‘I will, too, if that’s all right,’ Anna said quickly.

‘But – ’ Mary hesitated. Jelly seized the opportunity to throw her arms around the Southerns in turn, to bid them goodnight and to thank them profusely for taking such good care of her and her ailing assistant.

‘Now the mystery will remain,’ Charles said, as she made for the stairs. ‘Who knows what message might be waiting in heaven for Jelly d’Arányi?’

*

Anna paused on the landing.

‘Do you really believe in that glass game, Jelly?’ she asked.

Under her discomfort, Jelly pondered. ‘To be perfectly honest, no. And you?’

‘It’s not that I don’t believe in God. But I don’t think I believe in this as well.’

‘Good. Let’s get some sleep.’ Jelly kissed her assistant on both cheeks, then retreated to her guest room and welcome solitude. Was it not simply wrong to disrupt the heaven-set boundaries of our living dimension, and wrong to disturb the dead, even if they sometimes seemed willing to be disturbed? Supposing the spirits were not who they claimed to be, but demons waiting to misguide or destroy you? And if a spirit was communicating – in truth – how was she supposed to accept such a notion? How was anyone?

She had grown extra-resistant to the glass game since a message arrived purporting to be for her from Sep Kelly. If Sep wanted to speak to her from beyond the grave, she didn’t want to know. It would not bring him back. Besides, she couldn’t bear to imagine his bullish and uncompromising Australian spirit buzzing around someone’s dining table like an invisible mosquito. Sep had been blown up in the Battle of the Somme. If he were still present, if he loved her after all, precious little good it could do them now.

At first, in the aftermath of the war, she added her tears to the outpourings of grief among her equally bereaved friends; for a time, they yearned to attempt reunion through any means there might be, glass or otherwise. With the passing years, the futility of it began to creep up on them; life grew harder and bodies older, but nothing would bring back the departed. Now, trying in vain to sleep, Jelly was wishing she had gone straight home.

*