Does he know, in some corner of his mind, that what he is doing is wrong? Or, if you have never been forbidden absolutely, if you have never been harshly criticised by someone whose opinion genuinely matters to you, if you have never had to face the consequences of your own mistakes, does the quiet, critical, contrary voice at the back of the mind grow gradually quieter until it is no longer audible?

  Angelica does not resist his advances. Sometimes he must cajole, but he never needs to threaten. That, surely, is sufficient confirmation of his integrity. That, surely, is the measure of any relationship.

  The staff both know and do not know that something is not right. Hervé does not care greatly. He has little sympathy for Angelica. Hervé, though Philippe would be shocked to know it, has little sympathy for either of them. In truth Maja’s death pleased him, giving him a problem sufficiently complex to tax him at long last. When he is off duty, in the company of his partner and his friends, he does vicious and accurate impressions of the family and their circle. His lack of concern is precisely why he is good at his job. His objectivity is never clouded by emotion of any kind. Nikki cares but she took the financial bait laid by Andrew Maine and was shown evidence of her clumsy embezzlements at a meeting of which Philippe knows nothing, a meeting where Andrew made a theatrical show of sliding a sealed brown envelope of incriminating documents into a safe. It is something he has done quietly on behalf of many wealthy clients, a trick learnt from his father—simple, deniable and, so far, infallible. Her loyalty, he hopes, is now guaranteed.

  The cooks, the housekeepers, the cleaners, the gardeners…some can’t quite put a finger on the problem, some are more convinced, but what can anyone do with such information beyond sharing it with friends and family who pass it on in turn to friends so that it merges with the vapour of fantasy which always surrounds the rich, powerful and reclusive.

  Nevertheless, Philippe treats Angelica during the day with an affected coolness and never touches her until the staff have retreated from the main house. He makes sure that she always returns to her own bed. He tells her that it must remain their secret, that other people might not understand. He tells her that those people would be jealous if they knew and would try to separate the two of them, that this life of ease and luxury would then come to a terrible, crashing close. He invokes the ghost of Maja and imagines her casting a posthumous blessing on their union.

  There are close calls. When she is six years old a teacher finds her rubbing a doll between its legs, saying, “Do you know how much I love you?” He does something he rarely does and attends a meeting on his own behalf. He is offended by the suggestion of impropriety. You stroke dogs because you love them, you stroke cats because you love them, you stroke people because you love them. How is a girl as young as Angelica meant to know that certain areas of the body are out of bounds? They are reading their own prurient narratives into events of no consequence. Nevertheless he withdraws Angelica and they move to a rented penthouse apartment in Vancouver.

  The class is on a trip to the zoo in Aldergrove when Angelica sees a gazelle with an erection and says, “It’s like Papa.” The head of her new school is more insistent and less willing to bend to Philippe’s argument that Angelica is simply pointing out that men have penises. They leave Canada. Back in Winchester he removes Angelica from formal education altogether and arranges for tutors to teach her at home. She is eight years old. He tells her that she is so far in advance of other children academically that she needs personal attention and work tailored to her own special talents. She has spent so much of her life around adults that this is largely true, and already other children are aware of something different about her, something which makes them instinctively keep their distance. Consequently she is untroubled by the prospect of a solitary life, and the flattering suggestion that this is happening because of her intellectual superiority only sugars a pill she was already happy to swallow.

  Philippe never imagines that he will be found out, that he will be charged with wrongdoing. Such things are inconceivable. And that anxious thrum which runs constantly like the vibration of a ship’s engine in the walls and floors? Those moments when you are woken in the small hours by the conviction that a stranger is walking up the stairs…are they not universal feelings? Are they not simply the price of being human?

  * * *

  . . .

  She takes it as normal at first, what her father does to her. How would she know any different? She accepts, too, his insistence that she keep it secret and not discuss it with anyone. This is not a threat. It is simply the way things are. Some of the things he makes her do are disgusting and some of them are painful, but so many things to do with the human body are disgusting and painful and must simply be borne. Only as she gets older is there a growing sense of something wrong.

