Vivienne wanted the singer to finish alone. The invented man in the bishop's hat had spent enough of their song entering before the end; this time he could discover what happened without his own voice laid across it. She was not proposing a punishment. The woman had changed the words. Hearing them seemed the smallest useful thing he could do. Yet Vivienne heard the inconvenience in her own argument. She had just needed two attempts to wait for Vera. Wanting to join someone was hardly proof that one knew when to begin.
Vera wanted the singer to give him something definite to do. Listening once could be an instruction, rather than a test whose instructions were concealed until he failed. But even that depended on what the singer wanted afterwards. They had not earned the right to promise him a verse. Vera liked Vivienne's second attempt better than an effortless first: she had looked at Vera instead of guessing. She wanted that attention again. The bishop was becoming rather an elaborate means of arranging something she could ask for herself.
Their singer finally spoke. She asked to finish the changed line once, then asked him to say whether he still heard the old ending. Vivienne let her sing all the way to the stair. There was no interruption. The completion was small enough to sound obvious and substantial enough that Vivienne noticed she had finally allowed the woman to do something. A question had become an action. Beyond it lay another question, but they did not have to answer everything before a song could reach its last word.
The bishop admitted he had nearly sung the familiar ending. Vera accepted that without awarding him a medal. He had listened and still wanted the old thing; neither fact erased the other. Now the singer could ask for the missing words, if she needed them. Meanwhile, Vera had a condition for their own next attempt. Vivienne must choose something outside Friday's songs, something they could manage badly without preparation. Concentration made Vivienne handsome. Vera wanted the pleasure of causing that expression herself, rather than obtaining a ticket and watching it from elsewhere.
Vivienne received the compliment with frank delight. Handsome was a word worth keeping, and she meant to be impossible about it for several minutes. For their new line she offered a hat in a teapot, an invention with no prospect of becoming part of her career. She would sing the first portion; Vera could finish. The absurdity did not make her forget the other singer. That woman did ask for the old words. Vivienne found she wanted to know what the bishop remembered of her, even if the replacement ending remained the one they kept.
Vera completed the teapot line too low. The hat, by her own account, had landed in the cellar. Rather than correcting the mistake into disappearance, she asked Vivienne to try again at her pitch. She wanted to hear whether Vivienne could follow without tidying what she heard. Then the invented man's answer changed the difficulty of the other song. He remembered the tune; he used to enter before that word. Their assumption had been so convenient that neither woman had examined it. Perhaps the person being asked to recover the ending had never properly heard it.
Vivienne followed the low pitch, complaining on behalf of the teapot but leaving it where Vera had put it. She liked what the attempt required of her. Showing Vera a tune and listening to Vera sing it were different pleasures. The second demanded a kind of attention that could not be supplied by knowing the notes first. For their bishop she chose a plain admission: he did not know the last word, although he had thought he did. No grand excuse arrived to make that failure impressive. The singer had brought three endings to someone who could recognise none as the missing one.
What, then, should she do with the paper? Vera turned it towards him in their invention and placed the singer's finger beneath the first line. This one, then. Would he sing it with her? Asking plainly had become harder after he listened properly. The invitation could no longer depend on his possessing the answer she wanted. Nor did the invitation itself settle whether he would accept. Vera left him with the paper turned towards him and his ridiculous hat still a question.
She wanted to know whether he would take it off before answering. There their invention stopped, with neither an agreement nor a recovered word to soften the pause. Their own low teapot line could stay in its cellar. Vera had liked having Vivienne follow her. Next time she wanted to try the other direction, without pretending she already knew the tune.