Diana watched him leave the room, his defeated young body suddenly full of quick eagerness. Richard did have a great love, he did know what he wanted not some time in a far-off future but now, and he might learn to live in the present because of it. But how much harder it was to counsel such a boy than it had been to help a pregnant girl, deserted, disgraced, ready to kill herself. She could be delivered, one way or another. Even bad cases of venereal disease confronted women with sterility but rarely death, their own anyway. One such patient had killed her husband, and for years Diana had sent books to her in prison. Willing victims, they were called, and the right-to-lifers were bombing abortion clinics in the name of Christ and the unborn. They clamoured now to shut down the bars and baths, but really they didn’t have to do anything. They could even put away their labelling guns and let the disease run its fatal course, except that the general population was at increasing risk from bad blood transfusions, from bisexual men infecting their wives. Without a cure, education was the only hope, and the bottom line of that was to persuade boys like Richard that he did have a right to live.

In one sense Mike was right. Richard was dying because he was short and ugly. Of course it was little or no comfort to say to someone that young, we die in any case, sex the mortal bomb, used, abused, neglected, it didn’t matter, set at our conception to tick away until it triggered the spewing of seed on barren or fertile ground, it didn’t matter, set finally to fail in any case, that crucial failure in the complex and intricate design of a system meant to self-destruct.

She heard Constance’s reading voice, faintly behind the closed door of the TV room, then a burst of young male laughter.

‘What’s going on in here?’ Diana asked, opening the door.

‘I didn’t realize Romeo and Juliet was so full of real jokes,’ Mike said.

‘I’ve read this one before,’ Constance said. ‘In school, was it?’

‘Very likely,’ Diana said.

‘Where’s Richard?’ Mike asked, his attention quickly shifting away from his own concerns.

‘Upstairs looking at paintings,’ Diana said.

‘Could you … help him?’

‘I hope so. I want him to go to his new doctor and get in touch with the AIDS people. He has the number. You must encourage him to get all the help there is.’

Mike nodded.

‘That was really fun, Constance,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘Any time,’ Constance said, smiling.

‘And thank you, Aunt Diana.’

‘Let me know how it goes,’ Diana said.

‘I will.’

Richard came back downstairs, the pleasure in his face temporarily overcoming the grim set of his mouth.

‘Do you ever sketch, Richard?’ Diana asked.