Patsy and Christine were quick with examples of their own, though none so dramatic, of self-inflicted pain. As they speculated on the various reasons for it, they remembered their own self-defeating gestures, and Tyler finally came to his own conclusion.

‘He’s mad at somebody he’s scared to hurt.’

David felt mildly subversive though he knew Ted and Mary would be as impressed with Tyler as he was. They both thought of themselves as tolerant people, but they didn’t really teach tolerance any more than he had though it might be the only lesson useful for their children to carry into adulthood.

‘You know, Grandad,’ Christine said as he went into her room to say goodnight, ‘I wanted to say tonight that I thought I was the most unpopular girl I knew until Jerry asked me out to this movie. That’s dumb, isn’t it? Why should it make such a big difference?’

‘Maybe you’ll find out it doesn’t after it happens.’

It was only sensible to be where the children could find him easily but David had not wanted to agree to sleep in the master bedroom. He was quite simply afraid of it. He didn’t know what part of the past he might find there. He had only learned to sleep well again after he had moved out, divorcing Patricia from the space where he rested alone.

Though the furniture greeted him—Patricia’s chaise in the window nook where during the day she could look out over the sound to the north mountains whose remote serenity had comforted her, his low-slung old armchair where he had sat with her to watch television, their bed, their matching bureaux—it was not the same room. Its smells were foreign to him, and none of the small, homely objects were for his comfort, though he could take comfort from them since they were pictures of his grandchildren, a book he had given to Ted for Christmas, a dressing table set Patricia had given Mary on an adolescent birthday. Nowhere else in the house was a room so fully and newly inhabited as here. Even the children’s rooms had an unnatural neatness, as if they were still guests in a grandparental house.

It was of Ted and Mary that he thought as he got ready for bed, and it was the tension of their unhappiness that he felt as he got between the familiar sheets. He was acutely embarrassed to find himself aware of his daughter as a sexual creature withholding herself from him/Ted as virginally as a girl in obedience to the fears of her mother.