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righteousness.
    â€˜I don’t play a fiddle,’ he says. ‘I play the violin.’
    â€˜Don’t you be so damned churlish, you miserable nitpicking boy,’ Jacob says rather violently. He and Roger exchange a moment’s hatred. Roger wears his principles, a little provocatively, high on his shoulder like a schoolboy’s dufflebag.
    â€˜I am merely pointing out that to call a violin a fiddle is a form of name-dropping,’ he says coldly. ‘It’s a familiarity you earn the right to use – that’s if you like name-dropping.’
    It may appear melodramatic for me to interject here that in the face of that impressive vulnerable zeal, that high-minded verbal coup, I fell in love with Roger Goldman. I remember the moment as vividly as I remember the turn of his head. I cannotsend up the emotion as I do so much of my youthful self, for though I have made many compromises with it, it has never completely left me.
    â€˜Save your Oxford style till you get to Christ Church, sonny,’ Jacob says, with terrible put-down. ‘And in the meantime remember that to pick nits at my table, with my guests, is a form of bad manners.’ Jonathan, promptly and hair-raisingly, throws a large chunk of garlic bread at Jacob’s head. It misses him and hits the wall behind.
    â€˜Fiddle schmiddle,’ Jonathan says. ‘What’s all this “my table” crap, Aged Parent? Ma bought this table from the shop that closed down. What makes it yours? You really like to make a big patriarchal spiel over grub, don’t you, you big Jewish yobbo.’
    Nobody requires him to remember either his manners or the starving. Jacob merely instructs Sam in the subversive art of throwing the bread back. They appear to get on extremely well, do Jacob and Jonathan. Jacob is sufficiently opinionated to appreciate in Jonathan so much of himself.
    â€˜Make us some coffee, Flower,’ he says benignly.
    â€˜Make it your bloody self, you schmuck,’ Jonathan says.
    â€˜Sweet Jont,’ Jacob says, ‘be kind to us.’ Rosie takes a whole plum out of her mouth to air a profundity before putting it back in again.
    â€˜Jonty is showing off,’ she says. Jonathan laughs good-humouredly.
    â€˜Okay, Jake,’ he says. ‘I’ll make it, but only if I can make instant, mind? I’m not going to stand over that cocked-up filter. It takes for ever.’ Jacob licenses what to me is an alarming amount of blasphemy, insubordination and defiance. He seems to set it up. It’s as though he were all the time taking his children through an assault course in defiance. Jane by contrast is surprisingly school-marmish and she clearly believes in child labour. She could surely rise to a dishwasher, but she prefers to use her children. She believes that a row of children chopping vegetables is a better thing than a machine.
    â€˜Make the coffee, Jonathan,’ she says icily. ‘We’ll have the real thing and brought to us in the sitting room.’ Jonathan goes with the alacrity of Mustardseed. ‘Stack the dishes, Rosie,’ she says, ‘so that Roger can wash them.’ She is more demanding with Roger than with any of the others. Before the day is out I see her accost him where he engages in chewing grass on the front lawn and say to him, ‘Go and have a bash at the G Minor, Roggs.’
    â€˜The G Minor is hard,’ Roger says.
    â€˜Of course it’s hard,’ she says, working on him with her powerful elitism, ‘but not altogether beyond the likes of you, my darling.’ I find this more than rigorous, coming as I do from a world where Purcell is a washing powder.
    John Millet, over the coffee, talks lyrically about Rome. About the bell tower near his flat in Trastevere, about the fading gradations of mud-brown paint on the house fronts, about huge stuffed tomatoes in the piazza restaurants and the macho roar of Fiats. The images