TEN

1

In time, Treslove came to believe he could very easily have reason to suspect Finkler of setting his sights on Hephzibah. If this was a rather roundabout way of putting it, that was because Treslove’s suspicions were themselves rather roundabout.

In fact, he had no reason to believe that Finkler had set his sights on Hephzibah but he chose to suspect him anyway. Nothing he had seen, nothing that either Finkler or Hephzibah had said, just a feeling. And in jealousy a feeling is a reason.

He accepted that such a feeling might simply be the child of his devotion. When you love a woman deeply you are bound to imagine that every other man must love her deeply too. But it wasn’t every other man he had reason to believe had set his sights on Hephzibah. Just Finkler.

Without doubt, Finkler had changed. He was less cocksure, somehow. He held his head differently. When he came round to dinner with Libor he was quiet and unwilling to be drawn on Isrrrae. It was Hephzibah’s understanding, and Hephzibah was professionally in the know, that he had fallen out with his fellow exponents of Jewish ASHamedness in the matter of the proposed academic boycott. Though how serious was the falling-out she couldn’t say.

‘That would be because he doesn’t want to lose an all-expenses-paid lecture tour of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Eilat,’ Treslove guessed.

‘Julian!’ Hephzibah said.

(See!)

‘Julian what?’

‘Do you know that for a certainty?’

Treslove conceded that he didn’t. But he knew his friend.

‘Well, I wonder sometimes if you do,’ Hephzibah said.

(See!!)

With Treslove, too, Finkler was less combative, as though sensitive to the changes wrought in him by Hephzibah’s influence. But did that mean he saw Treslove differently or simply wanted some of what Treslove had found for himself ?

Yet Hephzibah was surely not Finkler’s type, particularly if Tyler was anything to go by. Treslove knew that Finkler had always taken mistresses. Jewish ones, too, Tyler had told him. But he was unable to picture them. The deep dark separation of Ronit Kravitz’s breasts, for example, would have come as a surprise to him had he seen them. When he put his mind to Finkler’s mistresses he imagined them as Jewish versions of Tyler whom he had always taken for a Jewess anyway. Razor-blade women with narrow jaws, more likely to favour sharply tailored trouser suits than shawls and cloaks. Women who hit the ground running, in creases and stilettos, not women who floated slowly down in acres of material. So no one remotely resembling Hephzibah. Which could mean one of two things: either Finkler was after Hephzibah only in order to get back at Treslove for something or other, or he had fallen for her as a woman entirely beyond his experience and preference, and in that case was likely to be dangerously smitten. Just as Treslove himself had been. Just as Treslove himself still was. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was what Hephzibah felt. Was she smitten too?

He brought the matter up with her in bed at the end of a couple of unusually taciturn days between them. What he didn’t know was that she was keeping information about the second attack on the museum from him.

‘Should we have Sam over for dinner one night soon?’ he said. ‘With Libor? I think he’s lonely.’

‘Libor? Of course he’s lonely.’

‘No, Sam.’

Hephzibah sipped her tea. ‘If you like.’

‘Well, only if you like.’

‘Yes, I like.’

‘Him or the idea of dinner?’

‘Explain that.’

‘Do you like the idea generally of having somebody round for dinner and that somebody might as well be Sam, or do you especially like the idea of its being Sam?’

She put her tea down and rolled over to his side of the bed. He loved the billowing undulations of the mattress when Hephzibah moved in his direction. Everything was momentous with her. From the start the earth had moved for him in her company, the oceans had heaved, the skies had gathered and gone black. Making love to her was like surviving an electrical storm. And some nights he wouldn’t have minded had he not survived. But the mornings too were heavy with promise. Something would be said. Something would happen. No day went by without her being an event.

So different from the mothers of his sons, whose pregnancies he had failed to notice.

But then they had left him by the time they discovered they were pregnant.

But then he should have noticed that they’d left him.

‘What’s this about?’ Hephzibah asked, coming at last to rest in the small corner of the bed that belonged to him.

‘This? Nothing. I just wondered if you liked the idea of dinner.’

‘With Sam?’

‘Ah, so you do like the idea of Sam? That’s to say of dinner with Sam?’

