August 2000

I insisted on giving Robin music lessons myself. Clara and I very nearly had a row about it.

‘Mrs Claysmore is terribly good. All the mothers swear by her.’

‘I’m sure she is, darling. But teaching Robin won’t be like teaching other children. We need to be cautious.’

Clara smoothed her already creaseless skirt. We were sitting side by side in the kitchen, both of us resolutely gazing out at the rain-soaked lawns so that we didn’t have to look directly at each other. We couldn’t possibly have an uncomfortable tête-à-tête while making eye contact. The gardener puttered up and down on the lawn tractor, puffing out black smoke. It made a God-awful racket, leaving nasty gouges in the sodden grass. I wished he’d use the hand mower as I’d asked but that was another battle I couldn’t face – my stomach for petty conflict had dwindled after Edie died. The smaller the task, the less I could bear it.

Clara frowned – a tiny furrow appearing in her forehead – and stared pointedly at the garden, but under the table I could see her knee tap-tapping in irritation.

‘I don’t want to single him out. Push him. All the books say that’s very risky.’

I swallowed my exasperation. As soon as I’d told her that her son had a gift for music, she’d retreated into books, desperate for the reassurance of so-called experts. I refrained from reminding her that I was also considered an expert in music, even if in nothing else. I stared at the black clouds, solid as barrage balloons, threatening more rain, and when I spoke, I made sure my voice was gentle.

‘Music lessons with his grandpa isn’t pushy. We won’t work any longer than he can manage. I want it to be fun. Music ought to be a pleasure.’

‘Mrs Claysmore will be most put out. I’ll probably lose my deposit.’

I wanted to say bugger Mrs sodding Claysmore but I said nothing and just wrote her a cheque for the lost deposit. The truth is that I wasn’t willing to surrender Robin to another teacher. I wanted to see for myself what the boy could do.

—

It was arranged that he’d come to me three mornings each week. I’d wanted five but Clara had insisted it was too much – whether for me or for him, I wasn’t sure. But I supposed, begrudgingly, she was probably right. During the first weeks and months after Edie, I had seemed to drift around the house in a permanent state of tiredness and irritability. Perhaps five days with a young, inexhaustible child in constant motion would have been too much.

I found that I was nervous. I had the jitters in my belly as though I were about to enter into rehearsals with a strange and hostile symphony orchestra rather than tinkle Mozart with my own grandson. I began to fret that, in my discombobulated state of mind, I’d over-egged the boy’s gift. Perhaps what had happened that day wasn’t so remarkable. Or perhaps it was merely a fluke and Robin had no real interest in music. As Clara and I negotiated terms, days and then a week, then two, ticked by and I began to doubt my own memory of that afternoon.

I lay awake all night before our first lesson, wishing that I could talk it through with Edie. When she was alive, I would store up the trivial details of my day to tell her. They hadn’t needed to be interesting. After a lifetime together, it’s not one’s great passions that create intimacy; it’s not the mutual love of Beethoven or Italian wine, but ordinary things. Without her, when I heard the first cuckoo of spring I had no one to tell. I found that sapphire earring she lost in ’93 and that we claimed for on the insurance. It was wedged inside the lining of a cufflink box. No one else would be interested, nor should they be, but Edie would have been tickled. I didn’t mention these things to anyone but the truth is that it’s these bric-a-brac moments that make up a shared life. The grand events: the births of one’s children, their first day at school or signing my first recording contract with Decca – these shine a little brighter, but they are only a tiny proportion of one’s life together; a handful of stars in the night sky. It was the mundane, frankly dull things I missed the most. I missed not talking to her over breakfast. We’d ignored one another over toast and morning coffee with great pleasure for nearly fifty years.

I was adrift those first months. My memories of Edie were like dandelion clocks in the wind, winnowing in every direction. I’d lost all chronology. I missed every Edie at once. The young and terribly glamorous woman I’d met after the war. She was so private about herself. She never spoke about her family or where she’d grown up and whenever she did let a detail slip – how she’d left school at twelve or how she used to queue with her grandmother on a Sunday at the best bagel shop in the East End – I fell upon it, delighted. I’d hoarded those details to myself, feeling sometimes that she was a jigsaw puzzle but I was not allowed to know the picture on the front of the box, and it was for me to piece her together, bit by bit, until finally my reward would be to see her all at once.

When I first knew her I’d thought that she was keeping us from her family. We were too eccentric, an old family clearly in decline, brought sadly low. I didn’t discover for many years that it was the other way around. She’d spent years constructing this careful version of herself, Edie Rose, and she kept the other parts of herself scrupulously hidden. Those dreadful wartime hits played everywhere for years and years; one couldn’t turn on the radio without being blasted by ‘A Shropshire Thrush’ sung by England’s Perfect Rose. That was the version of her we were supposed to accept.

Next I remembered how she cried for weeks after Clara was born. Just sat curled up on our bedroom floor, clasping this tiny blanketed bundle and weeping. My God, I’d felt useless. No one told you what to do about such things in those days.

And then I’d missed her when I went to the cupboard and found there was no loo roll left. She always wrote the shopping lists and purchased household things in bulk. The knowledge that I must fend for myself, even in the most trivial of matters, momentarily floored me and I’m afraid to confess that I found myself sitting on the loo sobbing – there was no loo roll and there was no Edie. There was no order to anything.

Clara gave me an advice book about grief, which claimed that the peculiar sensation of timelessness, of drifting through days, was quite normal. But why was grief normal? Grief meant that nothing would ever be ‘normal’ again. Normal was Edie. Without her nothing was normal. She couldn’t walk back through the kitchen door, chuck her keys on the table, sink into a chair and smile at me, asking for a gin and tonic. Normality could not be restored.

The morning before his first lesson, I couldn’t stay in bed and keep my eyes shut against the light. Robin would be arriving in an hour.

I didn’t have a plan as to how to actually teach him. I’d never had a regular pupil. I’d given the odd master class to promising students at the Royal College, but they’d always been in composition rather than the piano. I’m a decent pianist – the layman would mistakenly consider me excellent. I am not. I can play most things with the utmost competence, but my playing lacks any real emotion. I play in order to hear aloud the thing in my mind, but then I’m finished with it. It’s only when my idea is performed by a real musician that it is called to life. At the end of my fingers, it’s merely a blueprint, a sketch of possibility to be realised in its full dimensions by someone else. I have neither the desire nor the patience to play a phrase a thousand times in order to achieve the speckle of perfection.

