“Do you know what the essential problem of the piano is?” he asked. He held me so his head was a few inches from my own. His eyes darted back and forth. “It is impossible to play continuously on a piano string like a violin. The problem is to sustain a note.”

“At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds.”

“Take a seat, Charlie,” he said. “I’ll kill you in a few minutes. It’ll be good for you.”

“The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn’t bring ourselves to say.”

“Anita Kleinman was a slight woman in her seventies. Her hair was thinning and white with a touch of pink, and was swept back from her face in unbroken waves. She wore a full-length Chinese silk gown covered with bright gold dragons on a blue background. Her fingers were tipped with long red nails and heavy with gold rings. She held out her arms in an expression of welcome and perhaps to show me the full extent of her dragons.”

“What spares us is memory,” he said. “It’s what makes us worth saving. However low we sink, whatever promise we no longer fulfill, we tell our stories. That’s why you’re so important, Charlie. You’re a guardian of our national memory.”

“Aren’t autobiographies born in a question we ask ourselves: how did I get to this point? Don’t we look back over the path and tell ourselves a story? This is how it happened. This is who I am.”