My grandmother had a piano in her heart, and, when I was young, she used to play to me. Each time she said softly that she wasn’t a musician ; then she would put her hands up there and start to play, so that I easily imagined not being a musician was a gift, and her declaration was a prayer. What she played is hard to remember, for it was one with the player and the sense of the rooms about her; together, they were rugged, dry, beaten by the world, yet also durable, smooth and above all functional. This was not the music of inspiration, but the music of survival; that any music remained was surely testament to something universal in both the composition and its performer.

Many afternoons I followed the strains of a particular elegy out the door; it always brought me up against two ladies dressed in lace, their parasols like museum pieces, and when I asked them questions, they explained, politely enough, that we had not been introduced, so there was nothing they could do to accommodate me. At that point it was usual for me to take my leave, which I did according to the following ritual: I would go up to the prettier lady and press her hand very gently, as I had read somewhere in a book. Her cheeks would flush momentarily, and then, with a fathomless expression, she would turn away.

The scene was poignant, attended by three particular chords; in Romantic times they might have held themselves in check a little longer; they might have marvelled a little at their own poetry.

But my grandmother was an Edwardian; she and the chords, living in different eras, remained to be introduced, and it was concession enough that she volunteered even a little rallentando on their behalf. Thus the elegy upheld its plaint, though it also conceded, on a slightly whimsical note, that these things cannot be helped, and it’s actually more important to keep ourselves busy.

But this time something was different; I had sensed it before she lifted her hands; I had sensed it even before I asked her to play. It was in the drawing room – a whiteness, or, more precisely, a pallor that entered from the ceiling and spread itself indiscriminately about the contents of the room. In my own home, it should have proved harmless, falling upon surfaces constructed to its taste, and perhaps even inconceivable without it; but here, among the gas lamps and the candles where it did not belong, its acidic light revealed and illuminated only at the expense of something else. Like a nothing with substance, like a bulked-out shell of a thing, it forced itself into the spaces where something more real existed, so that there was no longer room enough for both.

Then I saw that the streets around us were being torn down to make way for new things, but by the time my grandmother had found her shoes, the damage was already done; the new nation was trickling through holes in the houses, slipping silently in a continuous stream over low walls and seething in turmoil through the open streets, where, all around, broken principles and shards of old ideals twirled and floundered in the foam. Balancing on the doorstep, fascinated by the flood, I could not refrain from touching this determined flow, whose viscous strength might carry one to the moon, and maybe further. At length, my grandmother joined me, but rather than send me in as I expected, she surveyed the scene a little wistfully, as though this were something she had seen before, whose consequences she had anticipated. Then, to my astonishment, she declared: “You know, my child, I rather think it’s time I join them.”

Before I could respond, she had stepped resolutely into the crowd. She was scarcely there a moment; now her green skirts were upside down, one leg was between two shoulders; she was sucked powerlessly among heads and epaulettes, sodden scraps of her dignity trailing like cans after a car.

At a loss, I ran along the pavement, hoping the crowd might set her down. But though she sometimes tumbled into reach, the arms promptly whirled her away again. Then I lost sight of her; then I caught sight of her once more on an adjoining street; then, for a long time, she struggled and revolved slowly where two great thoroughfares thundered against one another. In a little hollow there, at the heart of the fury, her worn, slightly whiskery face rotated, followed fast by the grey paint swill of her hair.

Then, somewhere in an elevated garden, where a café looked down onto the street from between two linden trees, I saw again the two women who did not deign to dance. They were watching with patient tolerance, and a very small bell was ringing, again and again, at the end of a wire. I ran up to them, up a blankness of curved steps and walls, with stone branches furrowed like a face, and a few well clipped shrubs in their corners, upside down. The pretty lady’s face wore an expression of weary amazement; the other lady was picking at her skirt. Somehow divining my intention, the waiter retrieved a boat hook from somewhere, which the women briefly saluted: “Youth and vigour before age and experience …” he suggested by way of conciliation, since clearly neither of them had any intention of touching it. And so, for the rest of the day, I was stretched out there in the dust, though all I could retrieve were broken bottles and ends of wire and pieces of old lace. In the end, when it was dark, I went away and sat down under a bridge through which the hollow traffic moaned and shook, and I put them all together, side by side, the pieces of glass and wire and fabric, believing that if I closed my eyes I could turn them into something else, just as I believed a different life was beginning to live me far away, and one day I too would take up its clarion call – at which moment I would be reduced, in an instant, to everything that represented me, with no one left to decipher what remained, or to make light of the place to which I had gone.