As I said, I’m not a real pianist. Yet, like most composers, I do become a dictator when it comes to my own work. I may not be able to achieve it myself, but I know precisely how it ought to sound. While I can listen in smiling awe to a recording of Albert Shields performing Rachmaninov, when the great man was rehearsing my own concerto at the Festival Hall I found myself stopping him after a few minutes to insist on a darker rumbling tone and then argued with some heat about his far-too-curvaceous phrasing in the wild second movement. All was well in the end – we’re old friends. We fought. We yelled. He performed it as I wished. We reconciled.

But how to teach a four-year-old child? I’d half considered telephoning Clara’s blasted Mrs Claysmore and asking for some tips – she did owe me fifty pounds for the deposit. In the end I’d visited a music shop and purchased several piano playbooks of varying difficulty.

Robin arrived at eight-thirty. Clara lingered in the kitchen, sipping tea, showing no eagerness to be off. Robin was oddly subdued. He made no dash for my cupboards and didn’t remove so much as a single sock, but stood beside the fridge, thoughtfully chewing on a one-eared cuddly mouse and picking his nose.

‘Shall I stay?’ asked Clara.

‘No,’ I said, too quickly, seeing then that Clara looked hurt. ‘We’re not ready for an audience yet. Let us muddle through for a bit together first.’

After she left we went into the music room. The lesson did not start well. I brought out the first book, propped it on the stand and called out the names of the notes as I tinkered through the first rather tedious tune. Robin grabbed the book and chucked it onto the floor.

‘Boring,’ he announced. ‘It’s a little tune. It’s silly. I want a proper tune. A big one.’

‘You have to learn the little ones first. The little ones make up the big ones,’ I said and entered into a simple scale.

Robin lay down on the floor in disgust.

‘But listen,’ I said, aware I was losing him already, ‘I can use those notes to build something else.’

I launched into two scales at once, crashing in different directions with thundering noise and a lot of show, and then used it to put together the opening of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. The piece requires two pianos to be played at once but I did my best alone, although I confess the sheer effort made me breathless and sweaty.

‘You see?’ I said, wiping my forehead. ‘A boring scale can make a lion.’

‘I only want the lion. The scale can go in the rubbish bin.’

‘All right. I’ll show you how to roar like a lion.’

He settled beside me and I watched with wonder as his small fingers bounded across the keys. We made the piano roar with considerable satisfaction for a quarter of an hour; then Robin stopped and put his fingers in his ears.

‘Another.’

‘Another animal?’

‘OK.’

We spent the morning hopping through Saint-Saëns’s entire menagerie. We conjured kangaroos and elephants, blue aquariums brimming with fish, wild horses and cuckoos. It was a warm September day, and beneath the music-room window scarlet Michaelmas daisies bossed pale geraniums into submission. I pictured the animals streaming out of the window and landing on the beds where they thumped, bounced and raced amongst the flowers, flattening every one. I was amazed at the speed with which Robin seized upon each new melody. He only had to hear me play a phrase a few times and he could copy with very few mistakes. He possessed at first, however, no desire to improve or perfect his performance. He was greedy for more tunes, more tricks, more animals, and whenever I dared suggest that we try to make the waters of our aquarium a little smoother, he glared at me and folded his arms across his chest.

With some trepidation I reached again for the music book.

‘The tunes for the animals and lots of new things are all in here,’ I said tapping a page. ‘It’s like a story book.’

Robin scowled. ‘There aren’t any pictures.’

‘Yes there are. Listen.’

I played a short Mozart piece and when I finished Robin was staring at the open book. He jabbed at the notes on the page with a thumbnail nibbled down to the quick.

‘Those dots are a photograph of the tune,’ he said.

‘Yes. That’s exactly it. Do you want to see the pictures the way I can?’

He pursed his lips into a grim little line and gave a single nod.

I was astonished at how quickly the boy learned. Within a month he understood the musical notation system – even though he remained quite unable to read or write his letters. He was a small starving man; no matter how much I fed him – Mozart, a touch of Handel, a sprinkle of Mendelssohn – he wanted more. I suppose I ought to have been more restrained, I was the adult after all, but I was greedy too. I wanted to know what more he could do – the child appeared almost limitless in his abilities.

And yet he was a child. One of the farm cats strolled into the music room and he was instantly down from his seat, crouched on all fours, dangling bits of string and roaring at it. When he was too tired to pick up a melody instantly, or if a complex sequence of fingering required effort and concentration, he’d lie on the floor and sob. With my own fervour interrupted, to my shame I’d huff with irritation and I’d be ready to tick him off, much as I would have done a third-desk violin during rehearsal, when suddenly I’d catch myself. I’d notice the littleness of the creature prostrate on the carpet, the hiccuping sobs. When he got into such a state, I’d try to persuade him down to the kitchen for a cup of cocoa or a walk around the garden, but he never wanted to come. All he wanted was to play the piano. Once or twice he fell asleep mid-rage. I felt ashamed for pushing so hard and forgetting that he was not some impetuous music student from the academy but my own grandson.

October was tipping towards November and during our time together I’d kept the poor child inside. I’d told myself it was because the weather had been poor and he liked to spend hours in the music room at the piano but I heard a voice in my mind, Edie’s voice, insisting that children also want to watch hours of television and eat chocolate until they’re sick, and it’s the adult’s task to moderate such excess. Guiltily, I recognised that I’d kept Robin at the piano out of selfishness. During his lessons Edie drifted into the background. Her loss remained a chronic pain, but one blunted by a powerful analgesic. The boy’s talent was a luminescence that rippled outwards, and I followed it like a man overboard grasping at a light in the dark.

I still could not sleep but in the long hours before dawn, instead of huddling in the cold, feeling the shape of silence beside me, I made lists of pieces to play for Robin. I’d started with the usual children’s tunes – Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and the candy-cane waltzes that my own daughters had enjoyed, but like the unusual child who prefers olives to sweeties, Robin preferred Bach to Strauss. As I lay awake, dawn crept in at the windows to the call of a woodlark. I decided to start the day with Vaughan Williams and his Lark Ascending.

Robin listened to the cadences of soaring sound, his mouth ajar and his eyes half closed – an indication of intense pleasure. He had the same expression when eating vanilla ice cream.

‘A lark’s a bird?’ he asked at the end.

