David realized how little he wanted to uproot Mary. And it was the garden rather than the house itself, for in the house the furniture was just the furniture, rearranged, reupholstered, replaced as fashion or Patricia’s whim took her, but in the garden what was planted grew and became itself, and the nurturing of it was a humbler and more requiring occupation than the similarly perennial taking of drapes to the cleaner, renting the rug shampooer from Safeway or pitching out the year’s accumulation of boxes, bags and egg cartons. ‘Why egg cartons?’ he used to wonder. His wife might have been raised on a farm!

There was nowhere in the house David couldn’t encounter hard memories, tensions, sicknesses, sorrows, angers. But in the garden his wife and children came back to him at every season, Patricia embodied in Mary now, his daughters in his grandchildren, having snowball fights, scrambling from terrace to terrace looking for Easter eggs, rolling down the long slope of lawn and heading off to the beach, grass-stained and tangle-haired, jumping in the great piles of leaves on the boulevard before he had a chance to rake them on to a burlap sheet and carry them off to dump into the ravine.

Mary was making her way slowly now off the path along the edge of the iris bed where there was as yet no sign of life. He knew she was going to a large rock, half-hidden in the trees. Both his children had found places of their own. Laura’s was down behind a curve of laurel hedge on the other side of the garden where she couldn’t be seen from the house, for her moods had always been private. Mary, even in a reclusive mood, hoped to be glimpsed through the trees. David wondered if even now she hoped he was watching her. He turned away. She could not learn to be alone in her own garden without being let alone.

‘Have you really given her away?’ his sister had asked him. He had thought he had, but offering her the house was a way of calling her home, of filling the terrible empty space with the sounds of young life again. He had abdicated that space fairly gracefully, but it was he and not Ted who had brought her home again this time. ‘Everyone was holding me hostage,’ Mary had said. Was he wrong to think that it was only Patricia’s power that must gradually wane, that he knew how to abdicate power over the children as she hadn’t?