The chimes sounded a long way off today as she pressed the bell. She heard birdlike steps sounding across the wooden floor, and the door opened.

Sky-blue eyes looked up from beneath a velvet alice band. The hair tucked under it was white and framed the face. Phyllis felt a lump come to her throat.

“Come on in, dear, you must be frozen,” tinkled the voice she knew so well.

Phyllis was having trouble seeing clearly, and Miss Sage—or Imo, as she preferred to be called—led her to an armchair beside an open fire, peat-burning (“a treat from Ireland for Christmas, you see”). A cat, black save for its eyes, sprawled in front of it. He eased himself up onto his back legs, stretched, and came to investigate Phyllis.

“You must be a soprano: his favourites are sopranos. Aren’t they, Winston?” Imo said with a smile.

Imo Sage was very old, and as fragile as the Worcester china that was displayed in glass-fronted cabinets around the room. Her eyes had a limpid quality which Phyllis had seen in the expression of Catholic priests she had known as a child.

They sat in the Victorian carpet armchairs across from each other and chatted like sisters who had been separated and were catching up on old times, the elder pouring the tea. Miss Sage talked first, her melodic voice giving Phyllis a sense of well-being that she had rarely experienced.

Listening to the teacher, Phyllis began to understand the theory she had heard at college of the left brain perceiving speech, whilst the right perceived song. She knew that certain sounds caused this cerebral duality to be lost, both halves listening simultaneously. Miss Sage’s voice, pitched as it was between the two, seemed to do that.

Miss Sage was telling her of her one love who had died when she was young.

“God moves in mysterious ways,” she quoted. “Perhaps I wouldn’t have devoted myself to music if he’d lived—wouldn’t have seen all the beauty that I have.” Her eyes moved to the middle distance. Perhaps the old teacher saw things like a prospector—always working in dirt, yet only seeing gold.

“I have met them all—McCormack, Rosa Ponselle—she came to see me when she was singing Norma at the Garden. Oh, and Lanza—my dear, what a character! I went to see him at the Dorchester. As we were leaving the Oliver Messel suite he hit a high C. He held it all the way down in the lift, and when we arrived on the ground floor he strolled over to the piano in the lounge and, still singing, played the high C. He turned to me and grinned. He was in perfect pitch. And McCormack—how proud he was when he was made a papal count.” She smiled and turned her head, looking so pointedly at the stairs that Phyllis turned around expecting to be joined. Winston chose that moment to jump onto her lap.

“There, you must be a soprano. Sopranos are your sweethearts, aren’t they Winston?” Winston’s only reply was a yelp in a minor key. He was apparently not in a talkative mood today.