She needs to get out. The gloomy Filipina, who also hates her, sees her to the door. She is definitely getting the chop when Harry dies. Fleur walks along the street towards the Royal Hospital, under the huge plane trees, just beginning to cast their deep, untidy shade. Eight million is a lot of money, but there was clearly some canny estimation going on when Harry drafted his will. He had calculated what he could leave her, just this side of looking mean. It isn’t the will of a besotted lover, although in the depths of the night he had made extravagant claims: she was his muse; she had utterly changed him with her youth and (relative) innocence. Most of all he had loved having her lying next to him, a sort of captive wood nymph in his bed. For a while she had loved him too, basking in his fervour and happy to have been smuggled into the enchanted world of the very rich. And he had believed completely in her talent as an actress. More completely than the producers, it turned out, which cast some retrospective doubt on his judgement. But until she met Morné she hadn’t really understood sex: sex with Morné was a revelation. Up until then she had seen it as a form of adulation, and she coveted adulation. Men had always wanted to fuck her. They responded to something in her with a sort of rutting instinct, as though she was unmistakably in season. Up for it. Now at the age of forty-three she has discovered the madness of true sexual passion. She thinks about Morné’s body all day. She even thinks about the amount of sperm he produces, nothing like the thin watery paste her two husbands had projected. God, what you think about in the privacy of your own mind. She longs for Morné as though she can’t be complete without him. But what it amounts to is about ten minutes a day in the storeroom. On the face of it this is demeaning, but the perfunctory nature of it, the awareness of borrowed time and of risk makes the whole business more charged. It’s strange to her. But maybe to him it’s routine. It’s not something she can rationalise; she’s having sex with a huge, hairy Afrikaner, an epigone of Harry, an uncultured, shallow and faintly hectoring athlete. It’s possible some hidden need of hers has been unearthed although she doesn’t want to explore exactly what that could be. At the Shirley Simms Stage School they had a voice teacher who set them exercises, which involved howling and uttering. The exercises were supposed to locate your core, because once you had found it – for example, by howling like a wolf on the tundra – you would become a better actor. She wondered why Ray Taplow – who taught the howling – wasn’t himself a famous actor. At the time she thought the whole thing laughable, but now she thinks she understands what he meant. Sex with Morné has stripped away many layers of pretence and artifice, just what Ray, who wore a bull-terrier spotted neckerchief, was aiming for. Now she thinks of herself not as a complex being, but as elemental, in touch with a few basic truths about life. An obsession that has taken her over. It’s exhilarating but at the same time she can see that it is doomed: what’s she going to do, run off with Morné to the veld?