‘I am their mother,’ Patricia would say whenever he suggested that she might be a bit heavy-handed about her own wishes and judgments and tastes once the children were grown. Yet she would never have made the mistake he increasingly thought he had made. How could it be corrected now without another arbitrary use of his authority? He was thinking like a father of a five-year-old, saying to Mary, ‘I know you want it, but you can’t have it. It’s not good for you.’ And she was responding like a five-year-old, varying temper tantrums with docile behaviour, alternately thinking of him as her slave, there to live his life with only her convenience or happiness in mind, and her master, the one person she couldn’t finally defy because in the end she never had.

How grateful David was when he could leave the house and make his way to Shaughnessy for dinner with Diana and Constance. He hardly ever any longer thought about the guilt he had carried for years, the ugly gulf there had been, for it was gone. He crossed nothing but the city streets which separated them, always taking a gift of some sort, a book, a good cheese, dinner, tonight a bunch of daffodils from the Chinese grocer near where he caught his bus because it had been a daffodil-coloured day out beyond his dark little den. He should have gone out into it much earlier.

Diana greeted him at the door with responding eagerness.

‘How long it seems to be now,’ she said.

The real passage of time, however, was there in Constance’s eyes. She did not know who he was. David checked his hurt like a physical pain from which he must not flinch and fell back on his old comic gallantry, bowing, offering up his daffodils as he said, ‘I’m David, Diana’s brother.’