‘Father, mother was old, she didn’t have the strength to get better.’

Esau rocked his head up and down up and down. ‘It was God’s will. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. How many times have I said that today?’ There was another long silence. Elgin coughed.

‘I have to be getting on.’

Esau shuffled back round the counter and dug in a large discoloured jar.

He gave his son a brown paper bag full of lozenges.

‘You have a cough my boy. Take these.’

Elgin stuffed the bag in his overcoat pocket and left. He walked as hard as he could away from the Jewish quarter and when he reached a main road he hailed a cab. Before he climbed in he dumped the bag in a bus-stop bin. It was the last time he saw his father.

It’s true that when Elgin began, he didn’t realise that his obsessional study of carcinoma would bring more substantial benefits to himself than to any of his patients. He used computer simulations to mimic the effects of rapidly multiplying rogue cells. He saw gene therapy as the likeliest way out for a body besieged by itself. It was very sexy medicine. Gene therapy is the frontier world where names and fortunes can be made. Elgin was wooed by an American pharmaceutical company who got him off the shop floor and into a lab. He’d never liked hospitals anyway.

‘Elgin’, said Louise, ‘can no longer wrap a Band-Aid round a cut finger but he can tell you everything there is to know about cancer. Everything except what causes it and how to cure it.’

‘That’s a bit cynical isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Elgin doesn’t care about people. He never sees any people. He hasn’t been on a terminal care ward for ten years. He sits in a multi-million pound laboratory in Switzerland for half the year and stares at a computer. He wants to make the big discovery. Get the Nobel prize.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with ambition.’

She laughed. ‘There’s a lot wrong with Elgin.’

I wondered if I could live up to Louise.

We lay down together and I followed the bow of her lips with my finger. She had a fine straight nose, severe and demanding.

Her mouth contradicted her nose, not because it wasn’t serious, but because it was sensual. It was full, lascivious in its depth, with a touch of cruelty. The nose and the mouth working together produced an odd effect of ascetic sexuality. There was discernment as well as desire in the picture. She was a Roman Cardinal, chaste, but for the perfect choirboy.

Louise’s tastes had no place in the late twentieth century where sex is about revealing not concealing. She enjoyed the titillation of suggestion. Her pleasure was in slow certain arousal, a game between equals who might not always choose to be equals. She was not a D.H. Lawrence type; no-one could take Louise with animal inevitability. It was necessary to engage her whole person. Her mind, her heart, her soul and her body could only be present as two sets of twins. She would not be divided from herself. She preferred celibacy to tupping.