She sits with Harry and nibbles a tuile aux amandes. Harry may never have another chance to go on his beloved boat. Harry looks out to sea and grimaces. Fleur sees that all her paths to the family are growing over. Estelle speaks for Harry; Julian bypasses her; Amanda gives her the brush-off, and Estelle does not want to enter into an alliance of any sort with her. She wonders what Estelle is planning to do when Harry passes. She remembers cringing when her mother, with fastidiously pursed lips, used the word ‘passed’ to describe a death. Now she thinks that it is the right word. Harry appears to be ready to pass through the window of the house and out on to the limitless, hazy Mediterranean beyond. There’s another Matisse that used to hang in his office in Bread Street; now it hangs in the morning room. Last night Harry sat in front of it for an hour. It’s called French Window at Collioure and is three panels of colour, but still clearly a window with a stone frame. The stone of the window is in lilac, the shutter – if it is a shutter – is of a wood bleached by exposure to the sun and on one side of that is a lintel of greeny grey. It could be seen simply as beautiful blocks of colour. But in the middle, where you would expect the view beyond, there is a large rectangle of darkness, absolutely black. And maybe that’s what Harry sees, the looming nothingness. Her lips are minutely littered with almond crumbs, and she brushes them with the back of her hand. Harry said to her that Matisse believed the artist should see with the eyes of a child throughout his life. Could that be what Harry was doing, staring at the blackness with childish apprehension?

She reaches for his hand; her heart, her little gingham actressy sentimental dishonest heart, is full. He turns towards her. There is a small aggregation of greenish scum at the corner of his mouth. It’s the colour of the lintel in the painting. His pills – there are many – have given him a strange scent, somewhere between the bottom of a mouldy biscuit tin and a doctor’s surgery. Even as she inhales this for a moment when he turns, she longs for Morné with his warm, vital scent of sweat and youth. She looks at Harry, adjusting his hat – slightly askew – and kisses him. But instead of being pleased or comforted, his dimpled, dry, veined, fungal, Somme-landscape face becomes contorted, and his cold parchment hands come up to his cheeks; he clutches them in unmistakable horror, his eyes are rheumy and liquid as tears – or a random expression of bodily fluid – gather in the corners.

She jumps up and runs back to the house. The turtle doves are at full volume. The cicadas are tuning up. Even the avian and insect life is telling her to fuck off.