At first it was simply a statement that The Alien Corn was no good, that the realization had come upon him out of the blue and with absolute conviction. “It was ghastly,” he said. “I was pouring out drinks and suddenly without warning, I knew. Nothing could alter it: the thing’s punk.”

“Was this performance already under consideration?” Alleyn asked him.

“She had it all planned. It was meant to be a — well — a huge surprise. And the ghastly thing is,” said Rupert, his startlingly blue eyes opened in horror, “I’d thought it all fantastic. Like one of those schmaltzy young-genius-makes-it films. I’d been in — well — in ecstasy.”

“Did you tell her, there and then?” asked Troy.

“Not then. Mr. Reece and Ben Ruby were there. I — well I was so — you know — shattered. Sort of. I waited,” said Rupert and blushed, “until that evening.”

“How did she take it?”

“She didn’t take it. I mean she simply wouldn’t listen. I mean she simply swept it aside. She said — my God, she said genius always had moments like these, moments of what she called divine despair. She said she did. Over her singing. And then, when I sort of tried to stick it out she — was — well, very angry. And you see — I means she had cause. All her plans and arrangements. She’d written to Beppo Lattienzo and Sir David Baumgartner and she’d fixed up with Roberto and Hilda and Sylvia and the others. And the press. The big names. All that. I did hang out for a bit but—”

He broke off, looked quickly at Alleyn and then at the floor. “There were other things. It’s more complicated than I’ve made it sound,” he muttered.

“Human relationships can be hellishly awkward, can’t they?” Alleyn said.

“You’re telling me,” Rupert fervently agreed. Then he burst out: “I think I must have been mad! Or ill, even. Like running a temperature and now it’s gone and — and — I’m cleaned out and left with tomorrow.”

“And you are sure?” Troy asked. “What about the company and the orchestra? Do you know what they think? And Signor Lattienzo?”

“She made me promise not to show it to him. I don’t know if she’s shown it. I think she has. He’ll have seen at once that it’s awful, of course. And the company: they know all right. Roberto Rodolfo very tactfully suggests alterations. I’ve seen them looking at each other. They stop talking when I turn up. Do you know what they call it? They think I haven’t heard but I’ve heard all right. They call it Corn. Very funny. Oh,” Rupert cried out, “she shouldn’t have done it! It hasn’t been a fair go: I hadn’t got a hope. Not a hope in hell. My God, she’s making me conduct. There I’ll stand, before those V.I.P.s waving my arms like a bloody puppet and they won’t know which way to look for embarrassment.”

There was a long silence, broken at last by Troy.

“Well,” she said vigorously, “refuse. Never mind about the celebrities and the fuss and the phony publicity. It’ll be very unpleasant and it’ll take a lot of guts, but at least it’ll be honest. To the devil with the lot of them. Refuse.”

He got to his feet. He had been bathing, and his short yellow robe had fallen open. He’s apricot-colored, Troy noted, not blackish tan and coarsened by exposure like most sun addicts. He’s really too much of a treat. No wonder she grabbed him. He’s a collector’s piece, poor chap.

“I don’t think,” Rupert said, “I’m any more chicken than the next guy. It’s not that. It’s her — Isabella. You saw last night what she can be like. And coming on top of this letter business — look, she’d either break down and make herself ill or — or go berserk and murder somebody. Me, for preference.”

“Oh, come on!” said Troy.

“No,” he said, “It’s not nonsense. Really. She’s a Sicilian.”

“Not all Sicilians are tigers,” Alleyn remarked.

“Her kind are.”

Troy said, “I’m going to leave you to Rory. I think this calls for male-chauvinist gossip.”

When she had gone, Rupert began apologizing again. What he asked, would Mrs. Alleyn think of him?

“Don’t start worrying about that,” Alleyn said. “She’s sorry, she’s not shocked and she’s certainly not bored. And I think she may be right. However unpleasant it may be, I think perhaps you should refuse. But I’m afraid it’s got to be your decision and nobody else’s.”

“Yes, but you see you don’t know the worst of it. I couldn’t bring it out with Mrs. Alleyn here. I–Isabella — we—”

“Good Lord, my dear chap—” Alleyn began and then pulled himself up. “You’re lovers, aren’t you?” he said.

“If you can call it that,” he muttered.

“And you think if you take this stand against her you’ll lose her? That it?”

“Not exactly — I mean, yes, of course, I suppose she’d kick me out.”

“Would that be such a very bad thing?”

“It’d be a bloody good thing,” he burst out.

“Well then—?”

“I can’t expect you to understand. I don’t understand myself. At first it was marvelous: magical. I felt equal to anything. Way up. Out of this world. To hear her sing, to stand at the back of the theatre and see two thousand people go mad about her and to know that for me it didn’t end with the curtain calls and flowers and ovations, but that for me the best was still to come. Talk about the crest of the wave — gosh, it was super.”

“I can imagine.”

“And then, after that — you know — that moment of truth about the opera, the whole picture changed. You could say that the same thing happened about her. I saw all at once, what she really is like and that she only approved of that bloody fiasco because she saw herself making a success in it and that she ought never, never to have given me the encouragement she did. And I knew she had no real musical judgment and that I was lost.”

“All the more reason,” Alleyn began and was shouted down.

“You can’t tell me anything I don’t know. But I was in it. Up to my eyes. Presents — like this thing, this cigarette case. Clothes, even. A fantastic salary. At first I was so far gone in, I suppose you could call it, rapture, that it didn’t seem degrading. And now, in spite of seeing it all as it really is, I can’t get out. I can’t.”

Alleyn waited. Rupert got to his feet. He squared his shoulders, pocketed his awful cigarette case, and actually produced a laugh of sorts.

“Silly, isn’t it?” he said, with an unhappy attempt at lightness. “Sorry to have bored you.”

Alleyn said: “Are you familiar with Shakespeare’s sonnets?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s a celebrated one that starts off by saying the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action. I suppose it’s the most devastating statement you can find of the sense of degradation that accompanies passion without love. ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is schmaltz alongside it. That’s your trouble, isn’t it? The gilt’s gone off the gingerbread, but the gingerbread is still compulsive eating. And that’s why you can’t make the break.”

Rupert twisted his hands together and bit his knuckles.

“You could put it like that,” he said.

The silence that followed was interrupted by an outbreak of voices on the patio down below: exclamations, sounds of arrival, and unmistakably the musical hoots that were the Sommita’s form of greeting.

“Those are the players,” said Rupert. “I must go down. We have to rehearse.”

ii

By midday Troy’s jet lag had begun to fade and with it the feeling of unreality in her surroundings. A familiar restlessness replaced it and this, as always, condensed into an itch to work. She and Alleyn walked round the Island and found that, apart from the landing ground for the helicopter and the lawnlike frontage with its sentinel trees, it was practically covered by house. The clever architect had allowed small areas of original bush to occur where they most could please. On the frontal approach from the Lake to the Lodge, this as well as the house itself served to conceal a pole from which power lines ran across the Lake to a spit of land with a dado of trees that reached out from the far side of the Island.