Later, when the hospital is dimmed and subdued, and the pools of lights at the nurses’ stations have become the lights of a necropolis, Estelle arrives.

She sits by the bed and she tells Harry about the villa and the colour of the sea and the calls of the ring-necked turtle doves in the umbrella pines. He doesn’t interrupt, but he is definitely listening. His face is tinged with blue and his mouth moves, trying to speak.

‘What is it, Harry?’

He makes a noise but she can’t decipher it. He’s smiling. She continues with her account of the work the gardeners are doing, planting lavender to replace the plants that have died – some always die inexplicably – because she knows these are the things that please him. She opens a parcel wrapped in brown paper and holds the picture of the port of Collioure in front of him like an icon at a Russian orthodox procession, and he gazes at that intently for a while before falling asleep. She puts the picture away and sits with him for a few hours, until a nurse comes in and asks her if she wants some tea. But as she’s asking, the nurse notices that Harry is not breathing. He’s dead. Estelle feels guilty; she too has dozed off. But she is thankful that his last sight on this earth was of his beloved picture. When the nurse has left the room to call a doctor, Estelle kisses Harry on his forehead.

‘Goodbye, dear Harry. I loved you.’

Is she saying this out loud, or has she, too, slipped into a world where small facts don’t matter?

She leaves the hospital before the family can be recalled, to stay with her sister in Queen’s Park. As she walks down through Marylebone, looking for a taxi, she wishes she had been born beautiful, and she weeps.

When Simon appears from the Okavango Delta, he brings with him his boundless innocence. He’s strangely cheerful because he doesn’t subscribe to the idea that death is a downer. It’s in fact uplifting, perhaps something to do with recycling. When he first enters his old room in Mulgrave House he is a little surprised to find that his things, for example his books and school photographs, have been moved. Fleur says they are all safely stored in a box room. He sees the point immediately. He says he must go off to buy a suit for the funeral. And he’s not upset about arriving after his father has died, because, quite honestly, he wouldn’t have known how to handle it. He proposes to walk from Chelsea, wearing his khaki shorts, to Gieves and Hawkes at 1 Savile Row, even though Fleur says that a driver would be delighted to take him. He’s very brown, but brown in a speckled way, like a chicken. His legs look as if they have been shot-blasted with African sand.