‘I was doing Rinaldo last week and Sir Rodney Macintosh, who must be over sixty, asked me to his room for a nightcap and greeted me wearing nothing but a pair of socks.’

Rannaldini wasn’t remotely shocked.

‘Eef you knee conductor in groin, he won’t give you more work. You must invent fiancé, preferably black belt at judo.’

Even such a fascinating subject couldn’t stop Tristan dropping off. Later he never knew if he’d dreamt it, or whether Rannaldini’s hand really had vanished into Hermione’s dark lace dress, and a moonlike breast emerged.

He did wake screaming, however, as Rannaldini pulled up outside the house and Étienne, still in his painter’s smock, loomed huger and blacker than the Grand Inquisitor in the doorway. Although his father cheered up when he saw Hermione, he curtly dispatched Tristan to bed.

‘And no ducking out of school tomorrow.’

‘Good night, little one,’ called Rannaldini, then, to irritate Étienne, ‘I’ll be up in a few minutes.’

In fact it was an hour, and Tristan again woke screaming from lobster-induced nightmare as another broad-shouldered black figure loomed over him.

‘It all ’appen four hundred years ago,’ said Rannaldini as he tucked the boy in. ‘You mustn’t ’ave bad dreams.’

Looking round the bleak attic room, seeing the video camera, the red leatherbound copy of Schiller’s Don Carlos and Hermione’s carnation in a tooth-mug on the bedside table, he picked up the silver frame, containing the only photograph of Tristan’s mother, Delphine, in the house.

‘So beautiful, a little like Madame Lauzerte, don’t you think?’

‘Will she sit for Papa?’ asked Tristan hopefully.

‘I doubt it. She is very pure lady — her nickname is Madame Vierge.’

‘Did they really burn people alive in those days?’

‘They do today with electric chairs and bombs. That’s how your brother, Laurent, died,’ said Rannaldini.