Her meeting with Guy outside the Associated Investment building was thus most carefully contrived, for Nerine’s first attempt at a brilliant marriage had been a disastrous failure. That her parents had forced her to marry Charles Hurlingham was not strictly true. Mrs Croft in particular, whose snobbery was so intense as to amount almost to a religious vocation, had been resolute in advising Nerine to wait for bigger prey. But it so happened that in the space of three weeks, the French girl who had been Nerine’s friend in Vienna wrote that she was marrying a marquis and the freckle-faced American sent ten pages of rapture about her engagement to a young industrialist. To be beaten to the altar by two girls who were, in every possible way, grossly her inferiors was not to Nerine’s taste. Charles was heir to a baronetcy and a famous estate in Wiltshire; she accepted him and had to endure the four years’ martyrdom that followed his injury in Flanders. Unspeakable years, walled up in the country with Charles who seemed to expect her to stay with him constantly though he had excellent nurses, and who followed her with his devoted, doggy eyes whenever she left the room. Oh, God, the waste of those years, the boredom, the frustration!

Well, that was over. Charles was dead and Guy — she had seen this within minutes of meeting him again — was hers for the asking.

‘I suppose you know what you’re doing,’ said Mrs Croft plaintively, ‘but I cannot approve. Not only found under a piece of sacking, but a piece of sacking in Newcastle upon Tyne! I’m sure you would do better to accept Lord Frith.’

The drawing-room of the villa in Twickenham had scarcely altered since Guy had all but broken the arm of the footman instructed to eject him. The same draped piano legs, the same over-stuffed cushions and looped, mauve curtains; the same brown portraits of dead and portly Crofts…

‘Compared with Guy, Frith is a pauper,’ said Nerine, who was making a list of the clothes she would need for Austria. But she had not finally refused the young Scottish nobleman pining for her so flatteringly in his crenellated tower in the Grampians, for this journey to Vienna was only a way of testing the ground. If Guy, in spite of his wealth, proved to be tight-fisted or attempted to make her mix with the company of her inferiors, there was still time to change her mind. Her period of mourning, about which she had purposefully been a little vague, had come in very useful there.

‘And that dreadful foster-mother,’ continued Mrs Croft. ‘You don’t mean to visit her, surely?’

‘No, of course not. Guy only hinted at it. I shall send her a nice note when the engagement is announced. If it is announced.’ Nerine’s exquisitely arched eyebrows drew together, but briefly, for never frowning had helped her to keep her marvellously youthful skin. Guy’s fondness for Mrs Hodge, who seemed to be some kind of washerwoman, was certainly a drawback but she did not believe that he would foist the company of such a person on his future wife.

‘I only hope that Farne knows what he’s doing,’ said Arthur. ‘They say he lived like a labourer in Brazil. I shall take some Keatings powder. And some Andrews Liver Salts. One cannot be too careful.’

Guy had written to say that he had engaged a suite for them at the Grand Hotel, making it clear that he himself would remain at Sachers. So far, so good — but after that they were to go into the country to join some kind of house party and it was this part of the programme that Arthur regarded with particular apprehension.

Nerine’s brother was the kind of young man intended from birth to be middle-aged. Though only two years older than his sister, he was already going bald; his fleshy cheeks, pendulous stomach and the flat feet that had kept him out of the army, represented a complete rout of those genes which had given substance to the glorious being which was his sister.

‘You must not expect to meet distinguished people while you are there,’ pursued Mrs Croft, for it was her brother who, by marrying the daughter of a baron, had acquired the aunt who was an Honourable. ‘No one well-connected is likely to receive a man with Farne’s origins and European high society is very exclusive. But once they know who you are…’

‘Don’t worry, Mother. Just leave it to me.’

‘I can’t say that I’m looking forward to this adventure,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m not at all sure that I shall be able to get the Financial Times abroad.’

‘There’s no need for you to come, Arthur, I’ve told you. I’m taking my maid — I shall be perfectly all right.’

But in the abacus that served Arthur for a brain there was room for a correct and protective attitude towards his sister. That he should let her travel without escort to a country full of people who were not only foreigners but practically Huns, and join an adventurer who was most unlikely to know how to behave was out of the question.

Nerine had put down her pencil and was looking into the shell-encrusted mirror opposite, her gaze settling on her own reflection with the sense of homecoming experienced by a great pianist as he lowers his hands on to the keyboard of a perfectly tuned Stein-way. She was seldom out of sight of a looking-glass, for she knew that her beauty was a gift bestowed by the gods, a kind of divine trust, and that to grudge any time of expense in caring for it would be selfishness indeed.

But all was well. The three dusky curls that she had trained to tumble from her high-piled hair on to her forehead still held their spring; her upper lashes — each one a burnished, raven scimitar — still soared away from her sapphire eyes. Her nose was matt, her mouth crimsoned and glossy, even without the bite on each lip which she now bestowed with her pearly teeth.

How she would reward Guy if he proved generous! Nothing would be too much trouble, nothing! Even now, uncomplainingly, she was preparing to spend every farthing she had wrested from the awful, stingy Hurlinghams on clothes for the journey, and then…! In Paris, in Vienna and all the capitals of Europe she would endure, patient and uncomplaining, the endless fittings at couture houses, the painstaking selection of suitable jewels and accessories which would make Guy, in possessing her, the envy of the fashionable world.

‘I think I’ll take some Jeyes Fluid too,’ said Arthur, who had been pursuing his own reflections. ‘You can never trust foreigners when it comes to drains.’

