‘That’s mine,’ said Louise as I came upstairs. ‘Don’t worry.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Do you remember when you and I were caught in that terrible shower on the way to your flat? Jacqueline insisted that I undress and she gave me her dressing gown to wear. It was very kind but I longed to be in yours. It was your smell I was after.’

‘Wasn’t I in mine?’

‘Yes. All the more tempting.’

She had lit a fire in the room with the bed she’d called a Lady’s Occasional. Most people don’t have open fires any more; Louise had no central heating. She said that Elgin complained every winter although it was she not he who bought the fuel and stoked the blaze.

‘He doesn’t really want to live like this,’ she said, meaning the austere grandeur of their marital home. ‘He’d be much happier in a 1930s mock Tudor with underfloor hot air.’

‘Then why does he do it?’

‘It brings him huge originality value.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘I made it.’ She paused. ‘The only thing Elgin’s ever put into this house is money.’

‘You despise him, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t despise him. I’m disappointed in him.’

Elgin had been a brilliant medical trainee. He had worked hard and learned well. He had been innovative and concerned. During his early hospital years, when Louise had supported him financially and paid all the bills that accumulated round their modest life together, Elgin had been determined to qualify and work in the Third World. He scorned what he called ‘the consultancy trail’, where able young men of a certain background put in their minimum share of hospital slog and were promoted up the ladder to easier and better things. There was a fast-track in medicine. Very few women were on it, it was the recognised route of the career doctor.

‘So what happened?’

‘Elgin’s mother got cancer.’

In Stamford Hill Sarah felt sick. She had always got up at five o’clock, prayed and lit the candles, gone to work preparing the day’s food and ironing Esau’s white shirts. She wore a headscarf in those early hours, only placing her long black wig a few moments before her husband came downstairs at seven. They ate breakfast and together got into their ancient car and drove the three miles to the shop. Sarah mopped the floor and dusted the counter while Esau put his white coat over his prayer shawl and shifted the cardboard boxes in the back room. It cannot truly be said that they opened their shop at nine, rather they unlocked the door. Sarah sold toothbrushes and lozenges. Esau made up paper packets of medicine. They had done so for fifty years.

The shop was unchanged. The mahogany counter and glass cabinets had been where they were since before the war, since before Esau and Sarah bought a sixty-year lease to carry them into old age. On one side of them, the cobbler had become a grocery store had become a delicatessen had become a Kosher Kebab House. On the other side, the take-in laundry had become a dry cleaners. It was still run by the children of their friends the Shiffys.