‘Your boy,’ said Shiffy to Esau. ‘He’s a doctor, I saw him in the paper. He could bring a nice practice here. You could expand.’

‘I’m seventy-two,’ said Esau.

‘So you’re seventy-two? Think of Abraham, think of Isaac, think of Methuselah. Nine hundred and sixty-nine. That’s the time to worry about your age.’

‘He’s married a shiksa.’

‘We all make mistakes. Look at Adam.’

Esau didn’t tell Shiffy that he never heard from Elgin any more. He never expected to hear from him again. Two weeks later when Sarah was in hospital unable to speak for the pain, Esau dialled Elgin’s number on his Bakelite sit-up-and-beg telephone. They had never bothered to get a later model. God’s children had no need of progress.

Elgin came at once and spoke to the doctor before he met his father at the bedside. The doctor said there was no hope. Sarah had cancer of the bone and would not live. The doctor said she must have been in pain for years. Slowly crumbling, dust to dust.

‘Does my father know?’

‘In a way.’ The doctor was busy and had to get on. He gave his notes to Elgin and left him at a desk under a lamp with a blown bulb.

Sarah died. Elgin went to the funeral then took his father back to the shop. Esau fumbled with the keys and opened the heavy door. The glass panel still had the gold lettering that had once announced the signs of Esau’s success. The upper arc had said ROSENTHAL and the lower, CHEMIST. Time and the weather had beat upon the sign and although it still declared ROSENTHAL, underneath it now read HE MIST.

Elgin, close behind his father, was sick to the stomach at the smell. It was the smell of his childhood, formaldehyde and peppermint. It was the smell of his homework behind the counter. The long nights waiting for his parents to take him home. Sometimes he fell asleep in his grey socks and shorts, his head on a table of logarithms, then Esau would scoop him up and carry him to the car. He remembered his father’s tenderness only through the net of dreams and half-wakefulness. Esau was hard on the boy but when he saw him head down on the table, his thin legs loose against the chair, he loved him and whispered in his ear about the lily of the valley and the Promised Land.

All this cut at Elgin as he watched his father slowly hang his black coat on the peg and shrug his arms into his chemist’s uniform. He seemed to take comfort from this regular act, didn’t look at Elgin but got out his order book and sat muttering over it. After a while Elgin coughed and said he had to go. His father nodded, wouldn’t speak.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked Elgin not wanting an answer.

‘Can you tell me why your mother died?’

Elgin cleared his throat a second time. He was desperate.