“Oh yes,” she breathed. “People always wanted this song—it used to make him quite cross.” She pinged off another button and kissed my bared chest. I felt her tongue trace a line down my breastbone.

I smelled it then. The scent of honeysuckle, and behind that, broken brick and smashed wood. How could I have ever thought it was her perfume?

“Did Cyrus play ‘Body and Soul’?” I asked.

“Who’s Cyrus?” she said and bit off a third button. I was running out of buttons.

“You used to go out with him,” I said. “You used to live at his house.”

“Did I? It seems so long ago,” she said and kissed my chest. “I used to love watching them play.”

“Who are they?”

“All my lovely jazzmen,” she said. “I was happiest when they were playing, I liked the sex and the company but I was really happiest when they were playing.”

I groaned as the next track on the iPod turned out to be the John Coltrane. Had I put it on shuffle by accident? It’s impossible to slow-dance to his version of “Body and Soul”—for a start he never actually stays with the melody for more than three notes, and after a couple of bars he goes to the wild musical place that only people like my dad can follow. I steered us over to the fridge so I could surreptitiously press the next-track button on the iPod. It was Nina Simone, thank God, a young Nina with a voice that could melt an ice sculpture at a Scottish bankers’ convention.

“What about Lord Grant?” I had to ask.

“The one that got away,” she said. “They said he was going to be an English Clifford Brown but he kept on leaving the scene. Cherie was so cross. You see, she had rather set her cap for him. She claimed once that she’d caught him, but then he got away.” She smiled at the memory. “I rather think I was more his type, and who knows what might have happened except that he had this fearsome wife.”

“How fearsome?”

“Oh, terrifying,” she said. “But you should know, she’s your—” Simone froze in my arms and frowned up at me but I rocked her back into the dance. In her eyes I could actually see the memory slipping away.

“Did you always love jazz?” I asked.

“Always,” she said.

“Even when you were at school?”

“We had the strangest music mistress at school,” said Simone. “Her name was Miss Patternost. She used to have her favorites around for tea—there she would play us records and encourage us to ‘commune’ with the music.”

“Were you one of her favorites?”

“Of course I was,” she said and slipped her hand inside my shirt again. “I was everybody’s favorite. Am I not your favorite as well?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Were Cherie and Peggy favorites too?”