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mutually exclusive, you know.’ Emma realised she’d responded automatically, and she blamed her tetchy correction on her previous encounter with the oleaginous fan. She could see from the looks on the students’ faces that they thought she had taken offence, so she quickly added, ‘Conductor and musicologist? It’s a winning combination.’
    She signed the score and, to break the awkward silence, expanded on her observation: early music, more than any other field of music, was built on the kind of partnerships of which Steven and Simon were an example. She herself relied a great deal on musicologists who specialised in fifteenth-century music: they were the experts who provided the group with transcriptions of the original manuscripts in modern notation, whilst her own research provided the social and historical background.
    â€˜The musicologists give us the black and white sketch, and we conductors just colour it in,’ she said, repeating a line she’d used recently in a radio interview. The students beamed their understanding and told her proudly of the name of the group –
JDP
– from Josquin’s initials. She reciprocated by telling them how the name of Beyond Compère had been a jokey, provisional name that had eventually stuck.
    She much preferred talking like this than receiving empty adulation, but sometimes it was difficult to steer the right course between encouragement and advice. She spared Simon and Steven the stuff that increasingly took up her time: the contracts with promoters and record companies; the promotion of the group; the fund-raising; the Trustees’ meetings; the finances. It made her tired just thinking about it all, and she knew that however much she warned them about the vicissitudes of touring – the lack of sleep, the late nights and early starts, the busy airports, the crummy hotel rooms, the exhausting repetition of it all – they would still come away with a false image of international glamour.
    Her rise had been as rapid as it was unplanned and it had begun in theatre, quite different to the more obvious routes of singing and teaching that these two students were following. There was only so much advice she could offer, therefore, for her own progress towards the recognition she now enjoyed was so quirky and unintentional, so laden with good luck and serendipity, that there was no clear path for her to extrapolate that would in turn guide them to equivalent success.
    Encouraging them to keep in touch, she gave them the contact details of her agent and walked back to the hotel past Newcastle’s pubs and clubs accompanied by the occasional thud of a bass-line from an unrecognisable pop song. She would have liked Ollie to be there, and not just to provide a reassuring protection from imagined threats of late-night high spirits. As director of the group she spent her days switching between assumed roles – fairy godmother to some, wicked witch to others – a parade of conflicting identities that exhausted her and prompted a vague, enduring sense of doubt. When she admitted her worries to Ollie, he responded with typically blunt pragmatism, telling her to have a drink and forget about it – a solution he would now be pursuing in a pub somewhere with Allie. Absence really did make the heart grow fonder, Emma thought. Recently she and Ollie had been spending more time in their respective flats in London, as though trying to reproduce the same conditions of isolation that she now found herself regretting. Without the familiar work context, their differences tended to fester and, ironically, the relatively independent social lives they pursued on tour meant that their occasional arguments were more often resolved away from home where they were afforded the space and time to heal wounds and appease resentment.
    Arriving at the hotel, Emma booked an alarm call and headed towards the bar. It was comically depressing, a windowless