David looked up at a car coming towards him. He noticed no more than the bald head of the driver. He suddenly remembered the man on the stretcher. It was a part of the story he hadn’t told Diana. What if that man died as a result of being hurried up the path in search of Constance? The thought angered David. If someone knew he had heart trouble, why had he been so careless as to try to lay his own death on a stranger’s conscience?

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ David said aloud.

He had spoken in a child’s voice, speaking the guilt of a child who knew his father had died rushing to the hospital to attend his birth. All his adult life he had tried to believe in taking care, in making everything safe, but it hadn’t prevented his own son from dying. Really, it was a bit of luck to have found Constance. It was a bit of bad luck if the man had died. Or not, for him. But perhaps he had a wife … a man should have the courtesy to outlive his wife.

David’s gentle mother had outlived two husbands, and of the three sons only David had felt briefly obligated to play a stand-in part as the man of the family. During all those war years he had had too much of being cast in roles nobody really thought him worthy of. He was a war substitute not only at home but at work and with a number of young women for whom he was not only too young but not good enough, having been unable to put on a uniform. Not much of a man, no, he hadn’t been, but he had outlived his wife.

And was he now setting himself up to outlive Constance? Either he or Diana would have to. David wasn’t sure what Diana had meant when she said Constance could not live in a cage, for she wasn’t speaking just about locked doors, the fence that was even now going up around their house if Ben and Mike were on schedule. Those two women had lived together for over forty years, and that seemed to him no less a commitment than marriage which was, he supposed, sometimes something of a cage, but it was also so much else in positive requirement that to use that image seemed to him perverse. Oh, he understood Diana’s distress, her grief for Constance in her increasing dependence, but at least there were things Diana could do about it. She was not yet reduced to sitting helplessly, day after day. If all David had had to do to keep Patricia safe was build a fence around the property—bars at all the windows would have seemed a small price—but he was committing the sin of claiming superior suffering, which comforted neither himself nor his sister.