‘Habit, I suppose. Patricia enjoyed that kind of thing. What I’d really like to do is get closer to my grandchildren. I’ve got three of them right there in the house, but I’ve been so busy keeping out of everyone’s way that I haven’t made much progress at it, except when I look after them occasionally in the evening.’

‘Who are they?’ Diana asked.

‘Christine, who’s fifteen, Patsy, and that would make her thirteen, and young Tyler. He’s eight. Those are Mary’s kids. Laura has two boys, Ben and Mike.’

Diana didn’t ask for Laura’s last name. She was curious and at the same time reluctant, not sure what it meant to her to have all these kin named. She should think of them as she thought of the hundreds of babies she’d delivered as no continuing concern of hers.

‘Do you miss your work?’ David asked, but he addressed his question to Constance rather than Diana.

‘Did I ever work?’ Constance asked.

‘That’s answer enough,’ David said, smiling.

How often Constance’s real questions were taken instead as comments as, in a way, they were. Was it possible to miss what you’d entirely forgotten?

‘And you, D?’

Their childhood name for each other caught at Diana, a snagging affection.

‘No. It’s not work for an old woman.’

David didn’t seem to her old in the same way, though he probably had fewer of his own teeth than she did; but he had always seemed to her younger than he was. Now he looked like someone made up for his part, the grey brushed-through still vigorous hair, the lines pencilled on to his face, the slight stoop assumed. As a boy, he had wanted to be an actor.

‘I was so grateful to quit,’ David said. ‘I don’t even read the newspaper now, and I don’t listen to anything but music.’

‘I miss listening to you,’ Diana admitted. ‘And I still feel I have to check in on the world at least once a day to see if it’s still there.’

‘But you’ve always lived in it,’ David said. ‘I’ve spent my life in a sound proof studio.’

‘Bomb shelter,’ Constance said.

Diana glanced at her, but she showed no sign of distress.

‘Either there isn’t any real world, or it’s all of a piece,’ Diana said. ‘Your life seems to me nearly cluttered with reality, compared to ours, for instance.’

‘Am I real to you?’ David asked.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ Constance said.

‘He’s my brother, my twin brother, David.’

David looked from one to the other of them, and Diana knew that neither answer was of any help to him, but they were not meant to be.