If he had focused only on his young charges, David would have slept at once, but he instead thought of himself at fifteen with his sister, how much they had preferred each other’s company, how gratefully they had inhibited and therefore postponed the sexual challenges in their lives. Everyone should be so twinned in adolescence. He must ask Diana about this pill business. Surely mothers weren’t marching their fifteen-year-olds off for a prescription! What kind of advice would she give? He had never really talked to her at all about her work, perhaps because talking about his own would have been entirely distasteful to him. Diana’s life did not seem so much odd to him as without the perennial questions that went unanswered or badly answered from generation to generation, but of course she would have professional opinions. His wife would stir in her grave at the thought that David would value advice from that sister, particularly in sexual matters! But he trusted Diana far more than he had his wife or now his daughter, Mary, and not only because Diana was a doctor but because she had been true to her own desire.

The children were already in bed when Mary and Ted got home on Sunday night. Ted looked tired and a little seedy, but he was a man who had to shave twice a day and hadn’t bothered. Mary’s face wasn’t as easy to read.

‘We’re beat,’ she said cheerfully.

‘Too old for the high life,’ Ted admitted.

‘We didn’t last on the dance floor past eleven o’clock.’

‘And all Mary did in the pool was float.’

‘You and your heroic two lengths!’ Mary said, laughing at him.

‘Next time we’re going to try a rest home,’ Ted said.

‘You don’t look any the worse for wear,’ Mary said to her father.

‘I’ve had a fine time,’ David said.

‘Oh, so did we, Daddy,’ Mary said, ‘and it’s funny, but this is the first time since we moved here that it felt like coming home. Do you know what I mean?’

It was Ted who asked. ‘How did Chrissie get along?’

‘Just fine. I’ll let her give you the details.’

He refused the drink Ted offered and went down to his own quarters which felt to him, too, a little more like home. There on his desk were the airline tickets, and he had mailed a deposit cheque for a-two-week stay at a place called the Road Runners’ Club in Borrego Springs where there had been a cancellation. Now that Mary and Ted had been away, it would be less difficult for David to tell them about his own holiday. But it was with Diana and Constance he wanted to share the happy details.

‘I called all the places you mentioned,’ David said. ‘But they were all full. Do you know this one?’