Fleur finds a letter from Morné. He asks if she could consider being a patron of a charity called the Disabled Rugby Footballers’ Trust. She wants desperately to see him but at the same time she can’t have anything to do with him after what Julian said. She has felt alone and diminished since Harry’s death. Only Kim has really been kind. With Morné she felt her spirits released, but now forces are gathering to confine her. Am I paranoid? she wonders. She writes Morné a brief and formal note.

After a few months, when my life is more settled and I feel stronger, I would like to hear more about your charity.

When I feel stronger. It’s a Jane Austenish sentiment. What she means is, when the will is settled and along with it the dust, she will seize any opportunity to have sex with him again, even if it involves visiting brain-dead rugby players in hospices. But she is in a Byzantine world now. Great wealth and privilege are settling themselves into new shapes and forms, now that the emperor is dead. If Harry was the emperor, she was more concubine than empress.

She and Kim are due to address a school on behalf of the Veggies and she’s been reading the pamphlets and preparing her talk. It seems like an appropriately responsible thing to be doing. Organic vegetables are, she thinks, a sort of moral crusade rather than a health issue. The vegetables – cropping well, says Kim – are not vegetables so much as a substitute for the Communion host. Partake of this and you will undergo spiritual transformation. You will become not only outwardly healthy, but inwardly enlightened. She’s wondering what to wear. She’s going to give information on composting and she thinks she should look sort of earthy herself.

Kimberly sees the sodden clay soil of London enriched with organic material, breathing freely again and providing a home for earthworms – which she calls night crawlers – and good bacteria. It’s a dream of heaven, an essential element of all religions: the day when all will be reconciled.