The thing that amazed me when I heard it was its energy and brilliance and excitement and vitality, because it was so unlike Mary, who was always so staid and placid, and if you knew her you would almost have expected her to write dreamy piano pieces. It made me wonder, too, what William was like as a young man, just as hearing Mary’s music made me wonder what she had been like as a young woman. Had they always been so quiet and placid and subdued? Maybe it’s all in the music. I think her music is very much of its time, but it seems expertly crafted and quite bold in the same way that William’s is, and there is the intriguing possibility that he absorbed some of her influence on his music as much as the other way round, because when he met her he had just put away all his early works and started afresh. Mary’s work doesn’t sound as if it is by someone so young, it is sure of itself. I wonder how much she had written before the work we now know about. If I had asked her she would probably have said ‘Oh, a few pieces, Andrew.’