Later she thinks of Harry lying in that hangar of a bedroom, fluting and groaning and back-diving into his past, in a welter of misdirected and aimless thoughts. She feels ashamed. Tomorrow she will ask Amanda where she stands if Harry dies.

What Kimberly says is true: English men are very weird. In Fleur’s experience, starting with the teachers at the Shirley Simms Stage School (same initials as the SS, only longer), all men have a sexual hinterland that is more real to them than the place they are living. Her own father had lived fairly placidly amongst them for fourteen years, before it turned out he was gay and a vigorous cottager. His night shifts at the Mirror, subbing away on the sports pages for Mr Maxwell, had merely been a part of his nocturnal activities. When somebody felt obliged to tell Fleur’s mother, she was relieved; much later when Fleur was at drama school and as a result was presumably in close contact with homosexuals, her mother told her the whole story: she knew something was wrong. This isn’t a judgement on gay people, she said, just an observation. He was always kind, but I felt I never knew him, as if I was living with a member of another species. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I have any prejudice against them, just that it seemed to me he had other priorities, so it was a huge burden from my shoulders to discover that it wasn’t because of me. And only then – silly me – I understood why he chose to be on nights four times a week.

Fleur hasn’t seen him for ten years and the last time was by chance in Bond Street, where he was arm in arm with a younger man in an Adidas tracksuit. Her father was in a large overcoat, with broad lapels of some cheap pale fur. The companion, who looked as if he might have been a Palestinian, was quite possibly the only person to have been seen wearing a tracksuit in Bond Street for decades. For a moment they nearly spoke; but they passed silently, both accepting that, apart from some genes, they were now totally unrelated. She had been reinvented as a society wife, and he as an old queen in a pantomime coat.

For some reason Sebastian’s hand is resting on her thigh. She looks at him briefly. He seems to need reassurance; Samantha is staring fixedly at someone on a nearby table. Fleur squeezes his hand and places it gently on his own thigh. Perhaps he’s too drunk to realise where it came to rest.

Chapter 6

Chapter 6