‘All the time. I guess I’m old-fashioned. There are really big painters now who never learned how, but for me it’s basic.’

‘I had to learn something about it in medical school,’ Diana said. ‘It was certainly basic there.’

‘The body,’ Richard said.

Perhaps precisely because it does fail, Diana thought, it is worthy of our various obsessions with it.

‘I’d like to see some of your sketches,’ Diana said.

Richard looked at her with his magnified eyes, as if trying to measure that interest.

‘Thank you,’ he said simply.

‘Do as I tell you,’ Diana said then, putting a hand on his shoulder.

To that instruction he simply nodded.

‘Did you know Romeo and Juliet was full of jokes?’ Diana heard Mike ask she shut the door behind them and locked it.

Constance sat watching television, her face in repose pale, the skin almost transparent, the mask of her will set aside. A boy’s laugh could touch her only for the moment while the effort to call it up left its longer lasting mark. Still it was true for Constance, as it was for Richard, for them all, to live as long as they could in the moment. In the moment, dread could fall away. On the way of it even Romeo and Juliet, that tale of mortal desire, was funny, and for Diana Mike’s laughter lingered in the room.

— 13 —

‘DAD, THIS CAN’T GO on too many more days,’ Laura said.

They were sitting drinking coffee in what David tried to think of as Mary’s kitchen, but now that she had absented herself, it had reverted to Patricia, and he felt her absence more acutely than he had in months.

‘The boys aren’t turning up for meals, and even I think of every excuse I can to get out of the house. Jack has scared up a consultant’s job in Prince George for a week. My family is just vanishing before my eyes.’

A rehearsal for the real event, David thought. He remembered how often at first he and Patricia had sat blankly when Mary was gone, unable to function in the quiet climate of their own relationship after so many years of emotional upheavals. They had to learn to talk all over again and to be companionably silent.

‘She says she has to stay away long enough for Ted to know what breaking up the marriage would really be, and she doesn’t seem to have any clear idea of how long that will be,’ Laura went on.

‘I don’t think Ted believes, in the real crunch, she would leave the children,’ David said.

‘Has she talked to you about it?’

‘No,’ David said.