‘Yes.’

‘Like a chicken?’

‘No. Not like a chicken.’

‘Like a duck then?’

‘A lark is a wild bird. She’s nothing like a chicken or a duck.’

He stared at me, puzzled. He didn’t understand the concept of a songbird. I was filled with an energy I hadn’t felt for months.

‘I think we should go out and hunt for a lark this morning.’

‘I want to play on the piano.’

He stuck out his bottom lip, which trembled, threatening tears.

‘You can’t play a lark until you’ve heard one in our woods.’

‘I’ve been a lion and I didn’t heard one of those in our woods.’

I was about to argue further when I remembered Edie’s caution – never enter into a debate with a child which you cannot win.

‘Let’s start by listening for a woodlark. You never know, we might get lucky and find a lion too.’

—

By the time I’d bribed him into his coat (a clear violation of Edie’s rules – but her resolve was always much stronger than mine) and both wellington boots, I was exhausted, almost ready to telephone Clara and ask her to come early to collect him. Sternly, I told myself that I wasn’t being fair to the boy. He must know green woods and lost love and a thousand other things, or his music will be an echo without a soul. I glanced down at Robin with his twin channels of yellow snot beneath his nose and his mis-buttoned red raincoat, and wondered whether I was being overambitious. No, I must hold firm. The boy must know more than music. We’d start with a lark.

The ground was wet from the morning’s rain, but the clouds had cleared into dirty drifts like roadside snow, leaving glorious streaks of blue sky. The effect of the light made all the colours brighter; the green of the grass appeared to glow, while the huddles of woodland conspiring on the hillside stood out in relief like illustrations in a pop-out book, the treetops glazed in red and brown. I smelled autumn in the air.

‘I want a biscuit.’

‘In a minute.’

‘My legs hurt.’

‘Nearly there.’

‘No we’re not.’

I clutched Robin’s hand tightly, and half dragged, half cajoled him up the hill, slip-sliding in his rubber boots. We entered the hush of the woods, the light smeared with a yellowish hue. We’d planted more than ten thousand trees over the last half-century, and the copse that had survived the war had spread long fingers of oak and ash across the shoulders of the hill. Robin sunk into silence and stuck close to my side. He glanced about, alert. Moss and lichen coated the upper branches of the rowans, which twisted in creaking spirals towards the sunlight. I led him deeper into the thicket, past a pile of stones. Robin stopped.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

‘It’s a grave marker. Your great-uncle George is buried there.’

Robin squatted down and scrutinised the stones. An earwig mountaineered across the uneven heap. Rotting leaves coated the topmost pebbles with brown sludge.

‘Why isn’t he in a churchyard? Isn’t that where you’re supposed to put dead people?’

‘Yes, well, George wasn’t much for God. And, in fact, you’re quite right. We really oughtn’t to have buried him here. They’re quite strict about those sorts of things. But they can’t really send him to prison now, can they?’ I said with a smile – it was a line I’d delivered many times since the small and somewhat illegal funeral in the woods.

Robin did not laugh. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘They won’t put him in prison. But they might dig him up.’

‘I won’t let them,’ I said with some resolve. ‘George liked it here. These woods were his favourite place in all the world. He loved Hartgrove. This was his home and he never, ever wanted to leave it. Now he doesn’t have to.’ I picked up a fallen stone and slotted it back onto the heap. ‘I like coming to visit him. One day, I expect I’ll be buried here too.’

Robin wiped his nose with his sleeve, smearing a glistening streak of mud across his face. ‘I’ll come and visit you,’ he announced magnanimously. ‘But not often. It’s a very long walk.’

‘That’s terribly kind of you, darling. I’m sure I’ll appreciate it,’ I said.

‘Did you dig the hole for Uncle George?’ asked Robin, after a moment.

‘I didn’t do it myself. Is that what you mean?’

Robin nodded.

‘A man dug it for me,’ I said, intrigued as to why he wanted the details.

‘Good,’ said Robin, relaxing ever so slightly. ‘I don’t think you would have digged it properly, Grandpa, and I wouldn’t like it if bits of Uncle George were poking out.’

He glanced about warily, clearly uneasy about the close proximity of George, eyeing the odd twigs lying on the woodland floor with great suspicion as though they were really finger bones.

‘There’s really nothing to worry about, darling. A dead person is no more horrid than a dead tree.’

‘Or a spider.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I don’t like spiders.’

I didn’t feel that my introduction to the pleasures of the countryside was progressing terribly well.

‘Shall we walk a little, and try to find our lark?’

Robin nodded and allowed me to lead him deeper still. We listened for an hour or more to the music of the wood. We picked out the bright note of a robin, the ever-cheery soul who knows only one song and a jolly one at that. After a while we detected our woodlark.

‘Do you hear that?’ I whispered.

Robin nodded. ‘Can we chuck it bread now?’

He still thought that the woodlark was like a duck in the park. Fat and idle and waiting for scraps of mouldy crusts.

I sighed. This child wasn’t as I had been. He was a creature of modernity and suburbs. He was used to fenced-in gardens and rows of uniform houses neatly addressing one another across the street like maiden aunts over the tea-table. He was driven everywhere in an air-conditioned, temperate box that neatly sealed him off from the untidiness beyond.

‘I’m cold, Grandpa. I want to go home.’

Subdued and tired, we turned back. The rain started up again, a gauze of drizzle that dripped from my cap and down my neck. And then a gunshot rang out.

Bang. Bang. The echo cracked through the trees. I grabbed Robin’s shoulders and pressed him close against my legs, my heart thundering in my chest.

‘Get out here and show yourself!’ I shouted. ‘How dare you shoot in my woods? How bloody dare you!’

I must admit that there’s nothing like an unauthorised gun to make me come over all feudal. There was a rustle and then a pause. I could tell he wasn’t far off – probably just assessing the level of threat to his own skin. Presumably upon seeing that we were an old man and a small boy, he stepped out from behind an oak and sauntered towards us, stopping thirty yards off. He was short, bundled into a dark waterproof jacket, woollen hat pulled low. He held a rifle. A proper huntsman’s gun. This was no local youth taking a furtive pop at a pheasant.

‘What the hell are you doing here? I certainly didn’t give you permission.’

He studied us for a moment in silence, clearly deciding which version of the truth to recount. ‘There’s no problem, mister. I’ll go. No trouble.’

