After many sleepless hours despite the countryside tranquillity, Jelly got up early and took Caesar for a walk. He had spent the night in a strange kennel and deserved a treat. She wandered with him up the hill to the headland and there perched on a rock close to the edge, listening to the waves below.

Jelly could rarely hear the sea without imagining Sep Kelly crossing it – whether in life, towards the killing fields of northern France, or perhaps equally, in death. She had dreamed, that night in 1916, of a ship setting out into the ocean with no destination. She thought nothing of it; someone had written to her, telling her that Sep was fine and that he was writing her a new piece. He was already dead, as she heard ten days later when his sister, Maisie, came to the house to tell her, weeping and incoherent. Jelly wept with her, then scarcely stopped crying for a month.

Nobody knew what to say to her. Sep had never spoken one word of love, let alone proposed marriage, yet everyone thought them virtually engaged. They’d spent much time together, but as duo partners, never lovers; when they met, out came her violin, up went the piano lid and off they went to work. They communicated better through music than most couples do through touch. She would signal a nuance with a breath, an inclination of her head or a slowing of her bow arm and he, despite looking straight ahead at the music on the stand, would sense her need and meet it at once. They never played anything the same way twice; if conversation was fun, musical dialogue was even more so, transforming a Mozart sonata into mutual teasing, or Brahms into a shared moment of emotional eloquence that they never tried to replicate in real life. At least, Sep did not, however much Jelly wished he would.

He was still at the piano: on the Bechstein at Netherton Grove stood the John Singer Sargent sketch showing the broad forehead and forthright gaze of a scholar, plus the thickset neck of a rowing champion. She wasn’t sure what had happened to Sep’s gold medal from the 1908 London Olympic Games; perhaps Maisie had kept it, or sent it home to their parents in Sydney.