‘I will find a way to come to London again soon,’ he wrote back. But months went by; letters flowed; progress did not.

*

The Fachiris saw in 1934 with champagne and trepidation. Jelly and Adila gave concerts and lessons, Erik worked on his book and Alec sweated over the intricate legal paperwork entailed by the upheavals at the League of Nations. Germany had indeed given its notice to leave, as he had feared; the rest of the League wished to talk about limiting armaments, but Hitler seemed hell-bent on doing the exact opposite. Expansionism was on the German cards, and while the League argued, Hitler used the time to his own advantage. If Germany and Japan could simply walk out of an organisation – one that was set up after the Great War to ensure it never happened again – once it no longer suited their purposes, then the whole ethos of its existence came into question; it could be fatally weakened, which might prove catastrophic for everyone else. ‘The League has been too nice,’ Alec, exhausted, remarked one evening to Adila and Jelly, over a whisky. ‘Far too lenient. Trying to be sensitive instead of calling a spade a spade.’

‘Can’t you do anything about it?’ Adila challenged.

‘Me? All I can do is deal with the legal fallout afterwards. Anyway, did you see this?’ Alec fetched a newspaper from his briefcase and placed it on his wife’s lap. It was the Daily Mail. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ read the headline above a front-page article by Viscount Rothermere, which asserted that the notion of a ‘permanent reign of terror’ in countries under ‘Blackshirt’ control had evolved solely from the ‘morbid imaginations’ of their opponents. ‘This paper’s feeding us nothing but lies, lies, lies,’ Alec said, ‘yet people gulp it down without questioning it, while there’s real suffering, real danger out there – and we could help, but we won’t because of these mendacious, self-serving… It makes me sick.’ He downed the rest of his drink in one. Adila and Jelly stared at him, unused to such outbursts.

Jelly shunned the glass game, infuriated by the stalemate over the manuscript and terrified at the thought of the marching Blackshirts. Anybody could be drawn to them, Alec said, from the unemployed to Eton lads, some believing they had the answer to keeping out the communists, others determined to restore the glory of British imperialism, or some such guff, which meant reasserting their superiority over filthy foreigners. Beside this, Erik and Adila’s glass game sessions seemed oddly disconnected from ordinary life. Don’t forget the concerto, the glass pleaded. Jelly hadn’t forgotten. She simply didn’t know what to do next. The spirits might be positive, but the humans were not.