‘Music and medicine are close, but sometimes not allowed to be close enough,’ he remarked. ‘We only treat the physical, whereas you can bring consolation – and that’s a rarity in this place. I don’t know how some of them find the will to get well again.’

‘Jelly?’

She dived back to Anna’s bedside.

Anna seemed to be struggling for words. ‘Thank you, Jelly,’ she managed. ‘I’ll never forget what you did for us all today.’

*

At home, the thought of the patients, their response, the doctor’s reaction, Anna’s face transfigured as she listened – none of it would leave Jelly alone. She’d once played in a children’s hospital, which nearly skinned her heart alive, but every note there seemed to mean ten times more than one anywhere else. At Exeter Cathedral recently, she had seen the evening light reflected in the eyes of her audience while she played, amid a silence more intimate than that of a salon, despite the gaping space – or perhaps because of it. Music as human goodness incarnate: that was what Tom saw in her. He knew that was the best she could give. Now she felt she had a doctor’s blessing as well. For that vision, defiant, she resolved her direction. She would set herself against the supposed spirits of the dead, towards healing the proven ones of the living.

She hunted through Anna’s desk for her concert diary. There, at the bottom of the last drawer, lay the paper on which she had written down the message from Schumann, if Schumann it were. Her hand hovered above it, vacillating, as if to touch it would be to accept its content. Why was she keeping it if she could not do that? Why couldn’t she forget? The image of the concerto, if concerto there were, troubled her; she pictured it shut away somewhere similar to that hospital, stricken and mute. She couldn’t save Tom; she could help Anna, without being able to make her well again; but if there really were a piece of music to rescue… Jelly pushed the thought away, slammed the drawer shut and tried another.

At last, diary retrieved, she licked her fingertips and began to turn the pages. The winter, six or eight months away, was relatively quiet and most of her concerts were in Britain. There had to be moments in which she and the largest venues she could find would be free on the same evening. She could go any time to play her violin in hospitals, in ordinary schools as well as Eton, working men’s clubs besides the Wigmore Hall. But the idea that had grasped her demanded somewhere to seat 1,000 or more. An audience of the unemployed, admitted free, plus benefactors who would pay only a donation for charity at the end – it had to be possible. In her mind one image came into focus: Westminster Abbey.