‘I wonder, Miss d’Arányi, did you perhaps suffer malnutrition during the Great War?’ the doctor asked.

‘You were very thin as a girl,’ Adila reminded her. She insisted on going with Jelly to all her appointments.

‘But not malnourished,’ Jelly insisted. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘That kind of thing can affect the strength of a lady’s bones later in life,’ the specialist explained, kindly enough.

‘That’s interesting – nobody ever told me that before. But I’m 42. Is that really “later in life”? And, forgive me, but each doctor I see tells me something different… ’

He gave a wry smile. ‘I find it inspiring, but also alarming, to think how much we in medicine simply don’t know. I’d love to see how the profession will look a hundred years from now.’

Jelly put her blouse back on; she had to fumble with the buttons. ‘I hear there’s a cure being developed for TB. Is that true?’

‘At the moment it’s very expensive. But one day, I hope, the sooner the better, we’ll have medical treatment available to all, no matter the cost. Don’t you agree, Miss d’Arányi, that no human life should be valued less highly than another?’

‘Then we must stop the wars, too.’

The doctor gave her an astute glance; he knew her generation well, those women whose loved ones never came back from the trenches.

*

‘Jelly, my dear,’ came Tovey’s voice on the telephone, ‘I have in my hand a copy of a French journal that contains an analysis of the Schumann Violin Concerto. It came out in December, but it has only reached me now.’

Jelly tried to speak, and couldn’t.

‘It would seem that under this regime, access to the concerto isn’t forbidden any longer. It’s just forbidden to us.’

‘But Eugenie Schumann – ?’

‘I hear she is even more outraged than we are. It looks as if Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda have decided there’s a use for this piece, so they’re annexing it themselves.’

‘But they can’t. It’s ours!’

‘Unfortunately they can and they will. They can do anything they like. And remember, it is only you and I who consider that the Schumann concerto is “ours”… ’

The article arrived the next day with the first post: a brown-paper parcel addressed in Tovey’s writing. Jelly shut herself in her room with the package, counted to ten, then pulled off the string.

The words were real, printed: Le Concerto pour violon et orchestre par Robert Schumann. The article was in French; the author’s name, Hermann Springer, German. And it said that the work was to be published by Breitkopf und Härtel in Germany – not Schott’s.