Illywhacker

Had it not been for this imaginary letter there might have been no correspondence between father and daughter at all. "I must first tell you", Sid would write in his second letter to his daughter, "what was in the letter that the porter did not post." The letters, at first, are shy and stilted on both sides, and Leah's are ponderous and dull. There is no indication of the dialogue that would later develop. This was not due, on Leah's side at least, to a lack of amusing incidents or new sights to describe but rather to the fact that she was just learning to talk.

Leah, at this time, was unaware of the virtues of discussion and had long been in the habit of making her mind up on important matters without any help from anyone. She would come to a conclusion slowly, tortuously, and she would go over and over it (her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the ceiling) until it was smooth and flawless. In this manner she arrived at ideas that were often original, but not easily accepted by others.

She did not, however, consider herself clever. If she was to succeed at the university she would have to work five times as hard as anyone else. She brushed aside any suggestion of joining debating societies or amateur theatricals and when there were pig worms to be dissected she managed to slip an extra one into her handbag so that she could bring the little pink parasite home to her room and there perform the dissection a second time. The pig worm, being only five inches long, was easily smuggled into the house and escaped Mrs Heller's attention. However, when she carried home a dogfish, the odours of formaldehyde and fish gave her away, and Mrs Heller, her red scaly skin hidden beneath Wysbraum's black tar treatment, came to complain about the smell.

Leah politely declined to place the "thing" in the large brown paper bag her landlady held out into the room. Whereupon Mrs Heller – as white-eyed and black-faced as Al Jolson – announced she would send up Mr Kaletsky.

Leah knew nothing of this Mr Kaletsky. She had promised her mother, in answer to a specific question, that there were no men in the house. She had not noticed the small room, tucked away beside the laundry in the concreted backyard, where Izzie Kaletsky slept. He did not pay full board and so did not come to table.

Leah, waiting for the mysterious Mr Kaletsky, sat in front of her dissection board where the dogfish's nervous system was being untidily exposed. She took out her notebook and began to sketch the pale ganglia, using her eraser too much so that pieces of indiarubber and paper found their way into the dissection.

This is how Izzie found her when she bade him "enter", a very prim and serious young lady, dressed in black, sketching a dead fish. To Izzie, this was an appealing sight. He did not, however, as Leah mischievously claimed on other occasions, introduce himself by saying: "My name is Kaletsky and my brother is a revolutionary in Moscow."

Leah had expected an old man with a belly. This did not look like a "Mr" anyone. He was tiny. He had dark ringlets of hair, small hands, and a wide mouth that hovered in the tantalizing androgynous no man's land between pretty and handsome. His good looks were spoiled only by his skin, and yet even that was interesting, being coarsely textured, a little like a lemon.

Izzie's pointed feet would not stay still. He grinned, mocking either her or himself – it wasn't clear. He had thin wrists like a girl.

"Miss Goldstein."

She was not above a little theatre – she leaned back and sharpened her pencil, squinting all the time at her smudgy drawing. Her cheeks were burning, but who was to know that this was not her normal colour?

"I am Kaletsky."

"Come in," she said. "Complain."

He moved into the room a little but left the door, as was proper, wide open. Leah could hear the voices of the student teachers in the stairwell.

"You are famous," he said. "First they talk about nothing else but how little you talk. Then it is all about how much you work. Now you have given them a smell. They love you."

Leah heard a clatter on the stairs, fast whispers, and then heavy brogues marching across the linoleum in the front hall.

Izzie grinned. "See what excitements you produce. They never talked to each other before you came. Mrs Heller only wanted to remember her husband the Police Commissioner and tell everyone how nice it is to have servants – 'When I had servants my skin was beautiful.' And the students were dull and made toast because they had nothing to say."