So the solution to the problem they had perhaps all agreed to was for David to move, something that had never crossed his mind as owner of the house. For he did still, in that sense, think of it as his house, and so it was not easy to think that Ted had any business asking him to leave it—though the others perhaps saw no irony in it?

David sat at dinner with Laura, Jack and the boys, a household in which he had been increasingly encouraged to feel at home over these last weeks after he’d persuaded Mary to go home. Now he found himself wondering if it had been part of a family plot to ease him out of Mary and Ted’s life and into a sterile, respectable place of his own. He found himself less able than usual to be amused at the boys’ horseplay or to take an interest in Jack’s latest project. He even looked at Laura suspiciously. Was she in league against him? He waited to raise the topic after Ben and Mike had gone off to their rooms to study.

‘Have you both decided with Ted and Mary that it would be best for me to move out?’

‘Move out?’ Laura repeated.

David measured her genuine puzzlement. She didn’t blush.

‘Ted has asked me to move.’

‘What?’ Jack demanded.

‘He says I’ve become a sort of built-in, unpaid servant, and you all thought it was undignified for me to live like that.’

‘We’ve never discussed it!’ Laura protested. ‘Oh, I guess we did at first. I guess we all worried that you wouldn’t be really comfortable.’

‘Is this another of Mary’s pranks?’ Jack asked.

Realizing it wasn’t a family conspiracy, he shifted his defensiveness from himself to his younger daughter who created enough genuine problems not to be wrongly blamed for this one.

‘I’m sure it’s not,’ David said.

‘But what right does Ted think he has …?’ Jack demanded.

‘I don’t suppose he thinks of it as a right,’ David said. ‘He knows he’s in no position to make a realistic offer. But, aside from its not being really fair to you, Laura … it’s after all as much your house as Mary’s.’

‘Oh, Daddy, I don’t care about that. You know that. It’s your house.’

‘I think Ted doesn’t think he can manage to take over the real responsibilities while he’s under my nose.’

‘Surely the real opportunities include money,’ Jack said. ‘He’s feckless about it.’

‘He’s generous,’ David said. ‘That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘It is if you don’t have the money to give,’ Jack said.