He told her, sobbing as he spoke, feeling the burden of his secrecy ebb away as the truth was laid bare. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake with Moray Place,’ he said. ‘They took a supporting wall away and the whole thing’s being held up by a Chinese cabinet. And the gallery; that girl, Kirsty – Pat says that I can’t get rid of her because she’ll do something terrible to me and I saw her looking at a Vuillard in a catalogue and I think that she’s going to buy it behind my back and then we’ll have to pay because she’ll have bought it on the gallery’s behalf and what if the money … And she’s got these really tight jeans which she wears deliberately and she makes women drag their husbands away without looking at the paintings and Big Lou says …’

‘Hush. Hush. My darling, this is all nonsense. Just nonsense.’

‘It’s not,’ wailed Matthew. ‘Bruce said that if we moved that cabinet then all of Moray Place will fall down and Pat said …’

Elspeth put her hand against his brow, just as she had done as a teacher when one of the six-year-olds had become hysterical. ‘Calm down,’ she said. ‘Just calm down. You’re under strain because of the move. That’s normal. Everybody finds a move stressful. I’ll sort out this Chinese cabinet business.’

Matthew was suddenly alarmed. ‘Don’t touch it!’ he said. ‘If you move it, then the ceiling—’

‘I’ll sort it out,’ said Elspeth. ‘Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to fall down. And as for Kirsty, I’ll sort her out too. She’s a student – she’ll get another job easily enough, and it’s not as if it’s her livelihood. I’ll get rid of her today.’

She brooked no argument. ‘You stay in bed,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘You get some more sleep – you obviously didn’t sleep very well last night. I shall go along to sort things out in Dundas Street. Then I’ll get a decent surveyor along to Moray Place and we’ll sort out this cabinet nonsense. Leave it to me.’

Matthew did not argue, and by the time that Elspeth left the flat after breakfast, he had fallen into a dreamless, untormented sleep. Elspeth looked in on him before she left; he appeared so vulnerable, she thought, so innocent, as men do in sleep. The strongest, the most masculine of men, she thought, can look like a baby when his head is on the pillow and his eyes are closed. It reminded her of human vulnerability; here we are with all our human pretensions, with our mastery of the world about us, with our clever machines and our elaborate conceits, and we are no more than children who must, like the smallest of creatures, surrender to sleep and the powerlessness of oblivion.

82. Shocking Developments