In the morning, Diana admitted to herself that going to the desert was a pipe dream. The only useful idea she had had in the night was the fence, and it would be as hateful to Constance as the locks were. Never had it been clearer to Diana that the possessor is as trapped as the possessed, and there could be no lesson she needed less to learn in her old age, but her only other choice was to commit Constance, and Diana didn’t have to learn the consequences of that either.

Constance was as cheerful that morning as Diana was bleak, a mood she gradually surrendered to Constance’s affectionate teasing.

‘I was remembering,’ Diana said with some confidence as they sat over a last cup of breakfast tea, ‘how much I used to enjoy drawing when I had to do some of it in medical school.’

‘Why aren’t all doctors vegetarians? Flesh must be so real to them.’

‘Another of your great opening lines, as Ben calls them,’ Diana said, smiling. ‘I wasn’t thinking so much about medical drawing as just drawing.’

‘What would you draw?’

‘I don’t know,’ Diana said, ‘anything, I suppose—that bowl of mandarin oranges, for instance.’

‘I might want to eat one,’ Constance warned her.

‘It might be something we could both do,’ Diana suggested.

Constance handed her a mandarin orange, and Diana knew she hadn’t been misunderstood but was being teased. She accepted the orange, peeled it and offered half to Constance.

‘Just the same,’ Diana said, ‘I’m going to try.’

Even if it turned out to be like wine, involving only herself, it was something she could do which didn’t so clearly withdraw her attention as reading did. Or so she imagined until she began, first attempting the mandarins, then adding their teacups, her hand and eye beginning to remember that pleasure of co-operation which the act of drawing was.

Constance was drawing, too, sitting across the table from Diana as absorbed as she, not with mandarins and teacups, but with Diana herself.

They sat and worked for an hour.

‘We should set your timer,’ Diana said, surprised at the time that had passed.

‘It’s a lot easier than trying to write,’ Constance said. ‘I can see what I’ve done.’

Diana looked at the half-dozen sheets of paper Constance had used to make crude caricatures of Diana, and she was reminded of a series of paintings she had seen, done by a disturbed child, depicting a huge female figure with ladders propped up on her, on which small children stood for the tasks of washing her face, combing her hair, feeding her. There was no such reversal of the role in Constance’s sketches, but they could be captioned, My real prison is trusting you.

‘You know,’ Constance said, looking at her sketches herself, ‘you need a good haircut.’