She should have left the bank when he married Fleur. She was still young enough then. But when Harry’s first wife, Eleanor, killed herself she had foolishly hoped that he might turn to her, Estelle. It was like something from Jane Austen: the plain governess who hopes her good qualities will win through with the master in the end. But he was arranging for Fleur, the twenty-five-year-old actress, to be cast in a play he was financing. How quickly she went from occasional actor in commercials and corporate videos, with one or two walk-on parts in proper theatre, to ornament of the social pages, photographed with Harry at Ascot, with Harry on his yacht, Niobe, with Harry at Covent Garden, with Harry – pleased as Punch – at the first-night party for They Came from Xanadu. It was a turkey. She wanted to leave Bread Street, but she couldn’t for the very simple reason that she loved him. Now she has him more or less to herself, but he shows no signs of gratitude for her devotion. In the bank he told people that he couldn’t live without her, that she was a force of nature. A wonder.

Now he seems barely to notice her; she is, as they say, part of the furniture. She lives in hope that his old self will return. She sees signs of it. But the truth is that the only things that engage him deeply are the twenty-two pictures in the house and of these he is particularly entranced by one of the Matisses. What does he see when he looks at the Matisse? She thinks that he is gazing through a window, perhaps deep into his past, as if the painting of Collioure draws him away from his restricted world into something more vibrant. She’s not sure how this could work, but she is glad that he is happy looking at his pictures. In the old days, before they closed the asylums and homes, they allowed the inmates to stare endlessly at walls or television sets that were never turned off on the grounds that nothing was going on in the inmates’ minds anyway. Who knows what goes through Harry’s mind? She sometimes imagines that it is paging endlessly through half-submerged experiences and ideas. She hopes that this compulsive rifling is pleasurable; what hell it would be if every memory was painful. Only sensations – music, pictures, aromas and sunshine – seem to work directly on him. She understands him and helps him with his letters to Julian, but he doesn’t acknowledge – he’s not capable of acknowledging – that she is writing them, interpreting his thoughts. In fact he still appears to suggest in little ways that he is doing her a favour. And in a way he is, because he is all she has now. They are locked together.