‘That’s so cool, Fleur, I am soo-oh happy you can do it. We’ve budgeted for a thousand starter kits and we’ve already identified nearly forty sites in London alone. Can you come round tomorrow for coffee? About ten? I really, really need someone with your presentational skills. You would be totally awesome talking to schools.’

‘OK. I will be speaking to the doctor who’s going down to check out Harry, but it should be cool. He has my number.’

She’s copying Kimberly’s upbeat manner. She wonders how her presentational skills are. Or what they are. She’s now agreed to sell the virtues of organic vegetables to dreadful children, to provide herself with cover during Harry’s twilight; Harry’s back-somersault into oblivion. She realises with a stab of guilt that she has accepted the fact that Harry is not the same person he was. Of course it’s to do with Morné and his body, but by what law is she required to continue to love a man who is not the man she married? And now Artair is asking questions. When Harry dies, she will be able to see Artair again. He must be seventy-six by now, and probably as full of mad schemes as ever. When he’d had a few drinks his mind became a virtual battlefield of forces he couldn’t control and the conflict spread to his face which became beatific and anguished by turns. She finds herself smiling. He lives somewhere in the sticks now, his universe shrinking. Once he had worked at the Old Vic and talked passionately over drinks with Larry and Johnny. But nothing ever worked out quite as he predicted: there would be some fatal disagreement, some unpaid bills – he was always let down by a third party – followed by the lavish expenditure befitting a titan of the theatre and once or twice there were rumours of misappropriation, but he would come back full of conviction and certainty to hold an audience rapt with his glorious, helter-skelter conversation, the emperor of the snug bar.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9