In the pianist’s Carlton Hill studio, lined with gold-hued hessian and gleaming with sunlight that slanted in from the garden, they were rehearsing for a Wigmore Hall Brahms centenary concert at which they would play all three of his sonatas. Jelly had been fighting back a longing to tell her duo partner about the visitations through the glass. Many years of working together had taught her that of everyone she knew who understood Schumann and how to play his music, Myra was by far the best; but that of everyone who would ridicule the notion of messages from beyond the grave, she would laugh longest and loudest.

Dotted around the studio stood photographs of her family – her parents and siblings, that is. No husband or children for her, any more than for Jelly. She turned down her first love, a violinist named Aldo Antonietti – Italian, yet hailing from Kingston-upon-Thames – because she intended to devote her life to music. Nothing should interfere with that. ‘You can’t be earnest about more than one thing in life,’ Myra insisted, ‘and I’d need to be earnest about marriage as well as music, and I can’t do that.’ Aldo wanted her to marry him and stop playing the piano. ‘Balderdash,’ said Myra. Neither she nor Jelly could understand why a man would fall for a woman with a vocation, only to insist she must give it up; music was, after all, a sizeable part of who they were. Yet if rejecting Aldo had caused Myra pain, Jelly accepted that she’d never know about it; her friend, sociable though she was, kept such feelings under strict lock and key. Later, Benno Moiseiwitsch proposed – but they’d have been two pianists together in the same home. ‘God help us, never mind the neighbours!’ Myra joked.

Here in St John’s Wood, Myra shared a house with two sisters, friends who didn’t mind her practising, and she identified in silence with the great rip in the fabric of their lives, having lived through all of it with them. They were the only survivors of five siblings. Their brother was killed in the war; afterwards their two younger sisters, grief-stricken, died together of a joint overdose. Nobody knew for certain whether it was accidental or deliberate; perhaps nobody wanted to know. Myra eventually adopted as her bedroom the one in which the girls’ bodies had been discovered. Jelly wondered how she could stand it, but the pianist, throwing open all the windows and applying paint, curtains and music of her own, wasn’t one for hauntings. Jelly could scarcely bear to set foot in there, so Myra confined their meetings to her studio.