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how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook. The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life. Here in the cavernous basement kitchen at 3.55 a.m., in a single pool of light, as though on stage, is Theo Perowne, eighteen years old, his formal education already long behind him, reclining on a tilted-back kitchen chair, his legs in tight black jeans, his feet in boots of soft black leather (paid for with his own money) crossed on the edge of the table. As unlike his sister Daisy as randomness will allow. He’s drinking from a largetumbler of water. In the other hand he holds the folded-back music magazine he’s reading. A studded leather jacket lies in a heap on the floor. Propped against a cupboard is his guitar in its case. It’s already acquired a few steamer trunk labels – Trieste, Oakland, Hamburg, Val d’Isère. There’s space for more. From a compact stereo player on a shelf above a library of cookery books comes the sound, like soft drizzle, of an all-night pop station.
    Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician. He himself was simply processed, without question or complaint, in a polished continuum from school, through medical school, to the dogged acquisition of clinical experience, in London, Southend-on-Sea, Newcastle, Bellevue Emergency Department in New York and London again. How have he and Rosalind, such dutiful, conventional types, given rise to such a free spirit? One who dresses, with a certain irony, in the style of the bohemian fifties, who won’t read books or let himself be persuaded to stay on at school, who’s rarely out of bed before lunchtime, whose passion is for mastery in all the nuances of the tradition, Delta, Chicago, Mississippi, for certain licks that contain for him the key to all mysteries, and for the success of his band, New Blue Rider. He has an enlarged version of his mother’s face and soft eyes, not green though, but dark brown – the proverbial almonds, with a faint and exotic slant. He has his mother’s wide open good-willed look – and a stronger more compact variant on his father’s big-boned lankiness. Usefully for his line of work, he’s also got the hands. In the confined, gossipy world of British blues, Theo is spoken of as a man of promise, already mature in his grasp of the idiom, who might even one day walk with the gods, the British gods that is – Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Eric Clapton. Someone has written somewhere that Theo Perowne plays like an angel.
    Naturally, his father agrees, despite his doubts about the limits of the form. He likes the blues well enough – in fact,he was the one who showed the nine-year-old Theo how it worked. After that, grandfather took over. But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.
    And there’s something in the loping authority of Theo’s playing that revives for Henry the inexplicable lure of that simple progression. Theo is the sort of guitarist who plays in an open-eyed trance, without moving his body or ever glancing down at his hands. He