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the prevarications of Christians who professed one thing and did another didn’t help him when it came to working out what to say to Leah. He couldn’t tell her that Jessica had left. That she had become a turncoat, a liar and a thief. Least of all could he tell her what it was that Jessica had stolen.
    It was an agony to him—keener than any knife-wound— to be keeping secrets from his wife, whatever the damp was doing to her flesh. It felt like a betrayal of the heart.
    And still she doesn’t know.
    A mercy, Shylock believes. A mercy she got away when she did.
    —
    Simon Strulovitch’s daughter had not got away. Not yet. Unless you call college getting away. Otherwise, he was similarly situated. He too fretted about the value placed on her as an exotic, feared the strength of the avidity she inspired, and the effect of the flattery on her. Added to this was his reputation as a wealthy connoisseur, a donor to elitist institutions and, for no reason other than that he’d visited Israel and given artworks to some of its universities, a Zionist—all in all a reputation he was vain enough to see as an inducement beyond Beatrice’s charms. It wasn’t theft he feared—Beatrice did not have the key to his vaults—it was the view of him as a bogeyman on all counts that she was bound to encounter at college, and the added value which that view of him lent her as a prize. She was worth turning, that was what it came to. The histories of terrorism and brigandage, of revolution and sedition, bulged with the apostate daughters of rich men with unacceptable convictions. A girl who would sleep with her father’s enemies was of a succulence beyond description, plunder that exceeded in value even Simon Strulovitch’s rubies and turquoises.
    Strulovitch resembled Shylock in another way as well. He, too, was denied the opportunity to raise the matter with the girl’s mother.
    The stroke she suffered on Beatrice’s fourteenth birthday felt too horribly symbolic to be any such thing. It was the cruellest misfortune, no more. Fate stuck out his hand and idly struck. It could have been any woman on any day. Hold on to that, Strulovitch told himself. Embrace the arbitrary. Otherwise the blaming would start and of blaming there is no end.
    Little by little Kay had recovered words—not actual utterances but the will to move her lips and shape a silent sound, and this was enough to make him feel that someone he knew was still in there. They never approached—in dumbshow or any other way—what had befallen her. She lived in bed now—her own bed—needed to be helped to bathe and eat, and couldn’t always make herself intelligible—beyond that, the pretence went, things were as they’d always been. About Beatrice he was careful to say little, and about his fears for her he said nothing at all. He was reluctant to put any pressures on her. Let Kay decide what subjects she wanted to approach by whatever means were available to her. Beatrice’s presence cheered her, but she seemed to wish to see her only on her own, as though they were separate families, individual spokes of a wheel that had fallen off.
    Strulovitch looked past her when he was in her presence. Beyond her, as in a broken mirror, he sometimes saw the wife he’d known but it felt like an infidelity to smile across the room at her. Better, in the presence of a ruined memory to remember nothing oneself. So they sat silently together, he in a chair by her bed, holding her hand, she looking into nothing, the two of them possessed of no before, and certainly no after, in a perfect harmony of unbeing. So unalive to sensation they could have been the first man and woman, waiting to be breathed into, poised for creation to begin.
    Strulovitch had never been more thankful for the fortune built on car-parts he had inherited. His relations with his father were repaired. The burial had been only temporary: with his divorce from Ophelia-Jane Smythson came reconciliation, and with