‘Why don’t we ever see Jill?’ Constance asked from a silence they often fell into.

‘We do occasionally,’ Diana answered. ‘She’s afraid her visits upset you.’

‘Do they?’

‘I think they upset her.’

‘Because of the way I am?’

‘You’re very good with her really. You can sometimes fake remembering and even fool me.’

‘I sometimes really do remember,’ Constance said, protesting.

‘Of course. I don’t think it’s that. Jill is lonely.’

‘She lives alone now?’

‘No, she has protégées, but you were the great love of her life.’

‘I shouldn’t have been,’ Constance said.

‘I don’t think she regrets it.’

‘What did happen?’

‘At the time,’ Diana said, ‘we thought it must have been the emotional strain. Both Jill and I were so busy with our own heroic stoicism, we hadn’t really thought how difficult it must have been for you, even though it was what you thought you wanted—to live with us both, not to have to choose between us. But now I doubt that. I think it was a delayed reaction to everything that happened during the war.’

Diana watched Constance’s face carefully even though she knew actually talking about the past didn’t trigger Constance’s disappearances into it.

‘But what did happen?’

‘Jill found you one night out in the garden. You didn’t know where you were or who she was.’

‘And I’ve been that way ever since?’

‘Oh, no darling. You spent five months in hospital. You had a series of shock treatments, and you were much, much better. You had the ordinary memory loss associated with the treatment, but we thought in those days it would be temporary. In a sense it was. It’s only been really bad in the last five years, and this may be something entirely different.’

‘Time is so hard for me.’ Constance said.

It was for Diana, too. The arthritic ache in her hands could make her think it was only yesterday that she had dug painfully with them through the rubble to deliver this beloved woman who had delivered Diana from the prison of her desire. ‘Constance, Constance, Constance,’ she kept calling. ‘I will get you out.’ But first there had been the mother, then the sister, stillbirths both, and only hours later, Constance, alive. Diana had chosen a field of medicine where the odds were better than that, and her practice had given her the faith that she could always reach Constance again, wherever she had gone, however badly she was trapped in the rubble of the past. But those aching hands reminded her, too, that she was old, failing in body much more quickly than Constance, and sometimes she was afraid.

— 3 —

DAVID HANDED HIS DAMP new raincoat and hat to his son-in-law, Jack Geller.

‘I do wish you’d let one of us pick you up,’ Jack said.