Adila strode down to the kitchen. An egg – boiled – stood uneaten in a porcelain cup. The pantry door was open; the lid was off the cake tin and a chunk of cake had gone.

‘Sai! Where are you? What’s going on?’

She stumped back to the ground floor. Jelly wouldn’t have gone out without her coat. The drawing room and dining room were deserted. In the Green Room, on the velvet chaise longue, she found nothing but an upturned book, which belonged to Alec.

Only the music room was left. Two cups sat abandoned on the coffee tables. The picture of Sep Kelly was in the wrong place. A figure in a brown skirt and fawn blouse lay prostrate on the rug.

Adila plummeted down beside her. ‘Sai! Speak to me!’

‘Adi?’ Her voice was weak.

‘You’re alive! Darling, what happened? Did you faint?’

She half helped, half hauled her sister towards the sofa, where Jelly slumped with her head down over her knees.

‘Menuhin,’ Jelly muttered.

‘Sai, you are raving. You think Menuhin was here?’

‘Not Yehudi. His father. He sat just there.’

‘What did he say to you, this man?’

‘I’m not sure. I can’t remember… When he’d gone I took some of my painkillers, the really strong ones. Several. They calm me down.’

Adila made for the telephone.

‘Adi, I’m all right, I don’t need a doctor.’

‘What did he say to you?’

‘I don’t know… he wants me to give up my concert… he says I’m washed up, no good anymore and apparently it’s all my fault – the scheduling, the Nazis, Schumann being – I don’t know, Schumann being imprisoned by the devil… All because of something I said or did to try and save him and myself, and – ’

‘Hush, you’re talking gibberish. When did he leave?’

‘I don’t know what happened until you came in.’

‘Let’s put you to bed and I call the doctor. Come, now.’

Jelly managed the stairs and crumpled onto her bed the moment Adila had flung her suitcase off the covers. It couldn’t be clearer: she was finished. Tipped over, all washed up, fit for nothing but incarceration. Scenes flew behind her eyelids. Schumann, seeking oblivion in the Rhine, then buried alive in the asylum at Endenich; his concerto, passing from Robert to Clara to Jo and then, abandoned, into the library; and her old self, everybody’s darling little Hungarian, now ailing and vilified in a world she could no longer recognise. She thought of the concerto, alone and on the fringes, with a last chance to prove its worth. And if that image was what had made her reach for the painkillers, she could no longer remember.

The doctor decided against sending Jelly to hospital. She had not taken a serious overdose; most of the problem was simply that she was overwrought. She needed a good rest.