I was guardian of the order. “It’ll have to be the pool,” I would say. “The ocean’s not on today. Today we’re seeing the Matisses, and then in the afternoon we’re going to see Cocteau’s house, with the big murals and the garden. I want to take a look at the church there where they do concerts; I might come back and play here next summer. The car’s due at ten, and lunch is being packed; there’s supposed to be a lovely place where we can stop for a picnic just past the valley. And at some point I’ve got to practice for a couple of hours. Maybe at the end of the afternoon? You two could swim then.”

Freddy would glower, and Helen would make peace. Each day fell into a sort of inner coherence on the basis of the arrangements. Wednesday was clearly the day to go down to the sea: a boat had been arranged to take us to a particularly charming and inaccessible cove, and we could have lunch at a café in a nearby village. In the afternoon, there was time to swim at the beach. Dinner was to be at the hotel since the schedule was rather an exhausting one. Thursday we needed to go to a particular museum because we had a lunch reservation near it, and the lunch reservation was for one because the museum was open in the mornings from ten to twelve-thirty. In the evenings, to prove our independence, we sometimes did other things: once we drove to a local theater and saw an American police film, with a lot of exploding vehicles, dubbed into French.

My practicing time, like everything else, seemed to have been scheduled, and there was not enough of it. I could not get up and play at night, as was my wont, because I would have woken the other hotel guests. If the French doors to our room were open, I felt that people were stopping to listen to me, and this was somewhat frustrating; I tended to get exhibitionistic, and did not work on the new pieces I needed to master. If the doors were closed, the room became suffocating. Helen had nowhere to go but Freddy’s room while I was playing, and she sometimes got peevish. “That Schubert’s lovely,” she said to me. “But if I have to listen to the first movement again this week, I’m going to go stark raving mad.” I had still not told her about the recording contract, and could not explain why the Schubert was so urgent.