Score!

‘No-one. They’re all so self-obsessed. I’m having dinner with the worst.’

‘Well, take care of yourself.’

‘I’ve never had a story like this, Gordy.’

Out of the window, she could see the dark rings of the maze and Rannaldini’s Unicorn Glade, both places where, in the old days, Rannaldini had laid her. At the centre of the former she could make out the glimmering silver figure of a pawing, snorting unicorn. Nearer, a fountain and a cascade of white roses were illuminated by huge lights.

‘“Come, Eboli.”’ Hermione’s voice soared gloriously into the darkness. ‘“The feast has but started, and I already tire of its joyful noise.”’

She’d better organize her own feast, reflected Beattie, which included gulls’ eggs, wild salmon, and raspberries and cream. ‘With this web, I will snare such a fly as Alpheus,’ murmured Beattie, as she put an ice-wrapped bottle of Dom Pérignon into the picnic basket.

She always sweated like a pig as she approached a deadline. What a relief, in her role as grotty Eulalia, that she didn’t have to bath or tart up for her date.

Alpheus’s long nose was thoroughly out of joint. Having seen a clip of him riding, Rupert Campbell-Black had pronounced he made a sack of potatoes look like Frankie Dettori and refused to let him participate in the polo shoot.

‘We can’t afford the insurance if you have a fall.’

Nor did Alpheus feel remotely compensated by the beautiful £3000 suit Griselda had hired for him to wear as a kingly spectator.

Going into the production office on Thursday night, he found it deserted except for Mikhail, four forks sticking out of a dinner jacket pocket, gabbling endearments into the telephone.

‘It will not be much longer, my darlink.’

Alpheus, who had picked up enough Russian while singing Boris, pursed his lips. Mikhail was clearly getting over Lara very quickly. Realizing he’d been clocked, Mikhail hastily hung up and clanked off. This left Alpheus to conduct a long telephonic interview with Le Monde, until he had made sure that Rozzy had departed carrying Mikhail and Baby’s dress shirts, and was able to nip into Wardrobe and appropriate his new three-thousand-pound suit.

Alpheus was pleased about his dinner with Eulalia. A double-page spread in the Sentinel would be most useful, particularly if it could be held over until September when he had a Wigmore recital and a new solo album, which would need every help to knock Rannaldini off the number-one spot.

‘You must be the handsomest man in opera. If you didn’t sing, you could make a fortune modelling,’ sighed Eulalia, putting in another roll of film. ‘So few men can carry off white suits.’

Having embarked on a rare third glass of Dom Pérignon, Alpheus was feeling romantic and manly. In the dusk at Jasmine Cottage, the dog daisies glowed like little moons. Down in the valley, tractors with headlamps were cutting Rannaldini’s hay, blotting out the din made by Hermione and Chloe.

‘Turn your head slightly, you’ve got such an imposing profile,’ went on Eulalia, ‘I’m sure when the Independent described you as wooden last year it was only in the context of a great tree sheltering the whole production.’

She was probably right, reflected Alpheus.

Eulalia, he decided, looked like a fashion model in a left-wing paper, with granny specs dominating a pale, set face, leg and armpit hair marginally longer than the hair on her head and a long floating black dress giving no advance information about the figure underneath. Pushing her on the swing earlier, he had deduced from the dark shadow between her hairy legs that she wasn’t wearing any panties.

Unfortunately, from Eulalia’s point of view, Alpheus was far more interested in analysing himself and his art and singing snatches of Don Giovanni with an engaging smile than in dishing the dirt. He had no idea who Tristan was screwing or who might have killed Rannaldini.

Having spent a further half-hour relaying how he sang his first Philip II, Alpheus leant forward, removed Eulalia’s spectacles, told her she had lovely eyes and suggested they try some of that delicious picnic to mop up the Dom Pérignon.

‘What a nurturing young woman,’ said Alpheus, selecting a gull’s egg. ‘You’ve even remembered the celery salt.’

Alas, the totally undomesticated Eulalia had not realized gulls’ eggs needed boiling, and the first one Alpheus cracked went all over his new white suit. Eulalia was unfazed.

‘Elderflower boiled with hemlock and comfrey will get egg yolk out of anything,’ she said and, next moment, had pushed Alpheus back on to the damp grass, released his cock, spread it with celery salt and had her incomparably wicked way with him.