The word “mistress”, insofar as she had thought of it at all, had always held a dark splendour for Monica. Because of her beauty, even Persis had not spoiled this notion that women who lived with men out of wedlock breathed a special, exciting and romantic air. But now she was a mistress herself, and although it had its excitements and rare, deep satisfactions it was by no means what she had, dimly, foreseen. It was very agreeable to be deferred to by Tuke and Tooley, and to see the baleful glint in Persis’ fine eyes, but there was a lot of hard work about it.

Giles liked comfort, though he had no intention of supplying it for himself, and once the flat was running in a reasonably orderly manner, he wanted it to continue that way. And Lantern, now that she had a bigger say in its production, took more of her time. Giles made a pretext to ask Domdaniel to cancel her German and Italian lessons, so that this time would be provided. And he began to work her mercilessly at her singing lessons. The success of Discoverie had raised his ambition as a composer to a new pitch. He hunted out and revised his songs—which were far more numerous than Odingsels’ estimate of fifty—and it was her task to copy the new versions neatly; under his tuition she became a quick, deft and pleasantly ornamental copyist. But he also began to write new songs, and as she was at hand, he arranged the tessitura of these new works to suit her voice, making them inconveniently high for the majority of singers. His choice of lyrics tended toward poets not widely popular and usually dead; his settings of modern verse were few. His sensitivity to poetry, and to the rhythms of English, was reflected in all his songs, but in the new works it expressed itself in complications of time, and in prolongations of phrase, which made them very hard to study, though wonderfully easy to hear. It was Monica’s delight, and also her despair, to slave at these songs through countless revisions, while the composer visited upon her all the irritation and dissatisfaction which he felt with himself. Giles never praised her. When a song had reached its final form, and she had sung it precisely as he wanted it, he would sometimes say, “Got it now, I think.” But it was of himself that he was speaking.

The flat ceased to be the hang-out of the menagerie, for Giles was too busy to be bothered with them, except when Lantern work was to be done, or when he wanted conversation and a party. Of course they blamed Monica for coming between him and his old friends. And of course they wondered what on earth he saw in her.

Sometimes she joined in this wonder herself, for as a lover Giles was fully as demanding as he was when he was teaching her to sing what he had written. Indeed, the two kinds of experience were uncomfortably similar. He could be tender, but he could not be patient. He was experimental and ingenious, demanding for himself aspects of pleasure which she could not comprehend, and therefore could provide only by happy accident. If luck was not with her he might scold; worse, he might laugh at her. Once, after what had seemed to her a wonderful, ecstatic afternoon in the pokey little bedroom of the flat, she had turned to him, certain that the moment had come, whispering, “Do you love me?” He had replied, “What if I say no?” The sardonic glint in his eye warned her not to press the matter. She could not conceal her hurt, so she rose, dressed herself, and made him the stodgy, jammy tea-meal which he liked. She knew better than to ask that question again.

She did not spend the nights at Tite Street. She did not dare, for fear that Mrs Merry would tell Mr Boykin, who would tell Mr Andrew, who would tell the Bridgetower Trust—who would tell her mother. But except for her lessons with Murtagh Molloy she spent almost all of her waking hours there. Her first decision to preserve some aloofness from Giles had quickly weakened; the harder he worked her, the more he nagged her about the most minute details of her singing, the more tyrannous his demands as a lover, the less was she able to keep away from him.

Bun Eccles alone of the menagerie seemed to have any true estimate of her relationship to Giles.

“You’ve certainly got it bad, kid,” said he to her one day as they sat in The Willing Horse.

“Worse than bad,” she replied. “It’s abject.”

“Well, cheer up. You’ll get over it.”

“Only when I’m dead.”

“Bad as that?”

“Yes; bad as that.”

It was Bun who sent her to a physician.

“You got trouble enough, Monny, without getting landed with a baby. You can’t expect Giles to do anything about it. He belongs in the great nineteenth-century tradition, when geniuses littered the earth with stupider-than-average kids. So you just cut along and see my friend Doc Barwick; I’ll tell him you’re coming, and why, and he’ll put you wise. Self-preservation is the first law of fallen women and a couple o’ quids’ worth of prevention is better than fifty guineas’ worth of dangerous cure.”

And thus a new and unwelcome complication was introduced into her love for Giles. Monica had been brought up with a Fundamentalist’s horror of this particular interference with Nature, and with an ill-defined but strong notion that if the consequences of sin were avoided now, some triply-compounded exaction would be made at last. She faithfully did as Eccles’ friend bade her, for she feared open disgrace, but she added immeasurably to her sense of guilt by doing so.

By the irrational account-keeping of unhappy love, the humiliations and labours which she underwent for Giles made her love him the more; and the more she loved him, the more inevitable it seemed to her that some day he must recognize the burdens which she had incurred on his account, and love her for it. He could not know the truth, and still withhold his love from her. Such indifference could not be reconciled with her estimate of his character.

Easter fell late, and it was the beginning of March when Molloy said to her, one morning—”Got a message for you from His Nibs; wants you to study the St Matthew Passion thoroughly and in a hurry—which can’t be done, as he well knows. But he’s conducting the Oxford Bach Choir in a performance on the first Sunday in April, and he wants you to be one of his London soloists. Oh, nothing tremendous, so don’t think it! You’ll be the soprano False Witness—seven glorious bars in your part. But he thinks it’s time you got a smell of public performance, and here’s your chance. You’re to bone up on the whole job, sit in the choir, sing your bit, and get your expenses paid. Know any Bach?”

“I’ve been through the Anna Magdalena Notebook with Revelstoke.”

“Ever look at the Passion? Ever hear it?”

“Never.”

“We’ve a month; we’ll scratch the surface.”

It seemed to Monica that they did much more than scratch the surface; she slaved at it, and Molloy even made her study the full score, so that she might have some acquaintance with classical orchestration. He forbade her jealously to seek help from Giles. “What would a fellow like that know about this sort of music?” he demanded, unreasonably. It was not Giles’ musical competence he doubted, but his moral worth. Molloy had a cult for the Passion which astonished Monica, for she had net supposed him to be a deeply religious man. “If the Bible was divinely inspired, so was the Matthew Passion,” said he; “you’ve not only to know it note for note and rest for rest—you’ve to feel it in the furthest depths of your soul.” It was in this spirit that they worked.

The effect on Monica was deeply unsettling. As the great music took possession of her, it became a monumental rebuke to the life she was living. Without having done so consciously, she had moved far from the Thirteener faith; the altered conditions of her life shoved it into the background, and when she thought of it at all, it was the crudities of its doctrine, the sweaty strenuosities of Pastor Beamis, and the trashiness of its music which recurred to her. Not that she condemned it in such clear terms, for to have done so would have been to condemn her family, and her own former self. Loyalty was as strong in Monica as it had been when she declared to George Medwall that nothing would make her untrue or ungrateful to her home. Fifteen months was not long enough to shake that resolve, though it was long enough to give quite another colour to the situation. The Thirteener faith was like a shoddy and unbecoming dress which she had ceased to wear, but had not yet thrown out.