The Song of Hartgrove Hall by Natasha Solomons

sadly low. I didn’t discover for many years that it was the other way around. She’d spent yearsconstructing this careful version of herself, Edie Rose, and she kept the other parts of herself scrupulously hidden. Those dreadful wartime hits played everywhere for years and years; one couldn’t turn on the radio without being blasted by ‘A Shropshire Thrush’ sung by England’s Perfect Rose. That was the version of her we were supposed to accept.
    Next I remembered how she cried for weeks after Clara was born. Just sat curled up on our bedroom floor, clasping this tiny blanketed bundle and weeping. My God, I’d felt useless. No one told you what to do about such things in those days.
    And then I’d missed her when I went to the cupboard and found there was no loo roll left. She always wrote the shopping lists and purchased household things in bulk. The knowledge that I must fend for myself, even in the most trivial of matters, momentarily floored me and I’m afraid to confess that I found myself sitting on the loo sobbing – there was no loo roll and there was no Edie. There was no order to anything.
    Clara gave me an advice book about grief, which claimed that the peculiar sensation of timelessness, of drifting through days, was quite normal. But why was grief normal? Grief meant that nothing would ever be ‘normal’ again. Normal was Edie. Without her nothing was normal. She couldn’t walk back through the kitchen door, chuck her keys on the table, sink into a chair and smile at me, asking for a gin and tonic. Normality could not be restored.

    The morning before his first lesson, I couldn’t stay in bed and keep my eyes shut against the light. Robin would be arriving in an hour.
    I didn’t have a plan as to how to actually teach him. I’d never had a regular pupil. I’d given the odd master class topromising students at the Royal College, but they’d always been in composition rather than the piano. I’m a decent pianist – the layman would mistakenly consider me excellent. I am not. I can play most things with the utmost competence, but my playing lacks any real emotion. I play in order to hear aloud the thing in my mind, but then I’m finished with it. It’s only when my idea is performed by a real musician that it is called to life. At the end of my fingers, it’s merely a blueprint, a sketch of possibility to be realised in its full dimensions by someone else. I have neither the desire nor the patience to play a phrase a thousand times in order to achieve the speckle of perfection.
    As I said, I’m not a real pianist. Yet, like most composers, I do become a dictator when it comes to my own work. I may not be able to achieve it myself, but I know precisely how it ought to sound. While I can listen in smiling awe to a recording of Albert Shields performing Rachmaninov, when the great man was rehearsing my own concerto at the Festival Hall I found myself stopping him after a few minutes to insist on a darker rumbling tone and then argued with some heat about his far-too-curvaceous phrasing in the wild second movement. All was well in the end – we’re old friends. We fought. We yelled. He performed it as I wished. We reconciled.
    But how to teach a four-year-old child? I’d half considered telephoning Clara’s blasted Mrs Claysmore and asking for some tips – she did owe me fifty pounds for the deposit. In the end I’d visited a music shop and purchased several piano playbooks of varying difficulty.
    Robin arrived at eight-thirty. Clara lingered in the kitchen, sipping tea, showing no eagerness to be off. Robin was oddly subdued. He made no dash for my cupboards and didn’t remove so much as a single sock, but stood beside the fridge, thoughtfully chewing on a one-eared cuddly mouse and picking his nose.
    â€˜Shall I stay?’ asked Clara.
    â€˜No,’ I said, too quickly, seeing