‘Where have you been?’ Constance asked. ‘I was about to cheat.’

‘I’m just seeing the boys out,’ Diana said.

As she did, she could hear faintly the buzzing ring of the timer. She stopped to relock the door before she went back in to Constance.

— 9 —

‘HOW CAN WE GO away for the weekend when Chrissie’s going out on her first date?’ Mary demanded of both her husband and father as they sat together in the living room Patricia had created and recreated over the years. ‘She’ll feel abandoned.’

‘I think, if you asked her, she’d tell you she was relieved,’ Ted said mildly.

‘Mary,’ David said, ‘there’s always going to be something to keep you at home if you let it. When all the children are gone, there can still be house plants to water or a sick cat.’

‘We don’t have a cat,’ Mary said.

Both men smiled.

David, as usual, was in conflict between his gut understanding of his daughter and his impatience with her. She reminded him so much of himself, trying to wriggle out of plans Patricia made for them, but Patricia had been firmer with him than Ted was with Mary, perhaps because David had never held the trump card of Mary’s temper. Overwhelmed and inadequate as he had often felt, his own solution would have been to sleep round the clock. Patricia’s answer to that was final: ‘That’s no holiday for me!’

‘Ted needs a break as much as you do,’ David said.

‘He could still go.’

‘Right,’ said Ted, getting up out of his (David’s ex-) chair, ‘and I’m going.’

Before Mary could answer him, he had left the room.

‘That’s what he does now,’ Mary said in exasperation. ‘He won’t discuss anything. He just gets up and walks off.’

‘He’s tired of fighting,’ David said.

‘Fighting is about the only way I can get through to him,’ Mary said.

‘Are you really not going to go?’ David asked.

‘Daddy, I’m afraid to go. What if, when we got there, we just really didn’t have anything to say to each other?’

‘The only serious mistake you can make about that is not to find out,’ David said.

Finally they went, Mary leaving David a list of instructions in case of such a variety of emergencies that it would have been funny if it hadn’t also been such a confession of Mary’s overtaxed imagination.