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Selena came over to where we sat and stood at our table. She didn’t try to kiss Walter. She held his hand for a moment and looked at him with the blue-green eyes she shared with her sister, and it looked for a moment as though Walter wanted to slap her pretty face.

Selena’s eyes hardened; no man would ever frighten her again. Never. She lowered her voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said without a falter. “I am really terribly sorry we made love. Then this awful thing has happened.”

Walter softened. He knew the accident was not her fault.

“I spoke to Ronnie,” Selena said, and Walter turned to her again, not knowing what to expect. “He says Floss fell from her horse in the afternoon, but collapsed later. Maybe she suffered the stroke in the shower. At the same time as the miscarriage.”

“Shower?” Walter was almost barking at Selena. “You never said anything about a shower on the phone. Who found her? Did Ronnie find her?”

“Ronnie was with her,” Selena explained. Her tone was conspiratorial.

“Ronnie was in the shower with Floss?” Walter shouted. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”

Selena lowered her eyes.

Walter slammed down his beer and walked out. As he did so Molly looked across the hall, concern for Walter in her eyes, and threw a disdainful look at Selena and mouthed the word “slag.”

I quickly ran over to Frank and explained that I needed to leave to try to make sure Walter got to the hospital. As I left the club, I took one last look back into a place I had the feeling I might never visit again. Everything about it was tainted, sullied, and tragic. Floss’s extraordinary entrance fifteen years before came into my mind; she had challenged Walter to ride with her as she drove Siobhan from his mind and heart forever, at least as a lover.

Selena smiled back at me defiantly, left there standing at the bar. I think she was wondering how she could be such a bloody fool. Then her eyes met Molly’s recriminating sneer and she smiled at the young roadie, like a grimace, on and quickly off, sarcastically.

Back in his car Walter waited, crumpled, for only a few moments before straightening his back, and as I got into the passenger seat he started the engine and we set off to Ealing to see his wife.

“Molly is a cool girl, isn’t she?”

At that moment of terrible jealousy, when he believed he had been deceived by Floss, Molly’s young and fit body had no doubt come quickly back into his mind. I looked askance at him and saw him push the thought away. He tightened his hands on the steering wheel and drove as fast as he could get away with.

“It’s ridiculous, Uncle Louis,” he spluttered. “None of this feels like me. Is it like me? Am I this fucking shallow?”

“For fuck’s sake,” I replied angrily. “Let’s just get to the hospital.”

As he drove I spoke in his defense. No, this was not who he was, not the real Walter. Selena had psyched him up. When she set her mind to it, she could achieve almost anything. Who knew what the truth really was? Errant or not, unfaithful or not, whether Ronnie was gay or straight, and whether Walter himself had slept with Floss’s best friend or her worst enemy—none of this mattered anymore. He just had to do something right for once.

Looking at the way Walter conducted himself in the next few hours my godson behaved properly; that much is safe to say. As he drove back from Camden to west London, along the A40, over the elevated road above Paddington and Kensal Rise, past Wormwood Scrubs prison and West Acton and onto Perivale and then south from Alperton to West Ealing, he found himself deep in thought. I knew him so well. I could imagine the questions running through his head.

What had happened to him?

Why had he done all the things he had done?

Why as a teenager had he turned to what Noël Coward had called “cheap music”?

Was it to annoy his father, who had often told him he would never make a professional musician?

Or was it to irritate his mother, who had attempted to make herself the sole glamourous female in young Walter’s life?

Having succeeded in music, why did he turn away from that career as well?

Not only had he made a living from music, but beautiful women—and their sisters, and their sisters’ best friends—had fallen in love with him.

Had everything he had done been driven by some aimless, childish vengeance?

At some level I expect he wondered if the green-fingered skills required of a great gardener and the performing abilities required to be a great front man in a band like the Stand had both somehow evaded him. What he was hearing now, the soundscapes, were a reflection of who he really was.

What did Floss think of all this? Would he ever know?

For a second he lost concentration and the wheel of the car caught in the rut of a gutter.

“Fuck! Walter!” I shouted and my voice sounded high-pitched and girlish, and we both broke out laughing.

He quickly recovered and smacked his forehead, then the questions in his mind seemed to appear before me again—I could almost hear his anguish.

How would she be?

The poor, poor girl!

A stroke!

Would she be able to speak?

How would she look?

Would she be able to walk?

He tried to reconnect himself to Floss, in his heart.

Why was it so difficult?

As he drove he told me he had never played Floss any of his new work, nor his father’s latest developments. She had been away working on the days when he had first played the completed scores to Crow, Hanson, and me. When she was home, she tended to allow him the same degree of privacy in his little recording studio as he had enjoyed—nay, demanded—in his labyrinthine garden. He hadn’t even shared with her his written descriptions of soundscapes. He had wanted his project to be complete before he displayed it to Floss. It might have been his gift to her. Today, as he regained control of the lumbering, overweight Volvo 4x4, the typical “Sheen-Mobile,” he realized that Floss was probably the only person in his limited circle who had no idea what he had been going through, creatively speaking. And he, it now seemed, had known equally little about what she had been doing.

“Our marriage has failed, Uncle Louis,” he confessed. “This is all such a mess.”

I could see that the question on the tip of his tongue was whether it was too late to mend.

We arrived in West Ealing, parked in the hospital lot in one of the neat rows of cars facing Uxbridge Road, and found directions to the critical care ward. It was on the top floor of the building, which was more like a multistory office block than a hospital.

We traveled up in the lift and as the doors opened I saw a restroom and ran toward it, shouting to Walter that I would catch him up. He was trying to find the ward from the muddling signage on the wall when a woman holding a clipboard accosted him.

He had met her once years before but didn’t recognize her at first. Instead he saw the name at the top of the form she held out to him: “Maud Andréevich.”

Walter tried to push past the irritating old woman.

“Please!” She was insistent and blocked him. “I have a petition here. Please look at it, and maybe you would agree to sign it.”

“I have come to see my wife,” he pleaded. “I haven’t got time for this.”

But Maud just poured out her resentment in a torrent. She was deeply upset, her hands shaking.

“I won’t keep you long. This awful hospital has mixed-sex wards and is open to the public. Perverts come in off the street and hang around in the restrooms.”

At that moment I was emerging from the restroom and saw the pair of them, Maud with her face tortured and drawn, pressed as close to Walter as she could. She was holding a clipboard, waving a pencil at him in mid-rant, and clearly hadn’t recognized Walter.