‘Julian, what’s this about?’

‘I’m wondering if you’re having an affair with him.’

‘With Sam?’

‘Or at least thinking about having an affair with him.’

‘With Sam?’

‘There you are, you see, you can’t stop saying his name.’

‘Julian, why would I be having or thinking of having an affair with anybody? I’m having an affair with you.’

‘That doesn’t stop people.’

‘Wouldn’t it stop you?’

‘Me, yes. But I’m not like other people.’

‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘but then neither am I. You should believe that.’

‘Then I do.’

She made him look at her. ‘I have no interest in Sam Finkler,’ she said. ‘I don’t find him interesting or attractive. He is the kind of Jewish man I have been avoiding all my life.’

‘What kind is that?’

‘Arrogant, heartless, self-centred, ambitious, and convinced his intelligence makes him irresistible.’

‘That sounds like a description, from your own account, of the two men you married.’

‘Exactly. In between marrying them I was avoiding them. And since marrying them I have avoided them.’

‘But you only avoid what you fear, surely. Do you fear Sam?’

She laughed loudly. Too loudly?

‘Well, he would no doubt love the idea that I do, but I don’t. It’s a strange question, though. Could it be that it’s you who fears Sam?’

‘Me? Why would I fear Sam?’

‘For the same reason that I do.’

‘But you said you don’t.’

‘And you aren’t sure you believe me. Did you have a thing together at school?’

‘Me and Sam? Christ, no.’

‘Don’t be so horrified. Boys do that, don’t they?’

‘Not any boys I knew.’

‘Then maybe you should have. I think it’s good to get all that out of the way early. Both my husbands had things at school.’

‘With each other?’

‘No, you fool. They didn’t know each other. With other boys.’

‘Yes and you weren’t happy being married to them.’

‘But not for that reason. I was waiting all along for you.’

‘The goy?’

She wrapped a grand arm around him and gathered him into her bosom. ‘As a goy – I have to tell you – you’re a bit of a disappointment. Most goys I know don’t spend their time reading Moses Maimonides and memorising Yiddish endearments.’

He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking.

‘Neshomeleh,’ he said, into her flesh.

But he couldn’t leave it at that. The next day, over his five-pan omelette, he said, ‘Is there a special bond?’

‘Between?’

‘Jews.’

‘Depends on the Jews.’

‘Is it like being gay? Is there a Jewdar that enables you to pick one another out?’

‘Again, depends. I rarely think someone is Jewish when they’re not, but I quite often don’t know I’m talking to a Jew when I am.’

‘And what is it you look for?’

‘I’m not looking for anything.’

‘What is that you recognise, then?’

‘Can’t explain. It’s not one thing, it’s a collection of things. Features, facial expression, a way of talking, a way of moving.’

‘So you’re making racial calculations?’

‘I wouldn’t call them racial, no.’

‘Religious?’

‘No, definitely not religious.’

‘Then what?’

She didn’t know what.

‘But you make a connection.’

‘Again, depends.’

‘And with Sam?’

‘What about with Sam?’

‘Do you make the connection?’

She sighed.

She sighed the next time Treslove brought it up as well. And the time after that. She thought she’d put his suspicions to bed. But that wasn’t the only reason she sighed the third time. Strangely enough, Sam had called in to see her that afternoon at the museum. This was not something he had ever done before. Nor was it a visit she could explain. It was as though, when she saw him, he had materialised out of Treslove’s conversation, or even out of Treslove’s will.

He must have been surprised himself, so open-mouthed was her welcome.

‘To what do I owe this?’ she asked, giving him her hand.

She knew the answer. She owed it to her lover’s fears.

‘Oh, I was driving past and I just thought I would call in,’ he said. ‘See how it’s going. Is Julian here?’

‘No. He’s stopped coming in. There’s not a lot he can do here while we’re still in this state.’

He looked about. At the finished cabinets, at the murals, at the banks of computers and headphones. On a far wall he thought he caught sight of a photograph of Sir Isaiah Berlin and Frankie Vaughan. Not together.

‘It’s looking pretty well advanced to me,’ he said.

‘Yes, but nothing’s connected.’

‘So I can’t trace my genealogy yet?’

