Jelly prepared to play her first notes, which entered before the orchestral paragraph was finished, commenting, echoing, then wandering into the discursive trails of a melody that arched like a hothouse creeper, climbing as if seeking the light. Tears oozed down her nose as her fingers and bow felt their way forward. Finally the longed-for concerto was in her hands, yet she found she was doubting her own capacity to play it. Her injuries, illness and arm problems had left her lacking her old assurance; she had cancelled concerts and lost others; her records, it seemed, were not selling so well now, while buyers flocked instead to grab those by Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and, of course, Yehudi Menuhin. Ten or fifteen years ago, the world’s greatest composers were queuing up to write new works for her. Four years ago the public had thronged to her cathedral concerts: young and elderly, wealthy and impoverished alike. Would they still? She had been reluctant to admit, even to herself, the degree of hope that she was investing in the Schumann Violin Concerto as the vehicle that could rescue her. She had thought she was saving it. Perhaps the truth was the other way around.

‘Bloody hell!’ Adila grumbled. ‘I can’t play this. You need a proper pianist.’

Jelly, notes somersaulting in front of her eyes, was trying to navigate the theme’s progress through Schumann’s twisting branches. It was dark in this woodland, she sensed; he, too, was trying to find his way. Ulli was a fine pianist. If only he’d brought it to her himself, they could have read it through together.

The curve of contrast came back, deep down: a contralto, as if singing words of good sense from Schumann’s sane self, perhaps from Clara. How could someone supposedly losing his faculties write music of such raw tenderness?

‘Slow movement,’ suggested Adila. ‘Easier.’

A few seconds in, though, Jelly understood that it wasn’t. The melody was there, yet not there. It began after another theme in the orchestra, led by a solo cello, but then fragmented: hinted at, displaced. And it was as if she knew it already, as if she knew how it should go, yet it didn’t, not quite. The violin line meandered, and that second theme of the first movement had seeded itself here too, twining through the music in the form of an innocuous, almost imperceptible link from lower register to upper.

‘Sai, you are hopeless.’ Adila yawned while Jelly flopped into a chair. ‘How can you cry now?’

‘Adi, how can you not cry now?’

‘I’m not you. But, you know? It’s just come back to me.’

‘What has?’