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arms and weird methods of transport seemed like a poorly thought-out set of cartoon superheroes. Why ? I kept wanting to ask. What has this got to do with anything?
    The tempests of spring finally blew themselves out with one last spectacular storm and another summer crept in on its warm heavy tread, breathing a lion-breath of carrion drains. I experimented privately before the mirror with Mum’s make-up, suffered an ear infection, and had my first period. I also acquired my first full-sized violin, a second hand thing nearly fifty years old and the product of some anonymous French workshop, but with a nice, deep tone. Leo had taken the lead in its purchase, and I always thought of his voice when I played it, and his guiding hands, and the soft pressure of that New Year’s kiss. Miss Freely my violin teacher, a spinsterish woman who smelled unaccountably of dog, was surprised at my sudden burst of progress. More surprising still, I suspect, was the ragged passion with which I had began to practise. Heard you playing in your room last night , Leo would say, bleary-eyed from another bad reaction as he shuffled down in the mornings to pick through the remnants of what he was still allowed to eat. Lovely tone, but you need to pace yourself and slow down now you can play the phrase at that speed, especially on that last down-bow…
    Music spilled from our house in that strange summer as it had never done before. Leo played brilliantly now, with fire and with tenderness. Sometimes it was scary to hear the music he made, especially when he and I were alone in the house. I’d retreat to my room and lie on my bed listening awestruck as Bach unravelled below in terrifying cathedral-leaps of light. How, I wondered as I lumbered through the spiralling Ciaccona bar by bar on my muted violin, did anyone ever make such sounds? What sometimes made me afraid of Leo’s playing now was the knowledge that, for all its soaring loveliness, what I was hearing was an expression of his illness. White plague, of course, was a misnomer. As the leaflets which Mum produced pointed out, the condition wasn’t fatal, at least in countries with advanced medical services. In fact, in a world which had already experienced AIDS, Ebola, MRS, pyrexia and cat flu, WRFI seemed like a small thing to non-sufferers—after all, didn’t we all have to watch what we ate? At the same time, there was also consider-able ignorance and hysteria. I remember how cousin Kapil insisted it was all down to “them fucking Pakkis”, whilst several Indian boys at my school were beaten up with WRFI as a pretext. Leo’s diet was often characterised as being like a slimming fad, and thus no big deal. The facts that he’d suffered liver problems and a kidney infection and was still losing weight were ignored, as were the fiddly tests he had to undertake of his blood and urine each morning, and the aches and the weariness and the dreary food, and the knowledge that his illness was the main reason our house hadn’t sold.
    There was no longer any question of Leo going to Oxford, or to London; he would have to study at home. Blythe announced that she had also decided against the LSE in favour of Birmingham. She was a frequent visitor to our house that summer, and we would sometimes visit hers. I remember how the air in Dad’s Renault suddenly seemed to cool when we reached the suburbs of Edgbaston, and the sky lost its sour tinge of grey and the trees tossed their heads as the security gates opened and we negotiated the speed bumps beyond. Long lawns green beneath sprinklers spread towards many-windowed palaces of mock-Tudor, mock-Medieval, mock-Modern.
    It seemed like another world, although Tim and Natalie Munro were decent people, and decently unembarrassed about their wealth. The rich upper middle classes of those times still spent generously on the armies of maids, minders, drivers, attendants, dog-walkers and nannies who then kept their lives afloat. That summer, though,