Elisabeth, Onkel Jo’s daughter, had settled in Oxford with her husband, Harold Joachim, who was also her cousin. He, a philosopher, had spent most of his career at the university, where he had now been Wykeham Professor of Logic at Merton College for some 14 years. To visit them was not only easy, but a joy: it gave Jelly the perfect excuse to wander again through Balliol, imagining Tovey strolling by with Sep and Tom. She loved to picture how life might have been if she’d studied at Oxford herself, immersed in writing, discussing and arguing, playing her violin only for fun. If she’d had the right education to attend St Hilda’s College for ladies, perhaps she could have read Greats, the Greek literature and philosophy she loved… though of course her handwriting was so awful that they would probably never have let her in. And in those days, when she was young enough to be a student, they would not have given her a degree, whatever her handwriting was like, since she was a girl. What nonsense: the same work, the same achievement, yet no recognition or reward if you happened to be female. Oxford had only agreed to confer degrees on its women students in 1920, when it seemed the natural step following the introduction of voting rights for women over 30 who met a property qualification. Cambridge took great pride in not following suit.

The new term had just begun and the freshers were easy to spot, timid and goggle-eyed, clutching books, tethering bicycles, so desperately young. Thinking of her male friends who had been just like these boys at one time – Sep, dead at the Somme, and George Mallory, lost beyond the clouds on Everest, and Tom, sick and fading in Ireland, and Aldous Huxley, working on his latest book in Italy, one that he hoped might cause a bit of a splash – Jelly stared at the boys with their short back and sides, their blazers, spectacles and tweeds, and wondered what would become of them all.

The Joachims lived on a tree-lined street off Banbury Road in Summertown, north of the city centre, but south of the suburban sprawl that had attached itself to Oxford in the past decade. They kept their substantial house simply furnished and open-hearted; Jelly remembered several teas there at which she found them entertaining Harold’s students with plentiful cakes, plus string quartets in the lounge. Harold, a quiet man with beautiful hands, was a good violinist in his spare time and in the quartets had often taken second violin to Onkel Jo’s first.