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shouldn't worry herself so. I quickly enter the room and then stop in my tracks, stiff with fright.
    A big robust woman is sitting in my place at the table. A stern female in a mouse-grey suit and black hair in a bun with a wooden pin stuck through it on the back of her head. She says my name and then I recognize her. Of course.
    'Hello, Ellen,' I say, timidly as a child, and spontaneously shake hands with her. As if by this gesture I want to make amends for having stared at her without recognizing her just now.
    'How formal you are today, Maarten,' she says. She laughs and Vera laughs a little too. Maybe everything is funny, although I cannot see what exactly there is to laugh at. But be that as it may . . .
    'How is Jack?' I ask.
    Their faces stiffen. Mysterious, how quickly people's facial expressions can change. You can't read thoughts. Language says you can, but reality is different. Faces are like the surface of the sea. They change constantly under the influence of countless contrary and invisible undercurrents.
    'I always recognize people best by their voices,' I say. 'I have a bad memory for faces, but voices I recognize at once.'
    The conversation must proceed. Their faces, on either side of the round patch of light from the lamp, still wear that rigid, plaster-cast expression.
    'And when someone is dead,' says Ellen Robbins. Her voice trembles and Vera puts her hand on Ellen's arm in a protective gesture.
    'Cassettes, tapes,' I continue. 'Lots of people do that these days. For later. You hear someone's voice and his whole person reappears before your eyes. Because of the sound of his voice you see him again altogether. Down to the smallest detail.'
    It's no good. I can tell, they don't want me to be with them. I turn away and go to the back room, to the piano. I sit down on the stool. I place my fingers in a chord on the keys and suddenly it is as if my whole body fills up with meaningful knowledge again. I begin to play, the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata. For how long have I known this by heart? What does that mean, knowing music 'by heart'? It is a knowledge you cannot picture, or put into words, but which pours straight, without the intervention of language and thought, from your fingers into the instrument.
    In the other room I hear two women talking softly to each other. I take an album from the top of the piano and place it open on the music stand. The first minuet from the fourth English Suite by Bach.
    Greta Laarmans always used to rap me on the knuckles here. You're not playing what it says. I can still play, but the tempo has gone. My playing sounds hesitant and slow, heavy and clumsy. I ought to practise more. Suddenly all the pleasure ebbs away from my hands. I press the pedal and let the notes die down in the middle of the minuet. For a long time I stare at the black and white notes, fixed between the staves and bars in the music book. Then I close the lid.
    It is silent in the house. Can Vera have gone to bed yet? It happens sometimes that I play for a while at night, before going to sleep. Vera likes it when I play while she is dozing in bed or reading, the book propped against the white bedside table, the little round reading glasses low down on her nose.
    It is only seven o'clock on the wall clock. Must have stopped. There is a clock in the kitchen too, an electric one.
    Vera is standing in the kitchen, wearing an apron. She stirs a steaming pan of soup with a wooden spoon. I look at the bright red kitchen clock.
    'I'm not hungry,' I say. 'It's only seven o'clock, I see, but it feels much later.'
    'That's because you're tired,' she says, stirring all the while. 'You didn't sleep well and you've been for a long walk. Why don't you go to bed?'
    'Children's bedtime,' I say. I meant it as a joke but the words came out quite differently. As if I were talking to children, real children, who whine to be allowed to stay up longer. (I used to have children myself, Kitty and Fred. I raised them