It always happens with these upper-crust families: their instinct is to close ranks against outsiders. They shut up like molluscs. None of them has ever really liked her. And now she is probably too old to have children without help from an in vitro specialist. She had better go and see Harry as soon as possible. And she must turn down Morné’s invitation to rugby. What was she thinking? Some journalist – even a sports journalist – would pick it up: Rugby star squires ailing banker’s wife. The family has always been wary of the press, although Harry liked being seen at the theatre and the ballet. When she married him fifteen years ago there were headlines about the prince of finance and his showgirl. But the family has understood that you can’t control the press and so you must try never to give them an opportunity. They sometimes write about Julian’s hippy brother, but because he is so naturally innocent it is usually harmless.

She texts Morné.

hi thnk u for rugby invite but I must pass. have 2 go 2 France 2 see my husband. I will be @ gym tomorrow. lol

It’s easy for her to assume a kind of carefree upbeat tone in a text. What she really wants to say to him can’t be said: she wants to tell him that she has fallen deeply in love with him and that she has to pursue this relationship to its end, however disastrous. She wants to tell him that there is a madness in her blood. Already she sees a kind of appealing tragedy ahead: a tragedy of doomed love. When her friend Avril said that she knew before she had left her husband for an unsuccessful painter that it was going to lead to disaster, Fleur thought it was a shallow and self-romanticising claim. How wrong she was! But she has enough sense to see that she must wait until Harry has died, however long that takes. When Harry has gone she will live in Tuscany in the cottage. She looks at herself in the mirror. She wonders if the pink trainers aren’t a little too stage school. Maybe the white ones would be better. She thinks her new skin-revitalising cream at £130 a jar is giving her face a healthy glow. Its effect is a little like going for a walk in a bracing wind. She’s losing all sense of irony. She’s turning into . . . what is she turning into? She doesn’t know. Ahead of her she sees a void. Maybe she’s become Emma Bovary, she thinks. She needs dramatic models to form a view of herself. When she was a little girl she was forever miming and dancing to pop songs. What is it I lack, that I always need to pretend?