‘I didn’t know you wanted to.’

He shrugged his shoulders. Who could say what he wanted? ‘Any chance of a guided tour,’ he asked, ‘or are you too busy?’

She looked at her watch. ‘I can give you ten minutes,’ she said. ‘But only if you promise to be less ironical about us than you were the last time we talked. This is not, I remind you, a Holocaust memorial museum.’

He smiled at her. He was not, she thought, so unattractive.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind if it were,’ he said.

2

When Treslove told Hephzibah he thought Finkler was looking lonely he omitted to mention where the thought came from. Other, that is, than from his own fear of being lonely. It came from a text Alfredo had sent him. saw your freaky telly friend out looking for tarts surprised you weren’t with him

Treslove texted back how do you tell when a man’s out looking for tarts?

It took Alfredo a couple of days to work up a reply. his tongues hanging out

Treslove texted back you are no son of mine, but decided against sending it. He didn’t want to give Alfredo a free shot at him for his paternal negligence.

As for Finkler, leaving Hephzibah out of it, he was sorry for him if Alfredo’s low supposition happened to be true, and sorrier still if it wasn’t but Finkler just looked like a man with no home to go to and no wife to care for.

It was a terrible thing to lose the woman you loved.

3

‘You’re probably imagining it,’ Libor said.

Treslove had taken him out for a salt-beef sandwich in the reopened Nosh Bar on Windmill Street. Years before, Libor had brought Treslove and Finkler here. Part of his introducing the young men to the hidden delights of the city Libor had come to love above all others. Then, a salt-beef sandwich in Soho was to Treslove as a descent into the underworld of cosmopolitan debauchery. He felt as though he were living through the last days of the Roman Empire, no matter that the Romans would not have known of salt-beef sandwiches. Now Treslove wondered if he was living through the last days of himself.

Libor, too, it seemed to him. The old man painstakingly separated the beef from the rye bread because the latter did not digest easily, and then he didn’t touch the beef. He had asked for no mustard. He wanted no pickled cucumber.

He no longer ate his food, he merely pulled it apart.

In the past he would have looked out of the window and enjoyed the parade of dissolutes. Today he stared as through shuttered eyes. I have done him no favours bringing him here, Treslove thought.

But then the outing hadn’t been planned as a favour to Libor. It was a necessity to Treslove.

‘Why would I imagine it?’ he asked. ‘I’m happy. I’m in love. I believe I am loved. Where would I conjure up this dread from?’

‘The usual place,’ Libor said.

‘That’s too Czech for me, Libor. Where’s the usual place?’

‘The place everything we fear comes from. The place where we store our longing for the end of things.’

‘That’s more Czech still. I have no longing for the end of things.’

Libor smiled at him and laid an old unsteady hand on his. But for the old and the unsteady the gesture reminded Treslove of Hephzibah. Why did everybody pat him?

‘My friend, all the years I’ve known you you’ve been longing for the end of things. You’ve lived in preparation, on the edge of tears, all your life. Malkie noticed that about you. She wasn’t sure she should even play Schubert when you were listening. He doesn’t need any encouragement, that one, she said.’

‘Encouragement to do what?’

‘To throw yourself into the flames. Isn’t that what being with my niece and reading Moses Maimonides is about?’

‘I don’t think of Hephzibah as fire.’

‘Don’t you? Then what are you so anxious about? I think you’re getting what you went in there to get. The whole Jewish gesheft. You think it’s a short cut to catastrophe. And I’m not going to say you’re wrong.’

He wanted to say that’s crap, Libor. But you don’t ask an elderly man out for salt-beef sandwiches he is unable to digest and tell him that what he’s saying is crap. ‘I don’t recognise what you’re describing,’ he said instead.

Libor shrugged. If you don’t you don’t. He didn’t have the strength to argue. But he could see Treslove needed more. ‘The fall, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Last Judgement, Masada, Auschwitz – see a Jew and you think of Armageddon,’ he said. ‘We tell good creation stories but we do destruction even better. We’re at the beginning and the end of everything. And everyone’s after a piece of the action. Those who can’t wait to pitchfork us into the flames, want to go down screaming by our side. It’s one or the other. Temperamentally, you were always going to choose the other.’

