‘Put him off. Tell him to get a job playing a piano in a brothel.’

‘He wants to eat potted meat and go sculling. In fact, he thinks he’s a vole.’

‘Good career choice, vole. Far better than being an actor. Got to go, sadly – Daniel Day-Lewis is waiting for my call.’

‘Is he in Thomas the Tank Engine?’

‘No, this is not part of my touring and community work, more a Hollywood production. Thanks so much for calling. I will leave some free tickets for you at the box office. How many do you need? Six? Oh, well four is all I can manage.’

A madwoman.

Like Oblomov, like Flann O’Brien, he feels a terrible urge to go to bed and stay there.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Estelle wakes early. Too early to be able to get going: there are certain proprieties. All her life she’s lived within hushed, unspoken proprieties. How did she become their servant? When she wakes at this time, before she can go and make sure Sir Harry has had a good night and she can release the night carer – there are three, all fully trained, on shifts – she sees herself far too clearly. She lies in her bed with a cup of tea. Her little house, Provençal from the outside, is wholly English inside with a flowery rug relieving the cold gloom of the terracotta tiles and some nice, homely needlepoint cushions on the sofa. Her bed is covered in an old rose chintz bedspread. She tries in her own way to replicate the effortless good taste of the family, but the fact is that, although she has some nice things, including a Regency card table and a one-hundred-and-fifty-piece canteen of silver – never used – she knows the place is a mishmash. Taste seems to be a barrier you can’t scale in one or even two generations. She wonders if her house has the scent of spinsterhood. The scent of disappointment, compounded by the solitary person’s self-regard, the close scrutiny of the self, which leads to patent medicines and corn plasters and mouthwash and many creams.