‘Damn right you will. I should call the police. This is trespass.’

He held up his hands. ‘Whatever you like. Was an honest mistake. Jon Bentley hired me. I’m out looking for a stray dog that’s been worrying his sheep on the hill. Lost twenty ewes this week, he has. I followed it into the woods. I thought this here were Bentley’s woods. My mistake.’

‘Well, they’re not. Twenty ewes, you say?’

‘Aye. Them that was killed outright. There was another ten what had to be shot.’

‘Good grief. I didn’t know.’

‘Said he didn’t want ter bother you with it. That you had enough on yer mind.’

I was unsettled. Beside me Robin fidgeted and squashed a beetle with his heel.

‘Can I carry on now? I wouldn’t have hurt you. I heard you a mile off and I were shooting the other way.’

I hesitated. ‘A dog, you say?’

‘Aye.’ He shifted the gun into his other hand.

‘Must be the size of a bloody wolf to need that calibre gun. So, no. I’m sorry for Bentley but I don’t like it. I won’t have a man with a rifle on my land. You need to leave, and if I catch you again, I will call the police.’

The man swore and spat but he turned and headed away, towards the edge of the woods and the open back of the hill. Robin tugged on my arm. ‘Come on, Grandpa.’

‘Just a minute. I want to make sure he’s gone.’

‘Are you going to shoot him if he comes back?’ For the first time that morning, he sounded enthusiastic.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Because I won’t tell Mummy, if you do.’

I laughed and we started back down the hill, and yet I couldn’t shake the sensation that beneath the rain-soaked scrub something crouched, watching.

Robin’s behaviour improved. With his energy and interest channelled into music, he no longer bit and scratched his sisters or tore the pages out of picture books. He remained a quiet child. Clara fretted that he was withdrawn but I tried to reassure her that he never seemed quiet with me.

‘Yes but does he talk, Papa?’ she asked.

I thought and realised that, while he did speak to me, he mostly spoke through the piano. I felt that I knew him rather well, but through his other voice. I tried to explain this to Clara.

‘He does communicate. He has a great deal to say, darling, but he says it using the piano.’

‘I can’t speak music. Not like you. I want him to talk to me.’

‘He is talking to you,’ I said. You simply don’t know how to listen. I succeeded in not saying that out loud. Edie would have been proud.

It was the twelfth of December – Robin’s fifth birthday – and I was hosting a party. This was the first family gathering since the funeral. I’d asked Mrs Stroud, my housekeeper, to light fires in the drawing room and in the great hall. Usually when the children visited, we never lit one in the vast inglenook in the hall – too dangerous without a fireguard, Clara complained. I decided that all the children were now old enough to be trusted – and I must say that when Clara and Lucy were small, we never fussed about such things. We didn’t have central heating then and it was either light the fires or freeze.

Rain was driving against the windows while a gale stole in through the gaps beneath the mullioned panes. Yet it was warm in the great hall – a huge log in the hearth blazed red and spat out orange sparks. As I gazed upon the flames, I could almost believe that the heart of the house was beating once again.

I had Mrs Stroud set out glasses of champagne for the adults in the hall – a party is still a party even if the guest of honour is only five. On the minstrels’ gallery, I’d installed a string quartet for the birthday boy. Clara had suggested a magician but I’d ignored her – I knew Robin would prefer musicians. I didn’t confide my plans to Clara, choosing to surprise them all.

Lucy was the first to arrive – alone. Over the years, I’d rarely been introduced to Lucy’s chaps and they never seemed to last. About ten years ago I’d wondered aloud whether she was a lesbian but Edie had laughed at me, informing me that lots of women nowadays meet a partner later in life and not all unmarried women were lesbians. I thought that was all well and good, but I would have liked Lucy to have a partner of some kind. Well, that isn’t quite true. I’m an old-fashioned man. Some may not approve of this, but I would have enjoyed walking Lucy down the aisle to her future husband and I would’ve liked her to be a mother. Lucy would have been a splendid mother. As the years went by, I was aware that Edie worried she was lonely and had left it all a bit late. When Edie told me that girls often didn’t get on with things until their forties, I knew she was reassuring herself rather than me. I think I would have liked Lucy’s children.

I hoped rather than believed that she was happy. She had many friends up in London and made it all sound interesting and full but still I worried. She worked as a graphic designer for an advertising company and sometimes sent me cuttings of things she had done that had appeared in the paper. I’d always rather hoped she’d be a painter. She’d made wonderful drawings as a child. Those delicate fingers that were so useless for the piano were skilled at creating pictures. I’d given her the Not-Constable on her twenty-first birthday, but when she’d come to understand that the original painting had once been in the family and been lost, she’d wept; the copy painting had seemed paltry and the gift thoughtless. I hadn’t dared confess that once there had also been three Romneys, two Stubbs and a Gainsborough.

‘Hello, darling,’ I said, kissing her. ‘Have some champagne.’

She took a glass and peered about the hall.

‘All this is for Robin?’ she asked.

‘He needed a treat. He’s been working terribly hard.’

I glanced around the hall – it was looking super. Mrs Stroud had given everything a thorough spring-clean. The flagstones had been swept and scrubbed; the dark panelling had been rubbed with beeswax so that it gleamed; and the room smelled faintly of honey. Soft winter light filtered through the stained glass in the high mullioned windows, forming puddles of green and red on the sandstone floor. From the antlers of the mounted stags Mrs Stroud had draped banners declaring ‘Happy Birthday’. I’m sure they’d never been used for such an ignominious purpose before, and I did wonder whether their glass eyes were gazing at me with reproach. Streamers dangled from the still somewhat dusty and unlit chandelier – the thing is an absolute devil to clean. We’d never had it converted to electricity. Too expensive. Now that I thought about it, I ought to have lit five of its candles – but it was too late.

‘Hello, Papa. Goodness, you’ve been busy,’ said Clara, sailing across the room, trailing her daughters, Katy and Annabel, in her wake like a pair of small tugboats. Both girls were china-doll copies of their mother, so like her that sometimes I wondered whether their dour and red-faced father had had any part in them at all.

‘Where’s the birthday boy?’ I asked.

‘Waiting in the kitchen with his father as instructed.’

‘Jolly good.’

I gave Clara a glass of champagne and presented each of the girls with sparkling apple juice in plastic cups decorated with treble clefs and sprays of quavers.

‘Where shall I put his cake?’ asked Clara.

