‘You care very much for him, don’t you?’ Ulli’s appetite had begun to fade, just as the waitress brought roast chicken and bread sauce for Jelly, and the chops for him. They were indeed overcooked. The fibres caught between his teeth: possibly mutton rather than lamb. Even if it wasn’t ‘foreign’.

‘But this is perhaps normal.’ Jelly was folding her handkerchief back into her bag. ‘Love is simple, Ulli, but nothing around it ever is.’

‘I know.’ He reached for her hand, raised it and kissed her knuckles. Her smile was gracious; perhaps kind, perhaps more, yet – now he understood – infinitely sad behind all that sparkle and charisma. What had this woman seen? What did she know of music and life, of this world and the world beyond? Far, far more than he did, that was certain.

He had to make a decision; he had to draw back, however magnetised she had made him, and he sensed she had enjoyed doing that, Heinrich Heine and all. Would he have accepted being third best to the dead composer and the dying baronet? Or fourth, given that her first husband was really her gorgeous Bergonzi violin? Besides, she had suffered enough; he would not risk adding to that. Tomorrow he must go home to Mainz. God alone knew when he’d come to London again; and Hitler would make sure Jelly never came to Germany.

‘I wish the world could be a different place,’ he said.

‘And then?’

‘Then we would play music together, when nobody was listening, and I’d walk the dog with you. And sometimes you’d come to Mainz and we’d go to Berlin and visit Professor Schnabel, who wouldn’t have left the country if the world were this different place. And we’d walk by the Rhine and go to Bayreuth to hear Wagner, and we’d travel around Bavaria and see Neuschwanstein, King Ludwig the Second’s castle on the mountain. You’d love Neuschwanstein, it’s a crazy place. A little bit like your house.’

Jelly began to laugh, but suppressed the volume into a gentle, upward gurgle, just as Ulli sometimes did himself. Their way of laughing was so similar – and the matters, too, that made them laugh – that once they’d started they couldn’t stop.

‘Even Neuschwanstein Castle couldn’t look stranger in Chelsea than my sister’s house!’ Jelly managed to say. ‘Ulli, I tell you, we will do it all.’

‘You think so?’

‘Of course. Sometime your government will change and everything will become more reasonable again. Then I’ll come and visit.’