There were moments in the early morning, after the mild excitement of dawn, with London already heading noisily for work and his creative turmoil finally smothered by exhaustion, when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights and looked back at the rich, the beautiful chaos that surrounded his toils, and had once more a passing thought, the minuscule fragment of a suspicion that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal, and whose key word he shaped in his mind only with reluctance; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was … a genius. A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips. He was not a vain man. A genius. It was a term that had suffered from inflationary overuse, but surely there was a certain level of achievement, a gold standard, that was nonnegotiable, beyond mere opinion. There hadn’t been many. Among his countrymen, Shakespeare was a genius, of course, and Darwin and Newton, he had heard it said. Purcell, almost. Britten, less so, though within range. But there had been no Beethovens here. When he had this suspicion about himself—and it had happened three or four times since he had returned from the Lake District—the world grew large and still, and in the gray-blue light of a March morning, his piano, the MIDI, the plates and cups, Molly’s armchair, took on a sculpted, rounded appearance, reminding him of how things had looked to him once in his youth when he had taken mescaline: bloated with volume, poised with benign significance. And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born. He also saw the grainy reverse, the figure lingering by the doorway in grubby loose white shirt, jeans roped in tight against a convexity of gut, eyes blackened and engorged by fatigue, the composer, heroic and endearing in his stubbly dishevelment. These were truly the great moments in a period of joyous creative outpouring such as he had never known, those moments when he stood from his work in a near-hallucinatory state and floated down the stairs to his bedroom, kicked off his shoes, and rolled under the covers to succumb to a dreamless sleep that was a sick numbness, a void, a death.

He woke in the late afternoon, pulled on his shoes, and went down to the kitchen to eat the cold plate the housekeeper had left for him. He opened a bottle of wine and took it with him up to the studio, where he would find a full coffee flask and begin a new journey into the night. Somewhere at his back, stalking him like a beast and closing in, was the deadline. In just over a week he must confront Giulio Bo and the British Symphony Orchestra in Amsterdam for two days of rehearsal and, two days after that, the premiere in the Birmingham Free Trade Hall. Given that the millennium’s end was years away, the pressure was quite ridiculous. Already his fair copy of the first three movements had been taken away and the orchestral parts had been transcribed. His secretary had called a few times to collect the latest pages of the final movement, and a team of copyists was at work. For now there could be no backward glances, and he could only push on and hope to be finished before next week. He complained, but in his heart he was untouched by the pressure, for this was how he needed to be working, lost to the mighty effort of bringing his work to its awesome finale. The ancient stone steps had been climbed, the wisps of sound had melted away like mist, his new melody, darkly scored in its first lonely manifestation for a muted trombone, had gathered around itself rich orchestral textures of sinuous harmony, then dissonance and whirling variations that spun away into space, never to reappear, and had now drawn itself up in a process of consolidation, like an explosion seen in reverse, funneling inward to a geometrical point of stillness; then the muted trombone again, and then, with a hushed crescendo, like a giant drawing breath, the final and colossal restatement of the melody (with one intriguing and as yet unsolved difference), which gathered pace and erupted into a wave, a racing tsunami of sound reaching an impossible velocity, then rearing up, higher, and when it seemed beyond human capability, higher yet, and at last toppling, breaking and crashing vertiginously down to shatter on the hard safe ground of the home key of C minor. What remained were the pedal notes promising resolution and peace in infinite space. Then a diminuendo spanning forty-five seconds, dissolving into four bars of scored silence. The end.

And it was almost done. Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Clive revised and perfected the diminuendo. All that was required now was to go back several pages in the score to the clamorous restatement and vary the harmonies perhaps, or even the melody itself, or devise some form of rhythmic undertow, a syncopation that cut into the leading edge of the notes. To Clive, this variation had become a crucial feature of the work’s conclusion; it needed to suggest the future’s unknowability. When that by now familiar melody returned for the very last time, altered in a small and significant way, it should prompt insecurity in the listener; it was a caution against clinging too tightly to what we knew.

On Thursday morning he was in bed, thinking about this and falling asleep, when Vernon phoned. The call was reassuring. Clive had been meaning to get in touch since he returned, but his work had swept him away, and Garmony, the photographs, and the Judge seemed to him like subplots in a barely remembered movie. All he knew was that he did not wish to be quarreling with anyone, least of all one of his oldest friends. When Vernon cut the conversation short and suggested coming by for a drink the following evening, it occurred to Clive that he might have finished by then. He would have written in that important change to the restatement, for it would surely take him no more than one all-night session. The last pages would have been taken away and he might ask in a few friends to make up a celebration party. These were his happy thoughts as he plunged into sleep. It was disorienting, then, to wake what seemed like two minutes later into Vernon’s bullying interrogation.

“I want you to go to the police now and tell them what you saw.”

This was the sentence that jolted Clive into the truth. He emerged from a tunnel into clarity. In fact, what came back to him was the train journey to Penrith, and those half-forgotten insights, and their sour taste. Each exchange was a click on the ratchet—no slipping back into civility. By invoking Molly’s memory—“meaning crapping on Molly’s grave”—Clive allowed a full flood of hot indignation to bathe him, and when Vernon outrageously threatened to go to the police himself, Clive gasped and kicked the bedclothes clear and stood in his socks by the bedside table for the concluding barter of abuse. Vernon hung up on him, just as he was about to hang up on Vernon. Without bothering to lace up his shoes, Clive ran down the stairs in a fury, cursing as he went. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, but he was having a drink, he deserved a drink and he’d punch the man who tried to stop him. But he was alone, of course, and thank God. It was a gin and tonic, though mostly it was a gin, and he stood by the draining board and sank it, without ice or lemon, and thought bitterly of the outrage. The outrage of it! He was framing the letter he would like to send to this scum he had mistaken for a friend. Him, with his loathsome daily round, his sordid cynical scheming mind, the wheedling sponging hypocritical passive-aggressive. Vermin Halliday, who knew nothing of what it was to create, because he’d never made anything good in his life and was eaten up with hatred for those who could. His poky suburban squeamishness was what passed for a moral stand, and meanwhile he was up to the elbows in shit, in fact he had verily pitched his tent on excrement, and to advance his squalid interests he was happy to debase Molly’s memory and ruin a vulnerable fool like Garmony and call up the hate codes of the yellow press and all along pretend to himself and tell anyone who would listen—and this was what took the breath away—that he was doing his duty, that he was in the service of some high ideal. He was mad, he was sick, he didn’t deserve to exist!