“In the summer, Harry. Fresh nectarines in the summer. Anyway, I ate that nectarine, or part of that nectarine, because of your voice when you gave it to me.”

“Why are we talking about that nectarine?” I asked.

“That’s the tone of voice you need in the first movement, Harry,” my mother said. “The way you’re playing it now is technically accomplished, but it should have a little bit of longing in it, something a little bit more urgent.”

• • •

New York was in too many ways the life I had outgrown. When I was there, I lived in my parents’ apartment, back in the room of my childhood. I practiced on the piano on which I had learned scales at the age of five. When Freddy came down from medical school, he was in his room next door. It was all set up as it had been when we were infants. He and I argued about whose turn it was to walk the dog and who should be doing the dishes. Janet did our ironing and in the end did most of the dishes and made the beds and smoothed the machinery between us as she had always done. “It’s OK,” she would say. “You two go talk to your mother. I’ll walk Molly.”

Then we would both be embarrassed.

“I’ve got some errands anyway,” Freddy would say. And he would shoot me an angry look and go to find the dog’s leash.

Each day, morning and evening, at rising and at sleeping, I examined my state of mind. I measured its progress against the previous day and noted the details of its changes, as though it were something outside of me, a variation in air pollution or fluctuation of humidity. It is almost impossible to remember from one feeling to another: England disappeared as soon as I touched down on US soil. And whereas Bernard went on with my life on my behalf, my family life seemed to die when I went away and to die again when I returned; there was nothing to keep up with.

We lived in a strange and artificial world. The house was kept unbearably overheated in deference to my mother’s lack of blood, and it was seen almost as a matter of poor form to comment on the temperature elsewhere. We all agreed with her that restaurants were icily cold; we all said that the winter was the worst in years; we all bundled into layers of sweaters and coats so as not to suggest that for us the days were bright and sunny and fine. And in time we came to feel how cold it was for my mother, who had always tended to feel the cold anyway, and our shivers became as authentic as hers. With time, we all found the days unbearable, because when we were with my mother and saw how her ever-delicate figure had become like some kind of exotic filigree work, as inexplicably fragile as inlay, we began to find our own flesh absurd, and we curled up within it as though to warm ourselves from the inside out.