“It was more than a bit premature at the time. I once woke up in the country and told your father that the dishwasher was jammed in the middle of the rinse cycle, and he told me that that was the Moonlight Sonata. It was the most God-awful noise I had ever heard. I don’t know what you were doing to that piece of music.” The TV family flickered on. “Sometimes other mothers used to tell me they thought you should be out playing football or swimming, and sometimes I worried that they were right. The predominant feeling when you were little was that you should try to help your children fit in with everyone else. But I thought I could try to push you to be good at football, which you clearly hated, or I could just encourage you at the things like music that you were so good at and that you loved. And I thought that the best way to help you be happy was to let you be exceptional where you could be exceptional, and not to try to make you uniform and monochrome and conventional, not to even everything out, not to try to fill in the gaps.”

“Here I am,” I said.

“Sometimes I think I went too far, or that we let you go too far. A little bit of conventional in some areas of life is not necessarily a bad thing.” She paused, pointedly. “But—oh, Harry,” she said, and she smiled her big smile, which I hadn’t seen since that first evening in Paris. “I’m so proud of you. So proud. Enjoy this moment. You’ve worked hard for it.”

“Partly,” I said, “it was just a matter of luck. If I hadn’t done that funny recital in Budapest, which they called me in for at the last minute, and if the English press hadn’t been in town for the reopening of that concert hall, then I don’t think—”

My mother cut me off. “We’ve been very lucky, all of us in this family, very lucky for the most part. But you make a lot of your own luck, Harry. It’s one of your greatest gifts. You deserve every bit of luck you have; it may be luck in a way, but it’s luck that you’ve struggled for.”

I laughed. “So I’ve struggled,” I said.

“You have, though. Sometimes you don’t even notice how much you’re struggling. But I’ve seen it; you’ve had to struggle a lot not to be defeated by all the little defeats, to be one of the survivors. We should celebrate this,” she said. “Have you told your father yet?”

I said that I hadn’t.

My father was in the library, working. “Leonard,” she shouted as loudly as she could. “He’s getting as deaf as a post,” she said.

I went into the hall outside the bedroom. “Dad,” I called. “I want to tell you something.” I walked to the end of the hall, and heard the sound of my father shuffling back in his bedroom slippers.