Diana couldn’t move. It was Constance who went to him, put her hand on the back of his neck and gently rubbed it. Two or three long minutes passed, through which Diana stared unmoving, before David recovered himself enough to apologize in an almost offhand way, as one might for a cough.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Diana asked.

He nodded.

‘I don’t know what you drink? Whisky? Gin?’

‘Gin, just with a bit of ice,’ he managed to say.

When Diana came back into the room with his drink, whisky and sodas for herself and Constance, Constance still stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder now, and he was speaking to her with a kind of helpless urgency, as if there were no evening before them, as if he expected to have to leave momentarily. He looked up at Diana, and stood suddenly, dislodging Constance’s hand.

‘I know I don’t have any right to be here.’

‘Take your drink,’ Diana said quietly.

He did and looked around him as if to discover where he actually was.

‘I must be sitting in your chair.’

‘Do calm down,’ Diana said. ‘Sit down, have your drink.’

Constance had taken her own drink and moved away a little, but her eyes stayed on David, concerned. He was seated again, looking into his glass.

‘I’ve thought about coming for months,’ he said.

It startled Diana. David was a very occasional visitor to her thoughts, consigned to the past. Had she been callous not to reach out to him when Patricia died? But how could she have when there was no question of her going to the funeral, no question of her even calling at the house where other family members might be?

‘What kind of a man must you think I am?’

‘I don’t really know,’ Diana said. ‘I’d have no way of knowing.’

‘Patricia never knew that I came on our birthday. When she died—it’s ridiculous isn’t it?—I somehow felt I couldn’t.’

Out of loyalty to her memory? Diana was tempted to ask sardonically, but Constance was probably right. Finally she would have to learn to forgive him for marrying so badly. Patricia was, after all, dead.

‘The dead take their own time letting go,’ Constance suddenly contributed with detached sympathy.

Diana wasn’t sure Constance even knew who this man was, so recently in tears in their living room.

‘David, I don’t really see what else you could have done, short of leaving her, and that’s not the sort of man I’d expect or even want you to be. It’s all long past. I certainly don’t want to deal with it again, and I don’t see why you should either.’

‘You did deal with it, you see. I never did. I never confronted Patricia and told her she was wrong.’

‘Would it have done any good?’ Diana asked.