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wrote it all through in one great piece, the string parts and a whole new instrument line she hadn’t even known was there – laid a flute’s silvery strand through the entire piece, start to finish, like a silver thread – the electricity that seemed to pass through her own body in the weeks of composition alive in the music itself … A trace of her, it might be, like the flight of a bird passing from one end to the other like the flight of a bird through a mead hall – wasn’t that how the Norse poem had it? She would set that to music too, if she had the time, that unknown writer’s thread of flight …
    But her work was done by now. And ahead of her: Meeting the conductor. The rehearsals. The performance. That would be the next few, brief weeks of spring. All the birds flown through the music and home and until then she had this flat, these rooms, this piano. So yes. Springtime in London. Magnolia trees. And enough just to be back here, wasn’t it? – with one tree right outsideher window, by the front door of the flat, the petals of its flowers thick and resilient and curved as wings.
    *
    The travel had made her tired though. So after spending those few minutes downstairs, after she’d got in, she pretty much went straight to bed. That’s what illness is like, she thought, as she made her way up the stairs.
Is
like
… It was all absolutely exhausting. She had energy enough to get out the sheets and duvet cover from the linen cupboard, the pillowcases … Just enough to half make up the bed – not put the cover on after all, it was too heavy – then when the last cotton pillowcase was on, she kicked off her shoes, dropped her skirt to the floor and crawled into the cool new sheets, drawing up the raw, uncovered duvet close to her, before falling into a dreamless sleep …
Is what illness is like
. Was the first thing she thought, hours later it must have been, when she opened her eyes and it was dark.
    At first, she couldn’t work out where she was at all. She lay there in a sort of state, actually, trying to remember what window it was, what wall was outside the window, trying to remember what it was about herself she had forgotten while she’d been asleep … Then there it was again: She was going to die. The remembering itself not nearly as bad as the nearly remembering, those scrambled nano-seconds after sleep when she came into consciousness in a sort of terror, was how it felt. The remembering not nearly as bad as the trying to. More … inevitable. Like all of life was. One thing going on to make another thing. Oneday into another, and some days ending with another day to follow, others just ending.
    She lay for a few more moments, savouring the dark and that feeling of coming into rested-ness in this bedroom with which she was so familiar. How many times she’d been here alone in the darkness. Times just like now …
Now
… She thinks,
Let it be now
, as if she might close her eyes now and the light would be gone from around her. Times like all of those times, early in the evening when she would lay down to rest before going out, taking a few minutes before she rose to get dressed, to get ready, lying quietly and letting the daylight fade slowly from the familiar walls and edges, letting the violet, the shadows in. Or waking in the middle of the night and Ed beside her. All of it, all those times and everything about this room known to her and familiar. All the laying down. All those dusks. Midnights. Sleeps.
    In the dark of this particular night, she smiled. It could almost have been one of those evenings from long ago, and she and Ed were on their way out to some big party or there was a concert or a reading he might be giving, a recital … That feeling of lying in a soft dark room but very soon you would be stepping out the door and a whole new portion of the evening would open up before you: bright-lit rooms, music, the tap of glasses, chink and rise of conversation … In the moment of