In his study, David picked up a copy of The Body Politic by which he had inadvertently offended his sister. She was the one who had brought up washroom sex. What he had been reading about was the blood-screening test for AIDS which might put numbers of people at political risk—not people in general, he had to admit, but homosexual males. But there was a story, too, about a lesbian couple who had won a custody case. And the photograph of Gale Wilhelm, a rediscovered novelist in her seventies, had the androgynous power that so often moved and sometimes intimidated him in his sister’s face. What Diana would see, in the middle of the admittedly awful want ads, was a male nude, kneeling dreamily on a white bear rug with a bow and arrows in his hands. He looked vulnerable and silly, but, even as cupid, a hunter of hearts, he was ‘politically incorrect’, part of the male romance with death. David had no more patience with that than Diana did, but he had tried to overlook such things in order to become familiar with the serious concerns of the gay community. It was crass of him to think of it as hers. Insulting even, yes. But, if David had to carry the burdens of his ‘meaningful minority’ as Constance put it, how could Diana so completely dissociate from hers? It didn’t exist, she said, at least not for her. David had no real male friends at all, no club, no bar, but that didn’t let him claim he wasn’t a man.

It was the label Diana objected to, as if by it he could dismiss her views as a lesbian plot against men’s privilege and pleasure though they offered the young a good deal more freedom than he felt comfortable with, raised in a generation when below the belt was out of bounds for lovers as well as boxers.

How did one go about discussing such matters or even thinking about them without getting bogged down in personal defensiveness and inaccurate generalities? Diana, for all her medical candour, was really no better at it than he.

Jack never invited his father-in-law to lunch without a reason. David accepted, feeling he was responding to a summons. He mustn’t let his apprehensions about Mary and her family spill over mindlessly on to Laura and hers, but he could not look forward simply to the pleasure he always took in his son-in-law’s company, for whom he had never felt, as he did with Ted, the least bit fatherly. Jack was the only person with whom David felt an instinctive alliance, trusting his balance in this boat of family through all its weathers. It wasn’t so much that they confided in each other as that it was always an open possibility.