Erik had yet another idea. ‘Perhaps we should ask Ulli to look more closely at the embargo – there might be a legal loophole,’ he said. ‘And also we might consider asking the British Ambassador in Berlin to raise the matter with Herr Hitler himself. I hear he is fond of music.’

*

When time allowed, reading offered the single best escape Jelly knew. Aldous Huxley sent her a copy of Brave New World. She took it up to the Green Room to begin.

What horror emanated from her old friend’s prose: the portrait of a society that denied family, destroyed love, grew babies in bell jars and made certain that anyone different – raised with the old values of ineluctable ties between mother and child or man and woman – would probably face execution or suicide. How and why had he conceived such a vision?

‘You saw Metropolis, didn’t you?’ Adila remarked. ‘It’s in vogue to be clever like that, to conjure up nasty futures for fun.’

‘That was years ago… ’ This is more than fashion, Jelly wanted to protest. Something in Aldous must have prompted him to envisage that Hatchery and Conditioning Centre that had ‘only’ 34 storeys.

Myra sent a postcard from New York, addressed to Jelly as ‘Darling Gut-Scraper’, signed ‘Hyra Mess’, and showing the tallest building in the world, which had many more storeys than that; it was a little over three years since Herbert Hoover had pressed a button to switch its lights on for the first time. The New York Jelly used to love would lie in the Empire State Building’s shadow from now on.

Myra’s increasing celebrity in New York had turned into a long, intense love affair with the city. Jelly wasn’t certain why her own fortunes in the US had not expanded too; she had not been invited back after touring there with Myra two years previously. Perhaps she needed to engage a manager to make such things possible. She and Adila preferred to employ a PA, preferably the much-missed Anna; but besides having an assistant of her own, Myra swore by her managers. Jelly had none, and her administrative skills had never extended to making calls on her own behalf to concert promoters, orchestras and music clubs. That – as she knew from the cathedral tour – would take time away from working on the music. And so the dates in her diary were starting to seem sparser than of late. Each week she promised herself that next week she would do something about it. But recently she’d noticed that when she and Myra went out together, admirers often approached them, wanting an autograph. Myra’s autograph.

‘It’s because of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ Adila insisted. ‘Everyone’s crazy for it.’ Myra’s piano transcription of the Bach piece was selling by the lorry-load. ‘You need something like that to help you out of this – this – ’