‘My child, a slow burn doesn’t mean the flame isn’t poised to singe the ceiling.’

‘Oh Christ,’ exploded Abby as, unwelcome as the bones singing in Ezekiel, the white cordless telephone rang.

It was Flora.

‘You’re not the only one in the doghouse, Abby, Hitler Hungerford says he’ll tear up Boris’s contract if he doesn’t deliver on 1 September, and he wants Boris to pay back the two-thousand-pound advance. Boris is in hysterics, he hasn’t got two pence, let alone two grand. I’ve asked him to stay. I hope you don’t mind. Perhaps Marcus and I can prod him into action and at least copy the stuff out for him.’

Abby looked down at Rodney’s hand, wrinkled, covered in liverspots, yet making it almost impossible for her to think rationally: ‘Boris can sleep in the attic bedroom.’ She glanced sideways at Rodney’s watch. ‘I’ll try and get the four o’clock plane.’

Rodney sighed as she switched off the telephone.

‘Probably just as well, darling. Tell Boris to give Lionel a long, flashy but not too difficult solo to keep him quiet. Haydn said you could do anything with musicians if you gave them the chance to show off.’

He was sad to see Abby go, but quite relieved. He wanted to learn the cello part of Don Quixote and he didn’t think he could have coped with a month of such obsessive introspection.

No-one could have been more obsessively introspective than Boris. Abby reached home before he did, and was pleased to see her little faded red-brick cottage peering out of the yellowing woods, the fox cub now seeking refuge from the hunting season.

‘You don’t think Boris has topped himself,’ said a worried Flora. ‘We expressed him some cash for his train fare and a taxi.’

Boris arrived with the first stars, having drunk his taxi fare on the train and drenched himself, falling into the lake, on his stumbling walk from the station. His only luggage was a bulging Waitrose carrier bag, of which Flora speedily relieved him.

‘Have you brought us some goodies?’

‘I vish.’

Inside, frantically scrawled on a mass of manuscript paper were the endless abandoned beginnings of Rachel’s Requiem.

‘I cannot write. I cannot pay back the RSO, I cannot pay Astrid, my lovely au pair, so she has taken the cheeldren to Rachel’s parents, who think me murderer anyway, for one month to geeve me peace to write.’

His upended dark curls were streaked with grey, his eyes were black caverns. He was shaking uncontrollably.

But after a very hot bath, and a change into Marcus’s sweatshirt and jeans, which now fitted his formerly stocky body, Boris had cheered up enough to tuck into a large steak, French beans and mashed potato, cooked by Marcus, and was soon pouring out his troubles and a great deal of red wine.

‘Schumann say: Requiem is a thing one writes for oneself! I shall not leeve long,’ Boris coated a piece of steak with mustard, ‘I am like Mozart, someone vill have to finish vork for me.’

Flora, who had Scriabin on her knee, removing goose-grass burrs out of his plumy white tail, picked up a spoon and helped herself to some French beans.

‘Who could finish it for you?’ she asked innocently.

‘Edith Spink or perhaps Sonny Parker,’ suggested Marcus equally innocently.

‘Never,’ Boris crashed his hand down on the kitchen table, spilling his half-pint of red wine. ‘Ovair my dead buddy.’

‘It’s going to be dead anyway,’ giggled Flora. ‘You’ll be twanging a harp on a cloud beside Rachel.’

‘Flora,’ reproved Marcus, mopping up the wine with a piece of kitchen roll. Scriabin’s proximity was making his eyes water.

‘I listened to John Tavener at the proms last night,’ Flora ignored Boris’s scowl. ‘It hardly left the note of D. You can be less boring than that.’

‘How far have you got?’ asked Abby.

‘I sketch most of it in the head, but I am so tired vorking sixteen hours a day.’ Then, as Flora played an imaginary violin, moaned, ‘I am so disappointed and frustrated at non-performance of my vork.’

‘How can they perform it, when you don’t write anything but rude postcards to Edith Spink?’ said Flora, returning to the French beans.

‘Are you still not having singers?’ asked Marcus, trying to lead the conversation into less thorny paths.

Boris nodded his shaggy head.

‘Britten write requiem to his parents wizout singers. I ’ate singers.’

‘I hate musicians,’ sighed Abby. ‘You’ve licked that spoon Flora. Why don’t we dispense with them as well.’

‘Then we could have sixty minutes of silence,’ said Flora, ‘jolly peaceful and much cheaper.’

‘The Arts Council would find it very meaningful,’ added Marcus.

