‘Thank you, Dr Schultheiss. Don’t worry, Germany now is not your fault. None of us can help the accident of where and to whom we are born. Now, do please excuse me, I must say hello to Professor Tovey.’ As dignified and upright as the queen mother, Myra smiled and slipped away, out of sight.

Still feeling the stab of mortification under his sternum, he distracted himself by listening to different voices. He identified the Swedish accent of a glamorous yet, he thought, semi-crippled baroness with a walking stick, whose husband seemed to be an ambassador; but he was defeated by his host, Alec Fachiri, whose elegant tone was tinged, as it turned out, with a mixture of Greek roots and American upbringing. What a strange milieu: famous musicians on the one hand, and the most serious, high-ranking diplomats and lawyers on the other. Like a zoo in which the tropical night creatures and the penguins had all been housed in the same enclosure. What could have brought them together?

Adila laughed long and loud when Ulli asked how she and Alec met. It was a mystical story, she declared. She’d been sauntering past Harrods one day when she was overwhelmed by a premonition: she was about to meet her future husband. ‘So surprised I was,’ she confided, pressing his elbow with one hand and balancing the dish of sausages in the other, ‘that I looked around to see who on earth it might be!’ She had spotted a swarthy, serious-faced young man with a big moustache – and he was so unlike the type she would ever take a fancy to that she decided she’d been grievously misled.

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No, nooo! But several weeks later we have a chamber music rehearsal and our cellist is ill. He doesn’t want us to cancel because of him, so he asks a friend, a fine amateur, to take his place. And into the room walks the same gentleman with the moustache! I tell you, Doktor Schultheiss, I could not believe it!’

‘Please, call me Ulli. Everyone does.’

‘He wrote me a letter afterwards,’ Adila said in a deep purr, ‘telling me he liked my voice. And you know, my voice is a little difficult, so at once I fell, crazy, in love! Then there was a wonderful fancy dress party in the roof gardens of Selfridges, and we meet and we admire the view and we walk under the pergola holding hands and we dance all night together… and Hortense, who we call Titi, our other sister, the prettiest one, danced with a beootiful man and fell in love too – ah, what magic… We both marry our beloveds that year. And presto! We are here!’

Ulli laughed. The sheer energy about Adila was scary and warming and enchanting, all at the same time. And the voice… was quite a voice.

‘Fancy dress?’ he said. ‘What did you go as?’