On a morning in April 1913, a week or so before an audience of music lovers would divide and declare war on one another at the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, the British composer Griffin Curzon threw himself from the top floor of the Royal Tredegar Hotel in Stepney.

A sigh was left hanging in the window as he slipped from the sill, and the doggy-paddle of his limbs spun him around a half-somersault in the air. But he did not die. He was saved. Half-an-hour later he was kissing a red rubber sheet in the Poplar Infirmary, squashed flat by three orderlies and a dispensary clerk. In the admissions ledger he would become: "Attempted suicide 153a. Treated for: generic dementia/mild sprain of the left wrist." His fall to the cobbles had been broken by the soft yet brittle body of Albie Shanet, bakers' boy, who was stepping up from the hotel kitchen after delivering the bread for the day, a bar of Fry's chocolate--a birthday present from Emily the cook--in the side pocket of his jacket. Later, when the doctors felt their way along Albie's bones with the tips of their fingers, they found that he had several cracked ribs, a crushed ankle, a dislocated hip and double fractures in both his legs. The chocolate bar, fate for once betraying a sweet tooth, remained undamaged.

It was gone midday before the composer's older brother, Alaric, was called to the hospital. Wings of his long leather overcoat beating, he flew out of the gates of the Curzon Motor Bicycle Company astride the prototype of the twin-cylinder Rapide Senior, the burnished steel of its petrol tank mirroring an unburnished sky. Swerving around a cairn of manure, he cut between an omnibus and a brewer's dray, the nearest horse rolling the yellow of an eye and baring its teeth in the style of a bad Hamlet. As he cut the corner into Dartington Street fine rain slapped his face and the rear wheel scrubbed an S on the wet road. Drab in their off-duty clothes, a trio of whores turned from a shop window to watch him tame the machine and rip on in a blue haze.

~

News, good or bad, was inescapable in this particular modern age. Alaric was proud of the ebony and silver telephone that stood by itself on the corner of his desk. Tall, sleek and elegant, a Nubian warrior with one good arm, it waited in significant silence, its anxious jangle confirming to him and his staff that he was busy in business and had the future by the coat tails.

The station sergeant, a baritone bee buzzing inside the ear piece, had made blunt work of the call. In his ignorance, Alaric listened to what might have been a tale of death and resurrection.

"I can only apologise," the policeman concluded, "for the delay in contacting you . . ." there was a short pause (a tick on a check-list?) ". . . it's just that we have been rather busy."

"Not at all, officer, I quite understand."

"Thank you, sir." A cheeky inflection here: sarcasm rather than sincerity.

Alaric curbed his temper. He knew the sergeant was taking it as his right--to say nothing of his pleasure--to blame as many people as he could for the upset that had been caused.

As his brother had registered at the hotel under an assumed name and answered every question put to him with eloquent but unhelpful kicks and bites, the bemused constable on the scene had been forced (having held back far longer than he should, perhaps because there was something inviolate about a gentleman in evening dress) to separate him from his clothes in order to check for clues to his identity. Luckily during the wrestling bout that followed his wallet and card case had fallen under the bed and the mystery had been solved.

~

The odour of floor polish and lye was oppressive as Alaric hurried down the infirmary corridor. On his right flickered a cloister of sunless windows with frames of faecal brown. Life, death and the movement of linen had smeared a dado of greasy yellow along the wall to his left. Carried on the echo and growing louder between the clump of his boots, he could hear a voice ahead of him arguing back and forth with itself. Although its tone was familiar, known, safe, its rhythm was not. He came to a corner. The voice was clear now and only a few paces away--it was clear but it could not be understood.

Alaric came to a stop at the junction, the soles of his boots skidding. Reaching out sideways for the wall he turned and leant back against it, his fingers spread behind him on the cold brickwork. He wanted to slip down to the floor and cover his ears, to fade to nothing, to disappear, to not be who he was. (He would later describe this feeling over and over again to his friends, not caring that it made them uncomfortable--wanting to make them uncomfortable.) After squeezing shut his eyes and inhaling deeply he stood upright. His face and hands were still numb from the ride across the city and his legs were wobbly. He shivered as he huffed warmth into his fists. Lowering his head and hunching his shoulders, he walked on around the corner.

