Albert Sammons, whose career had been curtailed by muscular disease, offered to let Dovidl practise with the Royal College student orchestra any time he liked. ‘We’ve lost so many good players these past few years,’ he lamented. ‘Old Flesch and young Neveu; Hubermann and Feuermann; Busch and Kulenkampff; old man Rosé and his daughter, Alma; me and slippery Kreisler, who has gone to the dogs with his latest record. This boy will give the blessed art a salutary kick up the backside, set a new benchmark.’

One morning in November 1950 I read of Josef Hassid’s death. The newspaper said he had passed away while undergoing brain surgery in Epsom. What, I wondered, had given doctors the right to invade that divinely endowed, desperately damaged organ? It so happened that Dovidl was due in Cambridge that week to explain to his tutors that he was reverting from science to art. Trinity being proud of its renaissance traditions, they seemed charmed by the transition and promised to hold him a place in either faculty. I told him of Josef ’s death as we walked that night around Great Court. His jaw tightened, but his voice was level as he murmured terse regrets of love and loss. Nothing could now deflect his concentration.

‘The thing you have to remember about artists,’ said Father, one night at the office, just after Christmas, ‘is never to trust their immediate response. Whatever the news, their reaction will be self-protective. The mask goes on, and you see only what they let you see. These creatures carry their emotions around in a violin-case, reserving their only honest expression for the public stage. In private, they turn emotion on and off at will. Never believe an artist when he weeps or declares love. It’s all a grand performance.

‘Treat their upsets as you would a child’s tantrums. Console, then instruct. Show compassion when it is called for, firmness when it runs out. Give them an illusion of your love for them – but never love itself, or they will devour you.’

He was in a rare confessional mood. We were the last in the office, with nothing much to do, and I poured us both a brandy with a view to lubricating his managerial tongue. Father drew deep on a thick Cuban cigar, an infrequent indulgence.

‘Sometimes,’ mused Mortimer Simmonds, ‘we make artists do things they don’t really want to do. We tell them it is for their own good, but it’s for ours. They resent us and say we exploit them. But even if the things we make them do are purely for our commercial benefit, which is not often the case, the ultimate profit would still be theirs. For if we made no money out of them, they would find themselves pretty smartly back on the street while we turned our energies to estate agency or running a restaurant chain. They need our greed to fuel their ambition.