‘I have to,’ Diana replied. ‘I have to know how it is for her. I always have. She was never like us, David. She always said she’d die in a cage. She was never at home in the way most people are.’

‘A cage?’

‘She never wanted to be owned, to belong to anyone. She had to be free, whatever the cost. But I own her now. What else can I do?’

‘She wasn’t trying to run away,’ David said. ‘She was frightened. She was hiding.’

‘Oh, D, I did want you to have a good time, too.’

‘I am having a good time, a wonderful time, in fact,’ David said. ‘This morning she did recognize me. She did trust me. I think it’s my voice.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ Diana said.

David could see Diana only in outline, and it struck him that this intimacy was more possible for her because she also recognized his voice which had been with her through all the years of their separation. In the light she would still be growing used to accepting this old man as her brother, as he puzzled, too, to find his sister in that aging flesh.

‘I want her to trust me,’ David said. ‘I want you both to trust me.’

Diana reached over and put a hand on David’s knee.

‘I’m not sure I know any longer what that means,’ she said. ‘I do love you, D.’

He understood that she was speaking without reluctance.

‘You’ve got to trust yourself,’ he said.

‘It never used to seem so difficult.’

It was as hard for David to see that strength in his sister waver as it was to see her lame and in pain. The sun was doing its good work on her bones. If David could share the responsibility of the accidents and mistakes, perhaps Diana could learn not to see each one as a defeat. There was a virtue in Constance’s failure to remember any of them. She might feel unaccountably tired tomorrow, but she would have nothing to forgive them for.

David walked the straight road into town in the morning, having said he would stay to have his lunch there. He wanted them to have an ordinary morning together, for Diana’s sake as much as for Constance’s. He never felt with them, as he had expected to, times when he was an intrusion. He cherished their solitude more than they did, their sharing it with him so that he became part of it. He did like these times to himself but mainly because he felt their presence behind him, there to welcome him back. His sister loved him. Constance knew who he was.