Diana had never wanted to think about how hard it must have been on David that not only she but Hugh had gone off to war, leaving David to look after his mother and the little boys. Diana had taken her life into her own hands because she had to be able to be herself beyond the range of David’s protection. She had fallen in love for the second time with a young woman her brother was interested in, and this time Diana could feel an answering attraction, to which she did not dare to respond, appalled by it for the sake of her brother. Instead, she warned him off.

‘Don’t ever marry someone like that,’ she said to him.

‘But I like her because she reminds me of you. You should be flattered. And she thinks the world of you.’

‘Be more original than to act out our incest taboo,’ Diana said.

He had taken her advice all too well. Patricia was as heterosexual as Eve. She put an end to Diana’s occasional speculation that David himself might have been happier with another man, for more than one of her own young men had been flirtatious with David, but David never seemed to notice.

What a sexual confusion they had both been to their friends! Virginal, devoted to each other, setting up crosscurrents of desire they hardly understood themselves, though for Diana it became increasingly clear that she was as fixed in her sexual direction as she was left-handed. David’s choices had always been wider than her own.

The milk was gone, and Diana was now relaxed enough to know how tired she was. Her hips and knees complained all the way up the stairs. How much better it would be to move into something smaller on one floor, but it was out of the question while Constance could still work in her garden, while the place still seemed familiar enough to her to keep her oriented. There might come a time when Constance didn’t know where she was, when her mind slipped back into her past and stayed there. Now she occasionally mistook Diana for her own sister or mother. Both women had been killed by a bomb that had also buried Constance for forty-eight hours. Constance was saved, suffering, it seemed, from no more than exposure and a broken collar bone. Her present confusion was understandable, for Diana had tried to be mother and sister to Constance as well as lover all their lives together.

When Diana finally got back into bed, Constance turned and welcomed her into a sleeping embrace, the body’s memory flawless.