She sounded very sure of herself, but Callum was concerned. Two years ago, Tamsin had played at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room. She worked towards the concert for months, telling everyone that if it went well it could be her ‘big break’. Apart from her father, all her friends and family were invited. When the reviews unanimously declared her a competent yet mediocre player, she had renounced the piano completely and taken a job at McDonald’s. It was a melodramatic overreaction that had irritated Callum. After two weeks, he and Roz succeeded in talking Tamsin back round to the idea of a career in music, albeit a slightly less glittery one. McDonald’s was abandoned and the piano resumed, more soberly than before.

It seemed to Callum that the Amad Health job had the same flavour of self-sabotage. True, Tamsin was using her music, but she was mostly playing hits from a collection entitled ‘101 Golden Oldies’. The job was poorly paid and she spent hours travelling from care home to care home. Often she had to work with a violinist whose creative approach to pitch and timing was accompanied by an unshakeable conviction that he was the next Yehudi Menuhin. At the end of the day, she was too tired from all the travelling to practise properly; and last week, she had even turned down an opportunity to play in a new recital series in Islington.

Callum could think of no obvious trigger. Tamsin had never had another concert so high-profile as the Southbank gig, but she was hired as an accompanist on a fairly regular basis, and she was getting a reputation as a reliable guest soloist for concerto work on the amateur orchestra circuit. Not, by any means, the high-flying career she had dreamt of; not a career she could hold up with pride before her father; but not a complete failure, either.

So what, then, had made the difference?

Tamsin didn’t know herself – which was partly why she became so shrewish whenever Callum tried to talk to her about it. For some time now she had been aware of a profound dissatisfaction. People kept telling her she was doing fine; and she knew that, in so much as she still had a chance of making a living from performance, she was doing fine. But practising up to eight hours a day to maintain a standard which would forever fall short of her personal expectations seemed a grim way to spend one’s life. Privately, she figured the Amad job as an epiphany. At last she had recognised her limitations and made the brave decision to free her music from its privileged bourgeois confines: instead, she would use her talents to bring light into the greyest of lives. The fact that both Callum and her mother were opposed to her new job gratified her, because it was exactly the reaction she had anticipated.