Louise and I were talking about Elgin.

‘He was born an Orthodox Jew,’ she said. ‘He feels put upon and superior at the same time.’

Elgin’s mother and father still lived in a 1930s semi in Stamford Hill. They had squatted it during the war and made a deal with the Cockney family who eventually came home to find the locks changed and a sign on the parlour door saying SABBATH. KEEP OUT. That was Friday night 1946. On Saturday night 1946 Arnold and Betty Small came face to face with Esau and Sarah Rosenthal. Money changed hands, or to be more precise, a certain amount of gold, and the Smalls went on to bigger things. The Rosenthals opened a chemist shop and refused to serve any Liberal or Reformed Jews.

‘We are God’s chosen people,’ they said, meaning themselves.

From such humble, arrogant beginnings, Elgin was born. They had intended to call him Samuel but, while she was pregnant, Sarah visited the British Museum and, unmoved by the Mummies, came at last to the glory that was Greece. This need not have affected the destiny of her son but Sarah developed serious complications during her fourteen-hour labour and it seemed that she would die. Sweating and delirious, her head twisting from side to side, she could only repeat over and over again the single word ELGIN. Esau, drawn and down at heel, twisting his prayer shawl beneath his black coat, had a superstitious side. If that were his wife’s last word then surely it should mean something, become something. And so the word was made flesh. Samuel became Elgin and Sarah did not die. She lived to produce thousands of gallons of chicken soup and whenever she ladled it into the bowl she said, ‘Elgin, Jehovah spared me to serve you.’

And so Elgin grew up thinking that the world ought to serve him and hating the dark counter in his father’s little shop and hating being set apart from the other boys but wanting it more than anything.

‘You’re nothing, you’re dust,’ said Esau. ‘Raise yourself up and be a man.’

Elgin won a scholarship to an Independent school. He was small, narrow-chested, short-sighted and ferociously clever. Unfortunately his religion excluded him from Saturday games and whilst he managed to avoid persecution he courted isolation. He knew he was better than those square-shouldered upright beauty queens whose good looks and easy manners commanded affection and respect. Besides, they were all queer, and Elgin had seen them grappling one another, mouths open, cocks hard. No-one tried to touch him.

He fell in love with Louise when she beat him in single combat at the Debating Society finals. Her school was only a mile away from his and he had to walk past it on the way home. He took to walking past it at just the time when Louise was leaving. He was gentle with her, he tried hard, he didn’t show off, he wasn’t sarcastic. She had only been in England for a year and it was cold. They were both refugees and they found comfort in each other. Then Elgin went to Cambridge, choosing a college outstanding for its sporting prowess. Louise, arriving a year later, had just begun to suspect him of being a masochist. This was confirmed when he lay on his single bed, legs apart, and begged her to scaffold his penis with bulldog clips.