“I mean, if we go into this, and I didn’t want to go into all this, I think, for himself, he did the right thing.”"Yes,” she says, putting the case before me as carefully as a judge, “because he can’t live with somebody. A proudly Jewish East End woman (Roth, take note), Alice was a crucial figure in her daughter’s life, always offering support, and encouragement “I wish she was here now,” says Bloom, smile back in place. I ask if she ever dreams about her, and she says rarely, but that when she does, they’ve been good dreams.As if thinking aloud, she adds: “I must say, when I’ve had dreams about Philip, I’ve woken up absolutely terrified. I shouldn’t have done it,” she continues, “but I had nowhere else to turn.”By that point, Bloom’s adored mother was dead. I think it made her question men and marriage a great deal, afterwards. “But it put a lot of weight on Anna, that was too much for her to carry at that time.” (I am momentarily distracted by the thought of Roth chuckling at this image – his “Anna” is called Sylphid, which gives some indication of just how obsessed he is with her girth.)”It was pretty damaging for her. At least they had each other, at least they knew it wasn’t them going mad.”Do you think it’s true,” says Bloom, wonderingly, “that you can’t lose it, if someone else is there, sharing it with you? I guess not…” She frowns.

She and Anna were both there, as one missive after another “plopped” on to the floor Eventually, the two women started laughing Which suggests, I say, that things could have been worse. There was also the night when Roth started bombarding her with faxes – one was a bill for the 600 hours he had spent rehearsing scripts with her; another demanded she return her wedding ring. I couldn’t.”She is still in several minds about the break-up itself, during which Roth was on Lithium for much of the time It damaged her, she says “Look, I’m not exactly the person I was before. At a certain point, you’ve got to come to terms with certain horrors, but it was pretty extreme.”She was manoeuvred out of the two homes they’d once shared. “And I’ve been fine ever since! It was as though it was saying, ‘Come on [she bangs on the table for emphasis], get on with it, pass this by, you’ve got to pass it by!’.”But she couldn’t do the same with I Married a Communist? She looks at me, like someone with a fish phobia who has just been asked to stroke Jaws “No, no, no I couldn’t.

And I looked down and, goddammit, it was Human Pain!” (Roth’s book is actually called The Human Stain; as slips go, this one speaks volumes.) “And I thought, ‘Buy it! Read it! Stop it!” She laughs, and sits down. “I was in the airport, in a bookshop, and I was standing like this [she leaps up] with my hand on a pile of books. Every time I saw a copy, I felt sick or faint.”Her face brightens. “Since Philip and I were separated – in 1993 really, though we were divorced in 1996 – I was terrified to read any of his books, and that one, for sure, I wasn’t going to read. “I just couldn’t.” I can hardly believe this, I say, and she gives a timid sort of shrug. What did Bloom make of that?She clutches at the collar of her coat and whispers, “No!”.

Still under her breath, she explains that she hasn’t read the book. Then, in his 1998 novel I Married a Communist, he created a character, Eve Frame, clearly based on Bloom, but with a few not-so-subtle twists. A self-loathing, anti-Semitic Jewess, she fawns over shallow society figures, endures physical attacks from her overweight and vengeful daughter, sides with fascists by denouncing her husband in print, and ends up a “hopeless drunk”. For starters, he hired solicitors in the US and Britain, who threatened legal action if Bloom continued to give interviews to promote her book. I don’t know what it was that she saw in it that she hated so.”All hostilities pale, though, when set against Roth’s response.