‘You all joke,’ grumbled Boris, scooping up the rest of the mashed potato and adding an ounce of butter. ‘None of you realize, not Lear, nor Oepidus nor ’Amlet suffer like I do. I’m so vorried I’m written out.’

‘Course you’re not,’ said Flora, ‘you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep, and no bottles of red under the bed. We’ll all help you.’

‘Tomorrow I go on vagon,’ said Boris, refilling his glass.

Because Marcus stayed at home to practise and give piano lessons while Flora and Abby left the cottage to work, it was assumed that he had the time to shop, cook, unload the dish-washer, transfer dripping underwear from washing-machine to dryer, feed the cats, change duvets, let in plumbers and electricians and often pay for them, too.

Predictably the lion’s share of helping Boris fell to him. Thus the following morning, it was Flora who read out the nine sections of the Mass, so Marcus could copy them down and Boris could later tick off each section as he finished it.

‘“Dies Irae”,’ read Flora, who was wandering round the kitchen with Scriabin, a purring black-and-white ruff round her neck.

‘That’s a joke for a start. Rachel was such a crosspatch she gave Boris months and years of “Irae”, always making him smoke outside and not putting salt in anything except wounds.’

‘Next,’ Marcus looked up.

‘“Rex Tremendae”, what a terrific name for a dog.’

‘Got that.’

‘“Agnus Dei”,’ Flora giggled. ‘Sounds like Doris Day’s sister. Doris was seriously kind to dogs and filled her house and the annexe with strays — I wish we could have a dog.’

‘Well, you can’t.’ Clad only in her bikini, Brahms’ Second Symphony under her arm, Abby was on her way out to the garden.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked crossly, as she went through the living-room and found Boris sitting on one of her pale beige Habitat sofas, with manuscript paper, several pencils and erasers on an uncomfortably low table in front of him.

‘I’m thinking what to put,’ said Boris sulkily. ‘It’s August and the birds are mute from feeding their young as I am. Zee muse as desert me.’

‘We are not a muse,’ murmured Flora to Marcus.

‘Rodney suggested you wrote a long easy solo for Lionel to keep him quiet,’ suggested Abby.

‘I ’ate Lionel, little vanker, I will make eet impossibly deeficult.’

Cheered at the prospect of Lionel on the rack, Boris started to scribble down notes, but, having been bawled out by Abby for spilling a sneaked glass of red wine over her new yellow rush-matting, he retreated sulkily to Marcus’s studio.

Here he worked feverishly, sometimes stopping to discuss ideas with Marcus, working out details on the piano together, singing phrases which Marcus, who had absolute pitch, could take down like shorthand.

But Marcus’s main task was emptying waste-paper baskets of scrumpled-up paper. The progress was desperately slow. Boris spent a lot of time ringing Astrid, ostensibly to check on the children.

‘Such a good father,’ sighed Abby.

A week later, Boris had struggled to the end of the ‘Dies Irae’ and ‘Rex Tremendae’, and Flora and Marcus were copying them out in the garden, helped by the kittens who kept jumping on top of the manuscript paper and shooting their black pens all over the place.

‘Probably improving it,’ muttered Flora. ‘Talk about Slav labour. And how many times do I have to tell you not to clean up after Abby — you’re too nice to her.’

They were harvesting in the field beyond the front gate, huge gold blocks rising like ingots out of the platinum-blond grass. But suddenly over the roar of the huge combine, Flora and Marcus heard Boris tapping out a tune on the piano, rising fourths and fifths, tentative but haunting. He was playing it again, changing it slightly, shoving in a few discords, then he played the first version.

Marcus and Flora looked at each other.

‘Oh, please don’t spoil it,’ they said in unison, as Boris introduced an interrupted cadence, and started messing around with the tempo.

‘We must tell him,’ Flora leapt to her feet.

‘He told us not to disturb him.’

‘We should before he buggers it up. Write it down. That is the most glorious, glorious tune,’ cried Flora, pushing open the door of Marcus’s once immaculate studio. ‘Play it again.’

Marcus followed, removing Boris’s wine glass from the top of the Steinway, which was already covered in drink rings, then scribbling down the notes on a piece of manuscript paper. As he finished he said in ecstasy: ‘It’s miraculous, Boris.’

Boris shook his head and, retrieving his glass, filled it up.

‘It’s too good, too little, too nice, too predictable.’

‘You’re crazy, Boris,’ interrupted Abby, who had heard that last version. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

‘Stunning.’ Flora picked up the piece of manuscript paper and sang the tune, lifting the hair on the back of everyone’s necks.