‘Wait for me!’ he shouted as she galloped into the finale. He was an Olympic champion; he should be able to keep up. She flew on, gaze unbendable, challenging him. By the end he was sweating more than she was. A crash of applause surprised them: getting their breath, they found Tovey, Hortense, Adila and their mother, all watching with widened eyes and mouths. Jelly laughed; Sep joined her. She’d made him follow her lead, thus far.

‘Come on, Sep, take a breath,’ Tovey advised, clapping a hand onto his shoulder. ‘Let me have a go.’

‘Game of chess?’ Sep suggested.

‘Absolutely.’ Tovey sat down at the piano and began to play the first prelude and fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Sep grabbed the chess set from the bookcase – an inlaid board full of mother-of-pearl and contrasting bright woods – and set out the pieces. He flipped a coin. ‘Heads!’ shouted Tovey from the piano without missing a note.

Jelly stared, amazed. ‘You can’t play the piano and chess at the same time!’ she exclaimed.

‘Nuff and stonsense,’ said Tovey. ‘Watch me.’

‘It’s tails. I’ll take white,’ said Sep. Tovey started on the C minor Prelude and Fugue as Sep made his first move and called it out to the professor, who considered deeply, Bach rattling out under his fingers, before responding: ‘Pawn, G–four!’

‘They might do this for hours,’ Adila whispered to the startled Jelly. ‘Let’s go outside.’ Jelly could have stayed and watched the slope of Sep’s neck and shoulders, muscular from rowing, and his beautiful hands while he controlled both ends of the game, shouting his moves to Tovey and receiving decisions back while the professor played, from memory, through the entire first book of the Bach 48 Preludes and Fugues, then started on the second.

Since Sep, she had never felt the same about anybody else, and she saw no reason to compromise. Probably Tom had never married because he was waiting for her; and she had waited, too, waited for her emotions to fasten upon him for sure and for all time. They both kept waiting and waiting – when, if it were going to happen, it would probably have done so the first day they met.

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