Of course it will. The conversation will earn them £650 an hour, plus disbursements. She’s amused by the way that, in the higher reaches of the law, the business of money is swaddled to keep out the light. Actually hourly rates have dropped recently in City law firms. She sometimes wonders, although she never says it, what powers this whole merry-go-round. Who is actually creating the money? You don’t see many horny-handed sons of the soil around Chelsea. The bank itself sits in the middle of its own magic circle of money – staid, reassuring, and very, very rich. It pulses benignly, broadcasting goodwill outwards to its clients. On the family it seems to exercise a soothing effect. She thinks of the Hindu temple she visited in Mumbai with its scented inner sanctum, the garbhagriha, where the deities are housed and the priests – surprisingly chubby – flap gently about like diligent housewives, giving off a kind of age-old assurance. She toyed with the idea of taking up Hinduism, just because of this serenity. The bank has the same narcotic-spiritual effect.

She gives up on the books. The scent of books, certainly of old books, is a myth, a self-serving myth, a kind of conceit, if that is the word: I love the smell of books; they are so evocative of childhood, they say. She remembers most vividly not the smell of books but of ballet shoes and chalk and the aroma of the dressing-up cupboard and stage make-up and the distant piano notes of ‘Für Elise’. These things all have a direct contact with flesh-and-blood human beings. But she has seen that Harry’s generation, from the very rarefied altitudes, are afraid of real human contact. For them it is all form and style and front. How did this happen?

It’s odd this friendship with Kimberly. Fleur is married to Kimberly’s father-in-law, and she is Kimberly’s stepmother-in-law. And yet they are less than six years apart. Kimberly has hinted to her that Julian is not as ‘attentive’ to her as he was before he took over as chairman, and of course she takes this to mean that she is not getting as much sex as she would like. Funny word, ‘attentive’. Americans, counter-intuitive as this may be, are often more decorous than most English people. The English have lost faith in the idea of absolute standards.

As she is getting ready to go round to Kimberly’s, Morné texts her.

wld u like to come rugby satday?

Rugby? Why would he ask her to rugby? She tries to deconstruct his text. Rugby is what he loves most in the whole world. And he is asking her to share it with him. She feels that it must mean that in his eyes she is attractive or he wouldn’t be taking her to meet his friends. His rugger chums. She has moved beyond well preserved. She feels wildly happy.

luv 2. see u @ gym.lol