“What’s on your agenda for today?” says West.
“Want some more toast?” says Tony. He nods and she gets up to tend the toaster, pausing to kiss the top of his head, inhaling his familiar scent of scalp and shampoo. His hair up there is thinning: soon he’ll have a tonsure, like a monk’s. For the moment she’s taller than he is: it isn’t often she gets such a bird’s-eye view.
There’s no need for West to be told who she’s having lunch with. He doesn’t like Roz and Charis. They make him nervous. He feels—rightly—that they know too much about him. “Nothing very exciting;” she says.
IV
After breakfast West goes up to his third-floor study to work, and Tony changes out of her dressing gown, into jeans and acotton pullover, and marks more papers. From upstairs she can hear a rhythmical thumping, punctuated by what sounds like a mixed chorus of mating hyenas, cows being hit with sledgehammers, and tropical birds in pain.
West is a musicologist. Some of what he does is traditional—influences, variants, derivations—but he’s also involved in one of those cross-disciplinary projects that have become so popular lately. He’s mixed up with a bunch of neurophysiologists from the medical school; together they’re studying the effects of music on the human brain—different kinds of music, and different kinds of noises, because some of the things West comes up with can hardly be thought of as music. They want to know which part of the brain is listening, and especially which half of it. They think this information may he useful to stroke victims, and to people who have lost parts of their brains in car accidents. They wire people’s brains up, play the music—or noises—and watch the results on a coloured computer screen.