For the moment, it did. Constance recognized the rooms she walked through, and, when she found the memory board on her bureau in the bedroom, she picked it up with relief. Then she frowned.

‘There’s nothing on it. I do need it, darling,’ Constance said earnestly. ‘Without it I just don’t know what to do or where to go next … or is it bedtime?’

Diana took the board and wrote on it, ‘Dinner with David, my brother.’

Constance looked at it and nodded. ‘Thank you. It’s for you, too, you know. Otherwise you have to tell me the same thing over and over again.’

It was difficult for Diana, who had always been scrupulously honest with Constance, to acknowledge that forcing honesty on her to the point of flat contradiction didn’t any longer serve to reassure her in her most confused moments. Diana simply could not do for Constance what Mike had done and what she now watched David doing. When Constance mistook him for the plumber or the garbage man or the gardener, he quietly took on those roles, not with any archness or flamboyance but with an understated gentleness which was meant to be reassuring to her and was. For his ever-present changing made him appear to Constance a temporary fact of life rather than an established custodian.

‘We’re getting old,’ Constance said to Jill as David brought them drinks from the kitchen. ‘We seem to need so much more help. There always seems to be someone around now, doing something.’

Jill smiled at David with an embarrassed apology his eyes refused, for, whenever Constance found it difficult to accept him as one of the company, he did actually become manservant or investment broker or doctor, whatever she suggested to him. Diana was learning not to be embarrassed by it and was the more impatient with Jill because she shared Diana’s basic lack of imagination. Together they could never have taken care of Constance as she was cared for now.

‘How does he stand it?’ Jill asked as Diana walked her to her car.

‘He doesn’t seem to mind at all,’ Diana said. ‘He did once want to be an actor.’

‘The butler isn’t exactly a prize role,’ Jill said.

‘I’m not sure he’d agree with you,’ Diana said. ‘He told me once the minor roles are the hardest because you so often have nothing to do but be.’

‘She didn’t really know who I was today,’ Jill said. ‘She was bluffing.’

‘To please you, if she was,’ Diana said.

‘I’m glad for you that David’s here,’ Jill said, ‘but it must be odd to have a man in the house.’

‘He’s my brother,’ Diana said, wondering why she had to remind Jill as she did Constance.

‘That would make it more rather than less difficult for me,’ Jill said. ‘But I never did get along with my family.’