Removing it from the pile, Flora sat down on the arm of Boris’s chair and started to brush his wild curls.

‘My music reflects the chaos of our times.’

‘I don’t know why you don’t save time and programme this flat instead.’

Ignoring her, Boris topped up Abby’s glass. ‘I am sorry about your wrist. I have all your records. Vil you play again?’

‘My physio thinks so, but I still can’t grip the neck of a violin and my fingers can’t get around the strings.’

‘Eet is same, I ’ave music bursting to get out of my head, but I cannot write.’

‘It’s not the same at all,’ reproved Flora. ‘You can still move a pencil. Don’t be a drama queen.’

‘Ouch,’ said Boris, as she tugged at a tangle at the back. ‘What’s got into you?’

‘I am sick of an old passion. Christ, you’ve got chewing-gum here.’

‘I wanted to tell you, Boris.’ Lowering her voice Abby broke into Russian again, obviously talking about Rachel because soon they were both crying and wiping each other’s eyes and pouring out more glasses of red.

‘Summit meeting between the super powers,’ said Flora drily, as Marcus returned with a second dustbin bag.

Beautiful red-and-blue patterned rugs were beginning to emerge on the floor and a gold-and-blue embroidered shawl on the piano where Marcus was righting the silver-framed photographs of the old days in Moscow: children on toboggans, grannies with swept-up hair, the young Boris with Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

‘That vas my Rachel,’ Boris pointed to a photograph of a beautiful but disapproving-looking woman. ‘She vas a saint.’

‘She was a crosspatch,’ said Flora, getting a black velvet toggle out of her trouser pocket to tie back Boris’s curls. Finally she brushed his wild eyebrows.

‘There, Mel Gibson.’ She kissed the tip of his nose.

‘How many voices are you scoring the Requiem for?’ asked Abby.

‘None,’ said Boris flatly. ‘The instruments play the voices. The RSO chorus is full of squawking amateurs and Hermione Harefield wanted to sing soprano part. So I stop them all. I ’ate singers.’

Returning to the pile through which she was making slow progress because she kept stopping to read things, Flora was now brandishing an unstamped postcard with a charging bison on the back.

‘Why are you writing to Edith Spink?’

‘She send tape of concert of my Berlin Vall Symphony she did in Vest Country. It sound so ‘orrible, I write telling her never to play my vork again. I vondered vot happen to that postcard, geeve it to me.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Flora tore up the postcard and chucked it into Marcus’s black bag. ‘Edith’s a good egg. When Rannaldini blocked my scholarship to the Academy, she put in a good word. You’re stupid to upset her, Boris, she’s on your side.’

‘Not ven she play my music like that. I shall have to go back to teaching.’

‘You can’t, you hated teaching,’ said Flora sensibly. ‘All those staff meetings about handles on lavatory doors, all the fuss when you wanted time off to go to performances, let alone rehearsals. And you can’t compose if you have to write lectures. You’ve got to finish, Rachel’s Requiem.’

‘I never meet a deadline or an honest woman,’ said Boris sulkily.

‘That’s bloody rude when I’ve given you the benefit of my advice. Christ,’ Flora pulled out a sheaf of brown envelopes, ‘don’t you ever pay bills?’

‘Not if I can’t pay them. I cannot buy my kids clothing, I cannot redecorate my flat. Look at the damp.’ Boris pointed to a dark stain above the window.

‘You’ll be able to paper it with brown envelopes,’ said Flora, ‘Here’s one from the Danish National Ballet — surely you don’t owe them any money?’

Opening the envelope Flora triumphantly shook out a cheque for thirty thousand kroners which Boris held up to the light in ecstasy.

‘It’s for ballet they want me to write about Little Mermaid.’

‘That’s terrific,’ said Abby excitedly. ‘You’ll get repeats every time anyone wants to do it and they can sell videos and tapes in the foyer.’

Boris, whose melancholy alternated with raging high spirits, became quite expansive at the prospect of relative riches. Normally he, Flora and Marcus would have played chamber music into the small hours but desisted in deference to Abby.

‘What are your plans?’ he asked her.

‘Take the course at the Academy. I’ve familiarized myself with loads of scores in Lucerne, now I need practise. I’ll take any gig offered.’

Having tidied up as much of the sitting-room as possible, Marcus was wheezing so badly from the dust that he had to retreat to the kitchen, resort to a couple of puffs from his inhaler, and sit down for ten minutes, hunched over the kitchen table to recover his breath. Then he started on supper. There was only a certain amount of his day that he could cope with other people. He needed to be alone now to think about next week’s concert.

