Bernard accepted the new shape of our relationship without protest; it was one of Bernard’s great strengths to bow to the inevitable. You would have thought, to see me with Bernard, that everything was much as it had always been. Our jokes and routines were unaltered, and we were serious about those matters about which we had always been serious, and jokey about the things that had always amused us. This made me feel rooted and secure; it was impossible to believe, when I was with Bernard, that life was tragic. I would sit down to the cold suppers he made on my arrival nights—when winter began, he added soup and they became warmer meals—and he would fill me in on what had happened while I was away. In the way that people take care of other people’s pets during a span of absence, Bernard took care of my life, so that when I came back I found it just where it would have been had I not gone to America. He called all my friends and paid my bills and dealt with the washing machine and bought me clothes I might under other circumstances have bought for myself; he spoke of me at dinners at which I would otherwise have been present, so that everyone I knew was always up-to-date on my various ups and downs.

“Don’t worry,” Bernard would say to me.

I worried all the time.

“Don’t worry,” he would say again, and when I was in England, some of the time, for his sake, I stopped worrying. Our relationship settled into a rhythm based on my nobility in the face of disaster and his kindness in the face of my nobility. It was what is known in the vernacular as an unequal struggle. I found that it was easier to let Bernard lead my life than to lead it myself; my time in England became more and more sedentary, and began to resemble time off.

• • •

I spent long hours practicing the Schubert and the Rachmaninoff, and when I went to record, it was a complete disaster. I was terrified by the permanence of these sounds, frozen by the thought of an eternal blunder. In the recording studio I was so keen to avoid wrong notes that I played as if I were wearing wooden gloves. I went in every day for a week, knowing that there was no poetry coming out of me. My agent came over at the end of each afternoon. “Well,” he would say dubiously, “that sounds a little better than it did before.” But I knew that it didn’t sound better. The joints of my fingers seemed to have gone out of my control. It was like trying to drive a car with a broken gearshift.