Bernard and I first met through mutual friends, two years before my mother got sick, and then chanced to run into each other in front of a neighborhood greengrocer some six months later. We made a plan for dinner, and within days I had moved into his flat—I kept my own house, but spent less and less time there, until I came to see it almost as storage space. My piano was of course there, but Bernard also had a piano, and though mine had a clearer sound, I eventually grew fond of the muted notes I made at his house. For the first month, the strangeness of being at last in a real proper living-together relationship kept me at bay, but then the easiness of it overwhelmed me. I put aside all the mannerisms of despair at which I had become so expert. I gave up, one by one, the elements of my life that had been about loneliness, and absorbed Bernard’s affection as though I were a towel and he were a swimming pool. He cooked lovely things for breakfast, and he bought bunches of flowers, and he laughed at stories that were really only a smile’s worth of funny, and he showed me that everything on earth was pleasant. He was of course no more in love with me than I was in love with him, but if I had not obstreperously blocked his love, perhaps he would have been; it was part of his lovely English nature not to resist anything that would have been agreeable.

Bernard picked me up at Heathrow when I got back from that first hospital sojourn. During the year that followed, he was to pick me up at Heathrow an inconceivable number of times, driving monotonously back and forth, listening in his appreciative but impassive way to tapes of grand opera in one direction and to the confessions of my heart in the other. He came to seem almost as routine as the customs officers, as inevitable a part of transit as the porters; but the fact that he was always happy to see me was addictive, and I came to be more reliant on his smile than on the engines of the planes in which I flew. When I was in New York, Bernard seemed remote and insignificant, but when I came to London, I relaxed into Bernard and became myself again. In New York, I felt as though I were being peeled, and when I returned to London and saw Bernard, my skin began to grow back.