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‘bombas’ in the summer holidays, practising their Arabic, running up the stairs to drop them down into the street from this balcony: Beloved, light of my eyes/Who dwells in my imagination/I’ve loved you for many years —
    ‘My mother is dying, I think,’ says Isabel.
    I look at her. I need a moment to bring myself into sync.Isabel’s mother, Jasmine, in the tiny space allotted to her in my mind, is a baby. My father had told me that story: Anna’s daughter had given birth to a baby girl, in Paris, and had named her Jasmine. And now Isabel tells me that baby is dying.
    ‘She has Alzheimer’s. She had to go into a home. I moved in with her for a while after my father died. Then it got too bad.’
    ‘But you go to see her?’ I ask, rather anxiously.
    ‘Yes. Sure I do. But mostly she doesn’t know me.’
    ‘That must be terrible.’
    ‘She doesn’t even know herself — mostly.’
    ‘That must be — God! I don’t know what that must be like.’
    ‘I think … sometimes I think it’s what she wants.’
    ‘What? To be rid of herself?’
    ‘She was always so worried. And when she wasn’t worried, she was sad. I watched her once — she didn’t know I was there, she was sitting in the living room, on the eau-de-Nil sofa, and her face … she just looked so sad.’
    ‘Why didn’t you go in and throw your arms round her? Couldn’t you make her happy?’
    ‘She never got over losing my brother.’
    ‘But were you close?’
    ‘So-so. Maybe. I was closer to my father. My mother was so intense. You could never just relax around her.’
    I was standing at the window today when Sir Charles came to call, and for a moment, before I realised it was he, I saw an old man, minding where he stepped. And I was filled — God forgive me — with a wicked anger against Edward — that he should have been more careful of himself, for his father’s sake —
    I got to know Anna as though she were my best friend — or better; for I heard the worst and the best of her thoughts, and I had her life whole in front of me, here in the box Isabel has brought me. I smoothed out her papers, I touched the objectsshe had touched and treasured. I read what others wrote of her and she became so present to me that I could almost swear she sits quietly by as I try to write down her story.
    If I could believe that he died for a noble cause —
    What’s done is done, I want to tell her. How can you reach someone who does not want to be reached? That door we spend lifetimes battering ourselves against — turn away, go out, go riding, go driving, eat, do charity work, take a tonic, travel …
    And it is in Rome, at the Teatro Costanzi, on 14 January, that Anna, gripped by the soaring notes and by Floria’s bewildered and impassioned grief, feels the answering sorrow swell and rise within her and presses her handkerchief to her mouth as the terrible emptiness fills mercifully with pain:
    It was as though I had been holding myself very still, holding a door shut, holding something down; something which the music swelled and strengthened until it broke through. And for many days later, although I could not put my feelings into words, much less write them down in this journal, it was as though I felt that music coursing through my body and as it went, like a river in full flood, it churned up its bed and its banks, and I was most ill with a fever and — poor Caroline tells me — delirious and impossible for many days till one morning I woke up and — I had not quite returned to the world, but I had seen the door by which I might return.
    ‘How long did it take her?’ asks Isabel. ‘Ten months?’
    ‘Life was slower then.’
    ‘I guess.’
    She stretches, and her long, pale arms seem to catch the light of the moon high up in the clear, black sky. She yawns, brings her arms down and ruffles her hair.
    ‘I’m keeping you up?’
    I shake my head: I never sleep before two.
    ‘It’s not common, is it, for a person, a woman, to