Ulli tried always to think first of his duties, not of his rights, and to be a man of honour, for the sake of Schott’s. With his feet firmly on the office floor, it took him no more than two seconds to imagine the outcome were he to have an affair with Jelly d’Arányi and be found out. A scandal: an older woman, at least partly Jewish, a starry soloist with a past that people rumoured was dubious – when he began to mention her name he soon discovered that some in the music business thought she’d been Bartók’s mistress, others that she was a man-eating femme fatale, still more that she would never even touch a man in preference to her violin. Besides, she had a vested interest in a work that she wanted his company to publish. Worse still, with relations between their countries plunging into the Channel, he had no idea how he might ever manage to see her again.

Even when her image flickered before his eyelids, delectable as palacsinta, even when he noticed, at Sunday lunch with his mother, that he hadn’t heard one word she had been saying because his inner ear was full of violin music, even when he went about his usual business in Mainz, cycling past the cathedral and the sleepy river, and wondered what had happened to the part of himself that was still in London, dancing the tango and reciting Heinrich Heine, there was no choice at all. Once he stopped at the cathedral and, most uncharacteristically, went inside to say a prayer for peace of mind. Yet something about the altarpiece paintings there of the Madonna, perhaps the tilt of her head, reminded him of Jelly. Ulli made a rapid retreat.

Their correspondence continued – yet whenever he picked up his fountain pen to write to her, he found himself chewing the end of its barrel with anxiety. Her friend had died; mourning him, she wrote, she had been careless on tour, fell and broke her finger; soon afterwards, she was laid low by a septic throat that affected her ears; and recovering from that, she fell again and hurt her back. She was having to cancel concerts, much to her own horror, and planning ahead was difficult with nobody to help. At any other point in history except for 1914–18, he reflected, this time would have been free and she could have come to visit him, or he could have begged for some leave from the office and gone to her.