She said, “You want to make this all more real, and what I am trying to tell you is that I will accept it but that I don’t want it to be more real. I don’t want to have to see it. As long as it remains invisible it remains remote to my time with you.”

I can remember that, at that time, her chemotherapy had affected her ability to balance so much that she could not lift a teacup at all, and so our tea together consisted of her watching me eat and drink. It was hard to argue with my mother under these circumstances—hard but not impossible. When I told her that her time with me had always been riddled with artifice, her hands shook even more and the lines of exhaustion that had set in around her mouth seemed to sag. As she got thinner and thinner, her resistance wore down, and by the early spring, she had conceded that she would meet Bernard when she came to London. I looked forward at that time to years of my mother as she would be after the end of her chemotherapy; if I had taken advantage of her weakened condition, I had done so with a wise eye to the future.

• • •

The crisis seemed to have passed by the time I went back to the recording studio in London, for my second chance; but when I sat down, I felt myself starting to freeze again, and I heard more of those wooden notes from which I had sworn I would free myself. I panicked. At noon, I stopped playing and called home, and I talked to my mother on the phone for a few minutes. She was going in for another round of chemotherapy that day. “Come on,” said my agent, interrupting the conversation. “Talk to her on your own time, not on studio time. Are you playing this for your mother or for the world?” I carefully avoided answering him.