Diana realized that Constance was the only one of them who did not know that within a few hours this happy arrangement would be over, and, once they were home again, she would forget to mind. Not for the first time, Diana was tempted to suggest that it didn’t have to end. Increasingly through the holiday, she had imagined David settled with his own things in the rooms that used to be Jill’s. They would offer him about as much private space as he had at home as well as giving him the run of the house. But every time she thought of it, she knew that what his living with them really meant was taking on a burden intolerable without love, occasionally intolerable even so. Those rooms, when the time came, should be nurse’s quarters.

It wasn’t as if they were losing him when they got home. He’d still come every Wednesday for dinner, and perhaps Mike and his odd, intense little friend would drop in occasionally. That whole family, for that matter, might gradually grow accustomed to two peculiar old women who had been offered up to them after all these years. Diana wanted to warm to Laura, and perhaps she could when they were more familiar to each other. Or if she couldn’t, Constance might. Diana wasn’t sure she hadn’t used Constance’s confusion and fear as an excuse to cut her off from the long habit of diverse intimacies. Constance had, after all, got used to David, as she put it.

At the little Palm Springs airport, they turned in their car and had time for lunch before they had to board their flight back to Vancouver.

‘I don’t need to be pre-boarded here,’ Diana said. ‘It’s an easy walk for me now.’

‘But in Vancouver you’ll need help,’ David said.

‘Oh, I suppose so,’ she said regretfully. ‘I hate to give up the desert illusion that I’m not an old cripple after all.’

Constance seemed less troubled now being surrounded by strangers. She looked about her with natural curiosity and even smiled at the waitress who took their order.

‘Do you remember that little place in Bloomsbury where we used to go for scotch woodcock?’ Constance asked.

‘I do,’ Diana said, ‘those awful watery powdered eggs which tasted so good,’ and she wondered what about this airport eating area could have reminded Constance of that little shoebox of a restaurant.

‘I had a mad passion for the waitress there,’ Constance confided to David.

Diana was relieved to see that David was amused rather than shocked. She looked more carefully at their waitress and could see nothing in her that would trigger Constance’s interest, but Diana rarely had seen what Constance saw to desire, her own so clearly locked in place.