I heard the sound of the piano coming from the house, background music to the river and the trees, to the garden and to Wheeler's voice. A Mozart sonata perhaps, or it could be by one of the Bachs, Johann Christian, one of Mozart's teachers and the poor, brilliant son of the genius, he lived in England for many years and is known there as 'the London Bach' and his music is often remembered and performed, an English German like those who worked at the Warburg Institute and like that admirable Viennese actor who was known first as Adolf Wohlbruck, and who also abandoned his name, and like Commodore Mountbatten, who was originally Battenberg, bogus Britons all of them, not even Tolkien was free of that. (Like my colleague, Rendel, who was an Austrian Englishman.) Mrs Berry must have finished all her chores and was amusing herself until it was time to call us in for lunch. She and Wheeler both played; she played with great energy, but I had rarely seen or heard him playing at all, I remembered one occasion when he wanted to introduce me to a song entitled
Lillabullero or Lilliburlero or something rather Spanish-sounding like that, the piano was not in the living-room, but upstairs, in an otherwise empty room, there was nothing you could do there except sit down at the instrument. Maybe it was the contrast of the present cheerful music with his own mournful words, but Wheeler seemed suddenly very tired, he raised one hand to his forehead and allowed the full weight of his head to fall on his hand, his elbow resting on the table with its full-skirted canvas cover. 'And so the centuries pass,' I thought, while I waited for him to go on or else put an end to the conversation, I feared he might opt for the latter, he had become too conscious that he was lecturing, and I saw him close his eyes as if they were stinging, although they were hidden by the fingers resting on his forehead. 'And so the centuries pass and nothing ever yields or ends, everything infects everything else, nothing releases us. And that "everything" slides like snow from the shoulders, slippery and docile, except that this snow travels through time and beyond us, and may never stop.'