He was shown into the room by a police sergeant with a torn tunic and cake crumbs in his moustache. Griffin did not look up; the dispute he was having with himself as intense as it was incoherent. Rounding on the policeman and raising an eyebrow, Alaric waited for him to back out and quietly shut the door. The bottoms of Griffin's dress trousers had been torn open to the knees, and there were convict shackles around his ankles, thick bracelets of iron linked by a short, heavy chain. There was a clean bandage on his left wrist. As he spoke, he swayed back and forth in his chair.

Alaric knelt down. "Griff? How are you, old fellow?"

Breaking off his conversation with an upheld palm as though asking for a moment to attend to a regrettable interruption, Griffin turned, his eyes wild and blue. Frowning at Alaric, he tilted his head in puzzlement. A large bruise--bloody maroon veined with blackish purple--bloomed on his temple. "I killed a boy," he said. "It was quite by accident."

Alaric shook his head. "The boy did not die. He is safe here in the hospital. When you are feeling better, I am sure the doctors will allow you to visit him."

"Flattened him. Heard the life come right out of his mouth."

Alaric lay his hand on top of his brother's. "Do not fret yourself, I shall see that he has everything he needs."

Griffin glanced down absently at the fingers resting on his own and then let his eyes wander to the dark spots on Alaric's coat. "Is it raining outside?"

"A little. I came on my motor bicycle."

Griffin nodded solemnly. "I could tell you were a fool."

"Indeed you could," agreed Alaric with a smile.

"You admit it?"

"To you. Between us. Brother to brother."

Griffin shifted in his chair and laughed. "Brother?" His eyes were flinty and alert. "I have a brother. His name is Alaric."

"I know," said Alaric when he was able to speak.

Griffin looked pleased. "You know him?"

"Intimately. He cares about you very much."

"You won't tell him about this, will you?"

"No."

Alaric took the best--which meant the most expensive--advice available as to what should be done with Griffin. Sparke Lea House was much recommended. It was, puffed the literature he was sent, "enfolded by wood and pasture, sequestered from all anxiety and harm." The treatment on offer (cranial manipulation, exercise of the faculties, all-fish diet, hot and cold sulphur baths) was acknowledged to be progressive and enlightened.

~

The still country lanes retreated before Alaric and the Rapide Senior. It was Sunday afternoon and he was roaring down to Sparke Lea to assure himself of the quality of the accommodations and care. At the main gate of the estate a short man wearing a tall uniform reluctantly stuck his nose through the bars and accepted Alaric's letter of authority, scanning it twice before turning the big key in its lock.

An old laburnum clung to the facade of the house, its branches like silver grey tentacles. The main building was square Georgian edifice with a domed conservatory on one flank--a huge birdcage of cast-iron and glass in the style of the Palm House at Kew.

Alaric, his voice drying in his throat as he looked about him, ran short of questions four rooms into his tour of inspection. However the director, a blubbery Farmer Brown of a man with topiaried side-whiskers and an intrusive stare, had answers to excess.

Later, in his office, the director handed over a thin whisky and soda and pointed out that Liszt had once stayed the night back when Sparke Lea was still the Gallway family home. "He became a priest, you know," he added as an afterthought.

"Yes," said Alaric. "And do you suppose he slept well?"

The director's laugh was polite, no more than protocol. "Why of course." He ran four puffy fingers over the committal form on the blotter in front of him--a fond, stroking motion--and then patted the fob pocket of his waistcoat.

~

Alaric was encouraged when he received a letter from Griffin two days after he was transferred to Sparke Lea from the Stepney Institute for the Insane, where he had been kept in isolation:

"Brother,

What strange place is this? My keepers carried me here like a Samson in chains. A great man graced my room today and peered hard into my face as if he aspired to read in it some prophesy. Many beautiful serpentine melodies have come to me in the stillness, every one of them in the minor. The angels often pass by outside my door, their laughter as cooling as water. I caught sight of one of them last evening and she wore her wings upon her head. Shades of the palest sea green surround me, the walls, the curtains, the armchairs. On waking this morning, I imagined myself at the bottom of the Atlantic and drowned."

