“I hadn’t thought much about that.”

“Little liar! Now, answer me honestly: haven’t you had day-dreams in which you see yourself as a great singer, sought after and courted, popular and rich—probably with handsome men breaking their necks to get into your bed?”

Monica blushed deeply, and was silent. None of her day-dreams had ever included bed.

“You see! I was right. In your heart of hearts you think of singing as a form of power: and you’ve got more common sense in your heart of hearts than you have on that smarmy little tongue of yours. You’re right; singing is a form of power—power of different kinds. Singing as a form of sexual allurement—there’s nothing wrong with that. Very natural, indeed: every real man responds to the woman with the golden, squalling, cat-like note, and every real woman longs to hurl herself at the cock-a-doodling tenor or the bellowing bass. Part of Nature’s Great Plan. But sex-shouting’s a trap, too. At fifty, your golden squall becomes a bad joke. What then? Teaching? If you’re not born to it—and few of the sex-shouters are—it’s a dog’s life; pupils are fatheads, most of ‘em. Are you trying for—well, when you’re trained—a possible twenty-five years of that kind of glory? Because it is glory, you know—real glory.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Not refined enough? Well, there’s another kind of singing. The technique is the same, but the end is different. It depends on what you have in your head and your imagination; it means being a kind of bard, who reveals the life that lies in a great music and poetry. You use your voice to give delight. That’s what music used to be for, you know—to capture the beauty and delight that people found in life. But then the Romantics came along and turned it all upside down; they made music a way of churning up emotions in people that they hadn’t felt before. Music ceased to be a distilment of life and became, for a lot of people, a substitute for life—a substitute for a sea-voyage, or the ecstasies of sainthood, or being raped by a cannibal king, or even for an hour with a psychoanalyst or a good movement of the bowels. And a whole class of people arose who thought themselves music-lovers, but who were really sensation-lovers. Not that I’m a hundred per cent against the Romantics—just against the people who think that Romanticism is all there is of music. Well, there are the two kinds of singing. The sexual singer is, in pretty nearly all respects, the greater of the two, just as a mountain torrent is necessarily a greater force than the most beautiful of fountains: when she sings, she’s a potent enchantress, and the music is merely the broomstick on which she flies. With the bardic singer, the music comes first, and self quite a long way second. Now: which sort of singing appeals to you?”

“Oh, the second, of course. The—bardic kind.”

“If you really mean that, I think the less of you for it. Far better to set out aiming as high as you can, and killing yourself to be one of the big, adored, sexy squallers. It argues more real vitality and gumption in you. Still, I don’t trust you to know what you want. You’re too full of a desire to please—not to please me, but to please your family, or your schoolteachers, or those people—the What’s Its Name Trust—who are paying the shot for you. Those people never want you to have great ambitions or strong, consuming passions. They want you to be refined—which means predictable, stable, controlled, always choosing the smallest cake on the plate, never breaking wind audibly, being a good loser—in a word, dead. I admit that the world couldn’t function properly without its legions of nice, refined, passionless living dead, but there is no room for them in the arts. So we’ll see what you are after you’ve had a few months of work. At the moment you’re just a nice girl with pots of money to spend on training. So let’s get to work.”

“You’ll let me study with you, then?”

“Not for a while. Not till we find out what your politics are.”

“Politics?”

“Haven’t you any politics?”

“Well, Dad’s a good union man, of course, so he always votes Conservative; he says the working man can get most out of them.”

“Sorry. Just a bad joke of mine. Let me give you a short talk on politics, and then you’ll have to go. There are, the world over, only two important political parties—the people who are for life, and the people who are against it. Most people are born one or the other, though there are a few here and there who change their coats. You know about Eros and Thanatos? No, I didn’t really suppose you did. Well, I’m an Eros man myself, and most people who are any good for anything, in the arts or wherever, belong to the Eros party. But there are Thanatossers everywhere—the Permanent Opposition. The very worst Thanatossers are those who pretend to be Eros men; you can sometimes spot them because they blather about the purpose of art being to lift people up out of the mire, and refine them and make them use lace hankies—to castrate them, in fact. You’ve obviously been in contact with a lot of these crypto-Thanatossers—probably educated by them, insofar as you have been educated at all. But there’s a chance that you may be on the Eros side; there’s something about you now and then which suggests it.”

Sir Benedict had risen, and was pushing papers into a briefcase. He rummaged on the top of his piano, and found a box containing some conductor’s batons, and he put this in the case also.

“I’ll get in touch with you from time to time to see how things are going and if your political colour has begun to show. Our first big problem is that you don’t appear to know anything except how to read music and play the piano. I’ll arrange some language lessons for you. And we must get your voice out from under wraps. You’re all buttoned up, vocally and spiritually. I’m going to send you for a few months to the very best vocal coach in London—old Murtagh. He’s a real artist, by the way, so take a good look at him. He’ll unbutton you! He’ll get a good healthy yell out of you if anybody can! Yes, I’ll start you next Monday with Murtagh Molloy.”

“You’ve the bar’l of a singer,” said Mr Molloy, giving Monica’s waist a squeeze which was certainly intended to be professional, but which had a strong hint of larkiness about it, too. He had been feeling her diaphragm with his stubby, nicotine-stained fingers, blowing out sour clouds of cigarette smoke meanwhile. Suddenly he drew her arms about his waist. “Feel this,” said he, and Monica felt his bulging, rubbery abdomen spring into embarrassing life under her hands. “That’s the way to do it,” said Murtagh Molloy, winking and lighting another cigarette.

This was going to take some getting used to, thought Monica. Sir Benedict had said that Molloy was the best singing coach in London, and she had expected someone comparable to himself; someone surprising, perhaps, but distinguished. Had not Domdaniel described him as an artist, an Eros-man? But here, on the second floor of a house in Coram Square, was a stumpy Irishman, bald and fifty if he was a day, who bade her feel his stomach, and talked about singing as if it were wrestling. Murtagh Molloy was a long way from the daemonic von Francius in The First Violin.

“Ben wants me to do what I can for you,” said Mr Molloy, “and I’ll do it because he’s an old friend. But I’ll be frank; if you don’t come across with the goods—out you’ll go. I won’t waste time on duds, and it’s not everyone I can teach anyhow. You’ve got to be simpatico—d’you know simpatico? Means we’ve got to get along. I worked with a dozen teachers when I was young. I even had a few lessons with ffrangcon-Davies in his last years. You wouldn’t know anything about him; a great, great artist. Why, I even worked for a while with William Shakespeare—ah, I thought that’d make your eyes bug—not the poet, of course, but the singing teacher—died, oh, it must be more than twenty years ago. But the greatest of them all was Harry Plunket Greene. You’ve heard of him? No? He was in Canada often. Worked with him off and on for years. Well, the point is, I was simpatico with ‘em all, and that’s why they could teach me, and that’s why I could learn from them. If you’re simpatico you can get down to business without a lot of palaver; hard words don’t hurt, and praise doesn’t puff y’up—makes you humble. Now, let’s hear you sing something. What’ve you there?”