‘I can see how you would,’ Anna admitted. ‘Your mother and father, and Sep, and… ’

The prospect of Tom joining this list cut through Jelly. She could cancel everything and go to him now; perhaps marry him, even though it was too late to build a life together. Or she could accept his exhortations to stay away and concentrate on her music. If only there were wise words to be found. If only she had known where she really stood with Sep before he had been killed.

‘You know – I was thinking… ’

‘What, Jelly?’

‘Don’t laugh, but we could try the glass game.’

Anna recoiled a little. ‘You want to do that? Are you sure?’

‘Perhaps there’d be advice. Even – my mother?’ She tried to smile, to hide the pain she experienced at the notion of her beloved mama trying to reach her through a moving tumbler – or Sep doing so. Tom’s words expanded in her mind: be true to yourself, true to your vocation. Glass games were not true to anything Jelly held dear; but Adila made it look so easy…

‘I didn’t think you believed in it,’ said Anna.

‘I don’t.’ Jelly gave a laugh. ‘It’s just a distraction. Perhaps we’ll ask questions only for you. About the nice young man you mentioned the other day?’

Anna nodded, her expression unreadable.

Jelly fetched from Adila’s bureau a set of small letter cards, which they used for word games, and laid them out alphabetically in a circle on the dining room table. In the centre she set in place an upended tumbler. A scratch and whine at the door revealed Caesar, who should have been in his basket by the back door, but had begun to hanker for company on hearing their voices. She let him in; he lay across her feet and thumped his tail before going to sleep, nose on paws.

Next she scrawled ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Goodbye’ on pieces of paper ripped from a notebook, barely legible in her strange, wide-lettered writing. As a child in Hungary she had gone to school for only eight days; each time she’d cried so much that eventually her mother could stand it no longer and kept her home. After that, Jelly played her violin to her heart’s content.

They lit a sole candle; the rest of the room disappeared into the night, while an island of creamy gold highlighted the whorls in the wooden surface. Now this seemed a cavern fit for other-worldly activities. The two women sat opposite one another, exchanging smiles to conceal their nerves.

‘Ready, darling?’ Jelly said, to reassure herself as much as Anna. ‘So, let’s sit quietly and clear our minds… ’

They waited, each with one finger on the glass, silent, focusing. The candle flame flickered in Jelly’s exhalations.

‘Do we need to invoke something?’ Anna whispered.