Busch had not played the concerto, so Elisabeth was wrong yet again. People were on edge, afraid, lashing out at anything within reach; really, the issue was Germany. Jelly remembered the bombing, the ceaseless fear, letters from Sep, his sister Maisie arriving in tears. Why should she be attacked when she was afraid too?

‘Come and stay,’ Anna said, by phone from Sussex.

‘I can’t. It’s sweet of you, but I won’t drag you into this insanity,’ said Jelly.

By night she sometimes fell into a fitful doze that resembled a kind of trance. She seemed to see Sep far away, in a grave; she still knew his face, riven by wounds. Then she seemed to hear him laughing as he left, and she thought he was closer to his companions, those elite young Oxford officers, than he’d ever been to her, and that he preferred their company to that of a gauche little girl who wouldn’t grow up even if she passed 20, or 30, or 40. And the dream merged into another, where he embraced her, then told her that he loved her and he would come back. That was the worst dream of all.

‘Sai, it won’t do!’ Adila exploded, around 11am, when Jelly surfaced, pale and headachey. ‘Snap out of it.’

It wasn’t that she was nervous, but when the day finally arrived, assuming the Nazis could not stop the performance in February, how could she stand up on the platform of the Queen’s Hall and play one note, wondering whether the audience might laugh at her and perhaps throw things and…

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Adila grabbed a coffee cup and filled it for her. ‘Nobody throws tomatoes in the Queen’s Hall. Nobody throws tomatoes in England. This is the 20th century!’

‘I should cancel it.’

‘Never! Come on, where is your gumption?’

*

The Listener reviewed Horizons of Immortality and the baron was not best pleased. ‘It’s good to have a review at all,’ Adila reassured him, ‘even if it’s hot air that belongs in a different part of their anatomies.’

‘Anyone would think there was nothing in this book except the Schumann concerto,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s a few pages, right at the end.’

Reading the review – by one Harry Price, who apparently had a reputation for exposing fake spiritualists – Jelly was torn between righteous indignation and a suspicion that certain ideas of his could perhaps be worth noting. On the one hand, he declared, if the baron’s book was to be believed, here was proof that the spirit survives the body’s demise. But on the other, he suggested that a ‘sensitive’ could acquire information, forget it, then inadvertently reveal it in a trance or automatic writing. Scientists, he continued, would probably conclude that that was what had happened to the d’Arányis and friends.