‘You sound like your great-great-niece.’

‘Not surprising. We’re family, you know.’

‘But isn’t all this a bit solipsistic, Libor, as Sam would say? By your account there’s no escaping the Jews for anyone.’

Libor pushed his plate aside. ‘There’s no escaping the Jews for anyone,’ he said.

Treslove stared out of the window. On the opposite side of the narrow street, an ill-favoured, fat girl in a short skirt was trying to persuade men to come into a club only a desperate or a deranged person would enter. She saw him looking at her and beckoned him over. Bring your friend, her gesture implied. Bring your salt-beef sandwich. He lowered his eyes.

‘And you think,’ he said, picking up Libor’s thread, ‘that I am imagining Hephzibah and Sam in order to hasten my end?’

Libor waved his hands in front of his face. ‘I didn’t quite say that. But people who expect the worst will always see the worst.’

‘I haven’t seen anything.’

‘Exactly.’

Treslove put his elbows on the table. ‘Libor, since you tell me Hephzibah is your family, what’s your view? Do you think she would do this?’

‘With Sam?’

‘With anybody?’

‘Well, her being my family doesn’t make her different from any other woman. Though I have never gone along with the view that women are by nature inconstant. My own experience has been very different. Malkie never played me false.’

‘Can you be sure?’

‘Of course I can’t be sure. But if she allowed me to believe she had never played me false, then she never played me false. You don’t judge fidelity by every act; it’s the desire to say you’re faithful and the desire to be believed.’

‘That can’t be true, Libor. Outside Prague.’

‘We didn’t live in Prague. What I’m saying is that an indiscretion needn’t matter. It’s the overall intention of fidelity that counts.’

‘So Hephzibah might mean to be faithful to me but still happen to be fucking Sam.’

‘I hope she isn’t.’

‘I hope she isn’t.’

‘And I doubt she is. The question is, why don’t you doubt she is, if you have seen nothing to make you suppose otherwise.’

Treslove thought about it.

‘I need to order another sandwich,’ he said, as though truthful reflection were dependent on it.

‘Have mine,’ Libor said.

Treslove shook his head and thought of Tyler. ‘Have mine,’ Finkler had said, if not in so many words. ‘Have mine, I am otherwise engaged.’

He had never told Libor of his evenings with Tyler, watching Finkler’s documentaries. He had never told anybody. They were not his alone to tell. They were poor Tyler’s too. And in a sense they were Finkler’s also. But he wished he could mention the affair, if it ever really was an affair, to Libor now. It would help to explain something, though he wasn’t sure what. But how would he know what if he didn’t hear himself put the question into words. Libor was old. Who would he tell? The secret that would otherwise go to the grave with Treslove, would surely go to the grave much sooner with Libor.

So on an impulse, he told.

Libor listened quietly. When it was over, to Treslove’s astonishment, he cried. Not copious tears, just a tear or two in the corner of an old man’s rheumy eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ Treslove said.

‘You should be.’

Treslove didn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected a response of this sort. Libor was a man of the world. Just squeeze me in a little fuck when you come to make a report of my life, he had told Treslove. Men and women did these things. An indiscretion needn’t matter – Libor’s own words.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Treslove said. ‘It was wrong of me.’

Libor looked into his hands. ‘Yes, it was wrong of you to tell me,’ he said, as though not talking to Treslove at all. ‘Probably more wrong of you to tell me than to do it. I don’t want the burden of the knowledge. I would prefer to remember Tyler differently. And you. Sam it doesn’t really matter about. He can look after himself. Though I would rather have not known about the falsity of your friendship. You make the world a sadder place, Julian, and it is already sad enough, believe me. Why did you tell me? It was unkind of you.’

‘I don’t know. And I say again I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what made me do this.’

‘You do. One always does know why one tells. Is it because you are proud of it as an escapade?’

‘An escapade? God, no.’

‘A conquest, then?’

‘A conquest? God, no.’

‘So you are proud of it as something. Are you proud of it because you got one over on Sam?’

Treslove knew he had a duty to think about his answer. Saying God, no all the time would not suffice.

