Score!

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.