Warmed by a veritable goblet of vino rosso, consumed with a deli style sliced cheese sandwich, she had put down the letter, and moving across the living room, picked up her Vasile violin from a piece of sheet music resting on her Mother’s Bechstein baby grand. She began the string section of Schubert’s Fantasy * for violin and piano that she had played with her Mother’s accompaniment just before her passing. Of course performing last night’s duo ‘solo’ didn’t achieve much, except to stymie its execution.

Carefully placing the instrument back on the piano, she again teetered on the brink by riskily choosing instead a compact disc recording of the Andante from a Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, the second, where an obbligato violin weaves in and out of the keyboard accompaniment with a cello, effecting a piano trio. * She chose it intentionally (silly girl) stirring from within a memory of herself on violin practising the same with her gifted parents, and their familial laughter during this preparatory jam for her college graduation recital of the same piece.

She recalled that last night, trance-like, she had removed her Father’s cello from its open case and leaned it against the deserted piano.

“First there was a family of three,” she had thought, “then there were two and now there is one.”

And so her evening ended as it began, in tears, and as she listened to the compact disc, she noticed a book of Leonardo paintings from the Louvre nesting nearby, a collection she then took up and opened, perusing and musing over the painter’s curious composition of The Virgin and Child with St Anne, * an image that at first sight strangely concurred with the ambivalent, background music, as it bubbled along.