Jelly had never applied for naturalisation – she felt it would be dishonest to claim to be British when she was not. The scorn she’d experienced on arrival at some venues in the provinces before the war, as a young girl still learning English, had alarmed her: finding the right words, aged 20, to answer a stranger’s tirade – ‘Why do we have to listen to you when we’ve plenty of fine musicians of our own?’ – had not proved easy. It was around then, too, that her mother gently suggested changing their name from the Germanic ‘von’ Arányi to the French-style equivalent – and her favourite concert hall, the Bechstein Hall, soon had to change its name to the Wigmore Hall, since even German pianos were publicly loathed. Once the war struck and musicians from abroad were banned, she’d been fortunate that most concert promoters loved her so much that they somehow neglected to check her nationality. No guarantees, though, that this would be the case if it all happened again. Alec worried about Oswald Mosley’s popularity and had started to call the Daily Mail the ‘Daily Rail’, since it regularly roused its readers to decry the number of Jewish immigrants who were arriving to escape the new regime in Germany.

After one small organisational cyclone too many in Hurricane House, Alec – perhaps guarding what remained of his peace of mind – decided to defuse the situation, encouraged by the diplomatic Erik. He suggested that they should treat themselves to a short holiday: a long weekend together in Dorset. ‘It’ll do you good, Sai,’ he insisted. ‘We need to look after you, because you’re not looking after yourself.’

‘You always do look after me,’ Jelly said. The last thing she wanted was a break.

‘Are you sure?’

Jelly knew he could see through her attempts at pretence. ‘If you and Adi want me there, then of course I’ll come along.’

‘And with Erik?’

‘It’s fine,’ said Jelly. ‘Really, it’s fine.’

She tried to defer to Alec, who respected the baron for his books on Swedish history and his passion for democratic politics, over which detractors used to call him ‘red outside and white beneath’. Erik in return never missed a chance to compliment Alec on his own book about the Permanent Court of International Justice. Alec’s legal work for the League of Nations and Erik’s involvement with the organisation – a priority for his government – meant the pair’s discussions were cordial at least, or, at best, of possible international significance. Now Japan had announced it would withdraw from the League, Alec feared Germany would follow suit. ‘If the League can’t even make all those countries agree on a single symbol to represent it,’ Jelly asked him, ‘and if one country can just walk out and leave if it wants to, how is it supposed to achieve world peace?’

*