Diana was tempted to remind Constance that she had no cause. Yet, though Diana had always been scrupulously professional in her work, she would not have chosen it if she hadn’t liked the intimate confidence she had to inspire in women entirely vulnerable to her.

Wives of her colleagues certainly complained of the extraordinary hours they kept. Not only did babies seem to prefer the small hours of the morning for their arrival, they came in batches which could sometimes be traced back to a city-wide power failure or, more curiously, natural disasters, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

‘You lead a beautifully sublimated life,’ Constance said.

Diana agreed with her. There was more than enough high drama in her work for her to have any taste for it in her private life.

Constance had tried to go back to school with Diana when the war was over, but a Canadian university was foreign to her idea of what a university should be, full of practical choices when she had expected to be required to study Greek, to cultivate her mind with no other motive than that. She took a course in Canadian literature to become more familiar with her new country and decided it was like studying English literature from a Boots lending library. And she felt stifled by the hard-working earnestness of all those returning veterans, whose scant social lives were carried on amid drying diapers and colicky babies.

‘I’ve been to the employment office,’ she announced one day. ‘What Vancouver needs is gardeners. All the Japanese were sent away from the coast and still haven’t been allowed back. I love to garden.’

Diana didn’t object. All solutions in those days seemed to her temporary, everything else postponed until she had finished her own training. Since the bombing, Constance had suffered from claustrophobia. A few years of healthy outdoor work might be exactly what she needed. And the money would be wonderfully welcome.

Constance was happy in her work and gradually successful. She bought a truck, the side panels of which announced, C. CROWLEY GARDENING SERVICE, and she hired students, always girls, to mow lawns and edge, while she planned and worked in the beds through the long growing season. But for four months every year she had very little to do. Diana had expected that Constance would use her free time to discover what she really wanted to do with her life.

‘Don’t be such a snob!’ Constance finally shouted at her. ‘I’m doing what I want to do, and my customers think I’m just as marvellous as your patients think you are.’

It was not snobbery, Diana realized; it was a judgment even more suspect. She had hoped that Constance might discover work so demanding that she had no time left for amorous adventures. Actually, Constance managed her winter affairs far more skilfully to suit Diana’s erratic schedule than she could have managed a year-round job.