‘We’re old women. What colour did my hair used to be?’

‘Black, like your eyes, but it turned early, before you were forty.’

‘I’ve always lived with you.’

‘Since you were twenty-five and I was twenty-two.’

‘Always just the two of us,’ Constance said.

‘No, once there were three of us.’

‘Three?’

‘Jill Carlysle. You can remember Jill.’

‘Jill,’ Constance repeated, and then she smiled.

Diana would not take her further in that memory than she asked to go. As a younger woman, Constance had been sexually restless. Lovely to look at, intense and tender, she was hardly aware of how it happened that so many people were drawn to her. It prejudiced her against friendships with men. She criticized in them the very random appetite she shared with them. She didn’t recognize that kinship because she had such various rationalizations for her affairs. This one was like a child to her, that one like a mother. All this one needed was to experience her sexuality to get out of a bad marriage. All that one needed was a little comfort and reassurance.

They had quarrelled fiercely over Constance’s women in their early years together until the emotions involved became so negatively patterned that Diana determined to break out of her own jealousy. Constance had, after all, never chosen any of them over Diana, and perhaps it was time Diana believed her when she said she never would.

At first Constance mistrusted Diana’s change of heart. It was either feigned or a sign of indifference. Constance began occasionally to suggest that sometimes she and the woman who currently interested her might do something together with Diana, go out to dinner, go to a film,. Diana reluctantly agreed and found to her surprise that getting to know Constance’s lovers made it easier to accept them as a necessary part of Constance’s life, even of their life together. Diana didn’t realize for some time that her new sense of security was based on a dangerous smugness, for none of these women had ever been in any position to offer Constance that blend of security and freedom Diana could once she had established her practice. They were mainly, as Constance said they were, women in transition, with as yet very little control over their own lives, and they all suffered in varying degrees their inability to compete with Diana, a jealousy which overtook erotic pleasure and broke it into emotional scenes. They irritated and finally bored Constance.

‘Is it worth it?’ Diana asked her one night when she came home particularly exasperated.

‘It’s inevitable, I suppose,’ Constance replied. ‘You’re the only person I know who doesn’t want eventually to own me.’

‘Only because I can’t,’ Diana replied. ‘It’s no virtue.’

‘But it is. I don’t own you either. What would it be like if I were jealous of all your patients?’