Jelly sat at her bedroom table, thinking hard. To bother Chamberlain over the date of a concert would be madness – even though he was the one person whose word might hold sway in Germany. Still, Alec had confided that he was not convinced the national hopes invested in the prime minister were entirely justified. He had come home from work distressed by news from Nuremberg concerning the Nazis’ largest rally so far, and meanwhile was dealing with Foreign Office issues further afield: in Palestine two British officials had been murdered, and in China, under invasion by Japan, the British ambassador had been wounded in an air raid and the aggressors refused to apologise. The legal aspects of all this landed plumb on Alec’s desk.

One thing worried him more than all the rest. Something odd, he told them, was going on near Weimar, at Buchenwald: a new type of prison camp in which they thought the Nazis were holding individuals they considered ‘enemies of the state’. Within select Foreign Office circles, several such camps were known to exist already, including one at Sachsenhausen, but now it seemed a much larger compound was being constructed. His colleagues were attempting to gather information, but he felt helpless in the face of such a thing; there was little anyone could do from London to prevent it. ‘You’re wearing yourself out,’ Adila fussed. His cough had worsened into a lung infection.

And at a time like this, Jelly wanted to write to Neville Chamberlain about Schumann. She herself had to laugh.

‘On the other hand,’ said Tovey, ‘you have to stand up for yourself, Jelly. Because, as you say, it is the time it is, and nobody else is going to do it for you.’

Jelly rolled a piece of paper into Anna’s old typewriter and began to bash out with two forefingers a letter to the prime minister.

Chapter 15

The next morning Adila went to the newsagent and bought every paper she could find that was likely to cover Horizons of Immortality and its association with Jelly and Schumann. At the dining-room table, the pages spread around them like a field full of landmines – and the detonators let rip.

After 15 minutes, Jelly, shattered, shook her head. ‘I can’t look at another one. I can’t.’

‘It’s nonsense, darling,’ Adila declared, though Jelly had never seen her so flummoxed. ‘What do they know? Nothing. They weren’t there with us. They didn’t see the glass. They can’t prove what we say isn’t true and they’re not even trying to. They’re writing out of their backsides.’

‘I don’t understand. How can they be so sure they’re right when they don’t know anything? They didn’t even call and ask.’

‘Darling, they were never going to believe us. They’d already made up their minds. Whatever we said, they’d have quoted us against ourselves, twisted things to make us look bad.’