She smiled at him, but in her smile was that almost hectic brilliance of will rather than the warmth of recognition. He felt punished by it, as if he had failed in some basic duty of love. And Diana knew he did. He was grateful to her for making no clumsy effort to cover up for Constance, but she did send him almost immediately to the kitchen to make drinks. There he didn’t allow himself a moment of self-indulgent grief. He had always known his love for Constance had to be entirely independent of any recognition from her. When she had come to know him, when he had crouched there with her in the shade of the rock, it had been a little miracle, and it was a mistake to have begun to count on that, for it was only his constant presence which had encouraged the small, guttering light that, of course, went out when days passed without him. If she never knew him again, he must refuse to mind, or he would turn all his ease with both his sister and Constance into tension and sadness.

Through drinks and dinner, David was careful not to talk about his family, conversations which always to some extent excluded Constance, and now that they were back on rationed time together, he must make the most of their being three together. He talked about gardens. He wondered if they might one day go to England to see some of the great ones, and gradually Constance relaxed enough to tell him about taking a boat to Kew when she was a child. For David and Diana both, the richness of that deprived childhood always amazed them, and Constance was more present with them in it than she could easily be herself now, for everything but her childhood broke on the shores of her mind in dissociated fragments which she and often they could not mend into meaning.

Constance did not read to him after dinner. The memory board which she had so resolutely carried with her had been abandoned in the TV room, and, since Diana had not retrieved it for her, David supposed Constance needed a rest from her attempt to live in the present. Instead they listened to music, Bach’s variations on a theme, and David had a moment of pure delight in rediscovering the power of that little machine to bring the piano right into the room with them.

When Constance asked if she might go to bed, Diana went with her, and David listened through a whole disc before she returned.

‘I’m sorry. …’ Diana began.

‘Don’t be,’ David said quickly.

‘When she doesn’t remember you, I wonder how soon the day will come when she doesn’t recognize me.’

‘D, I’m only a flicker of present light. You’ve been with her for forty years. She’ll always know you.’