Spätlese and all three of us were tiddly. A mere residue of anxiety prevented us from looking at the clock. And we didn’t look at the clock until later; before then we said, he must have been in an accident, but an accident can be any number of things, there are accidents and then there are accidents, we said; at this stage we’d ruled out the possibility of a breakdown, because he would have called, it was late after all. After an accident, you go to hospital at least, my brother said, and I said, at least. My mother changed the subject, saying, well, wouldn’t it be nice for once to have a Sunday without that Verdi racket, eh; in our house, you see, a Verdi record — at least one — was played every Sunday morning, and my father would whistle along to it; we had to be as quiet as church mice, as quiet as during the sports programme, and we had to stay in the living room and listen to my father whistling along to Rigoletto or Aida while Mum was cooking the roast, and this lasted until lunchtime; my mother couldn’t stand this endless Verdi, as she called it, this substitute for music, she said, this banal growling of the basses. She would close the kitchen door, refusing to come out again until Verdi was finished in the living room, then she’d open the window, albeit inconspicuously, to let out what remained of Il Trovatore; after all, my father always said with great satisfaction, Verdi’s the only music worth listening to, while my mother tried desperately to avoid the repulsive ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’. For many years the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ tormented my mother, Verdi in general tormented her, and the torment I suffered was especially cruel, because my father whistled along to it while the record was playing and we weren’t ever allowed to leave the living room. On rare occasions we struck lucky and my father would play Mozart, but only