‘Think of the situation. Schumann is ill in an asylum; Clara is forbidden to see him, so she’s writing to him. Now, supposing Tom were a composer, he had produced a piece of questionable quality and you had to write to him in his current unfortunate condition to tell him you had heard it? You would be “enthusiastic” too, I think.’

‘Where do you think we should start?’ Jelly asked, deflecting the topic away from the painful thought of Tom – who had once been Tovey’s pupil and remained his friend.

‘I suggest you contact two people,’ Tovey said. ‘First, Onkel Jo’s daughter, your cousin Elisabeth Joachim, in Oxford; and next, Eugenie Schumann, the daughter of Robert and Clara, who lives somewhere in Switzerland. She is the last of their children to survive with body and mind entirely intact.’

‘Really? What happened to the others?’

‘Several died young from tuberculosis. One, Ludwig, went mad like his father, but much younger, and spent the rest of his life – decades of it – in an asylum. Marie, the eldest, died just a few years ago, having mainly devoted herself to caring for her mother. Clara was very good at inspiring people to care for her, Brahms included.’

‘You never met Brahms, did you?’ Jelly was not quite four years old when the composer died.

‘Alas, no. Onkel Jo always said he would introduce me, but we were never in the same country at the same time. And then it was too late… ’

An image of Tom lingered in Jelly’s mind.

‘The glass said the concerto was in Weimar. Perhaps I should go to Germany to look for it.’

Tovey’s smile vanished. ‘Jelly, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

‘Whyever not?’

Tovey wandered to the window and stared out at the quiet morning, the townsfolk going about their business, bicycles and a few cars and trucks rattling up and down the hills. ‘You wouldn’t believe it possible from here. Jelly, listen: apparently there are disappearances, beatings, bricks through windows, notices in shops and restaurants forbidding Jews… There was an official boycott, so I’m told, of Jewish businesses in Berlin a month or so ago and now, I think in Frankfurt, they have forced the dismissal of all Jewish actors and musicians from their companies. It looks as if they are trying to negate Jewish influences wherever they can. I think you shouldn’t go.’

Jelly tried to absorb this information. ‘But I’m not Jewish, at least not entirely, and surely they can’t hurt me if I’m foreign?’

‘Onkel Jo was Jewish, so effectively that makes you part of his family and probably, therefore, Jewish as well – at least to the mind of a Nazi.’

‘But he converted. He became a Catholic, quite young… ’

‘I know, but is Jewishness a matter of race or religion? For Jo, it was religion. To the Nazis, it’s something quite different.’