‘Oh. I bought one in town already.’

‘I told you I was making him a cake,’ said Clara.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’ Clara did not smile.

‘Well, never mind.’

But I grasped as I said it that she did mind very much and I had made some kind of faux pas. I was hit with a gut punch of longing for Edie. Life without her meant navigating family waters without a pilot.

‘Well, he’s a lucky chap. Two birthday cakes.’

She set hers down on the table. It was a lopsided marbled sponge with a robin stencilled in icing, the red of his breast bleeding into his white feathers. On a whim, I had purchased a gateau in the shape of a piano, the tiny keys slivers of white and dark chocolate, the lid propped open with a spear of chocolate. When you pressed a button on the miniature piano stool, it piped ‘Happy Birthday’. Edie never approved of shop-bought cakes, but when I saw this in the bakery window in Dorchester, I couldn’t resist ordering one for Robin. Apparently this had been a mistake.

‘Shall we call in the birthday boy?’ I asked, wishing that I could retire to the music room, put on a little Mahler and abandon all my guests. I’d done it before.

As Robin entered the hall, I signalled to the musicians concealed in the gallery, and they started on a jaunty little Mozart march in D major – one of Robin’s current favourites. I conducted from my spot beside the birthday table out of habit rather than necessity – they would have managed perfectly well without me. Robin stood motionless in the middle of the room. He listened with his hands held out before him, fingers spread as though catching notes like snowflakes. The hall glowed with sound. It poured down upon us from the gallery in reds and gold and yellow. I’d forgotten how superb the acoustics were in this room. When they’d finished the piece, Robin remained quite still while the rest of the family clapped with more politeness than enthusiasm. I shouted my approval – I must admit that I can’t abide stingy applause after a good performance.

‘Jolly good show!’ I called.

‘More,’ said Robin.

‘Manners, Robin,’ reminded his mother.

‘More, please,’ said Robin. ‘Now.’

The musicians laughed and launched into a Haydn gavotte. I’d given them a playlist consisting mostly of pieces that Robin had been practising on the piano. I wanted him to learn that each performance is unique. The melodies he’d been rehearsing on the Steinway in the music room could be caught and reshaped on a violin or a cello. Music isn’t like Plato’s world of ideals – there isn’t a perfect version of Bach’s Sarabande in G, which all fiddle players attempt to emulate. Rather, there is an infinite variety of interpretations – as many as there are Hamlets or Othellos. One might prefer Laurence Olivier’s performance to Richard Burton’s but, like the words of a play in the mouth of an actor, the notes on the page are conjured to life by the musician and they contain a cosmos of variations.

I was too busy watching Robin to notice the rest of the family. Clara nudged me.

‘Papa, let’s eat. We’ve been standing here for nearly an hour. The girls are hungry.’

I looked round to see them studying the cakes and trays of sandwiches. They looked completely bored.

‘No,’ said Robin. ‘More music.’

‘Perhaps they can play while we eat,’ said Clara.

I opened my mouth to object – I can’t bear background music – but I conceded. It could be part of his treat – like having one’s supper on a tray in front of the television.

As we sat in the dining room, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches, strands of Handel fluttered about us, light and bright as garden butterflies. Robin sat between his sisters. Three shining gold heads, like polished coins. The girls nibbled and whispered to each other, ignoring their brother.

Ralph, the children’s father, lounged at the head of the table with his back to the fire, a sheen of sweat across his face as though he’d been wrapped in cellophane. I didn’t much like Ralph. He was rather clever and so reserved he appeared disdainful of everything and everyone. Edie always told me that he was a nice man – merely quiet. I’ve often noticed that we’re ready to believe the best of taciturn people as though, if they did speak, what they’d say was bound to be pleasant and amusing. I didn’t believe it with Ralph. Not for a moment did I think that the words he did not say were amiable. And he’d once declared that he disliked Bach. Cold, he said, and tedious. The accountant of music. That, I could not forgive.

To my bafflement, no one apart from Robin seemed to be enjoying the party. He was suffused with happiness – his cheeks shone pink – but the rest of the family were subdued. Clara and Lucy ate little and spoke less. I had the uneasy sense once again that I’d done something wrong.

Without waiting for Mrs Stroud, I took some glasses into the kitchen. Lucy followed with the dirty plates.

‘Darling, am I in trouble? I tried to make the party nice.’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Lucy, kissing me, and I knew instantly that it was worse than I’d thought. ‘It’s too nice. That’s the problem.’

I stiffened, my feelings stung. ‘What on earth does that mean?’

‘Daddy, you never even gave me and Clara birthday parties.’

‘You always had parties. There was a spy party, a witches—’

‘Mummy did everything. Mostly you came in for ten minutes. Complained that it was terribly noisy and retreated back to your study.’

‘Did I?’

‘It’s all right. You weren’t all bad.’

‘Pleased to hear it.’

I placed the glasses in the sink and stared out across the lawns to where the ground sloped down towards the river. The wind buffeted the bare willows, so that the fronds flew up into the air, tangling like a girl’s hair. I supposed it was true that I’d sometimes pleased myself. I liked my own children. Loved them. But I never understood those who declared that they adored children as a species. That was like saying one adores people. Children, like people in general, are all different – one prefers some to others. Only a simpleton likes everyone.

Lucy was still talking.

‘And a string quartet? For a fifth birthday party? I mean, come on, Daddy. You didn’t even get one for my twenty-first.’

‘Because you wanted some God-awful disco.’

‘So I did.’

‘And the musicians are old friends of mine. They’d never ask me to pay.’

This was partly true. They didn’t ask but I paid anyway. It’s bad luck to cheat musicians or taxi drivers.

I wanted to say to Lucy that it’s lonely here. The house is still. Your mother sang until the end and now I find yellowed and silent songbooks strewn around the music room like desiccated wedding confetti. The boy brings noise. Good noise. We hear the same things, he and I.

‘Shall we go back to the others?’ I said.

—

Robin sobbed when he saw the train set his parents had bought him. It was a gleaming, remote-controlled engine that raced around an aluminium track.

‘I don’t want it. I want a piano.’

Clara was trying to be patient. ‘It’s good to enjoy lots of things, Robin. Pianos are very expensive.’

Katy and Annabel tried to help. They cooed around the train, feigning enthusiasm, and pleaded with Robin to help them race it but he remained sullen, folding his arms and lying face down on the floor. I’d wanted to buy him a piano to practise on at home but Clara wouldn’t hear of it.