‘Not got one over, Libor. I hope not that. More having got into his world. Their world.’

‘From which you’d felt excluded?’

He had a duty to think about that, too. ‘Yes.’

‘Because they were a glamorously successful pair?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘But Sam was your friend. You’d grown up with him. You continued to see him. He didn’t inhabit a universe that was beyond yours.’

‘I’d grown up with him but he’d always been different to me. A mystery in some way.’

‘Because he was clever? Because he was famous? Because he was a Jew?’

Treslove’s salt-beef sandwich arrived, dripping in mustard the way he’d learned to like it. Accompanied by not one but two pickled cucumbers chopped into fine slices.

‘That’s a tough one to answer,’ he said. ‘But yes, all right, all of those.’

‘So when you lay in the arms of his wife you were, for a moment, as clever as he was, as famous as he was, as Jewish as he was.’

Treslove didn’t say that he had never lain in Tyler’s arms, and that she had never lain in his. He didn’t want Libor to know that she had turned her back to him.

‘I guess.’

‘Any one more than the others?’

Treslove sighed. A sigh from deep in the bowels of his guilt and of his fears. ‘I can’t say,’ he said.

‘Then let me say for you. It was the Jew part that mattered to you most.’

Treslove leaned across the table to halt him. ‘Before you go on,’ he said, ‘you do know that Tyler wasn’t Jewish. I’d thought she was, but it turned out that she wasn’t.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘I was, a little.’

‘All the more, then, I say it was the Jew. And I know that it was the Jew because of what you are afraid of in Sam and Hephzibah now.’

Treslove looked at him, an old man with no digestion system left, telling riddles. ‘Don’t follow,’ he said.

‘You suspect Sam and Hephzibah of what? Having sex together. And on what evidence? None, except that you suppose that is what they will do because they share something that excludes you. They are Jews, you are not, therefore they are fucking.’

‘Oh, come on, Libor.’

‘Please yourself. But you have no better explanation for your suspicions. You won’t be the first Gentile to ascribe lasciviousness to Jews. We had horns once, and a tail, like goats or like the devil. We bred like vermin. We polluted Christian women. The Nazis –’

‘Libor, stop – this is foolish and insulting.’

The old man sat back in his chair and rubbed his head. Once upon a time he had a wife who rubbed it for him, laughing as she polished, like a housewife delighting in her chores. But that was long ago.

Insulting? He shrugged.

‘I am deeply ashamed,’ Treslove said. ‘For telling you what I told you.’

‘You are deeply ashamed? Then that’s something else you two share.’

‘Show me mercy,’ Treslove begged.

‘Julian, you started this,’ Libor said. ‘You invited me out to discuss your fear that Sam and Hephzibah are fucking. I ask you what your suspicions are built on. You tell me an indefinable dread. I’m your friend – so I’m doing my best to define it for you. You attribute strange and secret sexual powers to them, that’s why you are afraid. You think they can’t stop themselves because they are driven by an ungovernable sexual urge, Jew to Jew, and you think they won’t stop themselves because they are unscrupulous, Jew to Gentile. Julian, you’re an anti-Semite.’

‘Me?’

‘Don’t sound so astonished. You’re not alone. We’re all anti-Semites. We have no choice. You. Me. Everyone.’

He had not eaten a bite of food.

4

They went to the theatre together – Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler. It was Treslove’s birthday and Hephzibah had suggested an outing instead of a party, since every day was a party for them. They had asked Libor along but he didn’t fancy the sound of the play.

None of them fancied the sound of the play. But as Finkler said, if you don’t go to the theatre whenever you don’t like the sound of a play, when do you ever go to the theatre? Besides, it was only on for a week, a piece of agitprop that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about. London was buzzing with it.

‘Are you sure it won’t spoil your birthday?’ Hephzibah asked, having second thoughts.

‘I’m not a child,’ Treslove told her. He didn’t add that everything was spoiling his birthday so why pick on this.

It was called Sons of Abraham and charted the agonies of the Chosen People from ancient times up until the present when they decided to visit their agonies on someone else. The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and hallooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children.

