‘She looks wonderful. Great job, Bryce.’

He climbs up the steps, his nose practically pressed to the newly gleaming hull. A sail has been rigged over the wheel deck and a table laid with drinks.

‘Wanna go for a ride, Boss?’

‘Yup. Once round the bay. How are the engines?’

‘Bonzer. And as quiet as a vibrator in a nunnery.’

Being Australian licenses Bryce to make these remarks. He starts the engines. There’s a deep, brief shudder as they come to life and settle into a contented and powerful throbbing.

‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ says Julian, and he is genuinely moved.

‘Cast off,’ Bryce calls, and they leave the mooring slowly.

These engines don’t roar so much as sing – a deep, male-voice chorale.

‘You wanna see what the old girl can do, don’t you, Boss?’

‘I do, Bryce.’

Julian takes the wheel.

‘Let’s give it some welly.’

He envies Bryce; it’s not just that his life is uncomplicated, but that he seems perfectly happy at all times: he loves boats, he loves barbies, he loves drinking, he loves wearing shorts, he loves girls and he loves sport. He’s even the pétanque champion down at the port. It doesn’t cause him any anxiety that he knows nothing about art and books and finance. If he has a philosophy, it is that we live for the day. Vivre pour vivre. And me, what am I doing? I’m living for an ideal of what this family apparently stands for. But I don’t actually know what that ideal is.

The boat cuts through the water effortlessly. Like shit off a shovel, as Bryce so elegantly phrases it. Julian wonders when he should tell Bryce that the boat is almost definitely sold to the Russian oligarch, the same one who has just upset the locals by buying the Villa Floriana for €120m.

Estelle senses as she fusses around the villa in the welcome bustle that she has become a little depressed here alone with Harry. There’s something vindictive about a stroke; it robs the victim of humanity, but it also takes it out on those closest to him. She wants to believe that deep down Harry is the same person, but when she wakes in the middle of the night she wonders, despite herself, if he hasn’t turned into someone entirely different, a form of life that looks more or less like its former self, but in fact has the instincts and the coldness and the mean horizons of something very primitive. Fleur, of course, is delighted that I have taken on the burden of looking after her husband.