Rum Affair by Dorothy Dunnett

meet are worse off than yourself.
    Then I realised that Michael wasn’t interested either. That I was not a girl, or a passing entertainment, but a pay cheque in prospect for the intense Mr Twiss.
    I had never known Michael’s origins, and I had never asked. He had been in his time many things, and had had many trades, but always his work had ended in disaster not of his making. Unlike me, he was embittered. He blamed not his intelligence but his birth, his accent, his lack of schooling, his lack of friends. But in fact he possessed many virtues: a quick brain, an ability to copy and to learn, and a capacity for work like my own. By the time he joined Milanese society he could pass for a gentleman, and when he left it he was a gentleman, and dressed and spoke like one. For he had made himself indispensable to my sponsors, and was fast becoming indispensable to me, too.
    For my debut was a sudden, overwhelming success. I touched on it lightly with Johnson, but when I speak of it, to myself, my throat is choked with the thought. At last it came, what I had worked for; and because of Ruddyman’s friends, and all the others I had met and cultivated since, other things came, far more quickly than I had a right to expect: recordings, concerts and, finally, films.
    For all this I needed a manager. For my money I needed an adviser. For my new career, I needed grooming. For my voice, I needed a coach.
    Michael became all these. It was Michael who, watching the Italian society we moved in, changed my hair to its present French roll; and then employed a hairdresser, whenever I appeared, to vary its style so that I photograph always differently. All my clothes were made finer: my shoes were made of thinner leather, my gloves were kid wisps; my underwear and dresses were of silk that made me more slender yet. And the pounds he forced me to lose!
    I was given a style: the jewellery I must wear: the hats I must eschew. And then, he set to work on my voice.
    He cannot have known that this talent lay within him, this understanding of music. He had always been fond of it, he said. He possessed, I know, at a time when he had few possessions, an ancient radiogram with bakelite records, which went everywhere with him then. To begin with, he heard me with Vittioni, listening to my faults being explained; and to Vittioni’s interpretation of the arias. Then, when he found me practising, Michael would act as Vittioni, correcting, reminding, forcing me to work on and on, improving until I was reproducing exactly what the master had said. He grew to know my voice better than I did myself; and then, as it came to light, to have a feeling for the music as great as my master’s. The day came when, having done all that could be done on my Mozart for the next study, Michael made me go on to tackle a recitative and aria I had never before sung. I learned afterwards that he had spent all the previous night poring over it in manuscript. In any case, the result was climacteric. Before Vittioni, next day, I sang Michael’s interpretation of Donna Elvira; and the master, silent for a long moment, suddenly rose and kissed me on both cheeks. Michael had made of me not a pupil, but a singer.
    He went everywhere with me after that. I paid his living expenses, and a tenth of what I earned he took, and probably much else of his own on private business besides. He was rich and wore only silk shirts, and referred to the owners of opera houses by their Christian names – but very occasionally he still dropped his aitches. He had women friends, I knew, but he was discreet about them. And nothing, ever, was allowed to come between him and his chosen vocation, which was Tina Rossi.
    But I said nothing of this at all to the bifocal glasses reflecting the bright cushions of Dolly. I merely said: “Yes. I’m very lucky to have Michael: he’s a genius for management. And he makes me work far too hard. But for Michael I should spend all my life lying on beautiful boats