She kissed him. Nothing but Bach would do. She stood by the window, letting the D minor Partita speak the thoughts she could not voice. Outside, rain spattered through the trees and the clouds breathed above them; a normal day on which someone would be born and someone else would die, someone would conceive and another would divorce, someone would win some triumph and another would lose a lover, all in one fragment of time, yet Bach lived on to talk of eternity through four strings, a bow and a strange-shaped wooden box with curled orifices to let the music out.

She finished the Partita and its Chaconne. Even that didn’t feel enough, so she played the E major Partita as well. Perhaps it would cheer everyone up. It was only after an hour had passed, in which the sun broke through and made the damp windowpanes shine, that a nurse tapped on the door.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have to give him a check, so would you please excuse us for a few minutes?’

‘Of course.’ She put her violin back in its case; Tovey draped her coat over her shoulders. His hand rested briefly on her elbow. His joints appeared more gnarled than she remembered, and the skin rougher – the hand of a man moving too rapidly onwards from middle age.

Downstairs, a lounge was designed for visitors, a space draped with autumn-hued curtains, each wall set with brown armchairs and sofas and, dominating everything, a grandfather clock with an overwhelming tick. Jelly wished it would keep quiet. An upright piano stood in one corner, lid closed.

Tovey, gazing about the room, clapped his hands to test its acoustic, singing out loud the while. ‘It could be better if they took out the curtains and some of those rugs. Then we could have a house concert for everybody.’ He clapped and hooted again. A puzzled staff member looked in to remind him, tactfully, that it was afternoon and the patients might be sleeping.

‘But you want Jelly’s music here,’ Tovey said. ‘This lady’s violin playing has healing properties.’

The nurse looked embarrassed. ‘Perhaps at teatime, sir.’

Jelly chose a soft armchair and curled up in it. Silence, but for that interminable clock with its pendulum: swing and clonk, swing and clonk, on and on. If she gave a concert in here, they would have to stop the clock. You can’t stop a clock in a place where people have come to die. She closed her eyes and at once images assaulted her, showing her yesterday and today, this century and the last; Tom, Sep and her mother; Bartók, Ravel and her father; Hungary, England, Paris; George Yeats, at whose house she was staying in Rathfarnham, last night sipping red wine and showing her 4,000 pages of old mystery automatic writing; and –

‘Jelly?’ Tovey was crouching by her chair. ‘You’ve been asleep for an hour.’