Finkler, sitting on the other side of Hephzibah to Treslove, was  surprised to discover from the programme notes that Tamara Krausz had neither written it nor assisted in its production. Watching it made him feel she was in the theatre somewhere. Not quite next to him. Hephzibah was next to him. But nearby. He could smell the harlot allure of her vindictive intelligence, laying out her daughters of Hebron beauty for her father’s enemies to feast and avenge themselves upon.

In the final seconds of the drama an aerial shot of a mass grave at Auschwitz was projected on to a gauze curtain, before dissolving into a photograph of the rubble of Gaza.

Pure Tamara.

It received a standing ovation. Neither Hephzibah nor Treslove rose from their seats. Finkler laughed loudly, turning round so that people could observe him. Treslove was surprised by this reaction. Not just by the judgement it implied but by the antic nature of it. Had Finkler flipped his lid?

A number of ASHamed Jews were in the audience but Finkler thought their response to seeing him there was decidedly cold. Only Merton Kugle made an approach.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Superb,’ Finkler said. ‘Simply superb.’

‘So why were you laughing?’

‘Wasn’t laughter, Merton. Those were the contortions of grief.’

Kugle nodded and went out into the street.

Finkler wondered if he’d popped into a supermarket on his way to the theatre and had tins of proscribed Israeli sturgeon in his pockets.

People left the theatre quietly, deep in thought. That deep in thought that is available only to those who already know what they think. They were mainly from the caring and the performing professions, Finkler reckoned. He believed he recognised a number of them from demos in Trafalgar Square. They had the air of seasoned marchers. End the massacre! Stop Israeli genocide! At another time he’d have shaken hands with them, in sombre festivity, like survivors of an air raid.

He suggested a birthday drink for Treslove at the bar in the crypt of the theatre. It reminded them all of their student days. Rare ales on tap. Houmous and tabbouleh with pitta bread to eat. Old couches draped with black curtains to talk things over on. Finkler bought the drinks, clinked his glass with Treslove and Hephzibah and then fell quiet. For ten minutes they didn’t speak. Treslove wondered whether the silence denoted suppressed eroticism on the part of the other two. It surprised him greatly that Finkler had accepted their invitation – that’s to say Hephzibah’s invitation – to accompany them to the play. He must have known they would react differently to it from him and perhaps even end up having a row. So there was an underlying motive to his aceptance. Out of the side of his head, Treslove kept an eye on their mutual glances and hand movements. He saw nothing.

In the end it was another person who broke what Treslove took to be their ideological deadlock.

‘Hey! Surprised to see you here.’

Treslove heard the voice before he saw the person.

‘Abe!’

Hephzibah, getting caught up in the couch drapes, rose in a tangle of shawls. ‘Julian, Sam, this is Abe – my ex.’

Which one of us, Treslove speculated, does Abe think she’s with now – Julian or Sam?

Abe shook hands and joined them. A roguish and yet somehow angelically handsome man with a crinkled halo of black hair shot with white, like gleams of light, a hawkish nose and eyes close together. He has a face that bores, Treslove thought, meaning a face that stabs and pierces not a face that wearies. A prophet’s or philosopher’s face – which thought pleased him in that it would be Finkler who should be jealous, therefore, not him.

Hephzibah had of course told him about her two husbands, Abe and Ben, but he had to rack his brains to remember which was the lawyer and which the actor. Given where they were, how he looked and the black T-shirt he was wearing, he calculated that Abe must be the actor.

‘Abe’s a lawyer,’ Hephzibah said. She was flushed, even flustered, Treslove thought, with the attentions of so many men. Her past, her present, her future . . .

‘So why did you say you were surprised to see Hep here?’ Treslove asked, staking a claim which a more confident man would have considered already staked.

Abe glowed like the embers of a fire that had only just gone out. ‘Not her kind of play,’ he said.

‘Do I have a kind of play?’ Hephzibah enquired. Skittish, Treslove reckoned, noticing everything.

‘Well, not this kind.’

‘You’ve heard about my museum?’

‘I have.’

‘Then it shouldn’t surprise you that I have to keep my ear to the ground.’

‘Though not necessarily that low to it,’ Finkler said.

Treslove was astonished. ‘You’re telling me you didn’t like it?’

Hephzibah too. ‘That’s interesting,’ she said.

