‘No,’ Constance said. ‘It’s like remembering, isn’t it? You can see so clearly, but you can’t make them see you. Knock on that glass. It wouldn’t help. They’d simply fly away.’

David washed the taste of childhood out of his mouth with a long drink of iced tea.

‘It says,’ Constance said, looking at her board, ‘“Read to David” with a question mark. What does that mean?’

‘If he’s in the mood,’ Diana said, ‘and you are.’

‘I like that,’ Constance said. ‘There should be more question marks. Why couldn’t everything be question-marked?’

‘It could,’ Diana said.

‘Would you like to be read to?’ Constance asked.

‘I would,’ David said. ‘Do you like poetry?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.’

How bright she could be and how quickly that brightness could fade! David wanted to snatch back the question that had discouraged her, snatch back the brightness. As soon trap the sunlight. He must trust it like the sunlight, not of the sort that shone with such constancy here on the desert but that more elusive light of his own climate.

Diana took her own book out on to the porch, which had already become her territory since Constance refused to go there, Diana’s and David’s in the late evening if Constance went early to bed.

Instead of the library books, David chose to have Constance continue to read from the book he had been reading for weeks in such snatches he couldn’t really keep the characters straight. It was Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out which he hadn’t read before, and he wanted to listen to it long enough to decide what in that young voice she had discarded and why.

The faint London accent in Constance’s voice did not suit the privileged cast of characters, but, when they actually spoke, Constance seemed to hear them, to be able to recall and mimic those voices as her working-class mother might have done, coming home with her filched food.

What an uproar of emotion the lovers seemed to be in, vacillating for pages in extremities of feeling. Had David ever experienced such extended periods of indecision? Or so acute a sense of the division of the sexes? On the contrary, he had struggled to discover his own male superiority as if his life had depended on it, passed through puberty and finally, even three inches taller than his sister, admitted failure with a sense of wondering relief. He hadn’t courted Patricia as these young men seemed to court these young women. Peacock-brained, these young men seem to have been, strutting their learning to dazzle, to intimidate and then blind.