The bird glowers at Alix. Its hard pink-rimmed eyes stare balefully. Is it the soul of Paul Whitmore, come to haunt her?

The publisher returns to his pew, and Aaron Headleand’s counter-tenor protégé takes the stand. Alix’s genial spirits lift.

This is more like it. He is a pale, Swinburnian young man, theatrically dressed in a suit of the palest grey, with a silver waistcoat embroidered with scarlet dragons. His hair is chestnut, and it is tossed back from his pale brow in romantic waves that contradict the formality of his garments. He wears gold-rimmed spectacles, and his buttonhole is a white rose. He arranges his music, and nods to the solitary female flautist who will accompany him. His voice rises through the unsatisfactory layers of architecture, above the urns and monuments, above the pulpit and the floral decorations, above the heads of the Headleands and the Bowens and the Coxes, above the whole assembly. It drifts with pure and unholy and unearthly yearning into the arched empyrean.

Oisive jeunesse

À tout asservie,

Par délicatesse

J’ai perdu ma vie . . .

Up and up, on and on, mounting in a single strand, a liquid melody of mourning, defiance, challenge, regret:

J’ai tant fait patience

Qu’à jamais j’oublie;

Craintes et souffrances

Aux deux sont parties,

Et la soif malsaine

Obscurcit mes veines . . .

Brian Bowen, listening, himself reprieved for a while from degeneration and humiliation and death, sees the face of his friend at the age of twenty: ardent, diffident, tenacious. Brian owes his career and his education to Stephen Cox. He owes his life to Stephen Cox. He will never have another such friend. He sees himself and Stephen, lying in the long grass in Dorset, reading, chatting, smoking, in the springtime of their days.

Ainsi la prairie

A l’oubli livrée,

Grandie, et fleurie

D’encens et d’ivraies

Au bourdon farouche

De cent sales mouches . . .

He sees Stephen lying sick in a field hospital on the far side of the world, amidst the buzzing of the filthy flies. In a solitude chosen, willed, intensified. The voice soars and planes, beyond and beyond, in its own disembodied sphere. How can it issue from this strange perverse young man? And here comes the reprise of the first verse, melancholy and triumphant: and as it rises in its final leave-taking, the double doors at the end of the aisle burst noisily open. The cadence ebbs and dies, and heads turn.

The newcomer stands there, facing the singer, along the full length of the black and white tiles. He has made it. The singer folds his music, gives a prim little bow as it were of recognition, saluting the timing of the intruder, and then a little bow of dismissal to the congregation, as he resumes his seat in the front pew.