So was that what he was doing, Treslove wondered, interesting Hephzibah?

Finkler turned to Abe. ‘Julian and I went to school together,’ he said. ‘He thinks he knows what I like.’

Treslove stood up for himself. ‘You’re an ASHamed Jew. You’re the Sam the Man of ASHamed Jews. You had to like it. It was written for you. Could have been written by you. I’ve heard you speak it.’

‘Not those words have you ever heard me speak. I don’t do Nazi analogies. The Nazis were the Nazis. Anyway, did you hear me say I didn’t like it? I loved it. I only wished there’d been more singing and dancing. It lacked a show-stopper like “Springtime for Hitler”, that’s my only complaint. I couldn’t tap my feet. Put it this way, did you see anyone going out humming the Wagner?’

‘So let me get this straight,’ Treslove said. ‘This is a taste issue for you, is it?’

‘Isn’t it for you?’

‘Not in the musical sense, no.’

Finkler put an arm around his shoulder. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I think I’d like to leave this conversation to the rest of you. I’ll get more birthday drinks. Abe?’

Abe didn’t drink. Ot at least he didn’t drink tonight. In a manner of speaking, he told them, he was working.

‘Aren’t you always,’ Hephzibah said, exercising the privilege of an ex.

‘Doing what?’ Treslove asked.

‘Well, essentially just watching the play and gauging responses to it. One of the co-writers is a client.’

‘And you’re here to see if he has a case for claiming damages from the Jewish people?’ Hephzibah continued, squeezing his arm. Treslove felt that he had seen into their marriage and wished he hadn’t.

On two glasses of wine, more than her year’s allowance, Hephzibah had, in his view, exceeded her yearly allowance of skittishness also.

‘Well, if you’re here to gauge responses I’m happy to give you mine,’ he said, but he was out of time with the conversation and wasn’t heard.

‘Abe always did know how to screw the last penny out of a defendant,’ Hephzibah told him.

‘That’s not quite the way of it,’ Abe said.

‘What, the Jewish people are suing him?’

‘No, not the Jews. And it’s not about money either. He’s just been sacked by his university department. He’s a marine biologist when he’s not writing plays. He was sacked when he was underwater. I’m trying to get him his job back.’

‘Sacked for writing this play?’

‘Not exactly. For saying that Auschwitz was more a holiday camp than a hell for most of the Jews in there.’

‘And where there’s no hell, there’s no devil – is that the idea?’

‘Well I can’t speak for his theology. What he argues, and claims he can prove beyond doubt, is that there were casinos and spas and prostitutes laid on. He has photographs of Jews lying on their backs in swimming pools being fed iced strawberries by camp hostesses.’

Hephzibah guffawed. ‘Then by the terms of his own play,’ she said, ‘Gaza must be a holiday camp too. He can’t have it both ways. No point calling out the Jews as Nazis if the Nazis turn out to have been fun-loving philanthropists.’

‘Maybe Sam was right in that case and what we’ve just watched was a light romantic comedy,’ Treslove said, but he was out of time again.

‘I think that’s being a bit literalist about the way analogy is meant to work,’ Abe said, replying to Hephzibah not Treslove. But he looked at Treslove, man to man, husband to husband. Such literalists, wives!

‘So as a Jew, what do you think?’ Treslove asked, raising his tempo.

‘Well as a lawyer –’

‘No, as a Jew what do you think?’

‘About the play? Or about my client?’

‘About the lot. The play, your client, the Auschwitz lido.’

Abe showed him the palms of his hands. ‘As a Jew I believe that every argument has a counter-argument,’ he said.

‘That’s why we make such good lawyers,’ Hephzibah laughed, squeezing both men’s arms.

These people don’t know how to stand up for themselves, Treslove thought. These people have had their chips.

He went to the bathroom. Bathrooms always made him angry. They were places that returned him to himself. Illusionless, he looked in the mirror. They’ve ceded their sense of outrage, he said to his reflection, washing his hands.

When he returned he saw that Sam had joined the party again. Sam, Hephzibah, Abe. A cosy coterie of Finklers. Or maybe it’s just me who’s had his chips, Treslove thought.