A mathematical prodigy at Imperial College, Bernard had taken early retirement from a large company for which he had done some kind of rewardingly abstruse work. He was of medium height, paunchy, with a pouty, pink face. During the years I knew him, his curly dark hair turned white and fuzzy; it then furnished him with the blanched aura of a superannuated angel.  He spoke little, but the downward tug of his lips gave his routine greetings a sarcastic edge. His dislike of Herbert Schosch was at once silent and undisguised.

When Herbert came to the club with a bad cold and sneezed and coughed with no effort to avert his head, Bernard took out his handkerchief (in his maidenly way, he still used one) and tied it, like a cowboy bandit, so that it masked his mouth and nose. I shared his displeasure but was a little embarrassed by its ostentation. Herbert compounded the heaviness of the air by lighting one of his small, pungent cigars. When I coughed, he said, "Not caught my cold already, have you, Freddie boy?"

My smooth partnership with Bernard Pinto did not bring the Stanhope sustained progress in the slow world of competitive "teams of four". Our other pair, whoever they might be, seldom had any knowledge of the expert game and small wish to acquire it. Bernard and I might drag them through a round or two, but our team's fortunes regularly foundered before the semi-finals. My partner seemed almost to relish the recurrent incompetence of our team-mates in what the jargon of the game calls "the other room". If he was pleased to play with me, he never indicated that he had read any of my books or seen any of my films.

Herbert Schosch, on the other hand, told me that his wife (his third) was a great admirer of my television work. Herbert's reduced stature and rumpled, liverish appearance made him seem an unlikely ladies' man, but Perry Frewin, who visited the bridge room only when he was not skiing at Gstaad or playing fifty pounds a hundred with Zia and Andrew and Omar, told me that Herbert's wife, Frankie (who but the English could reduce "Francesca" to so butch a diminutive?), was a former prima ballerina and renowned for being, to quote Perry, "no mean nut-cracker".

Perry was an Ulster Roman Catholic, by origin if not by persistent conviction. Like Fred Kleinman, his clothes were custom-made, but in his case the price tag seemed not to have been removed. He was both smart and not quite a gentleman. He had been in property and then in retail shops and then in whatever he was then in, and as quickly out of. If I saw him in the bar, he would summon me to a glass of the Bollinger which he always kept on ice at his elbow.  When I asked why he had refused Bernard's invitation to join us in the club team, he replied that he did not care to be a eunuch's second choice. He said it with a smile, but it was unusually tart in a club where "sodality" was an advertised tradition.

After Herbert (and Frankie) had seen me on television in a panel discussion with Claude Lanzmann about his film, Shoah, he left me a note in the R cubby-hole in the lobby, enclosing a Buchenwald survivor's memoir, which someone had given him at his synagogue. I replied thanking him and commented that the article had made me realise how lucky I had been to be born, and to have grown up, where I did. Herbert soon got into the habit of clipping things in the newspapers which might interest me. His scissors were busy and his mind seemed sharp.  I wished that I liked him.