The moment she stepped through the doors and Sidney introduced her, his family fawned around her. They made her tea. They buttered hot teacakes and presented her with all manner of biscuits. They made her feel more at home than her own family ever had. And she knew, in an instant, that she had a new family now. Perhaps it was a family the world might never know about – but it was a family all the same.

That Christmas had changed her life. She’d lain in the back bedroom here, with Sidney next to her, and wondered at the baby budding inside her. She’d been here at New Year too, when the Archie Adams Band played for Prince George, the Duke of Kent, who was entertaining his continental friends at the Buckingham’s famous Masquerade Ball. Sidney had kissed her goodbye on the doorstep and set off into the snow with his trumpet case at his side.

He’d never come home, for as he left the Buckingham late that night – drunk, perhaps, on what a beautiful turn his life was taking; drunk, too, on the brandy that Archie Adams had shared around while the festivities were at a high – he stepped out into the path of an omnibus slewing around in the snow.

The horror of the moment when Louis Kildare appeared on the doorstep in Brixton to break the news . . . The fraction of a second when she thought he was playing some terrifying joke and that Sidney would appear from around the corner, his trumpet in his hand. Then the yawning realisation that this was real, that Sidney was gone, that Hélène’s whole world was being torn into fragments around her. All of these moments were like photographs. She remembered them so starkly. But no moment would ever be imprinted on her consciousness as vividly as the moment Louis presented her with the trumpet that had been found just a few yards from his body, still safely tucked up inside its case. One day, she would give it to Sybil – the first and last gift from her father.