Finding a lot of eggs of dubious antiquity, some rockhard Gruyère and some big tomatoes, he decided to make cheese omelettes and tomato salad. There was no vinegar so he used the juice of a wrinkled lime and brought a loaf out of retirement by turning it into garlic bread.

Rubbing the Gruyère up and down the grater until the curls of cheese had overflowed the bowl, he studied the Chopin, humming and making notes.

‘Need a top-up?’ It was Abby with a bottle.

Marcus shook his head.

She looked much better than she had earlier. There was a sparkle in her eyes and colour in her cheeks.

‘My, that’s good,’ Abby pinched a bit of tomato out of the salad bowl. ‘Who taught you to cook?’

‘My stepmother.’

‘The divine Taggie,’ teased Abby. ‘Hermione Harefield said she wasn’t a woman of substance.’

‘She’s the most s-s-ubstantial person I know,’ stammered Marcus furiously. ‘She’s b-b-eautiful and k-kind and she’s the only woman who’s ever made my father happy. That bitch Hermione’s just jealous.’

‘I told you to keep your trap shut, Abby,’ said Flora, appearing in the doorway.

After supper, leaving the others to drink and gossip, Marcus settled down to play the piano. Boris’s flat was on the second floor of a four-sided block which looked out on to a square of garden dominated by a huge golden catalpa.

It was so mild that people in the surrounding flats opened their windows, wrapping their children in duvets, so they could all listen to Marcus until the stars came out, clapping and cheering whenever he stopped and shouting for him to go on.

‘Audience don’t do zat for me,’ grumbled Boris. ‘But he is good boy,’ he confided to Abby, ‘I teach him piano at school. Ven Rachel die he turn up at the house asking what he could do, looking after kids, helping me sort things out. He is gentle, but he is not at all vimp and he play like dream.’

Abby, a bit drunk now, was equally enchanted but also tearful. She must not neglect her physio.

Having dispatched the Grande Polonnaise with a great flourish, Marcus got out more music and launched into a modern piece, explosions of crashing notes, interspersed with a sad, haunting tune.

‘That’s beautiful,’ called out Abby. ‘What is it?’

‘Ees familiar.’ Boris looked perplexed.

‘Bloody well should be,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s part of the “Dies Irae” from Rachel’s Requiem. I finished transcribing it last night.’

‘I wrote that?’ Boris leapt to his feet. ‘Play it again. Where’s my violin?’

‘Under the sofa,’ said Flora.

Impatiently Boris tuned up and began to play the main tune with Marcus accompanying. Marcus’s copying was dark and clear which made it very easy to read.

Having Jewish blood like Abby, Boris tended to soup up the melody, playing very emotionally with great rhetorical gestures.

‘This is very grateful piece,’ he told Abby and Flora in delight.

‘You mean rewarding,’ corrected Flora. ‘Yes, it’s breathtaking. Like Bartók, “full of hitherto undreamed of possibilities”.’

Occasionally stopping to change a note, totally absorbed, they played on.

‘Marcus is seriously good,’ Abby told Flora. ‘Nothing can stop him making it.’

‘Let’s make some coffee,’ Flora led Abby into the kitchen.

‘Marcus is happy and relaxed at the moment,’ she went on, ‘because he’s among friends and he’s had the odd drink but he’s crippled by nerves, throwing up for hours before concerts, and he’s already had to cancel two recitals because of asthma attacks, which doesn’t help in the music world, which hates unreliability.

‘Shall we wash up?’ Flora looked unenthusiastically at the supper plates.

But, as the dish-washer was still working overtime, gurgling away cleaning all the silver and china they’d unearthed from the sitting-room, she decided to leave it.

‘Nothing ever gets clean that I wash by hand.’

After some rootling around she found a tin of Gold Blend in the breadbin and, unable to find a spoon, shook some coffee into four cups.

‘Also,’ she added, switching on the kettle, ‘Marcus has a terrible hang-up about Rupert, who doesn’t see the point of him at all.’

‘But Rupert seemed so caring in BA,’ said Abby perplexed. ‘And when he visited me in the hospital.’

‘Rupert’s dazzling,’ agreed Flora, ‘but the brighter the moon, the darker the shadow it casts and it’s no fun being son of Superstud. Rupert’s always preferred Tabitha, Marcus’s younger sister, and he passionately disapproves of his son and heir taking up anything as drippy as the piano, when he should be at home learning how to run the estate.’