  Her father does not allow her to watch TV and there is no Internet access in the main house. Indeed, she has been taught to think of the Internet as dangerous. It matters little. She has grown up knowing that problems will always be solved and questions answered by kind and efficient staff. She has no mobile phone and no friends she might call. She reads newspapers and magazines from an early age, but those occasional horror stories she cannot help but notice about sick men who prey on children bear no relation to her own experience. They are stepfathers, teachers, neighbours, strangers. Her father doesn’t hit her. He doesn’t lock her up. He loves her. He tells her so repeatedly.

  She tells no one about her unease. Her father is a good man. People respect him. She has never heard him criticised. He is the biggest thing in her life. It is not possible that he is in the wrong. So it must be she who is at fault, and the fact that she doesn’t know in what way she is at fault only makes the growing unease harder to bear. Who in any case would she tell? She is close to some of the staff, the housekeepers in particular—Paola, then Naomi who cycled to China, then Mariam the mountain climber from Tbilisi, then Dottie who can juggle and wears heavy-metal T-shirts under her uniform—but they are employees and seldom stay long, sensing, like so many of her father’s employees, something deeply out of kilter.

  She knows, too, that her father’s threat is real. If someone outside the family learns of their secret then this charmed life might indeed come to an end—whatever food she wants cooked whenever she wants, clean clothes every day, new clothes every few months, endless hot baths, a wooded garden where this world and the other world merge so effortlessly one into the other, the fact that they can open the atlas at random and, by the following evening, be looking at the marble caves of General Carrera Lake, or cruising through the Qutang Gorge on the Yangtze. Above all she would miss the library at Antioch.

  If she and her father were separated, if she were placed in the care of strangers and forced to live elsewhere, then how would she survive?

  Fourteen, fifteen. She never fights, never complains. She allows these things to happen, and the gap between acceptance and encouragement is a very narrow one. The longer it goes on the more she feels like an accomplice. Sixteen years without a complaint. Is that not tantamount to saying that you enjoyed it, that you wanted it?

  So she reads. For company, for solace, for escape. She reads beyond her years. She has fewer languages but she shares the omnivorous hunger her father once felt for the written word. At the same time she has retained a child’s ability to sit still for long periods and lose herself entirely in a fictional world. Not children’s books, not contemporary novels. She does not want to be mocked with visions of other lives she might be leading. Nor does she read poetry. Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge. Her favourite stories are the old ones, those that set deep truths ringing like bells, that take the raw materials of sex and cruelty, of fate and chance, and render them safe by trapping them in beautiful words. And every night, when her father comes to her room, she recites silently to herself the magic words which bring one of these other worlds into being and wanders there, far from the body he is using for his pleasure.

  She watches Arjuna string the great steel bow and fire an arrow through the eye of the mechanical fish to win the hand of Draupadi. She travels for a day with Gilgamesh along the subterranean Road of the Sun under Mount Mashu to the Garden of the Gods. She smiles at Rumpelstilzchen spinning himself into angry pieces. She is frightened by the knight who rides into the court of Genghis Khan on a magical bronze horse, bearing a mind-reading mirror, a ring that translates the language of birds and a sword whose deadly wounds can be healed only by a touch of the same sword.

  She has no one with whom she can share these stories. She is both teller and listener. She forgets, sometimes, where the page ends and her mind begins. She recounts these tales to herself in idle moments, inevitably changing them a little every time and comes to believe, in some occult way, that these are stories of her own invention, that she is bringing these lives into being, as if she is one of the Fates, those supernatural women who make and cut the thread of life. She is the abducted Helen sitting high in the Trojan citadel weaving her great purple web of double fold, the tapestry which describes the many battles of the horse-taming Trojans and the brazen-coated Achaeans, so that it is hard to tell whether she is simply describing the scenes far below her chamber window or whether she is creating them. Who in any case can say what is real? The Trojan War, Helen’s tapestry or this other quiet room in which we are re-creating those scenes in our own minds?

