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days’ time. When he had been taken to see her after a week he thought it was odd how hard she hugged him when he left. He quickly rubbed the memory from his mind as he left the hospital, and turned his thoughts to the football game he would be playing that afternoon. Then a few days later he was taken to see her again and he thought she looked peculiar, rather yellow in the face. At the age of twelve he didn’t often notice these things, or attach much importance to them: he could never understand how his mother was always saying to his father, ‘You look very well’, or ‘You look awfully tired’, when the old man always looked the same.
    Then she was discharged from hospital anyway, so he assumed she was better. She spent the time in bed, it was true, but he remembered how Mrs Graham was always telling her to run along to bed after the first time she’d been in hospital. After another week he asked his father what the matter was. He said it was the same trouble as before – nothing serious, just a little thing lots of women have, but now she’d got a bit of a complication. He didn’t sound upset. In fact the cancer had run out of control. Pietro went and sat on his mother’s bed and talked to her after the shy doctor had been and gone. She wanted him to read to her.
    â€˜I thought you hated it when I read to you,’ he said.
    â€˜That was when you were little, silly! Not now.’
    So he read her some pages from the book by her bed and she fell asleep, her black hair splayed about the pillow, her face very pale. Pietro looked at her in puzzlement, his dark eyebrows knotting as he studied her slightly open mouth. Why was she so tired?
    The following day when he returned from school Mrs Graham was looking very grim. ‘Don’t go upstairs,’ she said, as Pietro put his foot on the bottom step. ‘Come into the sitting room.’
    He expected his father to be there, but in fact it was the doctor. He clasped his hands nervously and coughed a few times. ‘Now listen, Pietro. Your mother’s not at all well, you know.’
    He did it, for all the anguish it cost him, exactly as you are supposed to do it. He broke the news in stages, and, as he talked, Pietro seemed to see his mother grow iller by the second, until he knew how it was going to end.
    â€˜She died this morning.’ The doctor seemed so overwrought that Pietro wanted to assure him he knew it wasn’t his fault. He tried to say something to that effect, but it came out as ‘Thank you’. What he wanted to know was why no one had told him. Then at least he might have said goodbye properly.
    And as for Dorking, she would never have allowed it. Itoccurred to him that perhaps his father had sent him there
because
his mother was dead. Perhaps he thought it would be better for him to live away from all the memories of her. This wasn’t what Pietro himself thought at all. Surely now was the time for him to be with his father, and perhaps be a comfort to him. He knew Mrs Graham had moved in and did all the work, but she wasn’t like his mother.
    Raymond Russell didn’t ask Pietro about Brockwood, and Pietro didn’t tell him. Russell was happy to accept the good word of other parents. One thing did arouse his interest, however, and that was the bill. The school announced that it was putting up its fees the following year, and he had a close look at what was charged.
    That first night of his fourth term, as Pietro fell asleep in the hated Surrey countryside, his father came across an entry in the bill for ‘Piano tuition: £25’. It was too much.

EVANSTON
ILLINOIS USA 1985
    PIETRO SAT IN the rosy darkness of a restaurant on the edge of Chicago looking at a photograph he had pulled from his wallet. It showed a two-year-old girl, Mary Francesca, with a shy, determined smile and a disregard for danger that made her parents despair.
    â€˜That your kid?’ It was an