64 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 2020
back of the terraced house, built on a
steep hill in Totterdown; there were es-
paliered apple trees trained around the
garden walls. The guests’ intimacy thick-
ened as the light faded; birds bustled in
the dusk amongst the leaves, and a robin
spilled over with his song. Venus pierced
the clear evening sky. They all said that
they wouldn’t talk politics but did any-
way, as if their opinions had been dragged
out of them, their outrage
too stale to be enjoyable. Was
it right or wrong to use the
word “fascism” to describe
what was happening in the
world? Was the future of so-
cialism in localism? Their
host, Antony, put out cush-
ions on the stone seats and
on the grass, because of the
cold coming up from the
earth; he poured more wine. Heloise had
her hair pinned up; she was wearing her
vintage navy crêpe dress.
She liked Delia right away.
Delia was older than the rest of them,
with a lined, tanned, big-boned face and
an alert, frank, open gaze; her dark hair
was streaked with gray and cut in a ga-
mine style, fringe falling into her eyes,
which made her look Italian, Heloise
thought, like an Italian intellectual.
Around her neck on a cord hung a strik-
ing, heavy piece of twisted silver, and as
the air grew cooler she wrapped herself
in an orange stole, loose-woven in thick
wool, throwing one end over her shoul-
der. Everything Delia did seemed grace-
ful and natural. Heloise was full of ad-
miration, at this point in her own life, for
older women who managed to live alone
and possess themselves with aplomb; she
was learning how to be single again, and
she didn’t want to end up like her mother,
volatile and carelessly greedy. Delia was
a violinist, it turned out, and taught vio-
lin to children, Suzuki-style; this was how
she’d got to know Antony, because his
younger son came to her classes. She
hadn’t been to his home before, and said
that she liked the neat creative order in
his garden; it made her think of a medi-
eval garden in a story. And she was right,
Heloise thought. There was something
Chaucerian about Antony, in a good way,
with his pink cheeks and plump hands,
soft, shapeless waist, baggy corduroy trou-
sers, tortoiseshell-framed glasses, tousled
caramel-colored hair.
“Delia’s like the Pied Piper!” he en-
thused. “At the end of the morning, she
leads the kids around the community
center in a sort of conga line, playing
away on these violins as tiny as toys, past
the Keep Fit and French Conversation
and the Alzheimer’s Coffee Morning, all
of them bowing away like crazy at Schu-
mann and Haydn. Some of these kids
have never heard classical music in their
lives before. And yet it all
sounds great: it’s in tune! Or
almost in tune, almost!”
Antony and Heloise had
been close friends since uni-
versity. He worked for the
city planning department,
which was innovative and
chronically short-staffed
and underfunded. Like her,
he was bringing up his chil-
dren as a single parent; his wife had left
him and gone back to Brazil. Heloise
had secret hopes of Antony. He wasn’t
the kind of man she’d ever have chosen
when they were young together—too
kind, not dangerous enough—but re-
cently she’d come to see him differently.
It was as if she’d turned a key in the door
of her perception, opening it onto a place
that had existed all along. How whole
Antony was! How nourishing his com-
pany, how sound his judgments! She
kept her hopes mostly hidden, though,
even from herself. She was afraid of spoil-
ing their friendship through a misun-
derstanding, or a move made too soon.
Delia said that intonation always came
first, in the Suzuki method. No mat-
ter how simple a piece you’re playing,
it should sound right from the very be-
ginning. The conversation became an-
imated, because the other guests were
parents of young children, too, and in-
tensely concerned about the creativity of
their offspring. Heloise thought that Delia
looked amused, as if she was used to par-
ents thinking their children were prod-
igies, because they liked banging away
on a piano. Antony wished that his older
boy would take lessons, but he had been
diagnosed on the autistic spectrum, and
wasn’t good at following directions; Helo-
ise thought that this boy was sometimes
just plain naughty, though she didn’t say
so to Antony. When she suggested that
she’d like to bring her own five-year-old
daughter, Jemima, to the class, Delia told
her the time and the venue. There werestill a couple of places free. Teaching was
a great pleasure, she added. She liked the
company of children, and had never had
any of her own. Heloise marvelled at how
calmly Delia talked about herself, not
trailing ragged ends of need or display.
“And what about your own playing?”
somebody asked her. “Do you still play?”
She belonged to a quartet that met
twice a week, she said, and played some-
times with another friend, who was a
pianist; they put on concerts from time
to time. “I had hopes of playing as a pro-
fessional when I was young,” she added.
“I won some competitions and dreamed
of being a soloist—it was probably only
a dream. But then I was involved in a
car accident in France—I damaged my
neck and my hands—I was ill for a long
time. And that was the end of that.”
The light was almost gone from the
garden. Antony had slipped inside to
serve up the food. He was a good cook;
appetizing smells were coming from the
kitchen. Through the open glass doors,
Heloise could see yellow lamplight spill-
ing over his books piled up on the coffee
table, a folded plaid blanket on a sofa,
the children’s toys put away in a toybox;
beyond that, a table set with glasses and
colored napkins, a jug filled with fresh
flowers and greenery.
“It was such a long time ago,” Delia
said, laughing to console the others when
they exclaimed over her awful loss. “Like
I said, I was very young. It was really all
very tragic, but don’t worry. It happened
to me in another life.”I
t was possible that Delia’s accident
had nothing to do with Heloise’s fa-
ther. There might have been two acci-
dents in France, two Delias. If it was the
same accident, then why hadn’t she iden-
tified Heloise when they met or guessed
whose daughter she was? Heloise was a
pretty unusual name. But then, why
would Clifford have mentioned his chil-
dren’s names to a girl who was only his
lover’s friend? Perhaps he had met Delia
for the first time on that fateful day: it
was likely that she’d come along only
for the drive, a lift to Paris. Anyway, he
wouldn’t have been talking about his
children to either of those young women.
He’d have been pretending, at least to
himself, that he wasn’t really the father
of a family, that he could do anything
he dared to do, that he was as young and