‘We ate those huge pink grapefruit at least twice a day. A dollar a bag for ten of them. And enormous moist dates. I didn’t think I liked dates until you made me taste one, and then I couldn’t stop eating them.

‘There was a little Mexican restaurant that served the best chilli rellenos I’d ever tasted, until you went right out into the kitchen and got the cook to teach you how to make them, and then yours were even better. You thought you might open a Mexican restaurant in Vancouver on the strength of those chilli rellenos.

‘We even talked about buying something down there. We had a real estate woman take us around. We looked at condos for sale with gardens and pools and tennis courts and golf courses. We thought it was odd that most of them were for sale furnished, even the new ones, right to the pictures on the walls and the china in the cupboards. The only house we really liked was out on the desert by itself with its own orchard and pool, filled with what was obviously old family stuff; the fellow was going to sell all that, too, but he apologized about wanting to take one chair; it had been his mother’s.

‘But we didn’t really want a place. Part of what we liked about Borrego Springs was having nothing we had to do.’

‘How could we ever have liked that?’ Constance said.

‘We were very hard-working women in those days,’ Diana said.

‘Do you think we could make up something we had to do now?’ Constance asked.

‘Most of the year, you have the garden,’ Diana reminded her.

‘I’d like to go home,’ Constance said.

‘Back to England, do you mean?’

‘No, home. Where we worked.’

‘This is home, Constance. It’s just that we’ve got old.’