She was standing in the shadows right at the edge of the room about halfway back. Her clothes as much as her isolation marked her out. Unlike the other women in the room apart from me, she wasn’t dressed up to the nines in teetering heels and a bright dress. Maggie wore jeans, a chambray shirt and a pair of trainers. From where I was standing, it looked like she had also avoided the cosmetic excesses of the rest of the room. She was about my height, with curly, shoulder-length pepper and salt hair. She was carrying about ten pounds overweight, but she looked sturdy rather than flabby.

For a moment, I toyed with the idea of making the first approach to her, but decided against it. I suspected she’d leap immediately to Moira’s defense and give me the elbow without actually weighing up what I had to say, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Even if I’d been going to approach her, I was cut off at the pass. The organist finished the Stan Getz piece with a flourish and played a fanfare. A burly man leapt on to the stage and peppered the audience with a few risqué jokes, then announced, “Ladies and animals, put your hands together for tonight’s star attraction, a young lady who’s going all the way to the top. Let’s hear it for Moira Moore!”

With another fanfare on the organ, he vanished into the wings. The band played the opening chords of “To Be With You Tonight” and Moira walked out on to the stage. As she moved forward into the fixed spotlight, she looked nervously from side to side, as if searching for an escape route that wasn’t there. She was wearing a tight blue lurex dress which came to just above her knees. She looked painfully thin.

As the band finished the intro, Moira leaned forward to the mike and began to sing. To say I was astonished would be putting it mildly. Could this really be the woman who’d been happy to take a back-seat, lyricist’s role because her voice wasn’t up to scratch? OK, she didn’t have the silky richness of Jett, but by any other standards Moira’s was quite a voice. Slightly husky, almost bluesy, she hit the notes perfectly, and the nerves that were obvious in her body language didn’t transmit themselves into her singing. Even the louts in the audience shut up to listen to Moira sing.