She’d had admirers, suitors, lovers, though never Sep; he’d never even tried to touch her. Perhaps he didn’t want to; Adila thought he preferred men, but Jelly tried to stop her ears to that notion. Instead, she’d had to deal with Tovey, who once uttered a painful declaration, awkward and red-faced, making her squirm, much as she adored him; anyway, she was sure he spent longer pursuing Maisie. There was Bartók, who first fell for Adila and later for Jelly and came to their Budapest house almost every day for five years, which mightily embarrassed them; the cruel young girls they were then thought only that he had no sense of humour. Elgar, who termed her his ‘tenth muse’, tried to kiss her after taking her to the British Museum, which she was too young and innocent to know was a popular den for assignations – and he was 35 years her senior, and an Order of Merit, too! In one stroke he’d wrecked any chance that she would ever play his interminable violin concerto. And poor, dear, Tom – the best of them, if she could have felt as strongly for him as she had for Sep.

She could still hear the first sound of Sep’s arrival in her life: his fancy car pulling up outside Donald Tovey’s home in Surrey, one glorious May morning full of shouting birds and lilac blossom. Cars were uncommon in those days, so the arrival of a noisy engine on a sleek machine meant that every schoolboy in Englefield Green came running out to stare and point.

You know at once when you meet someone who will change your life, even if you have no idea how it will happen. Jelly knew at one glance that Sep would, but the first thing he did was to laugh at her. People did, then, before she was famous enough to be more than one of ‘those darling Hungarian sisters’. Hortense, sweating with nerves at her piano, was the fragile beauty; Adila, the eldest, was the powerhouse violinist, pupil of the great Joachim; but Jelly was the baby, the one with the Gypsy looks and the silly name.

‘Where did you get that name, then?’ Sep challenged her, sipping Tovey’s tea. Most English people were too polite to ask outright, but Sep, for all his Eton schooling and Oxford scholarship, was an outsider, as Jelly was herself. His Australian accent clung to him like bathing trunks – despite, or perhaps because of, the English high society into which he’d tumbled, by design of his father’s money, but distinctly by accident where his own nature was concerned.

‘I was named after an African princess.’ Jelly raised her chin, trying to look taller. ‘Someone my father met when a group from Dahomey came to Budapest.’