He knew it was a mistake, he knew he should have kept writing, but once again he peered over the rock. She had turned to face in Clive’s direction now. He guessed her to be in her late thirties. She had a small, dark, boyish face and curly black hair. She and the man knew each other, then, for they were arguing—a marital row, most likely. She had put her pack on the ground and was standing in an attitude of defiance, feet apart, hands on hips, head tilted slightly back. The man took a step toward her and seized her by the elbow. She shook him off with a sharp downward movement of her arm. Then she shouted something and picked up her pack and tried to sling it across her shoulder. But he had hold of it too and was pulling. For a few seconds they tussled, and the pack was pulled this way and that. Then the man had it, and with a single contemptuous movement, a mere wave of the wrist, tossed it into the tarn, where it bobbed half submerged, slowly sinking. The woman took two quick paces into the water, then changed her mind. As she turned back, the man made another attempt to take her arm. All this time they were talking, arguing, but the sound of their voices reached Clive only intermittently. He lay on his tilted slab, pencil between his fingers, notebook in his other hand, and sighed. Was he really going to intervene? He imagined running down there. The point at which he reached them was when the possibilities would branch: the man might run off; the woman would be grateful, and together they could descend to the main road by Seatoller. Even this least probable of outcomes would destroy his fragile inspiration. The man was more likely to redirect his aggression at Clive while the woman looked on, helpless. Or gratified, for that was possible too; they might be closely bound, they might both turn on him for presuming to interfere.

The woman shouted again, and Clive, lying pressed against the rock, closed his eyes. Something precious, a little jewel, was rolling away from him. There had been another possibility: that instead of climbing up here, he had decided to go down to Sty Head, past the Day-Glo schoolchildren, to take the Corridor Route up Scafell Pike. Then whatever was happening here was bound to take its course. Their fate, his fate. The jewel, the melody. Its momentous-ness pressed upon him. So much depended on it—the symphony, the celebration, his reputation, the lamented century’s ode to joy. He did not doubt that what he half heard could bear the weight. In its simplicity lay all the authority of a lifetime’s work. He also had no doubt that it was not a piece of music that was simply waiting to be discovered; what he had been doing, until interrupted, was creating it, forging it out of the call of a bird, taking advantage of the alert passivity of an engaged creating mind. What was clear now was the pressure of choice: he should either go down and protect the woman, if she needed protection, or he should creep away round the side of Glaramara to find a sheltered place to continue his work, if it was not already lost. He could not remain here doing nothing.

At the sound of an angry voice he opened his eyes and pulled himself up to take another look. The man had hold of her wrist and was trying to drag her round the tarn toward the shelter of the sheer rock face directly below Clive. She was scrabbling on the ground with her free hand, possibly looking for a stone to use as a weapon, but that only made it easier for him to jerk her along. Her backpack had sunk from sight. All the while he was talking to her, his voice having dropped again to its unceasing, indistinct drone. She made a sudden pleading whimpering sound, and Clive knew exactly what it was he had to do. Even as he was easing himself back down the slope, he understood that his hesitation had been a sham. He had decided at the very moment he was interrupted.

On level ground he hurried back along the way he had come and then dropped down along the western side of the ridge in a long arc of detour. Twenty minutes later he found a flat-topped rock to use as a table and stood hunched over his scribble. There was almost nothing there now. He was trying to call it back, but his concentration was being broken by another voice, the insistent, interior voice of self-justification: whatever it might have involved—violence, or the threat of violence, or his embarrassed apologies, or, ultimately, a statement to the police—if he had approached the couple, a pivotal moment in his career would have been destroyed. The melody could not have survived the psychic flurry. Given the width of the ridge and the numerous paths that crossed it, how easily he could have missed them. It was as if he weren’t there. He wasn’t there. He was in his music. His fate, their fate, separate paths. It was not his business. This was his business, and it wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t asking for anyone’s help.

At last he managed to calm himself and begin to work his way back. Here were the three notes of the birdcall, here they were inverted for the piccolo, and here was the beginning of the overlapping, extending steps…

He stayed there for an hour, crouched above his writing. At last he put the notebook in his pocket and walked on at a quick pace, keeping all the while to the western side of the ridge and soon dropping down to the fells. It took him three hours to reach the hotel, and just as he did, the rain came again. All the more reason, then, to cancel the rest of his stay and pack his bag and ask the waitress to call him a taxi. He had got what he wanted from the Lake District. He could work again on the train, and when he was home he would take this sublime sequence of notes and the lovely harmony he had written for it to the piano and set free its beauty and sadness.

Surely it was creative excitement that made him pace up and down in the cramped hotel bar, waiting for his taxi, stopping now and then to gaze at the stuffed fox crouching in its evergreen foliage. It was excitement that caused him to step out into the lane a couple of times to see if his car was coming. He longed to be leaving the valley. When his taxi was announced, he hurried out and swung his bag onto the back seat and told the driver to hurry. He wanted to be away, he was longing to be on a train, hurtling southward, away from the Lakes. He wanted the anonymity of the city again, and the confinement of his studio, and—he had been thinking about this scrupulously—surely it was excitement that made him feel this way, not shame.

Rose Garmony woke at six-thirty, and even before her eyes were open the names of three children were on her mind, on her mind’s tongue: Leonora, John, Candy. Careful not to disturb her husband, she eased herself out of bed and reached for her dressing gown. She had reread the notes last thing at night and met Candy’s parents in the afternoon. The other two cases were routine: a diagnostic bronchoscopy following the inhalation of a peanut, and the insertion of a chest drain for a lung abscess. Candy was a quiet little West Indian girl whose hair had been kept back-combed and ribboned by her mother all through the dreary routines of a long illness. The open-heart procedure would last at least three hours, possibly five, and the outcome was uncertain. The father ran a grocery in Brixton and brought to the meeting a basket of pineapples, mangoes, and grapes-propitiation for the savage god of the knife.

The scent of this fruit filled the kitchen now as Mrs. Garmony entered barefoot to fill the kettle. While it heated she crossed the apartment’s narrow hallway to her office and packed her briefcase, pausing to glance at the notes once more. She returned a call to the party chairman, after which she wrote a note to her grown-up son who was asleep in the guest room; then she went back to the kitchen to make the tea. She took her cup to the kitchen window and, without moving the lace curtain, looked down into the street. She counted eight of them on the pavement of Lord North Street, three more than were there the same time yesterday. There was no sign yet of the TV cameras, or of the policemen the home secretary had personally promised. She should have made Julian stay over at Carlton Gardens rather than here, in her old flat. They were supposed to be competitors, these people, but they stood in a loose, chatty group, like men outside a pub on a summer’s evening. One of them was kneeling on the ground, attaching something to an aluminum pole. Then he stood and scanned the windows and seemed to see her. She watched expressionlessly as a camera came bobbing and telescoping toward her. When it was almost level with her face, she stepped back from the window and went upstairs to dress.