‘In my experience, the more self-righteous people are, the less troubled they are by conscience,’ Diana said. ‘It’s a waste of time to be angry with them.’

‘But he needs help, now,’ David protested.

‘He’s getting it,’ Diana said, ‘and from people a lot better equipped to do it than his parents. The last thing in the world he needs is people to reconfirm his own worst judgments of himself, that this is a punishment he must accept in all humility. He’s better off angry with them than reconciled to them.’

‘Maybe he is,’ David admitted. ‘Does he talk to you while you’re sketching?’

‘A little, but he has people to talk to about dying. He needs to talk about what he cares about. He’s a wonderful teacher.’

Diana looked forward to Richard’s coming though she had to overcome the first impression inevitable to her medical eye before she could share the hour with him; she gave him lessons in anatomy as he gave her lessons in drawing. His drawings took bolder substance, and she began to risk the minimal and suggestive lines at which he was so brilliant. There were days when she knew she took on the only strength he had, but at least that hour was a relief from the black apathy he sank back into, as one opportunistic infection after another had its own way with his defenceless body.

‘Some days I’m nothing but a stinking corpse!’ Richard cried out. ‘I’m rotting before I’m even buried.’

Then would come a stretch of several weeks when he seemed free of pain, when a frail, happy energy carried him along. He never spoke of being cured, of a miracle that might save him. He was learning to accept as miracle enough any good days he had.

Mike often came to meet him at the end of a sketching session to drive him back to his room if he needed a ride, to take him off to the beach or a movie. Sometimes both the boys stayed to supper. Richard hadn’t the ease with Constance that seemed to come so naturally to Mike. Richard could be reduced to staring at her blankly when she derailed a conversation he had been riding with Mike or David, yet Constance touched him more freely and naturally than anyone else could, not discouraged by his initial flinching away because she didn’t remember it.

‘She doesn’t even understand what I have,’ Richard said to Diana.

‘It wouldn’t make any difference if she did,’ Diana said. ‘It’s what she has to give. Let her.’

‘I’ve never realized it before, but dying is an alternative to getting old,’ Richard said.

‘Does she frighten you?’ Diana asked. ‘Do I?’

‘You did,’ Richard admitted. ‘But I’m more comfortable with you now than I am even with Mike. He’s all … tomorrow, next year. You’re always right now.’