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tickets for the opera tomorrow night. Elgin can’t come. Will you come?’
    ‘We’re supposed to be having a night in tomorrow.’
    She nodded and I got out. No kiss.
    What to do? Should I stay in with Jacqueline and hate it and start the slow motor of hating her? Should I make an excuse and go out? Should I tell the truth and go out? I can’t have it all my own way, relationships are about compromise. Give and take. Maybe I don’t want to stay in but she wants me to stay in. I should be glad to do that. It will make us stronger and sweeter. These were my thoughts as she slept beside me and if she had any fears she did not reveal them in those night-time hours. I looked at her lying trustfully in the spot where she had lain for so many nights. Could this bed be treacherous?
    By morning I was bad tempered and exhausted. Jacqueline, ever cheerful, got into her mini and went to her mother’s. At noon she rang to ask me over. Her mother wasn’t well and she wanted to spend the night with her.
    ‘Jacqueline,’ I said. ‘Stay the night. We’ll see each other tomorrow.’
    I felt reprieved and virtuous. Now I could sit in my own flat by myself and be pragmatic. Sometimes the best company is your own.
    During the interval of The Marriage of Figaro I realised how often other people looked at Louise. On every side we were battered by sequins, dazed with gold. The women wore their jewellery like medals. A husband here, a divorce there, they were a palimpsest of love-affairs. The chokers, the brooch, the rings, the tiara, the studded watch that couldn’t possibly tell the time to anyone without a magnifying glass. The bracelets, the ankle-chains, the veil hung with seed pearls and the earrings that far outnumberedthe ears. All these jewels were escorted by amply cut grey suits and dashingly spotted ties. The ties twitched when Louise walked by and the suits pulled themselves in a little. The jewels glinted their own warning at Louise’s bare throat. She wore a simple dress of moss green silk, a pair of jade earrings, and a wedding ring. ‘Never take your eyes from that ring,’ I told myself. ‘Whenever you think you are falling remember that ring is molten hot and will burn you through and through.’
    ‘What are you looking at?’ said Louise.
    ‘You bloody idiot,’ said my friend. ‘Another married woman.’
    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