I am learning the piano, more than half a century after I last played. I would like to be able to play Erik Satie. My father was a piano teacher and we even had two pianos in the house for a time when I was a child—one stood in my bedroom. In a London music shop in the 1970s I found a book of sheet music by Satie and, with fond memories of his music enhancing the mood of European films such as Carlos Saura’s Elisa, Vida Mia, I brought the book back to Melbourne and presented it to Dad. He was not familiar with the early twentieth-century French composer but he quickly learned to play the quirky melodies with their odd time signatures and plaintive chords.

Today, at the end of my first lesson for decades, my teacher starts to play the first of the Trois Gnossiennes. As I watch him play, his smooth fingers on the keys fade into the gnarled fingers of my father: their slightly swollen joints after he developed arthritis; the split nail on the index finger of his right hand, relic of a long-forgotten accident. My eyes blur with tears.