Back home, glowing, she is standing in Harry’s library. He collected books avidly, through a network of agents. He specialised in rare travel and exploration books and maps, with a sideline in natural history. His last great purchase before the stroke was a first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, still in its original green cover. He had always wanted one. (Bibliophiles have little fetishes.) She had come to see that books for Harry were not so much for reading as to compliment him. These rare and beautiful books were artefacts which demonstrated his taste. Easy to do if you’ve got millions, of course, but still he had a kind of unerring judgement so that he was equally at one with the Sotheran catalogue and his tailor’s swatches. He lived – she’s already using the past tense – fully in this world. Julian has never been completely at ease in it. And his brother, Simon, turned his back on it completely although he is really just a dropout with a trust fund and a network of contacts around the world to smooth his way as he seeks his true self in constant travel, usually to places which eccentric gentleman travellers have endowed with a kind of cachet by passing through. Simon was once stuck in a hole in a tomb made by grave robbers in the Kidron Valley near Jerusalem. He shouldn’t have been climbing over the tomb in the first place, and the Israeli police were harsh with him after they had pulled him out, until a second secretary from the embassy was able to spring him by telling the police that his family owned a bank and one of his predecessors had endowed a settlement just outside the Old City. It became Simon’s favourite anecdote, frequently repeated. These privileged boys are never quite able to escape the ties of silk that bind them.