Put to him that simply, the question clarified what had really very little to do with Mary and Ted.

‘I didn’t know it at the time, but this could never have been anything but an interim arrangement while we all took stock. My little apartment was a good place to grieve, but it isn’t really any place to live. It’s too dark and too small. I can’t have anyone in.’

‘Do you like to entertain?’

‘We always did a lot of it,’ David said. ‘I honestly can’t say I miss it. I’ve seen hardly any of our friends for months, and I’m not sure I will now. It’s the light really, more than anything.’

‘I’m going to ask you something I have no business to ask,’ Diana said. ‘Would you consider coming to live with us? It would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, I know that.’

‘Are you serious?’ David asked.

‘I shouldn’t be, for your sake. I should be saving those empty rooms upstairs for professional help, but I can’t bear the idea any more than I can bear the idea of finally having to commit Constance because I can’t care for her. But, if anything happened to me, she’d have no one. It’s an impossible thing to ask of you. I know that.’

‘But, D, I would have suggested it myself if it had ever occurred to me you’d be willing. There’s nothing that could make me happier. When we were together on the desert, it seemed to me so natural, so right for us to be together.’

‘That was a holiday,’ Diana said. ‘What we’re heading into now isn’t a holiday. You and Constance are very likely to outlive me.’

The weight of that statement was heavy on David’s shoulders, but it was also familiar. He was under no illusion that he controlled his own destiny, but he was careful. He did know that, if he were left with Constance, he would feel even more excruciatingly inadequate than he had with his children, for whom he couldn’t replace their mother. Though he might live the rest of his life with Constance, she would not know who he was. But whether he lived with her or not, he would love her and she would not know him. He was already learning to suffer and accept that.

‘Nothing could make more sense to me than living with both of you,’ David said.

‘Think about it,’ Diana admonished him as Jack had done. ‘Hoping you don’t have the good sense to refuse doesn’t mean I won’t accept it.’

On the third night after Ted had asked David to move, he went upstairs after dinner and found Mary in the kitchen.

‘Is this a good time to talk with you and Ted?’