‘He’s too fixated already. If he had one at home, I don’t think I could ever even get him to eat. I’d have to feed him like a baby bird, dropping titbits into his mouth as he sat at the keyboard. Promise me you won’t buy him one?’

I’d promised. Now, I caught Clara’s eye as she stared at me over the prostrate, weeping child. I had to concede that he wasn’t easy. I didn’t see the worst of him, as with me he was able to glut himself on what he loved best. I was like the grandparent who stuffed him with chocolate and then dispatched him back to his mother, only instead of a sugar buzz, I sent him home full of music.

Katy slumped on her chair. ‘Why does he always ruin everything? Can we just go home?’

‘Come on, old chap,’ cajoled his father. ‘Get up.’

‘You haven’t had my present yet,’ I said.

Robin lifted up his head, rubbed his eyes. ‘Is it a piano?’

‘Well, no. It isn’t.’

‘Can I have yours?’

I frowned. ‘You can play it whenever you like. I don’t think my piano would fit in your bedroom. It’s rather too big.’

Robin paused, considering. ‘Can I have it when you’re dead then? You won’t need it and I’ll buy a house big enough.’

I caught Clara’s eye and to my relief she was laughing.

‘Yes, Robin. You can have the piano when I’m dead.’

‘Say “thank you”,’ said Clara.

Robin shrugged and laid his head back on the carpet. ‘Why? He isn’t dead yet and I haven’t got it.’

I could sense things about to unravel once again, so I pulled out two parcels and slid them towards him. He rolled over and sat up. He rattled the first box.

‘Is it a train?’

‘Why don’t you open it and find out?’

‘If it is a train, then I don’t need to open it.’

I sighed. Sometimes he was neither an easy nor an endearing child.

‘Try the other one.’

He shredded the wrapping paper and held at arm’s length a large and battered leather book. He studied it dubiously.

‘What is it?’

I pulled over a chair and opened the book for him. ‘It’s a book of songs I collected from all over England. Most of them from right here in Dorset. I’ve written them all out in this book. It’s like a map but in songs.’

‘Can I play them on the piano?’

‘Yes, you could, although lots of them have words too.’

‘I don’t like singing.’

He shoved aside the book and set his face again. I’d been quite silly in thinking for a moment that he’d be interested. I should have bought him some music CDs or a Walkman or something. Quietly, I retrieved the book and put it back on a shelf.

‘Why don’t you play us something, Robin?’ said Annabel. ‘Me and Katy haven’t ever actually heard you.’

‘You must have,’ I said.

Annabel shook her head. ‘Nope. We’re always at school when he comes here.’

I looked at my twelve-year-old granddaughter and felt a ripple of guilt. She was dressed in the usual uniform of the young – a sweater and blue jeans – but like a sapling that had taken root she’d outgrown the spindliness of childhood. Now she studied me with a pair of brown eyes. I didn’t know her at all.

‘I’m sorry about that. You should hear him.’

Robin had stopped crying but remained lying on his stomach, picking at a hole in the Persian rug.

‘That’s quite enough, Robin,’ I declared. ‘You need to decide what to play for your sisters.’

Without hesitation, he stood, wiped his nose on his sleeve and raced across the great hall, into the music room. It had once been known as the morning room, and gentlemen had lingered here after breakfast to read the papers. It faced south-west and even on dark days it was filled with light. Long ago I’d claimed it for my own; it was large enough to comfortably fit a full-size concert grand piano as well as all my other paraphernalia but really I loved it because of the quality of the light. Dusk had crept up on us; the rain-dashed hills had warmed from grey to red and now shoals of rosy clouds drifted across the sky. The white walls of the music room had been temporarily repainted in pink.

I placed several cushions on the piano stool and set Robin on top.

‘Do you know what you want to play?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you need the sheet music?’

He shook his head and sat quietly, his hands in his lap. The girls had found a spot on the window seat at the far side of the room where they kneeled, tracing their names in the condensation on the glass, only vaguely interested in their brother. Lucy, Clara and Ralph leaned against my desk – a vast Victorian monstrosity in brass and mahogany. The string players from the quartet lingered in the doorway, curious.

Robin gulped a breath, a swimmer about to dive, and then started to play. The change was instant. The girls stopped fiddling with the windows, turned and sat and listened, absolutely still. The string players edged closer, quite unable to help themselves, travellers drawn to a fire on a winter’s night. Ralph reached for Clara’s hand and gripped it tightly.

Robin played a simple Chopin nocturne; it rippled from his fingers as smoothly as a stream over pebbles, as clear and cool. In those early days, I was still more technically adept than the boy, but I’d never called forth such a tone from the piano. It did what I asked of it, but Robin made it cry out; under his touch, the instrument was a thing that lived. Dusk dulled into evening and the room grew dark but Robin played on.

When at last he stopped, we listened in silence to the slow decay of the final chord. I glanced at Katy and Annabel, their faces pale in the gloom.

‘Well, shit on me,’ said Annabel.

Everyone laughed, but as I looked at my family I wondered whether they understood, whether any of us understood, what Robin’s talent would mean for us all.

It was the first Christmas without Edie. There was a cascade of unhappy anniversaries. The first weeks after she died, I’d been awash with grief and yet she was still so close that, if I just reached out far enough, I could still brush her fingertips. I kept her slippers beside the bed, just in case she needed them. She couldn’t bear cold feet when she got up for a pee in the night. I didn’t cancel her magazine subscriptions – somehow I couldn’t bring myself to telephone the call centre, it was too absolute. And suppose she wanted the latest issue of House & Garden when she came home? I knew these thoughts were ridiculous and I certainly couldn’t voice them aloud to my daughters – they’d cluck in concern and start whispering to one another, convinced I’d gone doolally.

During those early weeks and months, time slid and juddered – nothing was quite real. When I was a child of seven, I’d had measles and I’d been kept in bed in the nursery for a fortnight with the curtains closed to protect my eyes against damage from the light. In the midst of my darkness and fever, time had stuttered and slowed, and the boundary between wake and sleep had become indistinct and unimportant. The world had contracted to my sickroom and my bed, and the burning itching in my eyes.

