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He then took his overture at a totally different, lilting, cantering tempo to which the orchestra had a mad struggle to readjust. At the end there was utter silence. Gazing at their shoes, waiting for the inevitable explosion, his musicians didn’t see the tears in Rannaldini’s eyes.

‘Thank you, gentlemen, that was absolutely beautiful,’ he said quietly. ‘You can have the rest of the afternoon off.’

So he can take me to tea at the Ritz, thought Pushy joyfully.

But ignoring Pushy, abandoning the gaping orchestra, Rannaldini bounded upstairs to the control room where, for once, Serena had lost her cool.

‘You cannot waste an entire session,’ she yelled, as she met him in the doorway. ‘What about the introductions to the other acts?’

But her tirade faltered, as Rannaldini’s hand crept inside her purple jersey.

‘We shall go ’ome to your flat.’

‘But Jessie is there with Nanny Bratislava.’

‘Tell little Jessie she must learn to call me Uncle Roberto.’

13

The next drama to rock the recording was when Rozzy Pringle finally turned up to sing Tebaldo, Elisabetta’s page. A seventies beauty, the doe-eyed, long-legged Rozzy was so like Celia Johnson that everyone had wanted to have unbrief encounters with her. She was much too old for the part, but at least she’d make Hermione look young, and she had a host of fans.

Granny and Rannaldini, who’d often worked with her, admired her inordinately. Serena and Alpheus had long collected her records. On the other hand, Hermione disliked all other sopranos on principle, and Mikhail, Baby and Chloe, being from a younger generation, scoffed that Rozzy was past it.

Tristan was livid with them. Enchanted at the prospect of working with one of his heroines, he filled Rozzy’s dressing room with spring flowers.

But when Rozzy finally came through the door, on a dank, grey, viciously cold morning, he was appalled. She looked old enough to be Hermione’s grandmother, and was purple with cold to match the darned violet blazer she was wearing over her long, flowered dress. To combat the ageing hippie look, she had curled up her hair but it had dropped in the fog, and fell in lank straight tresses over her jutting collarbones. Everyone greeted her effusively to conceal their shock.

‘Hi, Rozzy, I’m such a fan,’ said Chloe, clanking cheeks. Then, ten seconds later to Baby, ‘She must have lied about her age in Who’s Who. She’ll never see fifty again.’

Having thrust a beautifully wrapped present into Tristan’s hand, ‘a little something because you’re so kind to book me’, Rozzy fled to the loo.

‘Such a drag having Rozzy Pringle here, stinking out the lav again,’ grumbled Hermione, half an hour later, as little Christy Foxe propelled her towards the microphone.

‘You have to move to mike four, next to Baby, in bar forty-five, Dame Hermione,’ he reminded her for the tenth time. Then, consulting his score, he said, smiling at Rozzy as she crept grey and shaking out of her dressing room, ‘You start off standing twelve feet from mike two, then move up close to mike three, Mrs Pringle.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Tristan put his bomber jacket round Rozzy’s trembling shoulders. ‘Tebaldo’s just as petrified as you in this scene. Just make sure those opening “Hey theres” really ring out.’

Rozzy, Baby and Hermione were all in place, their breath rising in white plumes as Rannaldini swept in.

‘Morning, Rozzy, lovely to have you with us. Shall we catch up over a spot of lunch?’ he called out, eliciting scowls from Serena, Pushy and Hermione.

It was too early for the offstage band, waiting in the bar, to have got drunk. Seeing Rannaldini raise his stick on the monitor, Viking O’Neill came in with the mournful, fading sob of the departing hunting horn.

‘“All is silent, night approaches, and the first star glitters on the horizon,”’ sang Baby, who worked the mike like a rock star.

Now they’ll eat their bitchy words, thought Tristan, as Rannaldini nodded, smiling at Rozzy, but despite her anguished face and frenzied mouthings, no ‘Hey theres’ came out.

Rannaldini halted the orchestra.

‘Rozzy?’

‘Sorry, Maestro.’

‘From the top.’ He raised his baton.

Viking’s horn, then Baby, both hauntingly exquisite, were followed by silence, and a dreadful, strangulated croak.

‘Relax, Rozzy, one, two, three,’ called Rannaldini.

Rozzy’s heart was crashing, the blood pumping through her veins, but her throat was drier than the desert. Even after ten minutes of struggling, all she could produce were scraping gasps. Tristan, in the control room, felt as if he was watching a dog, whose vocal cords had been cut in the vivisection clinic, trying to cry out as the surgeon’s knife went in. By the time he had run down into the hall, Rannaldini had lost his temper.

‘How dare you call yourself a professional singer?’ he was screaming.

‘You’ve let us all down,’ reproached Hermione, as Rozzy fled to her dressing room, her body racked as much with coughing as with sobs.

Rannaldini picked up the telephone to the control room.

‘Who booked her, for Christ’s sake?’

‘You and Tristan did,’ snapped Serena. ‘We’re going to have to reschedule.’

‘Tebaldo was my favourite part at college,’ piped up Pushy.

Rozzy’s present to Tristan was a cushion, green velvet on one side, the other exquisitely embroidered with the words, ‘The Lily in the Valley’.

Tristan couldn’t bear unhappiness. Leaving everyone fighting, and Baby and Hermione to finish their duet, he drove Rozzy to Harley Street with his car heater turned up.

She had had a terrible Christmas, she revealed, between sobs, yelling at insolent stepchildren, placating Glyn, her idle husband, coping with his frightful mother, who kept commiserating with him for being neglected by a wife who was always selfishly pursuing a career. Matters had not been helped when Rozzy had nipped off on 28 December to sing Mimì in a cheap Hungarian production to pay a tax bill, before singing Brünnhilde, with laryngitis, in Athens three days later. Brünnhilde’s immolation scene had done for her.

Why the fuck did you risk it? Tristan wanted to shout.

The throat specialist said Rozzy had thoroughly overstrained her voice. He couldn’t promise that it would come back and she certainly couldn’t sing in the recording.

Seated in Tristan’s car once more, Rozzy cried so hard that passers-by — swept down Harley Street by the north wind — gazed in horror.

‘People will think I am woman-beater,’ grumbled Tristan, and drove her to his flat overlooking Regent’s Park, which glittered with hoar frost in the midday sun. All round the walls of the sitting room were propped photographs of the cast.

‘I like to live with my characters,’ explained Tristan.

‘Past and present,’ said Rozzy, picking up a large photograph of Claudine Lauzerte in its own silver frame. ‘I wish I looked as good as that now.’ Wincing, as she glanced in the mirror she wiped mascara from under her eyes. ‘People used to say Claudine and I were a little alike.’

‘A little.’ Tristan smiled as he handed her a vast Bloody Mary.

She looked half starved. He couldn’t have her blubbing all over a restaurant. He’d been too uptight himself to eat the Chinese takeaway he’d brought home last night. Perhaps he could heat it up for Rozzy.

‘I’m sorry to be such a drip,’ she said, following him into the kitchen. ‘Yesterday I discovered Glyn had appropriated thirty thousand pounds I’d saved for my tax bill to subsidize some dodgy property deal.

‘He’s also employed an incredibly pretty temporary housekeeper called Sylvia at vast expense for the few days I was going to be away recording Carlos. This morning I took my mother-in-law Go-Cat in her breakfast bowl instead of muesli…’ Rozzy started to cry again.