Jelly d’Arányi’s assistant, Anna Robertson, seemed to enjoy keeping her employer’s feet attached in some small way to the earth. By the time their Eastbourne hosts called them downstairs for drinks, a frost was forming on Anna’s bedroom window; Jelly, though, had dressed for dinner in a crimson evening gown with a fashionable, deep-scooped back that exposed her shoulder blades. She had spent enough of her childhood in the 19th century to cherish a lingering nostalgia for its flamboyance and poetry.

‘Jelly, you’ll catch your death,’ Anna protested. She preferred a plain skirt, court shoes and cardigan; tonight it was buttoned up to her chin. Suffering from a chronic cough and a slight fever, she had been asleep for two hours while Jelly was practising. Last night Jelly had performed the Brahms Violin Concerto in nearby Hastings; today she could not rest. Another concert ahead meant more music to prepare.Jelly was pleased to see Anna looking a little brighter. ‘Darling, don’t worry about me. I just want you to feel better.’

The dining room was warm, the fire smouldering in its grate beneath the mantelpiece. There a silver frame held a photograph of the Southerns’ two sons, who had both fought at Mons in 1914. One body was never returned; the other boy came back with an uncontrollable twitch of the head and neck, unable to speak. After two months in a nursing home, he disappeared one night. Trawling a nearby lake for evidence, they discovered he had found peace at last in its waters.

The windowpanes multiplied Jelly’s slender image skimming across the lamplit hallway, the gleam catching her necklace – a gift from a long-ago admirer. Ten or fifteen years previously, scarcely a day would pass without a delivery boy on a bicycle bringing flowers, a parcel or an invitation to a dance – and Jelly loved dancing. Many weeks, what with concerts, salons and dinner parties, she’d seen in the dawn three or four times. This year at the end of May she would be 40. Part of her still felt no older than she was in 1916, on the day before she heard that Frederick Septimus Kelly was dead.

‘Jelly d’Arányi!’ Charles welcomed her with a mock-ceremonial bow as she swept in. ‘There she is. Muse to Bartók, Ravel and Elgar, angel to Vaughan Williams and Holst, and no wonder. You look positively scrumptious.’

‘And I’m a deeply grateful guest, as ever. I don’t know how many years I’ve been staying with you after concerts now.’

‘I’ve lost count, and the more it is, the happier we shall be.’

She gave him a kiss. He returned it, twice – then turned to Anna and pressed her hand to his lips, perhaps so that she would not feel left out.