~

Continued restraint was prescribed for Griffin throughout his first week in his new home. Leather straps bound him to his chair and his bed and Bernard, his male attendant, sat with him at all times. The curtains in his room were flung back for two hours each day and he was urged to take stock. Conversation was not permitted. Food was to be eaten with a spoon only. Books and writing materials and a commode were provided close at hand. From the second week onwards he was allowed greater and greater periods of freedom every day, each extra minute a gold star to be earned. All he had to prove was that he could remain calm if not lucid--although there never was a time when he did not react to simple requests as a normal person might. In the morning he rose and washed and dressed himself in an orderly fashion. He defecated only when and where he was supposed to.

Alaric rode down to Sparke Lea that Sunday.

The room he was shown into was on the ground floor. Griffin was sitting in one of two sea-green armchairs by the window. He was looking at himself in a shaving mirror.

"Hello," said Alaric.

Griffin said nothing.

Moving to the other chair, Alaric sat down. "I thought you might appreciate a visitor."

Angling the looking glass Griffin tracked around to keep his brother in sight.

When he smiled, he smiled not at Alaric but at Alaric's reflection.

Alaric crossed his legs and tried to appear relaxed. "You are a difficult chap to get to see."

Griffin blinked and seemed confused. Narrowing his eyes, he looked in the mirror, then at his brother, then back in the mirror.

"We needed you to get well," continued Alaric. "I can visit whenever I want to now you are feeling more yourself."

They sat together for an hour. A tea set was brought for them and they shared it in silence (total in Griffin's case, eventual in Alaric's), communicating wherever necessary with amiable nods and smiles like two heads of state who do not share a working language and are without an interpreter. At no point did Griffin show any sign of recognising his brother--although Alaric sensed that he was being surveyed with discreet wonder whenever he averted his eyes to sip from his cup.

"I quite understand if you would rather not speak," Alaric conceded at one point.

Griffin did not seem ungrateful. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed a corner of buttered bread.

"We have decided that you should have your piano here. It will help you to while away the time. Not with work, of course. Not unless you wish it."

With a sly smile, Griffin stole two biscuits and put them in the top pocket of his jacket.

Prior to leaving, Alaric returned angrily to the director's office.

"You would perhaps prefer him," the director's forbearance was infuriating, "to be as he was?"

"As he was, certainly. As he always was to me."

The director smiled and scratched the tip of his nose. "That choice might not be ours to make."

Alaric raced recklessly back to Town, jamming the throttle-lever wide open around the corners and taking his chances, tears in his eyes and a grin on his lips. Never had his spirit been more lifted by the knowledge that every road was connected to every other road, and that they all led somewhere.

~

At the time of Griffin's accident back in April, Alaric had assured both the police and the doctors at the Poplar Infirmary that his brother's reason had not been lost but mislaid.

After leaving them he had sat outside the hospital on the Rapide Senior and rubbed his face and looked about him. Two lads in blue and white shop aprons were huddled chin-to-chin lighting their cigarettes, the smoke gusting above them and vanishing like a spirit set free.

Making up his mind, Alaric set off for the Royal Tredegar Hotel.

The police had shut their notebooks and gone long before he arrived. Entering the foyer, he heard the manager's raised voice. The two maids who had been commanded repeatedly to go up to Griffin's room on the top floor to make the bed and replace the towels were flushed with protest. They bumped shoulders at the foot of the narrow stairway, each deferring to the other, their expressions bright with fear and fascination.

After handing his card and a gold sovereign to the manager, Alaric was granted a few minutes alone in the room.

It was small, a lot smaller than Griffin could afford. The single window was still open, the sill and carpet damp with blown drizzle. The bowl of the washstand in the corner was filled with cold, soapy water, the scum on the surface floating in sad grey chains (The manager had told Alaric that little more than a quarter of an hour before jumping, Griffin had ordered a hotel shaving set and a second jug of hot water. He was quite alone in the room when they were taken up and he had been most civil to the porter, tipping him sixpence).There was a chipped bedside table. On it stood a half-empty bottle of inferior champagne and two glasses, the one nearest to the bed still full, the contents flat save for a necklace of bubbles at the rim. Both the pillows on the double bed had been slept on and the covers were in disarray. When, after a guilty pause, Alaric stripped back the bedding with the toe of his boot and examined the bottom sheet, he saw the hard yellow stains his nose had already warned him to expect. But alongside them, jolting his eye and his heart, was something he had not been expecting, a spill of bloody red, the splash of it, with its many promontories and inlets, like a silhouette of the islands of Japan.

