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Edward’s arms around you … Close your eyes … Because …
    Here she is
…
    And she remembers thinking that on that day, too, when she’d arrived at the flat, was standing there by the piano. ‘Here I am,’ she’d said to herself then, the moment she’d dreaded come to rest around her, after she’d finished playing, in the silence. Really, she thought then, it wasn’t so bad. To be alone. To have decided alone what she was going to do. To have come down off her hill. Not so bad.
    ‘Go back,’ Edward had said. ‘Set your mind at rest. Have the tests. See the people at the Wigmore Hall, let them arrange for you to do the Adagio for them like you want it. Have some time, do that. I’ll be here. When you’re ready, I’ll come and get you. I’ll be waiting.’
    *
    Because she’d kind of known, hadn’t she? From the moment she decided to come back here on her own? That it was all down to her from now on, that she wouldn’t see Edward again. From the moment the doctor called that last time, and he’d asked her to come in; how his rooms in Edinburgh seemed colder than before and there was no nurse there with him this time, and how he came to the door to meet her … Because after they’d spoken, her first thought then was: I can fit it all in. Get back to London. Hear them do the Adagio, be there at the Wigmore to hear it. Organise the legal stuff, the medical stuff. I’ve enough time. In a couple of months, early spring, there was time then to fit it all in. There’d be rehearsals, she’d told Edward, and she wanted to be at some of the rehearsals, to meet the conductor who she’d never met, and, she told him, she wouldsee the specialist then that they’d both talked about, have the tests he offered and the new treatment, and Edward had called Alice and fixed it with her and Alice had said to ‘take as long as you need, no bother’. She had a sister in Islington, she’d said; Elisabeth could just go back to the old flat and settle right in …
    The diagnosis had always been fixed.
    That last appointment, the doctor coming to the door to meet her – what was that phrase of his, in the consulting rooms at Edinburgh? ‘We know where we stand’ – Elisabeth thought of him, David someone, as she sat at the piano, in Circus Gardens, in London. David Airdrie, that was his name. It was as though he was from another life. And another life ago again when she’d stood with Stewart Campbell in his consulting rooms in the village, in the little medical centre she’d barely been to before all this – the odd antibiotic, one year a bad flu – and there was Stewart using the same expression, near enough. That they would need to do some scans, that she would have to see someone else. On the mainland, in Inverness, but Edinburgh preferably, so they could ‘know where we’re at’, had been his phrase. Elisabeth had been aware then, in his choice of words that day, that people only used that kind of language when talking about something more serious than an operation. An operation, after all, was something to prepare for and recover from. There was a timeline present in ‘operation’ that wasn’t present in ‘know where we’re at’. ‘Know where we’re at’, she’d thought then, has no timeline at all. So by the end of the summer when she’dseen the second specialist, and what was his name, too, a friend of Stewart Campbell’s wasn’t he? and he’d given the second opinion and the date was fixed for the first round of surgery a year ago … The language was clear. Take another opinion again, for there was nothing to lose, after all, ‘and then we’ll know where we are’, is what he’d said. But the fact was, by then, Elisabeth knew pretty well where she was. By the time she got to Edinburgh last month she knew. And in the couple of weeks that had followed that last, terminal, diagnosis, she’d finished up the Wigmore commission as though lit up from within by a weird excited electricity,