and flushings. It began soon after midnight with Florrie, locking the front door after a dalliance with one of her demobbed suitors. Her scuttering of high heels, followed by the squish of stockinged soles on linoleum, ended with a reassuring click of her door-jamb and the creaking of bed-springs. It took Florrie twelve minutes by my luminous watch to shed her glitter and hum herself happily to bed. Minutes later, there would be a faint groan of floorboards and a fresh squeaking of her unresistant handle. Someone in slippered feet was paying Florrie a visit.

At first, I half hoped it was Father, pursuing the carnal comforts long denied him in marriage. But Mortimer Simmonds was too correct a man to sneak sexual relief from an employee, and the footstep was too light to be his. It had to be Dovidl who was creeping presumptuously into Florrie’s accommodating arms.

I was hugely relieved at first, delighted that someone was reaching into his well of grief, easing the alarming grid of fret-lines across his pallid forehead. As I lay in bed alert to any noise, I tried to conjure in my mind an image of their coition, but I had nothing except literary metanyms to go by. It would be years before I achieved sexual initiation and my expectations were harmlessly imprecise. Nevertheless, I felt no envy for Dovidl or animal rivalry, nothing other than an immense surge of sympathy.

This sensation quickly gave way to something more feral, to the grim fear that he was crossing yet another barrier in his flight from me, sheltering in a place where I could never reach him. The erosion of our bond, the crumbling of unity, destroyed my sleep.