Dear D,

I so badly regret the way I behaved tonight. I don’t know why I couldn’t have imagined it more clearly and realized that, however good the motive, I could not possibly walk back into your life, apologize, and go on from there. I have a bad habit of thinking about us when we were young and good friends and blanking out everything that came later. It’s been thirty years since I’ve actually tried to meet your level gaze and say something that mattered.

I can certainly see why you don’t want to go back over what happened so long and maybe irretrievably ago. I don’t really have any more excuses than you have already offered for me, and now that Patricia is dead, there’s not much point in making excuses for her.

There was no point in my visit at all, except inadvertent cruelty, if I really am no more to you now than a painful memory. And I also see now that there is no point either if my only intention was to clear my guilty conscience.

This is the fifth draft of what has been, at one stage, a ten-page long letter assuming a concern for me I have no right to expect, but it has had the virtue of making clear to me how much it matters to me to see you again, to know you as you are now, to be a brother to you in whatever ways I can.

Your brother, D.

‘No point. No point. No point,’ Diana said aloud as she read the note which David must have delivered by hand some time in the early hours of the morning.

Constance, sitting across the breakfast table from her, looked up inquiringly.

‘It’s a note from my brother, David, who was here last night for dinner.’

Constance gave the resigned nod for information she had to accept on faith.

‘You were very kind to him. I was very impatient.’

‘What did he want?’

‘To make friends again. We haven’t seen him except on our birthday for nearly forty years.’

‘Do you want to?’

‘It doesn’t feel to me as if I have any choice. I don’t like that.’

‘You don’t like to be forced to be as kind as you can be.’

‘No,’ Diana said and smiled.

‘Is he dependable?’

‘I suppose so, within his limits.’

‘I’d like you to have a brother of that sort.’

‘Why?’

‘For when I can’t any longer keep you in mind,’ Constance said.

‘No one else would do for that,’ Diana said.

But after breakfast she went to her desk to draft an answer to her brother.