‘Never delude yourself that you do this job for love of music. Every now and then you must take from it some crude satisfaction, purely for yourself, otherwise you will lose interest and incentive and the business will go down the drain.’

He blew a blue curlicue of Caribbean smoke, releasing a fine whiff of masculine gratifications. I did not press the point.

‘They don’t like to see us making money or having fun.’ My father sighed. ‘To our faces, they call us brothers. Behind our backs, we are parasites. Artists give managers a bad name, Martin, but where would they be without us? I’ll tell you where. In a provincial town hall on a wet November Wednesday, wondering if they can skip an encore to catch the last direct train to London.

‘And remember this, Martin: the grubbier we look, the brighter they shine. That is our role, and it is not a dishonourable one. We are the soil-carriers of their souls. They devolve the dirty work on to us, and we accept it with decency and a sense of duty because we hope that they, relieved of common need, will have the power to improve lives. That’s all there is to it.

‘So keep your distance, my boy, that’s my advice to you. Never trust a musician when he speaks about love, never trust a manager when he talks about money.’

I heard out his homily with mild alarm, knowing that in Dovidl’s case we had broken all the rules. We had given the artist unconditional love, admitting him to the family. Now, we were about to risk our reputation on his success. If Dovidl let us down, the Simmonds name would be seriously damaged.

Try as I might, however, I could not raise this cavil with my father. We were both too far gone, taken in like bumpkins by the three-card trick of talent, personality and historic justice. I was in love with the artist, Father believed in him, all reservations suspended. So confident was he of the artistic inevitability and moral imperative of our project that, for once in his life, he neglected to insure the concerts against artist cancellation – a routine precaution that would have averted financial ruination when Dovidl disappeared. It is a measure of my father’s nobility that he never once uttered a word of self-reproach for that costly, imprudent and entirely uncharacteristic omission.

When, on the afternoon of the concert, Dovidl failed to return for lunch, I called the conductor Freudenstein, the composer Kuznetsov, the leader of the orchestra, the president of the Royal Handel Society – anyone who might have detained or distracted him after rehearsal. An orchestral assistant who dropped in at the office to negotiate expenses said he had seen the evening’s soloist leaving the Royal Albert Hall just after noon, violin case in hand, crossing the road towards Hyde Park. He had no umbrella, and it was starting to rain. The stupid clerk had not thought of offering Dovidl a lift.