Two weeks after the première of Pelleas, Miss Thisbe Purse appeared in Jacob’s office and was greeted by him with sighs of relief. Guy Farne, materializing out of the night like the Prince of Darkness, might have been a dream conjured out of Jacob’s own need, but no one could have dreamed up Miss Thisbe Purse.

At the hands of this gaunt and comically English spinster, Jacob now received the contract between the International Opera Company and a syndicate entitled ‘Associated Investments Ltd’. He received also the measurements of the theatre in which they were to perform, a preliminary cheque which brought tears of emotion to his eyes — and an envelope containing a single sheet of paper which informed him that an appointment had been made for one of his employees, by name Tessa, at Anita’s in the Kärntnerstrasse at 3 p.m. that afternoon to have her hair styled. The fee had been taken care of. Mr Farne’s name was not to appear in the matter.

Jacob was left staring in puzzlement at these somewhat autocratically worded instructions when Miss Purse had gone. Tessa? How had Herr Farne even seen Tessa? Could she be the explanation of the Englishman’s interest in the company? Impossible, surely? But if so… if she had that kind of potential, something must be done. Could he, perhaps, put her in a ballet?

Tessa, when he finally found her in the workshop, was painting the ballcock and chain of a derelict lavatory cistern with silver paint and as he gazed at her, Jacob’s bewilderment increased. Since the première of Pelleas she had taken to wearing a blue beret and now resembled both Jackie Coogan in The Kid and the smaller kind of French railway porter. Surely it was not conceivable that this foreign multi-millionaire with his power and sexuality intended to make her the object of his attentions?

‘Anita!’ shrieked Tessa when she heard what was to befall her. ‘I can’t afford Anita! And anyway, I have to finish this ball and chain for Cavaradossi and then I must go and get some manuscript paper for Herr Klasky and fetch the velvet samples from the warehouse because Frau Pollack has a migraine.’

Jacob frowned. The senior wardrobe mistress had been in a state of almost constant prostration since she had eaten — or very nearly eaten — the ashes of her great-uncle Sandor which had arrived from Budapest for burial and been supposed by her to be an ersatz meat powder of the kind much used in the last years of the war. ‘It’s an order,’ he said to Tessa. ‘The company is paying. Three o’clock.’

Three o’clock accordingly saw Tessa, dressed in a blue skirt and embroidered blouse from Pagliacci and carrying, for some reason, a large biscuit tin, enter the sacred portals of what was arguably the most expensive hairdresser in Europe.

‘Impossible!’ declared Anita, a platinum-blonde Berliner with a contempt for the easy-going Viennese. ‘It is out of the question that I can do anything with you. The hair has not been cut; it has been butchered. I am not a magician. It is too short.’

‘I know, I’m sorry,’ said Tessa. ‘They made me come, but I’ll go.’ She tried to get out of the chair. ‘I’ll grow it again.’

‘Grow it!’ sneered Anita, pushing her down. ‘Are you mad? Do you want to look like an Austrian strudel girl with earphones?’ She gestured to an assistant. ‘A fringe I must have to emphasize the eyes but my God, the back… And of course a Nestlé’s out of the question with that face.’

She began savagely to comb, to slash, to complain…

An hour later Tessa crept out of the shop. The biscuit tin was still clutched under her arm but there was a bewildered look in her eyes. ‘The simplicity which costs no less than everything’ is a phrase much beloved of saints and mystics who use it to describe the pursuit of a spiritual life. This simplicity Anita had brought to Tessa’s hair. The minutely calculated sweep of the silken fringe above the eyes, the curving fronds lapping the pointed ears, the soft strands nestling into the hollow at the back of the neck suggested now a very different kind of urchin: a winged messenger, the young Mercury perhaps, or Ariel.

‘You look charming.’

It had not been Guy’s intention to pursue his acquaintance with Witzler’s under wardrobe mistress. But leaving the Treasury on a personal errand he had recalled his instructions to Thisbe and, on an impulse, crossed the road to Anita’s. Now he too was startled. Tessa had been not so much transformed as revealed. The vulnerable little face, the delicate bones, the strange air of puzzlement as she tried to comprehend what the mirror had shown her moved Guy strangely. He had the absurd feeling that as one can see in young babies the throbbing of their pulse beneath the fontanelle, so he could put his hand on the bronze and shining head and feel the beating of her soul.

‘She is not ready,’ thought Guy. ‘Poor child, what have I done?’ And lightly he said, ‘May I relieve you of your burden?’ For the tin she was carrying, adorned with a painting of the former Empress Elizabeth in a tiara, was large.

‘Oh no, thank you. I’m just going to the Stadtpark to release the mice.’

‘The mice?’ said Guy, nevertheless taking the tin.

Tessa nodded. ‘You see, when I first came to work in the theatre they had those traps that break their backs, only sometimes… they… didn’t. So I borrowed some of those where the mice go in through those bristle tunnels that point backwards, you know, and then they can’t get out. Only then, of course, you have the mice.’

Guy, steering her across the road with a light hand under her elbow, said he saw this.

‘So I let them out in the Stadtpark,’ she said, ‘when I can get away. But please… I’m sure I’m delaying you?’

‘Not at all. I was only going to buy a birthday present for my foster-mother in England.’

They had entered the park where lilacs mingled their heavy, fragrant clusters with the golden tresses of the laburnums, little girls bowled their hoops and a troop of firemen in Ruritanian uniforms were marching towards the bandstand.

‘Are they musical mice?’ Guy enquired. ‘I mean, are we making for the Johann Strauss statue? Or the Schubert Memorial?’