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She compares the moment to one of those optical illusions that suddenly changes from a vase into two faces. Once she had heard the slow wobble between two strings, she could never stop hearing it. That evening she rang her mother and played a single note down the phone, which, as her mother pointed out, was not the most exciting call she had ever received.

Then, in the spring of 2018, the company was taken over and her whole department was told it would close within the year. Corinne, then forty-three, was offered a generous redundancy package and a list of career advisers. She took the money and ignored the list. ‘I’d spent twenty years in meetings,’ she says. ‘I wanted a job where you could tell whether you’d done it properly.’

A full tuning involves adjusting more than two hundred strings, each by a tiny amount, often while kneeling or leaning at an awkward angle. After a day with four appointments, her wrists ache and her concentration has gone. She has learned to book no more than three a day and to drive between them in silence, with the radio off, to give her ears a rest.

He is twenty-four, a former warehouse worker called Tomasz, who answered an advert she placed in the local paper more or less as an experiment. He was the only applicant. She says he is more patient than she was at his stage and much better with a screwdriver, although he still cannot hear the beats reliably. ‘He will,’ she says. ‘It took me three months.’

She enrolled that September, the oldest student in a class of nine by almost twenty years. The first term was humbling. Students had to take a piano’s mechanism apart down to the last piece of felt and put it back together, and her early efforts, she admits, sounded like ‘a cutlery drawer falling downstairs’. Her classmates, mostly school-leavers with perfect pitch, were kind but clearly puzzled by her.

The head teacher, a former music teacher herself, had been told by a dealer that most of the instruments were beyond repair. Corinne spent three days at the school during the summer holidays and got nine of the eleven playable again. The other two, she told the head frankly, really were finished, and she suggested a charity that would take them for spare parts.

The old tuner, it turned out, was looking for someone to take over his customers, and within a month Corinne was travelling with him three days a week, learning the trade in the traditional way. He would not let her touch a string for the first six weeks, insisting that she simply watch and listen, day after day, until she understood exactly what she was hearing.