Sebastian comes bounding up the stairs, lean, lively, and desperate, as if the hounds of old age would be yapping at his heels if he went more slowly. He seems pleased to see Chloe, to Grace’s surprise. He clasps Chloe’s stiff, self-conscious body to his thin, denim shirt, asks how she is, even asks after Marjorie.
‘Having a hysterectomy,’ says Chloe.
‘My God, in the hysterectomy belt already!’ says Sebastian.
Sebastian wears a wide belt with a brass buckle, in the form of a snake swallowing an eagle. How he mocks and masters the world! How he suffers and shrinks at the prospect of boredom and solitude. How untouched he is by the world’s miseries.
All Sebastian owes the world, Sebastian believes, is his own existence, and the pleasure he takes in it.
Sebastian’s buttocks are clearly defined in faded jeans. Chloe surprises herself with a sudden surge of sexual desire, which goes straight from eyes to womb, bypassing her brain. Is this, she wonders, what Esther Songford saw and felt, lifting her eyes from the geraniums to those of Patrick Bates?
Forget it outside, remember it inside. It will do you good.
‘Marjorie’s insides were always a source of trouble to her,’ says Grace, ushering Chloe out rather hastily. ‘She’d be better off without them.’
Well, thinks Chloe, forgiving, if your mother died in childbirth, giving birth to the half-brother of one of your own children, you too might find yourself viewing female insides as more trouble than they’re worth.
‘Grace,’ says Chloe, lingering and anxious, ‘your mother didn’t know about you and Patrick, did she?’
‘No,’ says Grace. ‘But I think she knew about father and me. That must have helped her die happy. She was always putting me in his way, you must have noticed, drawing attention to my tits or my arse, under guise of clothing coupons.’
‘You imagine it.’ Chloe is nervous.
‘She didn’t like me and she didn’t like him, and it killed two birds with one stone. Like you and your Françoise.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Pushing her under your husband’s nose. I watched you do it, and I think you deserve what happened.’
She is all malevolence, suddenly, eyes aglitter. Chloe trembles, as she does when her reasonable world turns upside down.
‘What harm have I done you?’ she asks. ‘Why are you like this?’
‘You just existed,’ says Grace. ‘You and Marjorie. Great big cuckoos in my nest. It was you who killed my mother. You wore her out.’
And Grace goes inside and slams the door and poor Chloe, much upset, goes back home to Egden, to cope with Françoise and weed the geranium beds, before the light fades.