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‘Thank you all so much for letting me stay.’
    Nina watched her nibble on a slice of cucumber and then push it to the side of her plate.
    ‘You should thank Isabel,’ Laura corrected her. ‘She is very kind-hearted.’
    ‘I wouldn’t say Isabel is kind, would you, Nina?’
    Joe rolled another slice of bloody beef and pushed it into his mouth.
    This was the cue for Nina to say something critical about her mother to please her father, something like, ‘My mother doesn’t know me at all.’ In fact she was tempted to say, ‘My mother doesn’t know I know my father will sleep with Kitty Finch. She doesn’t even know I know what anorexic means.’
    Instead she said, ‘Kitty thinks walls can open and close.’
    When Mitchell whirled his left forefinger in circles around his ear as if to say, crazeee she’s crazeee, Joe reached over and violently slapped down Mitchell’s teasing pink finger with his tight brown fist.
    ‘It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell. Even you must have been a child once. Even you might have thought there were monsters lurking under your bed. Now that you are such an impeccably normal adult you probably take a discreet look under the bed and tell yourself, well, maybe the monster is invisible!’
    Mitchell rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling as if pleading with it for help and advice. ‘Has anyone ever actually told you how up yourself you are?
     
     
    The telephone was ringing. A fax was sliding and grinding its way on to the plastic tray next to the villa’s fact file. Nina stood up and walked over to pick it up. She glanced at it and brought it to her father.
    ‘It’s for you. About your reading in Poland.’
    ‘Thank you.’ He kissed her hand with his wine-stained lips and told her to read the fax out loud to him.
    LUNCH ON ARRIVAL.
TWO MENUS. White borscht with boiled egg and sausage. Traditional hunter’s stew with mash potatoes. Soft drink.
OR
Traditional Polish cucumber soup. Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat and mash potatoes. Soft drink.
KINDLY FAX YOUR CHOICE.
     
    Laura coughed. ‘You were born in Poland, weren’t you, Joe?’
    Nina watched her father shake his head vaguely.
    ‘I don’t remember.’
    Mitchell raised his eyebrows in what he imagined was disbelief. ‘You got to be a bit forgetful not to remember where you were born. You’re Jewish, aren’t you, sir?’
    Joe looked startled. Nina wondered if it was because her father had been called sir. Kitty was frowning too. She sat up straighter in her chair and addressed the table as if she was Joe’s biographer.
    ‘Of course he was born in Poland. It’s on all his book jackets. Jozef Nowogrodzki was born in western Poland in 1937. He arrived in Whitechapel, east London, when he was five years old.’
    ‘Right.’ Mitchell looked confused again. ‘So how come you’re Joe Jacobs, then?’
    Kitty once again took charge. She might as well have pinged her wine glass three times to create an expectant silence. ‘The teachers at his boarding school changed his name so they could spell it.’
    The spoon Joe had been polishing all through supper was now silver and shiny. When he held it up as if to inspect his hard work, Nina could see Kitty’s distorted reflection floating on the back of it.
    ‘Boarding school? Where were your parents, then?’
    Mitchell noticed that Laura was squirming in her chair. Whatever it was he was supposed to know about Joe had totally gone from his mind. Laura had told him of course, but it hadn’t sunk in. He was relieved Kitty Finch did not take it upon herself to answer his question and sort of wished he hadn’t gone there.
    ‘Well, you’re more or less English, then, aren’t you, Joe?’
    Joe nodded. ‘Yes, I am. I’m nearly as English as you are.’
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t go along all the way with that, Joe,’ Mitchell asserted in the tone of a convivial customs official, ‘but, as I always say to Laura, it’s what we feel inside that counts.’
    ‘You’re