“They gave them their starting note, told them where they had to end up, and then let them find their way there.” Jane had lifted the stylus from the record. If she hadn’t, the nonsense in the inner groove would have continued into infinity. Which was almost certainly the idea. It sounded like Paul McCartney on helium chanting something like “never could be any other…” over and over again. Aaron had looked it up on his phone. It turned out he was wrong in his assessment. It was some kind of backwards gobbledegook, apparently. But if you heard what you heard, then what did it matter what even the Beatles had intended?

A good question, that.

“And you hear him?” Aaron asked. There were no rills, she’d told him, in Sgt. Pepper. By which she meant no gaps between the tracks on the vinyl. They all ran one into another, so it was a real test of skill to find the start of the track again. Although this time she aimed for the first of the piece’s two wild crescendos – the one mid-way through the song, when Lennon gave way to McCartney. When whimsy gave way to poetry. Paul on the top deck of the bus having a smoke. His rather more prosaic day, as opposed to John’s darker flights of fancy, all holes in the road and fatal crashes at the traffic lights.

So very much had been written about the song. And Jane had read most of it.

“Oh, yes,” she said. It was 10th February 1967 and the forty-piece orchestra had assembled for what they were told would be orchestral overdubs. They were in costume, some of them. Tail coats and clown noses because they’d been told the band wanted a party atmosphere. Aaron had found her the film of that day on YouTube – it had been edited together to make a “video” for the song – because he thought she might maybe have found the man she listened for every time she heard the record somewhere in there. Even if only behind one of the uncanny valley plastic masks. But that would have been too easy. That might even have spoiled the song for her.

“He was one of the violins, right?”

Jane had her eyes closed, one hand out to steady herself against the wall. She was braced for the twenty-four bar build to the crescendo. Every musician for themselves. Told to break every rule they held dear. Pianissimo to fortissimo. Without listening to their neighbours.

“He was.”

“And you hear him?”

There were twelve violins. This was easy enough to look up, too. Aaron had even found their names in the Beatles Bible. But as for how each one of them took their instructions… As for the route each of them took to the climax? She could hear it?

“There,” she said, holding up a finger, pointing into the speaker. “He’s there.”

Jane had told Aaron, when they’d first met, what had become of her grandfather. How few days he’d had after that February day over fifty years ago. She’d told him, too, how she had learned about his music. How the violin was all her mother had left of her dad. How that was all that had come down to his granddaughter. How amazing it was to think that, at the very least, he was captured forever in that slab of 180gm vinyl. How reassuring it was that something still lived of him. How important it had been to her mother as she came to the end of her own life.

Aaron leaned in to the speaker and listened through the welter of percussion and brass and woodwind and concentrated on the strings. And he said what she needed him to say. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I can start to make them out.”

And when Jane had let the record play through to the inner groove again, and lifted the stylus again, and wiped her eyes again, Aaron suggested they do what they always did at this time of an evening. When she had let John Lennon turn her on in a way he could never have imagined.

She had given him his starting note.

It was clear where she needed to end up.

There was no need to show her the list of the real violin players that day when it would only go and spoil everything.