I can remember that, at that time, her chemotherapy had affected her ability to balance so much that she could not lift a teacup at all, and so our tea together consisted of her watching me eat and drink. It was hard to argue with my mother under these circumstances—hard but not impossible. When I told her that her time with me had always been riddled with artifice, her hands shook even more and the lines of exhaustion that had set in around her mouth seemed to sag. As she got thinner and thinner, her resistance wore down, and by the early spring, she had conceded that she would meet Bernard when she came to London. I looked forward at that time to years of my mother as she would be after the end of her chemotherapy; if I had taken advantage of her weakened condition, I had done so with a wise eye to the future.

• • •

The crisis seemed to have passed by the time I went back to the recording studio in London, for my second chance; but when I sat down, I felt myself starting to freeze again, and I heard more of those wooden notes from which I had sworn I would free myself. I panicked. At noon, I stopped playing and called home, and I talked to my mother on the phone for a few minutes. She was going in for another round of chemotherapy that day. “Come on,” said my agent, interrupting the conversation. “Talk to her on your own time, not on studio time. Are you playing this for your mother or for the world?” I carefully avoided answering him.

As I sat down to play, I thought about what the actual CD would look like, the flat disc of plastic, neutral as a large coin. I began the Schubert. I thought about the nectarine, and about my mother, and about the orange chemical. And then I stopped playing, brought up short at the phrase that had appeared in my dream. Suddenly I felt all the sadness that I had tried to close out in England, that I had put aside after my mother’s good test results had started. I had not been able to explain this sadness to Bernard, nor to admit it to my mother, nor to share it with Freddy or my father, nor, much of the time, to see it myself; but it came washing out all over the piano that day. The Schubert is not exactly a sad piece of music, but it has enough sadness in it so that it could lead me to my own sadness in that sad season. It was the most incredible release, to play that piece, to say at last all the things I had not been saying. I played it from beginning to end without pausing, and when I stopped, I found tears on my face. I wiped them off quickly, before anyone else could see them.