A critic once commented, in the nicest possible way, that Myra resembled a solid, modern, reliable wristwatch fashioned to the latest design, while Jelly was a golden antique pocket watch, ‘the best that money can buy’. The pair derived much hilarity from that. ‘There we go, ticking away like time bombs!’ Myra said.

They looked, nonetheless, as different as those imaginary watches would be. Myra was the shorter and rounder of figure, her dark hair draping like angel’s wings from a centre parting above a direct gaze that missed no detail. Jelly was taller, indeed taller and darker than her own sisters, bony and flexible – Sep used to tease her about being double-jointed; her posture was open, her movements generous and impulsive, and her laughter as ready as her tears.

This time the tears were sparked by her increasing awareness of another difference between her and Myra: for the pianist, life was a photo, not a drawing, and she could manage it with commensurate clarity. She was tougher than Jelly, more practical and astute; a woman of this century, not the last. Was Jelly what the critic had said: an antique, admired for her old-fashioned beauty, but created in the past and for the past, useless beyond it? The Brahms sonata’s slow movement seemed filled with mourning, chiming so strongly with hers that it felt almost too painful to play.

‘You have to go to Tom,’ Myra said, when Jelly had explained everything that was going on – except, of course, for the mysterious concerto. ‘You mustn’t think you’re being disloyal to Sep. He’s in another world, perhaps, and he won’t care. He’d mind if you didn’t, I think.’ She, too, saw Sep as Jelly’s unofficial fiancé.

‘Tom keeps telling me to concentrate on work and not worry about him,’ Jelly said, ‘and I just… don’t know how I… ’

‘… would say goodbye?’ suggested Myra gently. ‘That I can understand very well.’

‘What would you do, if you were me?’

‘I don’t know. It seems to me that you want to be with him, but the prospect of that pain is stopping you, and no wonder. In the end perhaps you have to trust your instinct… ’

Sep had died without her being able to tell him that she loved him; now Tom might, too; and she could save neither of them. Her instinct was telling her something different: that she might instead save, even resurrect, another entity. A Schumann concerto.

Myra’s fingers moved softly across the keyboard, tracing a chorale-like theme that Jelly didn’t recognise. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘It sounds like Schubert.’

‘Funny you should say that. Actually it’s a little theme by Schumann that nobody knows, used for some variations by Brahms.’

Jelly tried not to show the shockwave.