No Balkan pianist with three Zs in his name would ever come under pressure from Mortimer Simmonds to adopt a new identity for English convenience. No fat singer was ever required to slim. He gave second chances to panic-frozen beginners and blamed his own shortcomings when a concert flopped. He had no time for snob-appeal or seasonal brochures, for copyright niceties and entertainment tax – least of all, let it be noted, for his wife and son, whom he only ever saw in daylight over Sunday lunch, and not with undivided attention or unfailing punctuality.

So when the phone rang one winter Sunday with the roast beef charred in the oven and my mother muttering over her petit-point, I failed to react in any way, hysterical or practical, to news of his death at the desk. My father belonged to Simmonds (Symphonic Scores and Concerts) Ltd, not to me; he died at his post, as it were, amid a mound of unopened mail. He was sixty-one, my present age. At the funeral, the rabbi spoke of his love of art, his humility and self-deprecating wit. He left me wishing I had seen more of him.

Hauled out of Cambridge, where I was sitting my history finals, I took charge of the firm and swiftly secured its future. On to my father’s hyperactive disorder, I imposed financial rigour. The rabble of loss-making unheard-of composers, most of them Hitler or Stalin refugees, was parcelled off to a modern-music publisher in Vienna, who kept three and unsentimentally sacked the rest. The family concerts were wound up and the soloists redirected to rival agencies. Two became famous; the rest vanished into marriage, music-teaching or orchestral drudgery. I was sorry to lose the artists, for their eagerness was infectious and their egotism endlessly amusing. Some I had grown up with, others were so daunted by the challenge of tying their shoelaces that I did not like to think what would become of them without our unstinted protection – but what else, in the circumstances, could I have done? There was a pressing personal reason for me to terminate our involvement with talent, a reason I try very hard, on medical and legal advice, not to dwell upon or commit to print.

I got a good price for the offices from a Dutch merchant bank, retaining a corner space for myself, a spinster secretary called Erna Winter and an occasional junior. The revenue from these rapid disposals provided for Mother, who fell silent after Father’s death and required periodic care in a private psychiatric hospital. During a remission she helped arrange my introduction to Myrtle, the bony daughter of Hispanic cousins, and morosely graced our solemn nuptials before overdosing on anti-depressants – whether deliberately or accidentally I neither knew nor deeply cared.