The drawing room beneath its Wedgwood mouldings was filling with guests, who gathered in groups to converse and browse through the new book. Swedish and British mingled, as always at 27 Portland Place: the official, the titled, the press and a smattering of artistic types hand-picked to offset them. To one side, near the windows, stood a table piled high with fresh copies, the paper so new that it still smelled of wood. ‘It’s real! It’s out!’ Adila pressed one to her heart.

‘Of course it’s real,’ Alec sighed. ‘Otherwise what have you been working on all these months?’

Jelly had read little of the book, beyond the extracts that Adila had foisted aloud on them all. The proofs had been strewn about Hurricane House, but she had been too busy working to take much notice.

‘Jelly! Welcome, welcome, my dear.’ Erik kissed her on both cheeks. ‘As you know, you have most of a chapter.’ Smiles waltzed about his jowls as guest after guest gushed congratulations and asked him to sign their copies. Ebba with her walking stick stood by his side, gracious and pallid, the corners of her mouth fixed upward as if by staples.

Around the room scents mingled – beeswax polish, passing whiffs of Chanel and dill sauce from the canapés; photographers’ flashbulbs turned the assembled guests into freeze-frame silhouettes, glasses poised at various heights. Jelly wasn’t sure if the cameras were for the embassy or from the press. Normally a constant bright planet, she felt adrift today in an unfamiliar universe. She accepted a glass of wine, then retreated to the stairs with a copy of the book to see what Erik had written about her.

It was right at the end, entitled ‘Retrospect’. He’d called her ‘J d’A’. The messages were there – well, many of them. The book suggested that the first their little group knew of the spirits was the occasion on which ‘two friends’ – Jelly and Anna, evidently – had received the initial communication from Schumann or his representative, and that it was only after this that Adila discovered her gift as psychic ‘sensitive’. Why would he say that, when he and Adila and half the people they knew had been playing the glass game at salons and parlours and after-dinner parties for decades, even if it had become less prevalent of late? To put the responsibility on to her, Jelly, when she was the most reluctant participant? Perhaps to push his friendship with Adila into the background? Then there came the story of Schott’s involvement, though not of Ulli’s, and the tale of how Erik himself had gone to Berlin and rooted out the manuscript after others had failed to find it. This account made the author of the book into a hero. She took a sip of wine. Her old friend George would have directed her to something stronger for this occasion.