~

The piano was swung out and lowered from its home in Chelsea by a firm of specialist removers who then transported it to Sparke Lea in a motor pantechnicon. The reunion between the instrument and its owner was a happy one: after circling the piano several times like a tiger circling a goat staked out to tempt it, Griffin sat down and commenced to play. Twelve hours later he rippled one last ambiguous chord, rested his head on the keys and fell asleep.

But, if the music Griffin coerced from all eighty-eight notes during that long first day was therapeutic to him, it was a source of uneasiness to the director and his staff. It was only when Alaric arrived the following evening and insisted that it was supposed to sound as it did that a further spell of enforced restraint was ruled out for the composer.

Nonetheless, a week later Griffin was strapped down in his room for three days as a punishment for an assault of a more palpable nature:

"Brother,

There is music here. I have music. The beauty of it gives the angels pain, but they are brave. A little imperfection does not frighten them. Today I became tired of the devil who lives with me like my conscience in this new world of mine and dealt him a swift blow on his unfortunate snout."

By the time of Alaric's next visit, Griffin was as compliant as a collie dog. The director, conscious of the calming effect the female staff had on the composer, decided to risk an experiment and appointed Gertrude, one of the younger nurses, as an intermediary attendant, permitting Bernard of the injured nose and pride to oversee from a chair placed just outside the door.

~

"Brother,

At last I have goodness to watch over me. It fills me with sadness that you are not afforded such blessings where you are. As for myself, I was lost and now am forgiven. My protector has blue eyes and smells of starch and concern. While we remain as we are I am safe."

~

Alaric did not take to Gertrude. He was repelled by her big downy forearms and the animal rosiness of her complexion. There was a stillness and containment about her that made his own concern seem manufactured and melodramatic. She said very little but it was clear she thought he was expecting too much from his brother. And did she really have to smile so freely? When she did speak, the slow sympathy in her voice only pushed him away--you are no more than a visitor, it said, a visitor and an intruder.

"Intriguing and extraordinarily profitable," was how the director described the relationship between nurse and patient. "Your brother will not stray within a few yards of her or look her in the eye, but neither will he go anywhere or do anything without her. Poor Bernard has now been consigned to the role of their man servant."

When asked, Gertrude would always say that Griffin was a good man, that she found his attentions sweet and rather melancholy. Which did not mean, of course, that she was any the less bewildered by them.

They spent their days together in what would, because of the piano, come to be christened "the salon." In the morning, Griffin would bring one of the sea green cushions from the window seat in his room and lay it on her chair with a courtier's deference. Any music he had completed the previous afternoon would then be presented to her, and she would have to pretend that she was able to read the tune in her head; take the sheets of manuscript (not the original working draught but a beautiful clean copy, the notes--little legs and boots and tails--hung on the staves with painterly flicks and strokes of the pen) and study them while smiling and nodding her approval.

When Griffin did not want to play or compose, Gertrude would read to him, at first from The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and then increasingly--for he did not seem to mind what she chose--from a monthly journal she subscribed to called The Modern Women's Compendium. Sitting opposite her with his eyes fixed on the front of her apron, he would listen absently to articles about the current upsurge of important young women determined to make careers for themselves in science and the arts, about Emmaline and Christabel Pankhurst and the broadening out of the movement for equal rights, about the iniquity of the "Cat and Mouse Act," about hunger strikes and force feeding.

