The Last Samurai

He put the microphone down & walked to the box with the two glasses of water & took a sip from one, and then he put it back and walked offstage.

I thought: How can he ever play in public again?

I started thinking about the best way to get home, should I cross the river & take the District Line or maybe it would actually be easier to walk right up to Tottenham Court Road & catch a Number 8, & then I remembered that I had moved since I last went to a concert & that I now had a son. The reason this had slipped my mind was that the seat beside me was empty.

I made my way calmly toward the nearest exit where a couple of ushers were talking in low, angry voices. I asked if they had seen a little boy. They said they had not. I asked politely whether he could be paged, and one said not at this time of the morning. I was about to demand hysterically that he be paged when my eye was caught by my programme, on which was the following reassuring message:

Dear Sibylla I am tired so I have decided to walk home.

I thought: Let’s think about this rationally. There is no point in getting worried or upset when for all I know he may be safe at home. First I will get the pushchair & go home, and then if he is not there I can decide whether to get worried.

I got the pushchair from the cloakroom & I took a taxi home so that I would know as soon as possible whether to be worried. The house was still locked & he did not have a key. I opened the door and went inside. I thought: Well, of course if he got in somehow he would be upstairs in bed, so I went upstairs. He was lying asleep in his bed still wearing his clothes. His window was open. He had scraped the skin on one cheek.

I went back downstairs and I thought: Let’s think about this rationally. This has been terrifying but should I tell him never to do it again just because I was terrified? What are the risks that were run? Traffic: negligible at that time of night. Muggers: possible but surely less likely to attack a small child than (say) a man likely to be carrying cash or wearing an expensive watch. Rapists: possible but surely less likely to attack a small child than (say) me & I would not have thought I was running a big risk if I had walked home. Kidnappers: distinguish possible from likely. Satanists: distinguish possible from likely. Type of person who enjoys inflicting pain on the defenceless: distinguish possible from likely.

Then I thought: Anyway this is stupid. When am I ever going to go to a concert? So why scare him with a lot of things that might have happened? I’ll just say that if it happens again he should ask me for money for a taxi because it’s a long walk home. And thinking of taxis I realised that I had spent some £35 that I could not afford. I turned on the computer and I turned to page 27 of The Poodle Breeder, 1972 (Vol. 48, No. 3): ‘Clipping the Country Poodle—Secrets of Success’.

Ludo got up at 11:00. I went on typing until 2:00. That was about seven hours which was good going for the day, and paid off for the concert and taxi and ice cream. I thought: 1: If I could do this every day I would have hours left over and 2: If I could play a piece 60 times in seven hours I could probably learn to play the piece. I had a longing to hear again Brahms’ Ballade Op. 10 No. 2 which I had heard only once at the concert the night before.

I took Ludo to the Barbican & I borrowed Brahms Piano Works Vol. 1 & took it home. As I had done so much typing already that day & as I had had no sleep I thought I would try to play the piece, and I began to play just one little phrase over and over. I tried to vary it this way & that but it always sounded pretty much the same except sometimes with a few mistakes and sometimes with several and once in a while with none. I played the phrase again and again until at last I could play it with a lot of mistakes every single time and when I had played it with a lot of mistakes for the tenth time in a row Ludo began to laugh.

I turned around on the chair and looked at him. He was still laughing.

I thought I would probably hit him if I stayed in the room, so I went upstairs into the bathroom and shut the door. It was bitterly cold. I put down the toilet lid and sat on it.

I once read somewhere about some research that was done on baby monkeys who were given cloth surrogate mothers which became monsters: one expelled jets of air—one had an embedded wire frame that sprang out and threw the baby to the floor—another ejected sharp brass spikes on command. The response of the baby monkeys was always the same: they clung ever more tightly to the monster, or if thrown off waited for spikes to disappear & returned to cling to their mother. Though sometimes I think I am the monster of spikes & wire & jets of air that is not so bad for the researchers were not able, through these methods, to produce psychopathology in the young monkeys, but perhaps