Jelly, Adila, Adila’s American-Greek husband Alec Fachiri, their little girl Adrienne and their yappy fox terrier named Caesar lived on a Chelsea cul-de-sac – off the Fulham Road by St Stephen’s Hospital and what used to be the workhouse – in a graceful Victorian villa with a fake Italian bell-tower and tripartite windows. From within, the sky appeared to divide into three like a Renaissance altarpiece. Their friends dubbed the place Hurricane House: you’d understand why as soon as you went in and faced the piles of books, magazines and sheet music, along with the ornaments spilling off the shelves – vases, tea sets, photographs, Hungarian dolls, Dresden china figurines, musical boxes that no longer worked. And the sound of instruments being practised simultaneously in different rooms would blend now and then with the chime of clocks that never struck together. Here, Jelly felt as much at home as she could anywhere, now that their parents were dead.

The three sisters and their mother, Antoinette, arrived in Britain when Jelly was 16, bringing with them little more than talent, charm, the good name of their great-uncle Joseph Joachim, and a handful of concert dates in Haslemere. Jelly still remembered Wesselényi Street in Budapest where she spent her childhood: a dark chimney of a road, snaking into town just behind the Great Synagogue of Dohány Street. How precarious life there must have been, and with what care their mother had concealed this; Jelly had been aware that times were growing tougher, with no idea why, and if Antoinette had had her own reasons for wanting to leave her husband behind, she kept them to herself. These days Jelly sometimes wondered what had passed between them, how much her mother had had in the bank, if anything, and whether the concerts that she and Adila gave with their pianist sister Hortense had been out of volition or out of necessity. It was too late to ask.

She could not pass the former workhouse without imagining how it must have felt to be its inmate. Though she earned well, relatively speaking, for her performances and recordings, she knew she would have commanded still higher fees had she been a man and that her imminent 40th birthday, had she been a man, would be seen as the start of her prime, not the end of it. Once she had dreamed about having her own house, but those earnings were not what they were ten years ago, before the Depression, and Adila and Alec would not hear of her leaving them in any case. Still, she was well aware that she remained an unpaying guest in their home – in her darker moments, perhaps a ‘maiden aunt’. Joking about her nomadic concert life, declaring, ‘I’m a Gypsy,’ she could never quite escape the sensation of glassy surfaces under her feet: slippery to walk on, easy to shatter.

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