‘Don’t be frightened, there’s help coming. You’ll be all right.’ Jelly despaired of her own distraction. How could she have been so stupid as not to notice how ill Anna looked? Had she been working her too hard? Had she grown unwell so slowly that one small strain too much had tipped her over the edge? And never a complaint, never a word… Coughing blood – that was why the commuting crowd had rushed away from them.

‘Hartnell,’ mumbled Anna.

‘As if I’d leave you now!’

Anna’s eyes, huge in her too-thin face, gazed up into Jelly’s at last. ‘You’re so kind, Jelly,’ she said. ‘You’re such a good, sweet, real sort of person, and we never tell you… ’

The sound of a siren cut through the stairwell’s echoes, and a minute later two ambulance men were pounding up the steps towards them. Anna’s pulse was taken, her condition assessed and a stretcher brought. Jelly could hear the tension in their barked instructions.

‘She’s my secretary and my friend,’ she told them. ‘I’d like to go with her, please.’

Jelly perched on a fold-out seat in the back of the ambulance, holding Anna’s hand, searching her face for any sign of awareness. She had either drifted into a light sleep or started to lose consciousness. It had to be what Jelly feared: the dreaded tuberculosis, which nobody dared talk about, even though it was everywhere. Less usual, though, in Chelsea, where they had assumed it was a disease of the slums and the dosshouses.

‘That’s an infectious disease, Miss, and it can infect anyone,’ said the ambulance man who was monitoring Anna’s weak pulse.

If only she had bothered to see a doctor sooner. ‘Don’t let her die,’ Jelly prayed.

‘It’s all right, she’s not at death’s door,’ he reassured her. ‘But she should’ve been with us a long time ago.’

‘I envy your job. I should have liked to be a doctor.’

‘What’s the accent, Miss? Can’t say it’s one I know.’

Jelly recognised the tone of voice: suspicion. She used to hear it more often before, during and just after the war: the English loathing of anything foreign. Since the recent upheavals in Germany, the doubt had begun to creep back. ‘I’m Hungarian,’ she said, fighting back her alarm.

‘Hungarian? That’s a rum one… ’ She could hear his relief that she wasn’t German. ‘When are you going back?’

‘I’ve lived here more than 20 years.’

‘Oh yes? Don’t you miss it? A country of your own?’

‘This is my country now,’ she said, still quailing a little.

‘Can’t be easy, being foreign, things as they are. What’s in the box, then?’

‘Violin. I’m a musician.’

‘Oh, a Hungarian Gypsy violinist?’ The ambulance man laughed aloud – he had no idea why she might not laugh with him.