Each evening my father would visit. He sat on the edge of my bed; I don’t remember him saying a word, but he pressed the cold circle of his gold watch against the hotness of my forehead. It was pleasanter than any flannel or compress. Then he’d remove the watch and wind it up. Ticketty-tick. Ticketty-tick. Like the crunch of the death-watch beetles in the attic beams above. In my feverish state I thought that he held time itself in that watch, and that he released a little for me each evening, the precise quantity that would allow me to manage through the night. And then one evening when I was feeling better and sitting up in bed, he allowed me to rewind the watch. I fumbled, my fingers sweaty and clumsy, but for once he gave no reprimand. It was a great boon – a treat so immense that I could not dilute it by confiding it to my brothers. After I had wound the watch and my father had refastened it on his wrist, he had opened the curtains and time had restarted.

In the first year after Edie, I was still waiting for the curtains to be pulled back and for time to resume. I lived by rote, surviving on habits. I made lists of groceries for Mrs Stroud to purchase. I paid the gas bill. I asked the gardener to plant a thousand daffodils and narcissi along the woodland walk. I declined requests to conduct concerts in London and New York and Bournemouth. But, most of all, I waited. I waited for Edie to come back and, despite knowing intellectually it was quite impossible, I waited.

I tried to write music and failed, and out of frustration continued to keep notes in the exercise book I kept on the bedside table. Discovering it was nearly full, I purchased another in Dorchester. As I scanned the contents, I observed that I was no longer noting reminiscences, rags and scraps of memory, but also recording the events of the last year, of life after Edie. The last year, however dreadful and painful, had its own value. Grief had not yet receded, and yet I could acknowledge that at some point in the future it might. It would be a gradual retreating of the tide, a lessening that ebbed and flowed. I needed to remember the grief itself. The evidence of love.

Robin was the only new addition to my strange and airless world. The mornings that the boy came, we lived in music and there was pleasure in existence. And then he left and the quiet took hold, loneliness leavening it like yeast until it grew and smothered the house. The silence was monstrous. At the moment I needed her most, music deserted me once more.

I worried about Robin. I was concerned that I continued to teach him out of selfishness. I taught him because our lessons were my only respite but I was no piano teacher, especially for a student as brilliant as Robin.

I summoned a few old friends for advice. They arrived with a February gale. The driveway had turned into a series of puddles and a blackbird bathed on a patch of lawn that had metamorphosed into a small pond. Yet my friends braved the foulness of the weather, curious to hear my grandson play. I guessed they all wanted to discover whether grandpaternal fondness had clouded my judgement. I wanted to know it too.

We gathered in the music room, Albert, John, Marcus and I. We were a coterie of grand old men, the elder statesmen of music. Mrs Stroud had stoked the fire to a furnace and turned up the heating. Marcus, at eighty-two, was a little frail and contemplating surrendering his driving licence – although, I noted, he had still agreed to conduct one last performance of the Messiah at Easter.

‘It will be my last,’ he said, eating a large slice of fruit cake with surprising gusto.

Albert laughed. ‘You say that each time.’

Marcus shrugged. ‘Well, one day it will be true whether I intend it or not. Now, if I should give up the ghost mid-performance, would that improve the crits or not? “Last night’s concert at the Festival Hall was a tremendous disappointment. Sir Marcus Albright really let himself down in the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth by turning his toes up—”’

John poured more tea. ‘I don’t see why you should retire. You can get someone to drive you to Waitrose; you can’t get someone to conduct Handel on your behalf.’

‘In the spring I might just delve into Beethoven’s late quartets,’ Marcus added, spearing a stray currant with his fork. ‘I never really understood them before. They always seemed a bit strained, uneasy. But then, after my stroke, I listened to them and they made sense for the first time. I’m not sure that they can make sense to anyone under seventy.’

‘It’s not about age,’ I said quietly. ‘His late quartets are about suffering. It’s acute sadness, a muscular unhappiness that provokes the music. That can happen at any time of life.’

The others paused and looked at me, presuming I was speaking about Edie. I hadn’t been directly, but then everything led back to her.

We chatted on for half an hour, debating the nuances of Mozart’s sonatas and the narrowness of the car park spaces at the new Tesco, until the door opened. Robin stood there. The men beamed at him.

‘Do come in, young man,’ said Albert. ‘It’s probably much too hot in here for you but I’m afraid we old fellows do feel the cold.’

Robin marched in, too young to feel self-conscious or abashed.

‘This is my friend Albert,’ I said to him. ‘You like his recording of the Bach fugues, remember?’

This was an understatement. He had played it so much at home that Clara had limited him to only three times each day.

‘I listened to it a hundred and fifteen times,’ he declared.

‘Why so few?’ quipped Marcus.

Robin blinked, not understanding he was being teased. ‘I needed to know how it worked. How he put all the bits together. I get it now. It’s in my head and I don’t need to listen to it any more.’

I glanced at Albert to see how he was reacting to this. His mouth did not betray a twitch of humour; instead he listened with the same thoughtful gravity he would have given to an adult. Robin surveyed the faces of the celebrated men gathered by the fire and scowled.

‘I like the recording of Rachmaninov playing his own stuff even better. Is Mr Rachmaninov coming too, Grandpa?’

‘He was unavailable this afternoon.’

There was a pause, while we pretended to drink our tea and tried not to smile.

‘Would you like to play us something?’ asked John.

Robin nodded and moved quickly to the piano, piling up his cushions. The men settled back into their chairs by the fire. Robin hesitated for a few seconds, fingers poised over the piano, and then he began.

—

‘Something a little stronger than tea, I think,’ said Marcus after Robin had finished, been collected by Mrs Stroud and taken to the kitchen in search of chocolate biscuits. I produced a bottle of Scotch from my desk. We sat in silence for a few minutes, drinking and somehow still hearing the swell of music swishing through the stillness. Albert was the first to speak.

‘I’m sorry, Fox. But you can’t continue to teach him piano. You’re simply not good enough. He’ll pick up all manner of bad habits from you, thinking that’s the way it should be done.’

Miserably, I nodded and took a long swig of whisky. My eyes burned but I hoped they’d put it down to the fumes. It was true. These fellows knew that my playing was serviceable at best.

‘What ought I to do?’ I asked when I could speak.

Albert wrinkled his brow in thought. ‘I can give him the odd master class, but that’s really for later on. In a year or so when he’s mastered a bit more technique. He has a real instinctive emotionality that needs to be nurtured carefully. His playing is highly personal – and that’s rare in such a young player. More often than not, prodigies are miraculous chameleons, borrowing other players’ styles but lacking their own voice. Robin is himself.’

