There were still occasional moments of life as it had been, which felt as though they had been cut out of a colorful magazine and glued onto our monochrome days. There were the snatched hours each day that I spent practicing. Sometimes my mother would come in and sit at the end of the piano bench and listen. This destroyed my concentration, but it was also a strangely intimate time, when neither of us thought of saying anything, and cancer did not intervene. She would stay for perhaps half an hour, and then we would lapse into conversation, and I would follow her back to the bedroom to talk.

Later in her illness, I was to incorporate the idea of her suffering, and had to make an effort to put it aside. At the beginning, however, I had to remind myself that my mother was really ill, or the strangeness and unreality of the situation would take over and I would dissociate myself from it entirely. If it was in the end hard to find the vestiges of our old lives, in the beginning it was in some ways difficult to be aware of the fresh changes. My mother and I could not talk about her or her plans without discussing the disease, but we could easily talk about me, and so with a kind of generous egotism (since my mother was also better off discussing something other than her own illness) I would drag the conversation to subjects of my own. This was, however, an imperfect solution, since too often my life braided its way back into hers. It was much safer to discuss friends, better yet to watch television in the evenings and analyze the people on the screen.

I have talked about my mother in Paris, dressed in couture, at her best and brightest, and about my mother in a hospital, at her lowest of all. What is hardest to describe is my mother as she was on the ordinary days of our ordinary lives. I have as strong a memory of my mother when I hear the theme tunes from certain television shows as when I sit in the bar at the Paris Ritz. Maybe the TV memories remain clearer, in fact, because I have celebrated them less often. Starting when I was eight or nine, and continuing until I was about fourteen, on Saturday nights when my parents did not go out, my father, after dinner, would sit in the living room and work, and my mother and I would watch television together. Sometimes Freddy joined us, but what we watched was not his kind of TV and he got bored; those evenings were mostly my mother’s and mine. Over the years, the lineup varied, but the shows were all the same anyway, so the changes didn’t really matter. We watched situation comedies about people bumbling through their lives, or their jobs, or their families. Later, my mother tended to dismiss that time; she referred to the shows as junk we had watched for lack of anything better to do. But, in fact, we loved them.