‘How did I live so long without you two?’ Diana asked.

‘We’ve only been much use to anyone recently,’ Mike said, grinning.

‘This is a great set up for Grandad,’ Ben said, looking around. ‘Much better than the basement.’

‘He’ll have to decide about the pictures,’ Diana said. ‘There are far too many of them.’

‘I’d keep them all,’ Mike said.

‘Maybe you’d like to have any David doesn’t want,’ Diana suggested.

Mike shook his head in embarrassment at the extravagance of the offer.

‘Well, you’ll have them eventually,’ Diana said, only realizing it as she spoke. ‘Why not now if they’ll only be stored in the basement otherwise?’

‘Maybe you could lend one or two to Richard for his new room,’ Mike suggested tentatively.

‘What a good idea!’ Diana said.

Diana admired the strength and skill of her two great-nephews as they negotiated the stairs with a heavy, awkward couch. Her aversion to young male bodies had not been sexual: it was developed as an emotional protest when she had had to nurse so many during the war. They had forever shaken her sense of the integrity of the body, that vast complexity of cellular intelligence in its fragile sack of skin. Even now she wanted to admonish, ‘Be careful!’ because she agreed with her brother that males generally are defective in their own defence equally against accident or aggression. Then how baffled they were to discover that they were made of flesh and bone and blood when they lay like the broken toys of their own games.

But these two had been allowed to grow up without the fact of war, instead with the threat of such a war that there would be no place for death-defying heroic fantasies, and they seemed to her gentler, more domestic creatures than her own generation had been, not soft, no, but their strength given to mending, moving, making things. They were great docile beings who conferred authority on their elders as if it were a gift from them rather than a yoke the young were force to bear.

In her involvement with all the preparations, Diana had for some moments lost track of Constance and went to look for her first in the garden where her memory board would have directed her to go, then into the TV room where Diana found the board and timer. She picked those up and carried them back upstairs to their bedroom where Constance often retreated when the house was a confusion of people. There she was standing before an open suitcase with Diana’s bathrobe in her hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Diana asked cheerfully.

‘I’m trying to pack,’ Constance said irritably. ‘I can’t find any of my own clothes.’

‘Well, that’s my robe,’ Diana agreed. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I’m going home,’ Constance said.

‘You are at home, my darling,’ Diana said gently.