~

"Brother,

How bitter you must be to have to suffer on as you are? I am shown compassion while you are scorned--charity for sorry me, injustice for good-hearted you. Do not fret yourself, music makes sense of the senses: feeling is not always a sin. Pleasure must have its limits, it seems, for the food available here is neither palatable nor plentiful. The making of custard must be an Earthly art. "

~

Griffin's behaviour might have stabilised, grown sedate, grown normal in its abnormality if he had not forgotten to close the piano lid one night before going to bed. Because it was the Steinway's great ivory grin that drew Gertrude across the room the following morning. When she glanced over her shoulder at the empty salon--she had arrived a few minutes earlier than usual--it seemed to dare her to risk a one-finger dab. After resisting slightly the cold key bottomed and a note sang out loud and pure. Encouraged, she added a second finger and pressed the key next door at the same time; the two notes blended together sadly. Holding her arms rigid and splaying her fingers as best she could, Gertrude then began to bang and stab at the keys, her hands seesawing here and there in haphazard mimicry of Griffin's. Fighting back, the piano roared and rumbled, the sound, which at first had been so simple and clear, now a mad jangle that frightened her fingers back on to her lap as though they had been scalded.

The final monstrous chord was still humming in the far corners of the room when Griffin entered and came hurrying to the piano stool, his expression beatific. Behind him, a pair of wary eyes peeked around the door and then vanished.

Griffin had fallen in love with Gertrude's piano playing. Although the fretful cadences stirred up by her fingers did little for the other patients' turmoil of mind, the director advised the nurse to humour the composer in the hope that some rite of passage would take place and he would come out the other side of his obsession all the better for having passed through it. But he did not. He was not travelling; he had arrived. Gertrude was expected to spend whole afternoons at the Steinway, urged on by Griffin until her arms ached and her fingertips were fat with blisters. If she rebelled and stopped, he would become distraught. And even though she did her best to please him, he would grow more and more agitated at her inability to repeat any part of her performance, at her continual falling away into embarrassed laughter. Running his hands through the sweaty loops of his hair, he would have to keep singing each malformed phrase over and over again to establish it in his memory, the exasperation working in his face as he knelt on the floor with pages of manuscript strewn all around him.

~

"Brother,

When we were young we used to bicker about the need for purity in all forms. Art will never be pure while reason intrudes on the instant of creation. Here, we are without reason. Here, we are not chained to meaning, to the obvious. If there is a Heaven above and beyond this it will be all feeling."

~

Griffin became so frustrated with his attempts to transcribe the raw truths of Gertrude's piano playing, he found it impossible to sleep. Their anarchy denied the fixity of notation--their spontaneity refused to be ensnared and encoded. Morning after morning he would squat at the Steinway with a rumpled sheaf of sheet music in front of him, trying and failing to recover from the page a passage that had thrilled him the previous afternoon.

When the entire house was jarred awake by the pounding of the piano at three o'clock one morning, Bernard was forced to resume locking Griffin into his room at night, where he padded back and forth droning tunelessly into his chest.

Gertrude had no need to feel guilty, but guilt was what she felt. The idiocy of the situation only made it worse. Both Alaric and the director were hoping work might redeem Griffin, jolt him back into his earlier, saner self. They were willing to risk what the pressure could do. They decidedthat if they were wrong and a crisis did occur then at least some deeper truth about the composer's illness might be revealed. When Gertrude protested that breaking a thing to see how it was put together did not strike her as very intelligent, she was told that she should just get on with the job she had been given. A job that now entailed sitting behind Griffin and trying not to weep as he hammered convulsively at the keys in an attempt to unlearn all he had ever learned about music; all harmony, all rhythm, all melody.

Griffin came apart on the Monday of the second week. Afterwards Gertrude was angry with herself for not seeing what was coming. His toil at the piano had been listless that morning. He paused often and sat with his knuckles on his knees and his shoulders slumped.

When he stopped playing altogether, Gertrude said: "Why don't you rest? Poor soul, you must be tired to death."

At the sound of her voice, the puppet strings holding Griffin up seemed to snap and he folded over in his seat. Soon he was sobbing quietly, his long-boned hands limp at his sides.

Gertrude went to him and rubbed his back. "Let it all out, she said softly, "let it all out."

When she touched his hair he turned to her warmth like a child, arms reaching out, face pressing into her breasts, fingers sliding to the small of her back and winding themselves under her belt. Collapsing his whole weight against her, he clung on with such ferocity it was all she could do not to tumble to the floor.

