‘There’s a telegram. She’s travelling in France, but she’s sending you all her love too. Anna called to say she’ll come if there is no snow today. But I think in Sussex, there is snow… ’

‘The Joachims, perhaps?’

‘If Elisabeth is here, she hasn’t told me. Perhaps she forgot… ’

‘Jelly, I’m here.’ Tovey was in the doorway, leaning against the frame and wiping a tear from the corner of his eye at the sight of her.

‘Donald!’ Jelly jumped out of her chair and cascaded across the room to him. He flushed nearly as purple as the Savoy porter. ‘You found your tickets?’ She had booked complimentary seats for him.

‘Yes, thank you, my dear, and I have a friend with me. I think you may find many unexpected friends here tonight, visible and otherwise. See how far you’ve come? You’ve turned an old academic codger like me into a mystic believer and yourself into a heroine.’

‘But I’ve made an almighty mess for everyone and they’ve all told me so.’

‘Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. You see tonight as an end, but it’s a beginning. This concerto has come back to life because of you, whatever anyone says, and violinists are going to play it, love it and understand it better for generations to come. That’s thanks to you. You’ve achieved something everyone wants. Call it, if you like, immortality.’

Jelly pondered his words for a moment. She had never looked for that, merely for a slightly longer lifespan on the concert platform; it was a strange idea, one that might mean little if Herr Hitler could not be restrained from his military ambitions for ever. Besides, she felt that just now she would trade any amount of immortality for one word from Ulli Schultheiss. It was several months since his last phone call. Today no card had arrived, no letter, no telegram. Willy Strecker had wired a message, but Ulli had not signed it. She let herself imagine, for an instant, another type of world, one in which a German man and a partly Jewish woman, older than he was, could meet unencumbered, laugh together, dance the tango, play Schumann, and goodness knows what else, without the English Channel, mad governments and prejudiced societies to stop them.

Instead, should she take all that unborn feeling and sink it in the sea? She chose: she would not. She couldn’t mourn a formless love; she’d already mourned too many others. There could be another way to look at it: perhaps it didn’t matter if people she loved weren’t physically there. Presence, as Tovey suggested, exists in other forms.

And the messages? What was the truth? The subconscious, or Schumann’s spirit? Jelly chose again: Schumann’s spirit. On the same principle as Ulli’s.