one regard, outside their father’s influence. There was a large mattress on the floor of Yoav’s room, a wall of books, and little else.
The kitchen was down a flight of stairs on the garden level. From there you could look out on the back garden. A door at the end of a short corridor took one out into it. To open it required destroying the complicated work of the spiders that lived there; as soon as you closed it again they were back at it. Bogna, who belonged to the Orthodox Church, cared too much for the sanctity of life to kill them. The garden was wild and overgrown, full of brambles. When I saw it for the first time it was November and the whole of it was dying back. At some point the garden must have been planted and cared for, but left to its own devices, the steady tenacity and stubbornness of vegetable life unchecked, only the coarser plants had survived, grown thick and tangled. The walkway had collapsed. The rhododendrons and laurel grew up in a great, dark wall against the sunlight. There was a card table on the grass. Candle wax had collected in places on the surface, and an ashtray from the Excelsior in Rome was filled with dirty water. Later, once the weather got warm, we started to use it again, sitting out with a bottle of wine. The state of the garden suited Yoav and Leah. They had a taste and respect for the private lives of things let be; they held these things in distant, high regard. Scattered throughout the house were objects abandoned, dropped, or left where they had last been put down. Sometimes these tableaux were left to sit for weeks before Bogna finally cleared them away, returning things to their proper place if they had one or throwing them out in the trash. She seemed to understand Yoav and Leah’s taste and habits even when they stood in opposition to her own. She pretended at exasperation, making much of her heavy sighing and adding extra weight to the bad leg, yet it was obvious she felt sorry for them. But in the end Bogna had her job to do. It was Weisz who paid her, and to whom she had to answer if the place wasn’t clean when at last he appeared.
BEFORE THEIR father arrived, I always took the bus back to Oxford. Though his work demanded a certain charm and sociability, he was a withdrawn and private person, surrounded by a kind of moat. The sort of person who creates the illusion of intimacy by drawing you out, asking you about yourself and remembering the names of your children, if you have any, or the kind of drink you like, but who, you realize later, if you realized it at all, managed not to share much about himself. When it came to his family, he didn’t like the presence of outsiders. I don’t remember exactly how this was explained to me—it was never said outright—but I knew it was verboten to be there when their father was. After his visits, Yoav often seemed remote and listless, and Leah disappeared for long, punishing hours of practice. As time passed and my relationship with Yoav grew more serious, my place in the Belsize Park house more entrenched, I began to become hurt and annoyed at having to remove myself like some inappropriate or unsightly guest whenever their father arrived. The feeling was made worse by the fact the Yoav refused to explain why, or to talk about it much at all. He only insinuated that there were certain unspoken rules and expectations that simply couldn’t be broken. All that remained explicit was that I couldn’t be present when his father was. It aggravated an insecurity in me that always lurked below our relationship: the sense that some large share of Yoav would always be held back from me, some life he lived never mine to live beside him.
BY JANUARY, I was spending almost every day at the British Library. It was dark when I set out up Haverstock Hill for the Tube, and dark when I came out of the library onto Euston Road in the afternoon. I still hadn’t come up with a new topic for a dissertation. I spent the days reading aimlessly, not absorbing much, still nervous about a relapse of panic. I called A. L. Plummer, for whom I seemed to hold less and less