The harsher Jack was the more inclined David was to take Ted’s part. Of course, Ted couldn’t call David anything but ‘Dad’ because the request he’d made could only be made not as one man to another but as a son to a father. It was not a father’s place to drive hard financial bargains with his son. David had made too hard an emotional bargain with both Ted and Mary, not because the associations of the house had forced them to regress into childhood but because he was still there. Why had the obvious been so difficult for him to see?

‘At least while you’re there,’ Jack was saying, ‘you can see that the house doesn’t fall down around their ears. Ted’s never been any good at those things. Oh, he knows how but he doesn’t see. He didn’t do anything to his own house until he decided to sell it.’

‘He’s beginning to,’ David said. ‘In any case, there’s really no reason for them to live as houseproud as Patricia and I were. Mary’s very good in the garden.’

‘But where would you go?’ Laura asked. ‘You’d hate living in an apartment.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ David said. ‘After the basement, I might like living up in the air and light, maybe somewhere in the West End near the park.’

‘And be one of the funny old men who sit around in the sun all day with nothing to do?’ Laura demanded.

‘I’ve been practising already,’ David said. ‘The only thing I really don’t like about it is feeding the ducks.’

‘David, don’t make any quick decisions,’ Jack said. ‘Think about it first, and for once think about it from your point of view.’

‘Do you know the only thing that really troubled me?’ David asked. ‘I thought you were all in on it, and I felt conspired against. I’m getting paranoid in my old age.’

When David told Diana of his decision to move, he did not tell her he had been asked to leave by his son-in-law. That omission forced him to be aware that conspiracy was not the only aspect of this experience which troubled him. He wasn’t sure the residual shame he felt was for himself or for Ted. But it was Ted he was protecting from any further criticism, even though his hope that Diana might finally meet this family had grown considerably dimmer. Or was he behaving as he might have with Patricia, trying to protect himself from that old and habitual charge that he had no gumption, that he never stood up for himself? It wasn’t bad enough that he’d been a fool in the first place but now he was letting his children ride roughshod over him.

‘Do you really want to move?’ was the question Diana asked him.