not ask a violinist of Raphael's calibre to commit vast stretches of his teaching time to one small student without recompensing him for his travel, for the hours lost from instructing other students, and from the increased time he will be spending on me. Man does not, after all, live on the love of music alone. And while Raphael has no family to support, he does have his own mouth to feed and his own rent to pay and the money must be raised somehow to see to it that he wants for nothing that would make it necessary for him to reduce his hours with me.
My father is already working at two jobs. Granddad gets a small pension from a Government grateful for the wartime sacrifice of his sanity, and it has been in the course of preserving that sanity that my grandparents have never moved to less expensive but more trying surroundings in the postwar years. They've cut back to the bone, they've let out rooms to lodgers, and they've shared the expense and the work of running a large house with my father. But they have not allowed for having a child prodigy in the family and that is what my grandfather insists upon calling me nor have they budgeted for what the costs will be in nurturing that prodigy to fulfill his potential.
And I don't make it easy for them. When Raphael suggests another lesson here or there, another hour or two or three with our instruments, I am passionate about my need for this time. And they see how I thrive under Raphael's tutelage: He steps into the house and I am ready for him, my instrument in one hand and my bow in the other.
So an accommodation must be made for my lessons, and my mother is the one who makes it.
Chapter One
It was the knowledge of a touch reserved for him but given to another -that drove Ted Wiley out into the night. He'd seen it from his window, not intending to spy but spying all the same. The time: just past one in the morning. The place: Friday Street, Henley-on-Thames, a mere sixty yards from the river, and in front of her house which they'd exited only moments before, both of them having to duck their heads to avoid a lintel put into a building in centuries past when men and women were shorter and when their lives were more clearly defined.
Ted Wiley liked that: the definition of roles. She did not. And if he hadn't understood before now that Eugenie would not be easily identified as his woman and placed into a convenient category in his life, Ted had certainly reached that conclusion when he saw the two of them Eugenie and that broomstick stranger out on the pavement and in each other's arms.
Flagrant, he'd thought. She wants me to see this. She wants me to see the way she's embracing him, then curving her palm to describe the shape of his cheek as he steps away. God damn the woman. She wants me to see this.
That, of course, was sophistry, and had the embrace and the touch occurred at a more reasonable hour, Ted would have talked himself out of the ominous direction his mind began taking. He would have thought, It can't mean anything if she's touching a stranger out in the street in public in a shaft of light from her sitting room window in the autumn sunshine in front of God and everyone and most of all me.. .
But instead of these thoughts, what was implied by a man's departure from a woman's home at one in the morning filled Ted's head like a noxious gas whose volume continued to increase over the next seven days as he -anxious and interpreting every gesture and nuance waited for her to say, "Ted, have I mentioned that my brother or my cousin or my father or my uncle or the homosexual architect who intends to build another room onto the house 'stopped for a chat just the other night?
It went on into the early hours of the morning and I thought he'd never leave. By the way, you might have seen us just outside my front door if you were lurking behind your window shades as you've taken to doing recently." Except, of course, there was no brother or cousin or uncle or father that Ted Wiley knew of, and if there was a homosexual architect, he'd yet