When Harry is dead she’s going to buy a small house in London and do it up quite differently. She will spend much more time in Tuscany, too. Mulgrave oppresses her with its stuffy magnificence. It was never hers and she was never able to decorate it as she would have chosen, more like Kim and Julian’s house. Although Harry adored her, he said that Mulgrave House was not the sort of place you could ‘muck about’ with. The only major change she made was to the kitchen. Harry hadn’t been brought up to think of the kitchen as part of the family domain; generations of cooks reigned in this terra incognita. But she had made a comfortable breakfast bar with a small television and brightly coloured banquettes and put in steel German ovens and a huge gas range. Harry was happy to let her cook simple suppers on the few nights they weren’t going out or were without staff. He called it her Petit Trianon. She smiled, and later looked it up on Wikipedia: she was deliberately slumming, apparently. And she sits there now, as if in retreat from the French tassels and gilt frames and Aubusson paysages and Sheraton card tables and Boulle side tables and gloomy ancestors – less Mitteleuropa with each passing generation as they married fair people – and the perfect flowers, sent in by the bushel.

Around her the house is very quiet, although there’s always a little groaning in the pipes and at intervals a distinct rumble from the Underground. There’s also a subdued whisper, the noise of old fabrics and curtains responding minutely to draughts, but also there’s just the sighing and settling of an old house in the way that elderly people make little noises as they move or bend or sit – a sigh here, a groan there, and sometimes the small whoosh of an involuntary emission. All the noises are much louder now that she’s alone. She plays some Chopin on the CD but it doesn’t calm her. Instead it seems to isolate her: it’s like a small waterfall of piano notes, and she is standing on the other side, behind the water. Her thoughts are becoming disordered. What had happened to her for eighteen years was a form of embalming. She was embalmed by Harry, and the unguent was money. In the old days – she’s a bit vague about millennia – the Egyptians used spices; now the embalmers inject wealth straight into the aorta. She’s been lying in her own tomb. She thinks with sympathy of her old father and his boyfriend; maybe he felt he was entombed in heterosexuality. This cultural/artistic gulag she’s been living in is not so noble. It’s nothing more than the product of money. She has the feeling that Julian also finds it oppressive, but he is far too buttoned-up to admit to anything like that.