Simmonds is the first music company to enter e-commerce, light-years ahead of the rest of field. My competitors accuse me of sharp practice and all manner of chicaneries. I am flattered by their fear. No longer the respected doyen of my trade, I have become the ferocious pace-setter, the market leader. The attendance at my funeral, not a subject I have much leisure to contemplate any longer, will be depleted and the eulogies less fulsome. So much the better. Edgar relocates his chambers from Gray’s Inn to the floor below me, acquired on the cheap. He joins the Simmonds masthead as legal director, a hedge against Sandi’s uncorked rapacity.

Mrs Adams’s attention now turns west, to the greatest market of all. She plans Maria Olszewska’s Carnegie Hall début with meticulous foresight and the best PR that money can buy. Maria goes on NBC’s Today show in a white confirmation dress and plays ‘Ave Maria’ over the closing titles. On ABC’s Good Morning America she reveals that, aged eight, she saw a vision of the Virgin Mary rising from the North Sea, telling her to put her talent in the service of Jesus. Every note she plays is an ode to divine goodness in an ugly, graceless world.

At Carnegie, the regular recital audience is crowded out by Catholic grandees, led by the Cardinal Archbishop of New York in a pre-Easter parade. Maria plays an all-Chopin programme ‘with immaculate chastity’, as the New York Times reviewer puts it, Jewish tongue in cheek. No matter: she is made for life on the incense circuit; she has played powerfully enough to satisfy the half-dozen hard-bitten bookers who dominate the concert circuit. Her native charm is the more compelling for having shed its disabling encumbrance of Englishness. Sandi has wisely engaged an expensive elocutionist to mould her tangy Taw accent into expressionless middle-American.

A week or so after Maria’s début, Anatoly Gudzinsky, while playing the Schumann concerto with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, rises from his stool to inform the audience that the conductor is an excremental homosexual half-wit who cannot be bothered to rehearse and that they, the public, know ‘fuck-all’ about music. As security men rush on to subdue him, he rips off his pink vaginal tie, throws it to a front-row dowager and strides off through rows of open-mouthed subscribers. The press besiege his hotel, but Gudzinsky refuses to emerge until second-serve Sophie, ranked eighty-ninth in the world, flies out and agrees to marry him. The ceremony takes place on the cover of People magazine. Gudzinsky need not fear for future American celebrity.