Amanda calls. It’s after eight, but she’s still in the office.

‘Can you talk for a moment?’

Oh God, Amanda has found out about Morné. She’s got a hotline to the tabloids. Somebody at the gym must have been talking. Or maybe Morné has been boasting.

‘Yes, I can,’ she says brightly. ‘Fire away, Amanda.’

‘I wanted to ask you what your understanding was of the settlement with your first husband. I wasn’t working here then, as you know. But Artair MacCleod – that’s his name, isn’t it? – has sent a letter via some rustic lawyer to the bank asking why he hasn’t received his grant. It was pushed on to me, as a family matter. Before I go into it with the trust, it looks as though it wasn’t an award in court, but a grant from one of Sir Harry’s arts charities. Is that your understanding?’

‘I don’t know anything about it. Harry simply said, as I recall, that he had made a settlement which would keep Artair going for the rest of his life.’

‘Have you spoken to Mr MacCleod?’

‘No. Not once in eighteen years.’

‘Well, don’t speak to him under any circumstances.’

‘I wasn’t planning to.’

Amanda isn’t really listening.

‘No, but he may try to get in touch with you,’ she says as though this is a given, which people like her, wised-up, realistic people, understand without help.

Amanda rings off.

Fleur is so relieved that the call has nothing to do with Morné that she feels light-headed, like somebody who has survived a car crash. She cancels gym for tomorrow, leaving another message for Morné, which invokes Harry’s doctor: she feels she should be on hand in case he wants to speak to her. The truth is that a deep survival instinct tells her that it would be an absolute disaster if it was ever revealed that she was having sex with a rugby player at the same moment as a top neurosurgeon was examining her stricken husband. Amanda’s call has reminded her of her real status in this family which, despite the title, is precarious: she’s Harry’s indulgence, an old man’s infatuation with a fluffy, failed actress. She’s tried to fit in, but without Harry’s protection they could easily gang up on her if she displays fear. Morné would say that that is the law of survival. He’s keen on natural laws.

She calls Kimberly, to tell her that she has been thinking about her project, organic food grown on bits of spare urban land, to be donated to soup kitchens and schools . . . And so on. She says how keen she is to help.

‘It sounds like just such a great idea. So fun.’