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afraid there are times when Helen – Miss Locke – quite loses patience with my clumsy fingers. I hope this won’t make your head swell, Sylvia, but the staff all agree that nobody plays for prayers better than you do.’
    The praise, sweet to my ears, brought a lump to my throat.
    â€˜Do they really?’
    â€˜Miss Malahide always says, the way you play us out, though our feet are obliged to march for the sake of decorum, our spirits go to our classrooms dancing.’
    Miss Malahide was the art mistress, whiskered, leathery, and demonstrably barmy. Reduced to life size, I followed Miss Gosse down the hall almost to the end of it.
    â€˜We shall have to take you on a conducted tour.’ She smiled as she opened yet another shut door. ‘In the mean time, this is the dining-room.’
    I went through the door and exclaimed, ‘How pretty!’
    Miss Gosse looked pleased. I could see she thought I meant the room, and I knew better than to put her right. In fact, the room was nothing much: dull beige paper almost hidden under framed photographs of rocky places, bleak and treeless and without people; a round dining-table covered with a brown cloth, an old-fashioned sideboard holding toast racks and cruets and a bottle of HP sauce, and a piano of which I knew instantly to expect the worst, since its front was made of a kind of fretwork with faded mauve satin showing through the holes. Somebody had placed my music case at the side of it. It leaned against the yellowish wood nonchalantly enough, but I transmitted a silent apology to the music books within, or rather to their progenitors, to Mozart and Beethoven, to Ivor Novello and (my taste in music being as eclectic and indiscriminating as my taste in literature) to whoever it was who wrote ‘The Birth of the Blues’.
    â€˜Go on,’ Miss Gosse urged. ‘Try it out, just to see what you think of the tone.’
    I raised the lid from the yellowed keys and, without sitting down on the stool covered in worn burgundy velvet, pounded out the first few chords of ‘Three-Fours’ by Coleridge-Taylor, my show-off piece, which I loved because it sounded so difficult when in fact it was almost as easy as ‘Chopsticks’.
    Miss Gosse exclaimed, ‘There! I knew you’d like it!’ I did not say that, on the contrary, I thought it sounded like a string of old tin cans. One thing was certain: I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on that. But then, who was I kidding? I was never going to sound like Moisevitch on anything, not even the Steinway in St Andrew’s Hall; which was why, without having discussed it with my mother, I had told Miss Barker, my music teacher, that I would be discontinuing my lessons once I had moved. Though I had said it was too far to come all the way to Earlham Road twice a week, I would have come ten times the distance if there had been a dog’s chance that I would sound like Moisevitch at the end of the journey. Miss Barker had been quite put out – not only, I am pretty sure, because of losing the money from my fees. I had passed several Royal Academy of Music examinations and had won the medal at the Norwich Music Festival for piano solo under twelve, playing one of Bach’s French Suites, so she had expectations of me. There was even the possibility – she had dangled the dream in front of me as one proffering a golden apple of the Hesperides – that I might one day become a music teacher like herself if I went on practising.
    That was before my father took me to hear Moisevitch, which he did not long before he died. It was meant to be a treat, which it was, and an incentive, which it definitely was not, because I, who had previously – even if, out of superstitious dread, the actual words remained unspoken – thought myself capable of everything, almost, learned with the opening arpeggios that not only would I never be a concert pianist but that to be a music