Cradling the back of his neck, Gertrude waited for Griffin's emotion to use itself up, burn out like a candle under a jar. It did not take long. After a few minutes his trembling calmed and his sobs became sniffs. As his need slackened, Gertrude, sensing a different kind of awareness in him, began to feel awkward and uneasy. His upper body had withdrawn slightly from hers, not quite supporting its own heft but controlling it nevertheless. His breathing was slower, its moist heat less insistent through the material of her dress. But when she tried to pull away he resisted, his hands moving from her belt to her hips and his face burrowing deeper into hiding. Stiffening her back she stood waxworks still, assuming that when he saw that she did not mean to encourage him, he would let go. After waiting awhile she pushed gently at his shoulders, instead of releasing her he reached around and grasped her buttocks, squeezing hard, almost dragging her off her feet.

It took two numbing blows to the side of Griffin's head to set Gertrude free. As he drew away, drunk on the pain, he was trapped face to face with her for the first time, his eyes widening as they cleared, as they understood. His fingers were still cupped in the air, their curve profane, and looking down at them he groaned. Leaping up and kicking back the stool, he ran on bowed legs to the door, his hands held out in front of him as if they belonged to someone else.

That night Griffin barricaded himself in his room, smashed the window with a chair, cut his thumb snatching up a sliver of glass and then began to saw into the veins in his wrists. If Bernard--sleeping on a chair in the hall after being warned by a concerned Gertrude--had not heard the window shatter and roused the house the composer would have killed himself this time for sure. As it was, the first few cuts were shallow and badly placed and he was overpowered before he was able to do any further damage.

Alaric was furious with himself when he discovered what had happened, feeling he had tried for too much too soon with his brother, betrayed him, patronised him in his despair. When he arrived at Sparke Lea and found the wounded Griffin lashed to his bed under a rib cage of leather straps, he shoved the long-suffering Bernard back into his seat and swore at him. Striding from the room, he turned towardthe offices at the front of the building and shouted the name of the man he knew was to blame.

"But he must learn that he has done wrong," protested the director, white between his side-whiskers. He had been dragged to Griffin's room by his lapel and now he stood stroking the material of his coat, petulant yet watchful.

Alaric was at the bed unbuckling the straps. His lips were twisted when he jerked his head around. "And you," he said, the words barely able to get past the emotion in his chest, "must learn that my brother is not an animal."

Griffin, however, seemed reluctant to confirm his humanity. Although they gave him his freedom he would not let himself be released. He lay in bed for three months, would not get up, would not eat unless the spoon was pushed into his mouth, would not wash, would not ask for a bedpan or bottle.

Alaric now visited his brother more often. At the beginning he faked conversation, chatting on despite Griffin's silence, now and then leaving a reminiscence unfinished as a temptation. Eventually he just sat by the bed thinking and planning. One day he came to a decision.

Pink above the high collars of their dress shirts, the string quartet resembled doctors called away from the opera as they bundled their black instrument cases in through the bedroom door. Intimidated by the ridge of blankets in the bed, by the odour of the sickroom, they set out their chairs and music stands with jittery precision, jumping at each rattle and scrape. Commencing--as Alaric had asked--with Griffin Curzon's String Quartet No. 1 in G minor , the four musicians promptly focused in on themselves, all elbows and grimaces, lost both to Sparke Lea and to the planet: the fat cellist, his knees spread wide, scrubbing his bow across the strings like a butler bathing a large, brown dog; the two fiddlers aiming their long noses at one another and fluttering their eyelids; the viola player swaying in his seat like a Hungarian gypsy, the movement rhapsodic, the absence of a head scarf and earring a bribe to subtlety. Beautiful music, beautifully performed, concluded Alaric, stealing a little pride for himself. He had been prepared for the music to sound naive, but all he could hear now was a huge hopefulness.

Although he could feel Bernard and the director looking at him, Alaric did not smile in triumph when Griffin began to turn over in bed. Slowly unfolding from under the covers like a cobra from a pot, the composer sat up. Listening, he craned forward and concentrated with a sleepy frown, his fingers with their long yellow nails tapping arpeggios on the counterpane.

