‘There’s another possibility.’ Tovey was in lecture mode, thinking aloud rather than engaging in conversation, a pattern into which he often fell. ‘With Brahms, Schumann, Clara and Onkel Jo, it’s often a matter of a tribute. Their music is stuffed full of ciphers and symbols that were private references to one another. Take Brahms’s personal motto, F-A-F – frei aber froh, free but happy. That was based on Onkel Jo’s own one, F-A-E, frei aber einsam, free but lonely. Onkel Jo must have spotted all the Schumanneries and Clara-isms in Brahms, and if we had three clear days, I’d show them to you and you’d never hear a note of it the same way again. But now, listen to what happens in the Brahms Violin Concerto immediately after that little Schumann theme appears for the first time.’ He half-closed his eyes and played the extract by ear. ‘It’s the darkest, most inward-looking moment in the score, before all those strong rhythms banish it, and in comes the violin for the first time, Onkel Jo in full flood. Now that we have this context, I believe Brahms was thinking of Schumann when he wrote that, don’t you?’

Jelly imagined she had lifted a lid and beneath it found an unsuspected universe of space and stars. Not that anything should surprise her now.

‘You see how vital it is that this piece should be played and known,’ Tovey said. ‘It doesn’t only tell us about itself; it tells us much about Schumann and perhaps even more about Brahms.’

He stood and stretched his hands, wincing slightly at the pain in his knuckles. ‘Come along, Jelly, what about a little stroll before supper?’

*

Tovey’s idea of a ‘little stroll’ involved striding across country at a good five miles an hour. The flat fields were slick with mud and Jelly, in borrowed galoshes, picked her way round puddles and stray clumps of barley, trying to keep up.

Around them lingered the quietness that always drew Tovey back to East Anglia. Here, in a slice of nature that seemed 90 per cent sky, he could listen to the music in his head without the intrusion of city sound-clutter. It was early evening and their shadows faded in and out, length and shape exaggerated.

‘Do you know, Jelly, of a woman named Bettina von Arnim?’

‘No? Who is she?’

‘Back in the 1850s she nearly became Onkel Jo’s mother-in-law. He was very much in love with her daughter, Gisela. He proposed, but was turned down and I don’t believe he ever got over it.’

Jelly was astonished, never having heard this tale before. ‘What became of the girl?’

‘She was a fine writer of fairy tales and she married – much later – the son of Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm. They were great literary types together. Then she had some nervous trouble, sadly, and eventually she died rather too young.’