When the day came Monica’s nervousness, as always, took the form of depression, a sense of unworthiness, and a fear not of failure but of a spiritless mediocrity. By now she had some experience of this state, and recent reflection had convinced her that it was part of her heritage from Ma; her imagination, and her ups and downs of feeling, were Ma’s. Well, she must not let them dominate her life, as they had dominated the life of Mrs Gall.

But it is one thing to reason with depression, and another to lift it. All day she was gloomy. She had procured invitations for her own friends. Would Kevin and Alex draw attention to themselves in some unsuitable way? Would George Medwall, with whom she had had two or three brief, uneasy conversations, come at all, and would it bother her if she could not see him in the audience? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had asked to make a tape-recording of part of the concert; was that going to mean a microphone to fix her with its disapproving, steely face, somewhere directly in her view? Why, she wondered, did anyone want to be a singer?

Did she indeed want to be a singer? What singer whom she knew did she admire? In her present mood she could think of none. Singers! The creatures of a physical talent, constantly fussing about draughts in spite of their horse-like health—conscious that their voices might drop a tone if the room were too hot. Evelyn Burnaby, with whom she now had some acquaintance, and whom she admired as an artist—did she really want to be like Evelyn? So dull, except when she sang.

And Ludwiga Kressel—a genuine diva, that one, to whom Domdaniel had introduced her after a performance at Covent Garden. Ludwiga had dominated the party, a powerful, brass-haired woman, with a sense of humour as heavy as her own tread. She had compelled them all to silence while she told them of her experiences with the stage director at the Metropolitan. She had been unable to continue, convulsed by her own fun, yet protesting through her big-throated laughter, “However funny I am I cannot be so funny as Graf.” She had got to the Metropolitan because she had previously secured an engagement in Vienna. “Byng is impressed by Vienna, but Vienna is nothing, nothing at all.” Did she want to think like Ludwiga, who talked endlessly of “concertizing” and “recitalizing”? Did she want to live like Ludwiga, whose ferocious schedule of plane travel made it possible for her to cram the greatest possible number of appearances—operatic and concert—into a single season? No, no; not like Ludwiga.

By six o’clock she was in the depths, and wanted a drink more than anything else. No—obviously not more than anything else, for a drink was easily within her reach; Kevin and Alex had been discreetly keeping her modest needs supplied. But a drink before a concert might disturb her voice, so it was out of the question for her to have one. She knew very well, as she denied herself, that she was by that abnegation settling her shoulders to the singer’s yoke.

The recital was to be at half-past eight, and well before eight she was entering the artist’s door of Fallen Hall. The artist’s door, in this case, simply meant the entrance to a poky little room, piled half-full with folded wooden chairs and ferociously over-heated by steam coils, at one side of the stage. But this was what an “artist’s door” meant in her native land—not the mysterious and somewhat furtive side-doors which led to stages in England, nor the glorious, lamplit courtyard which led to the stage entrance of the Paris Opera; she entered Fallen Hall itself by just the same door as the public used; for after all, what had an artist to conceal, or what marked him off from the general public? Nothing, of course; nothing but a world of dedication.

Having failed to open a window, or find a janitor to do it for her, Monica was fearful that she might take cold even before her concert. The air was hot and dry, so she went into the corridor, and at last found another room, dark and not so hot, where faculty meetings were held, and here she concealed herself until five minutes before the concert was to begin.

Her accompanist, Humphrey Cobbler, had not yet arrived, and Monica worried furiously. But with a minute to spare he appeared, much rumpled and utterly unpressed, but in evening clothes and plainly in very good spirits. During rehearsals she had learned to know and like Humphrey very much, and so now she was able to speak sharply to him about his lateness.

“But I’m not late,” said he, smiling indulgently. “You don’t suppose they’ll get going before eight forty-five? My dear, the nobility and gentry, the beauty and chivalry, not to mention the money and the stretched credit, of Salterton are assembling to hear you. You can smell the moth-balls and the bunny coats away back here if you sniff. And it’s all for you. Don’t fuss; glory in it.”

“I can’t glory. I think I’m going to be sick. Oh, Humphrey, this scares me far worse than the BBC, or anything I’ve ever done.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s my home town, that’s why. You couldn’t understand. You’re an Englishman; you haven’t got Salterton in your bones; you didn’t grow up with those people out there meaning the larger world to you. So far as they know me at all, they know me as a stenographer at the Glue Works. And right now that’s exactly what I feel like.”

“Listen, poppet, it’s very charming of you to love your home town, but now is the time to put that love in its proper place—which is right outside Fallen Hall, in a snowbank. Salterton can’t be your measure of success or failure; what you think are its standards are just the standards of childhood and provincialism. You’ve been away long enough to recognize that your home town is not only the Rome and the Athens of your early life, but also in many important ways a remote, God-forsaken dump. Those people out there are just vincial professors, and bankers, and wholesale druggists who want to be proud of you if you give them half a chance, but who will just as readily take any opportunity you give them to keep you down. Now: don’t try to dominate them; you’re not a lion-tamer. Go out on the platform and do what your teachers have told you, and what you know to be right and best, and pay no heed to them at all, except when courtesy—the high courtesy of the artist—demands it. We’ll walk up and down this corridor, you and I, taking deep but not hysterical breaths, until the head usher tells us that all the bunny coats are in their seats. Come on, Monica: head forward and up, back long and easy, and—what does Molloy say?—breathe the muhd.”

The first part of the Recital was over, and Cobbler returned Monica to the Faculty Room, shut the door and guarded it from outside. It had gone well. That is, she knew that she had sung well, and the audience, after a rather watchful beginning, was prepared to like her.

It was true, as Cobbler had said when she first discussed her programme with him, that she was giving them something tough to chew. But—”It’s a fine programme,” he had said, “and I’m delighted you’re getting away from that fathead notion that music must always be performed in the chronological order of its composition. The audience here has had a thorough Community Concerts training; they’ll be expecting you to start off with a Classical Group, putting your voice through its hardest paces while it’s still cold and before you’ve really got the feel of the hall or the audience, and then a group of Lieder, to show that you know German, and a French group, to show that you know French, and then a Contemporary Group, consisting entirely of second-rank Americans, and topping off with a Popular Group, in which you really let your hair down and show how vulgar and folksy you can be. But this makes sense.”