The director and Alaric were celebrating when they heard the news, the director's secretary leaving the telephone as they returned, laughing, to the office. (While she was speaking, Alaric remembered the clinic's printed boast. Anxiety and harm, Griffin, he said to himself, his brother's face before him anxiety and harm, dear boy.) Refilling their glasses with neat whisky, the two men drank a toast to the King and to victory and to it all being over by Christmas. It was the 4th of August 1914, Germany had invaded Belgium and Britain had duly declared war.

But the patients at Sparke Lea would never be informed about the fighting, would never include it in their nightmares.

Although he rose from his bed, Griffin could not be persuaded from his room for another month. And, when he did at long last begin to explore the house again, he would become agitated and violent if he happened to glance up and find Bernard--no less a feared and hated figure for all this, apparently--was not there in his eyeline. None of the female staff were allowed near him after one of them brought him his breakfast and he ran out naked into the park and climbed a tree and would not come down. When he played the piano now he would strike the same note over and over again, bending his head close to the keys to hear it swell and die. He would remain on middle C for the rest of 1914 and the first few months of 1915, content in his curiosity, encircled by it.

~

"Brother,

We see merit in numbers, in sequences. We search for the infinite in variety. We are imbeciles. Every note of music is a whole, deep symphony of sound. Play it soft, then softer still, breath on it, then strike it hard, harder, hit it so it rings on and on, the texture wavering and changing. Then add rhythm, slow, slower, a little bit faster, build it up, rat-ta-tat. There is staccato, legato, on and on and on. One note, one beautiful, indivisible note."

~

Alaric never lived to read this letter. He would die, quite by accident, while demonstrating the toughness and agility of the Rapide Senior to the signals corps. The generals and staff had not wanted him to do the riding himself in fact they had slapped their swagger sticks and twitched their moustaches and mumbled amongst themselves when he told them what he was going to do. It was a matter of confidence, he explained, of demonstrating his belief in the pre-eminence of his own design. The motor bicycle would without doubt revolutionise the transportation of documents behind the lines and his was by far the best machine for the task.

The crude tracks and muddy hills and dales of the training ground were no worse than Alaric had anticipated. The Rapide Senior performed marvellously. He had done enough, he was sure, to secure a contract when he decided to take a rutted incline steeper than he had ever ridden up before, steeper than the practical side of his reasoning advised him was possible. He wanted to see if he could do it simply because he wanted to do it, because doubt, in the roar of the moment, seemed like lack of willpower. It was only when he reached the very brink of the slope that he lost faith, a lurch of the heart sucking the breath from his lungs as he took to the air, the machine rearing up with a kick of its handlebars and flying back at him spitting mud.

Lying amid the untidiness of his own limbs, Alaric fought unconsciousness just long enough to see the sky above him darken with silhouettes. He smiled when he saw his brother's face bending down to peer into his, a face as familiar to him as life, its features alert, intelligent, the eyes communicating warmth and care and good humour. Rising, Griffin winked and took a puff on his cigar. In his other hand he was holding a glass of champagne. A woman in a red feather head-dress came forward and hung on his arm. Knowing he was safe, Alaric allowed himself to rest.

Griffin continued to write to Alaric. The director and the rest of the hospital administration thought it safer not to mention the tragedy. How, they reasoned, could the composer be expected to mourn the death of a stranger in a world full of strangers? For not once in all of Alaric's visits to Sparke Lea had Griffin betrayed any sign of recognising him. The letters were collected and stored unopened, first in a special drawer in one of the office filing cabinets, then a sea trunk in director's storeroom. Eventually there would be over two thousand of them.

The proceeds from the sale of the Curzon Motor Bicycle Company worked away ringing up interest for the rest of Griffin's life. By the time of his death from a stroke in 1963 his one finger had travelled up and down the Steinway's keyboard twice. Four Bernards came and went during this long journey, all of them, after leaving Sparke Lea, married to silence.

Griffin wrote his last letter the night he died.

~

"Brother,

I feel some new challenge is before me. I cannot catch my breath for thinking about it, longing for it. I wanted it before but I was not ready then, was not ripe. I have spent my days here with a hunger to move on, to receive my reward. I have willingly given up what I cannot control. Is this not enough? What else do they want from me? Surely you must know by now? Are you there, brother? Have you gone before? Are you there?"

* * *

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