He paused and rubbed his forehead. ‘You need a teacher who’s not only a brilliant pianist himself but experienced in teaching the very young. One mustn’t interfere too much. He requires very gentle guidance.’

Marcus glanced at me. ‘You’ll have to take him to London.’

Albert nodded in agreement. ‘It will almost certainly have to be London. Probably every week. Perhaps twice. There needs to be regular lessons and a stringent practice schedule. An older student I’d expect to do eight or nine hours each day. Since he’s so young, it will be less but still probably three or four.’

John had said nothing but now he got to his feet, grabbed the poker and started rooting around amongst the coals. I swallowed my irritation – a man’s fire is his own. No one should interfere with his host’s hearth.

‘Are you quite certain that he wants that?’ he asked. ‘Do his parents? Most child prodigies are washed up by the age of twelve. It’s rarely worth it.’

Albert leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m afraid John’s quite right. The boy is clearly exceptionally gifted. It’s remarkable what he can do after a few months with frankly a rather ropy pianist as his teacher.’ He smiled but only for an instant and then gave a tiny sigh. ‘But the odds are stacked against him. Even with everything we’ll try to give him, he will probably never be a concert pianist. It’s a shame that his passion isn’t for the violin.’

We all grunted in agreement. Even if a violinist doesn’t conquer the Everest of becoming a concert soloist and a virtuoso, he can still make a life of music as part of an orchestra. The pianist has no such alternative. His career opportunities are either at the summit, with world concert tours and recording contracts, or giving piano lessons to recalcitrant children. The music departments of most schools reverberate with the spoiled dreams of talented pianists who came close but not close enough.

‘I’ll make some calls,’ said Albert. ‘But in the meantime, you need to talk to his mother.’

I asked Clara to come for a walk. It was late February and although the morning’s frost still lingered in the shade, patches of snowdrops and hordes of crocuses had emerged in compact puddles of colour. The months of dreary rain and sleet had turned the hillside a muddy brown, the grass uneven and yellowed. The trees remained bare, the fine patterns of branches against the sky reminding me of drawings of capillaries in old anatomy books. The startling purple and vivid yellow of the crocuses adorned the colourless world, reassuring me, just as I was heartily sick of the cold and rain, that spring wasn’t far off. I’ve never been like Edie. I’m a summertime man. I hanker for blue skies and dawns lively with birds.

Clara and I walked briskly across the estate and towards the Wessex Ridgeway along the spine of hills, the trees echoing with the squabble of wood pigeons. As we climbed, the county was spread out below us in miniature, the fields a tone poem in browns and greens, here and there the flooded water meadows catching in the sunlight like molten aluminium. By silent accord we made for Ringmoor, emerging onto the hilltop like swimmers surfacing into the open air. The wind sang in the telephone wires, a perfect C sharp.

No matter how still the day, it’s always windy up at Ringmoor. It’s a strange place, echoing with millennia of footsteps. Iron Age workings crease the grassy downland like folds in a blanket alongside the raised outlines of a Roman village. At the boundary lie the tumbledown remains of a Victorian cottage, the assorted settlements lying on top of one another as though time has been compressed at a single point, every period in history existing all at once. The wind is loud and the boundary between the ages insubstantial.

We perched for a rest on the ruins of a flint cottage wall and Clara passed me an apple. In a habit inherited from her mother, she never ventures anywhere without pockets bulging with treats.

‘Didn’t you collect songs once from the shepherd who lived up here?’ she asked.

‘Yes, you’re quite right. So I did. That was long ago. Before you were born.’

We were silent for a while, eating our apples. After a few minutes Clara hurled the core into a tangle of scrub that at some time must have formed part of the cottage garden, and said, ‘I liked the story of you coming up here and listening to his old songs. He’d sing them to you only at the right time of year. Wasn’t that it? A song for summer? Another for winter?’

I chuckled. ‘Yes. Peculiar old fellow. I attempted to hack up here in the snow to hear his winter song. I caught a foul cold. Was in bed for a week.’

Clara studied me for a moment. ‘Do you still collect songs?’

I closed my eyes and felt the sting of bright light against my lids. ‘Not really. I can’t remember the last time I collected something new. It’s terribly hard nowadays. The ancient and the wild retreat to the edge of things. The countryside is teeming and too bright at night. I remember coming up here years ago after dark when I was only a little younger than you and it was black. You have no concept of a proper—’

‘— a properly dark night. Yes. I know. You’ve said.’

I smiled. ‘I’m sorry, darling. You’ve heard all my stories before.’

‘It just seems a shame that you’ve given up.’

‘There aren’t people left any more who sing the old songs. If they do, it’s because they’ve learned them from a book or a CD. There weren’t many such chaps around even when I was a boy. I worry that they’re all extinct now.’

‘Dorset dodos.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Haven’t all the songs been collected in any case?’

‘I suspect that’s impossible. There’s always one more song to be found.’

‘So you are still looking, then?’

I laughed. ‘You got me. Perhaps I am.’

We sat quietly for a minute, watching the cloud shadows trawl the hillside below, and listening to the melodic hum of the telephone wires.

I talked about Robin. She sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap and said nothing until I’d finished. Then she turned to me and asked, ‘But what do you think? Do you think he should stop lessons with you and go to London?’

‘I can’t teach him what he needs. The teacher Albert’s found at the Royal College is experienced with very young children.’

‘But travelling to London twice every week. It’s a lot. Won’t the lessons be awfully expensive? I mean, we’ll find the money somehow . . . but what about school?’

‘They won’t charge for the lessons. Or only a nominal amount.’

This wasn’t true. The lessons were indeed expensive, but I’d arranged for the bills to be sent directly to me. Clara never need know.

‘And I suppose either his new school will accommodate him or somehow he’ll have to be taught at home.’ She kicked at a stone with her walking shoe. ‘But despite all of that he might never succeed.’

‘No. He probably won’t.’

‘For God’s sake, Daddy.’

‘You need to know the reality.’

‘It sounds like a lot of misery for everyone.’ She paused. ‘Will it even make Robin happy?’

I told her the one thing I knew with any certainty. ‘The boy is happiest at the piano. If he has a chance of making it his life, don’t we have to give it to him, even if it’s only a little chance?’

Clara didn’t answer. The wind buffeted the trees.