I write:

By the time Catriona reached sixteen, she had joined Le Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Nice, the regional music and dance conservatory. Singing now her principal study, she was currently preparing for a competition that would grant her entrance to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris. So far, Catriona had won every level of the competition. Now, there were only two finalists competing for one prize, one place, and she was working long hours to ensure she would be the winner, securing her admission to the coveted conservatory, and hopefully launching her career in the world of opera.

Thus, Catriona takes her future in singing very seriously. She has a mature outlook. Yet at the same time, she is very naive.

Her early childhood was sheltered and somewhat isolated. I write:

Catriona de Vere and her mother moved to Nice when she was eleven… Up until then Catriona had spent her childhood growing up in the wilds of Norfolk, with its chalk downs and still waters, a remote location where few of her friends were within easy distance.

When Sir William de Vere, Catriona’s English father, died, her mother Marguerite, who had never taken to the English weather, decided to leave Norfolk and move to Nice, her native home. So from the age of eleven Catriona lived alone with her mother.

Marguerite has always meant well. She is a loving and doting mother who has been entirely responsible for her daughter’s upbringing and consequently has become very overprotective. When Catriona was younger, this was fine; the girl simply ‘got used to withdrawing into a world where she found her freedom – a world of music, from which she came back refreshed, enlivened and somehow fulfilled’. But now that Catriona is of an age to make her own way in the world, her mother’s cossetting is problematic. The golden cage Catriona has lived in since birth, and especially after her father died, is beginning to suffocate her.

I write, ‘Marguerite de Vere had made sure that her daughter was so shielded from the realities of life that at the age of eighteen Catriona was still innocent, unaware of the pitfalls of love, ignorant of the harsher aspects of life.’ As a result, when Catriona meets celebrated pianist composer Umberto Rolando Monteverdi, she is hopelessly naive. He is older than her, in his mid-twenties, and a good deal worldlier; he is charismatic and charming and confident – and she is captivated by ‘the undercurrent of something thrilling and novel that spoke to the wilder side of her and pushed away all coherent thought’.

Meeting Umberto unleashes a torrent of emotions and sensations in Catriona, and suddenly she wonders what she has been missing:

She was eighteen. Other girls of her age came and went freely, she thought testily. Most of them had even had their first sexual experience and were no longer virgins. When they told her she didn’t know what she was missing, Catriona just shrugged: her music was her world, her passion, and as long as she could play the piano and sing, she was happy. Yet now, suddenly, another passion had muscled in to her dreams, intruding into her world. A strange sort of overwhelming feeling which, although exulting, was frightening because it was so alien to everything she had known.

What happens when you open the door to the golden cage? Catriona will be eager to escape, to rebel. Umberto awakens in her all kinds of womanly feelings, and he represents excitement and novelty and learning through heady experiences.

But Catriona is woefully ‘unaware of the pitfalls of love’; she does not understand how love can hurt. She falls for Umberto, she gives herself to Umberto… and he leaves her to further his career. She has lost her innocence, she has become a woman, but what a price to pay: her heart is broken.

When Umberto and Catriona cross paths ten years later, they have both changed. Catriona is a single mother herself now and Umberto has lost the career that was once so precious to him. They are older and wiser in so many ways, but is there still an innocence deep down within that can give them hope in love, in each other? As Anais Nin wrote:

‘We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.’

Can Catriona and Umberto form a constellation together?