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you need to.” Was it her fault that some possessive music mistress had “discovered” her? Or that her ailing father, who had once thought of himself as a “gifted” surgeon, took some solace in his final days from his daughter’s accomplishment (the tableau is perfect: the humbled dissector of the brain; that ineffable virtuosity)?
    The word “gift” troubles me. Is a gift something that belongs to us or not? If it is simply something we have rather than receive, why do we use the strange word “gift”? And if a gift is a true gift, then surely my mother was right—it comes unconditionally; you can take it or leave it, cherish or renounce it. But Ruth would not have held this view. Ruth would have said, I think, though she never said it in so many words, that we must serve our gifts.
    I have always thought of myself as one of the great ungifted, so who am I to judge? My mother died, of throat cancer, because she neglected her gift. Ruth died of lung cancer, because she served her gift and was rewarded for it—and fate strikes quickest at the gifted and successful. There is no consistency or justice in superstition—but you have these thoughts. Easier to say that Ruth died of lung cancer because she smoked a lot. But then, we all know, some people smoke and live to be ninety. I like a cigarette myself. (Neither my wife’s death nor my own foiled onehas cured me of the habit.) A gift is a gift: to treasure or disdain, to use or abuse, keep or reject. Including our bodies? Including our lives? Including our selves?
    And, truly, my mother’s gift, as I remember it, was like something that didn’t belong to her. When she sang, it was as though some other creature was born inside her. A spasm of breast and throat, an upward parturition, a songbird hatching in her bosom—and out of this woman, so unscrupulous, so indolent, so heartless, my mother, would come a sound so sweet and miraculous, it was impossible not to yield.
    “Who is Sil-via? What is she-e …?”
    It must have softened even the rancorous heart of Uncle Ratty, disturbed in his dusty studies by those clear notes rinsing through the house. It must have bewitched the audience at concert halls and recital rooms in Reading and Maidenhead and Windsor. Among the debris that came into my possession after her death (along with Matthew Pearce’s testament) was a yellowed newspaper cutting recording my mother’s solo début (arias by Handel, Gluck and Purcell) at a concert in Reading in March 1929, in which the reviewer, Hugo Duval, saving his barbs for the orchestra, singles out “Miss Rawlinson” for her “exceptional promise” and “exquisite charm and purity.” Charm and purity! Charm, yes. How much was Hugo’s enthusiasm elicited by my mother’s vocal talents alone?
    A career lay before her (she might have thrown away that cutting; she kept it). She might—who knows?—have trod the opera stage. And yet when she married my father, she abandoned the prospect and sang thenceforth—as if simply for the pleasure of it—only those intoxicating snatches I remember. And when my father died—it took time for me to realise, time for the truth of it to sink in—shegave up even that. Her throat never quivered, the songbird never took flight again.
    And it is curious that in that catalogue of family failures, in that roll-call of doomed, obscurity-dreading, honour-hunting attention-seekers, she did not mention my father. She avoided my father altogether.
    How were they ever joined together? Why, with her merciless view of masculine pretension—though perhaps it was unformed then, perhaps it only
came
with my father—did my mother marry my father? A man over twenty years her senior and, superficially at least, of precisely the same mould as Uncle Ratty: Colonel Unwin (a full and true colonel this time), formerly of the regular army, latterly of some ill-defined, semi-civilian sphere of duty between the military and the diplomatic services. Another