Yesterday I was on a plane. I remember when that was an event in my life—to take a plane somewhere—but now planes are the most regular occurrence of all; I am the emperor of baggage claim, the king of check-in, the prime minister of in-flight meals. I am as savvy as a flight attendant, with a profound knowledge of the location of the emergency exits and an aficionado’s grasp of the technology of seat belts. I can guess within a fraction of a second when the “No Smoking” sign will go on. I have figured out how to angle myself so that the overhead reading light illuminates my book and not my hair, and I know where the further extra pillows are stored when the first cache of extra pillows has been distributed. I have mastered the look that bores customs officers, and even when I am carrying great misshapen boxes and large cumbersome suitcases, I am not stopped on my way out of the airport.

On Friday I will take a plane to Istanbul to play in a Brahms festival in the gardens of the Topkapi Palace. No doubt the piano will be sliding out of tune. Next Monday I will return to London. Next Tuesday I will go to New York, and then for a few days to Berlin to play Schubert, and then the following Friday I will go back to New York for an indefinite period of not more than nine days. That’s the plan, unless my mother needs to go in for surgery. If my mother needs to go in for surgery, I’ll just go straight to New York and miss some more of the rest of my life and stay for as long as I have to and cancel all my performances. I’ve done it before.

• • •

This is what happened when my mother got sick: we were in Europe, on one of those family trips we had been taking since my childhood, one of those exquisitely conceived and impeccable holidays into which my mother poured—so it seems in retrospect—more energy than she could afford. “Just think, Harry,” my mother had said a week before, her voice lilting. “Four days of Paris, August sun, the city almost empty, and then we’ll go down to the château—you’ll love the château—and we’ll eat breakfast looking across the valley, and we’ll go for walks, and we’ll swim a little if it gets really warm, and we’ll go see all the Matisses. There’s a piano at the château, so you can practice, but no one is going to make you perform for a whole two weeks. Just come along and relax and have a good time.”