Chapters (17)
She got up and saw herself out. As she made her way back down through the garden, she understood better the haughty game David had been playing with this daughter, the reason he could not talk about it. They were in a power struggle they both had to lose, and they knew it. Diana really had been nothing more than a confusing excuse. Well, not any longer.
‘I went to call on Mary this morning,’ Diana said to David at the lunch table.
She saw in his look the first signal of trespass he had sent her.
‘I thought it was time,’ Diana said.
‘I hope she was civil,’ David said coolly.
‘Civility isn’t Mary’s strong suit surely,’ Diana said, smiling. ‘She let me in. She was a bit sulky. She says I sound like you.’
‘You do,’ Constance said, surprised by information which obviously confirmed a suspicion of her own.
‘I’m Diana’s brother,’ David said.
‘You’re anybody I want you to be,’ Constance said.
‘Sometimes that’s a tall order,’ David said, smiling at her.
‘I know,’ Constance said. ‘But you do sound like her. That’s how I tell.’
Was is not the radio after all but some shared timbre in their voices? Constance certainly did know David again, momentarily anyway.
‘I didn’t want to be the excuse,’ Diana continued, ‘for what’s going on between you and Mary.’
‘Excuse?’ David repeated.
‘I told her I didn’t think either her mother or I had anything to do with it.’
David refused to encourage Diana to say more. She had to go on uninvited.
‘Mary says you’ve forgotten you’re her father.’
‘Forgotten!’ David exclaimed, hurling his napkin to the table.
He left the room, obviously unwilling to let his sister see his own defeating tears.
Of all the misfunctions of memory, grudgeholding was perhaps the worst, for it fixed in stone episodes which should be carried along in the flow of time, diluted, finally forgotten. Diana’s grudge had died much more slowly than its victim, but she had finally put it to rest in Patricia’s child, Mary, whose temper, not so murderous as Diana’s, might save her from similar mistakes. Perhaps after all, it helped to cry.
‘He’ll have to give in first,’ Diana said.
‘Like me?’ Constance asked.
Diana laughed. There was no one in the world like Constance, and she wasn’t, as Jill once bitterly complained, ridiculously misnamed; she was constant in will to herself even now against the blanks, the confusions, the terrors.
‘I love your honesty,’ Constance said, ‘even when I have to go on believing you.’
‘Keep me in mind,’ Diana said.
‘Yes, and what’s his name,’ Constance said, nodding to David’s half-eaten lunch.
‘David, my brother.’