  There are darker tales about women who weave stories. Arachne the shepherd’s daughter, for example, who boasts that her extraordinary handiwork is not a gift from the gods but something she has taught herself. She challenges the outraged Minerva to a contest and two looms are strung so that they may compete against one another. Minerva begins, weaving a picture of the twelve Olympians seated in their majesty watching Minerva herself strike the ground with the tip of her spear so that the olive tree is born. In the corners of the picture she depicts mortals who have been transformed as punishment for defying the gods—Haemus and Rhodope who became mountain ranges, the Queen of the Pygmies who became a crane, Trojan Antigone who became a stork, Cynaras whose daughters were turned to stone.

  Arachne responds with a weaving which shows Jupiter taking the form of a bull to rape Europa, the form of an eagle to rape Asterië, of a swan to rape Leda, of a satyr to rape Antiope, of a shower of gold to rape Danaë, of a speckled serpent to rape Ceres…

  Seeing that the work is better than her own, Minerva tears it to shreds and beats Arachne with her boxwood shuttle. Too proud to endure this humiliation, Arachne hangs herself, but Minerva refuses to let her die and transforms her into a spider, for ever dangling from a rope, for ever weaving, punished by metamorphosis exactly like the characters depicted in her own tapestry.

  The house is cleaned scrupulously and Angelica is no more likely to stumble across a cobweb than she is to stumble across a dead mouse, but she finds them in the garden sometimes, strung between branches, picked out early in the morning by the tiniest drops of dew which hang from the individual filaments, and she wonders every time whether they were made by a woman who was punished for telling the truth.

  * * *

  . . .

  Old friends have largely given up trying to stay in touch. There are fleeting encounters in hotels and restaurants, but Philippe takes her to hotels and restaurants less and less frequently once she becomes a teenager. Her gawkiness has gone, she has become a young woman and it is painfully obvious to him that when she walks into a room, men turn to look at her and have trouble looking away. Sometimes they tell him how attractive she is. Sometimes they say this to Angelica herself. They do not spell it out but they are saying, I want to have sex with your daughter. Angelica cannot understand this. Dangerously naive, she is flattered by their attention. She acts as if she were living in a fairy tale, as if she were a princess and these were her admirers. Sometimes she responds in a way which could be described as flirting, if she knew what flirting meant. He finds it unbearable, though what he finds most unbearable is a possibility he hardly dare articulate, that she is looking for a white knight, someone to hoist her onto his saddle and bear her away.

  So they holiday in isolated locations, they stay in cities where he knows no one, they stay at home. Stories circulate, nevertheless, about the aloof but radiant daughter of the famous mother, the stories made more compelling by their sinister footnotes. Angelica rarely speaks, it is said. Some suggest that she is unable to speak. Is it possible, in spite of her beauty, that she has a learning difficulty, or a brain injury as a result of her traumatic birth? Others, who have heard her speak, say that she is shockingly naive, an unnerving mix of sophistication and childishness. Might she be mentally unwell? It would not be wholly surprising given her motherless, hermetic upbringing. Some wonder if there is a nastier story, though it is rarely spelled out any more clearly than in remarks that it’s not quite right for a father to keep a daughter so close. To be explicit would be to say that one knows but does nothing. Far easier to dismiss it as baseless innuendo and bored gossip.

  * * *

  . . .

  Bobby Koulouris is an art dealer, in twentieth-century prints mostly—Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Louise Bourgeois…He sells work to Philippe and, occasionally, buys work from him. He is as near to a genuine friend as Philippe has and these transactions are as much conversation as commerce. He has a reprobate son, Darius, of whom he despairs and about whom he has complained on many occasions, a vain, idle boy who was thrown out of two schools, turned up his nose at university, flirted sporadically with paid employment and now leads a life of dissipation among minor European aristocracy and trust-fund beneficiaries of equal vanity and idleness. Predictably, he has no interest in art, and rejoices in his ignorance. But when his father dies unexpectedly of pneumonia in Laos, Darius takes it upon himself to go through the contents of his father’s apartments in Athens and Berlin where work rests on its journey from seller to buyer, intending to squirrel away a few valuable pieces with no paper trail. In doing so he stumbles on an exchange of emails between his father and Philippe in which his father says that he is hopeful of getting his hands on a complete signed set of Hockney’s Brothers Grimm fairy-tale etchings which Darius has been looking at only moments before and has, uncharacteristically, recognised.

