‘We must hand on the house to the next man in the job. As for Sweden, I don’t know yet. There’ll be big changes, for sure.’

Adila excused herself to fetch the dessert, then vanished to the bathroom, pleading stomach pains.

*

Immediately after Christmas Jelly and Adila both had to set off for new UK tours. Once upon a time Anna Robertson would have gone along to keep Jelly company, but now Jelly travelled alone – and perhaps that was best. The distances were substantial, the cold intense; no good for a recovering consumptive. Hull, Nottingham, Sheffield, Bognor Regis. She battled with icy draughts on stage and strained her eyes against dim lighting. At least the audiences warmed her spirit: people who loved music, wanted to listen to what she could give them, and even came to thank her for it; people who didn’t give a damn how she found the Schumann, as long as she would play it for them someday. On occasion, mercifully, they didn’t know about the furore at all; then she enjoyed the relief of pretending it hadn’t happened.

Yet often she was sure they knew, but weren’t saying so, and she’d wonder half the night what gossip there might be behind her back. She’d never worried about such things before. She’d been too busy enjoying herself and charming people. Now she felt worn out by slow trains and bumpy roads; and the drizzle and the wind were eating at her joints. She would excuse herself politely from well-intentioned post-concert dinners and go straight to bed in whatever hotel or bed and breakfast she’d been booked into, and she didn’t mind if it was simple, because nobody had any money these days and she had to do her bit to help them get by. Sometimes she ate little after the concert except tinned cream of tomato soup and a ham sandwich, sitting on a sagging mattress, a solitary lightbulb dangling overhead.

One night, just before the new year, she opened a newspaper and found there the obituary of Ravel, who had died after undergoing brain surgery. His birdlike gaze was still alive in her mind: the way they’d laughed together at Kettner’s back in the Twenties, the gusto with which he tucked his napkin into his collar to protect his elegant clothes, and the thrill of anticipation when she opened the parcel he’d sent and saw Tzigane for the first time. She cried herself to sleep.

*

At last, at the start of February, just two weeks before the concerto, she reached the end of the tour, on a Sunday afternoon in Eastbourne. She stayed with her old friends the Southerns, enjoying a rare good night’s sleep, besides a respite from tinned tomato soup; in the morning she headed home, ready to gasp with relief at the sight of Victoria Station’s blackened archways and the smell of lingering London fog.