‘I went for a walk, just after I got dressed. I liked to be alone before parties. I walked for ages, through the village, over the fields, feeling as if I were skirting something huge, something vast and important. It was the most glorious day, Tom, the sun beaming down. And I heard music – the most wonderful music, Tom, you would not believe it.’

Tom stiffened a little, but did not mention the flute he had heard or the one he had been given.

Zita continued. ‘I’d heard rumours about Mundham Farm – an old man lived there, an eccentric who saw nobody, they said, with a beautiful silver-haired servant who hardly ever spoke. I came past Uriah Fiske’s pigs, and paused to scratch one of them with a long stick, then through Long Pightle, which Captain Urquhart had let go fallow, and by the Home Field of Mundham Farm, and saw the house.

‘It was about six o’clock in the evening, and there were lights blazing in every window, though the sun was still out. I don’t know what I was thinking – that I would ask the music player to come to my party. Something in that music, Tom, entered my soul and pulled me onwards. I walked through the field as if in a dream, and as I walked, I realised that all thoughts of home were leaving my mind, and only the farm and the music were what I wanted.

‘I stood at the edge of the bridge.’

At this point, she bent her head and when she looked up again, tears were flowing down her cheeks. Tom laid a hand on her arm, and she took his with her own, entwining their fingers.

‘Behind me was my twenty-first birthday and Bunny Vere and John Temple and T.S. Eliot and cocktails and dances and my silly schoolfriends Moggy and Janey and my mother’s social climbing and my father’s county duties. But those things all seemed to melt away in the music, to become shadows, empty. As I set foot on the bridge, I felt something pass through me – a shock or a wave of power.

‘The back door was open. I came into the hall, and Kit was there, sweeping the stone floor. He looked up, and I had never seen such sadness in a man’s eyes before. Those silver eyes … He didn’t say anything. And I think, for a minute or two, a teeny, tiny minute, I fell in love with him.’

She sipped slowly from her cup.