  Remembering the stories about the elusive and beautiful Angelica and thinking that he can both solve a mystery and have himself a small adventure, he rings Philippe on the private number known only to a very small number of people. Philippe ignores the first three calls but Darius is persistent and when he finally picks up, Philippe’s annoyance is undercut immediately by the news of Bobby’s death. Darius moves swiftly to capitalise on his advantage and says that he will by very happy accident be passing through Hampshire in the next few days and will drop a set of prints off, politely drawing the call to a close before Philippe can demur.

  Philippe no longer feels the same hunger for the pictures—he no longer feels the same hunger for any pictures—but there will be some satisfaction in the purchase, given that he already possesses complete sets of the Cavafy and the Rake’s Progress. It seems, too, like a small, belated recompense to a friend whose final communications he left unanswered.

  Three afternoons later Darius comes to a halt in a white BMW 3 Series with an ostentatious little skid on the gravel outside Antioch, sporting an elderly, sun-bleached, denim shirt and a hundred and seventy-five thousand euros’ worth of art slung over his shoulder in a portfolio, for all the world as if he were carrying a few watercolours of New Forest ponies he’d knocked off that morning.

  Hervé walks out onto the drive to give the interloper the once-over and to allow the interloper to give him the once-over and take on board the knowledge that Hervé will be somewhere in the building for the duration. Judging the young man harmless he leads him inside.

  Philippe has not done the appropriate calculation and when Darius turns up, Philippe discovers that he is a decade younger than expected. His swagger is a surprise, too, just self-mocking enough to charm everyone apart from the person who was the centre of attention before Darius walked into that particular room. He shakes Philippe’s hand with a grip halfway between exuberant and overpowering and Philippe feels that he is being bested in a contest whose rules are not wholly clear. He considers saying that he has to leave post-haste to deal with some unforeseen business complication but he imagines this supremely confident young man fixing him with a wry stare and simply refusing to believe him. As they walk through the house, however, Darius makes enthusiastic and knowledgeable remarks about the work of Amyas Connell (“He was born in New Zealand, if my memory serves me correctly”) whom he googled over a pub lunch en route, so that by the time they are being served with a pot of first flush Darjeeling and slices of rhubarb-and-pistachio cake, Philippe is rowing back on his presumptions. He asks the obligatory questions about Bobby’s death and Darius lingers a little on the ghoulish details.

  Angelica hears the soft rip of gravel when Darius arrives and goes to the window to look, visitors being a rare entertainment. The young man who gets out of the sports car and removes a portfolio from the boot is more entertaining than she could have hoped for. He is clearly not someone employed by her father—a lawyer, a banker. He is utterly uncowed by the house and garden and looks, for all the world, as if he might own the place. Is it possible that he is a friend of the family?

  His looks are unimportant. He is young and wealthy, he comes from the Great Elsewhere and there is a dash about him which suggests that in his company anything might happen. But on top of these things he happens to be almost comically handsome—slim hips, a wave of thick hair the colour of black coffee, a feline ease in his own body. She has read about Lydia Bennet’s elopement with George Wickham, about Marie Melmotte falling for the rakish idiot Sir Felix Carbury but she knows little of the world and it is often hard to recognise stories when you find yourself inside them, so that by the time she has found Darius and her father sitting in the slatted sunshine of the roof terrace she is already in thrall to an imagined future in which he takes her away from all this, and the knowledge that the fantasy is ridiculous does nothing to sour its addictive sweetness.