‘She was just wonderful, as good at squatting as a Jap.’

David flinched inwardly as he always did at his wife’s vocabulary on his children’s lips, but he would have had to correct her to be free to correct them.

‘Is she the one?’ Ben asked.

‘Yes,’ David said.

‘She’s English, isn’t she?’ Laura asked.

‘Yes. They met during the war. I don’t know just how,’ David began uncertainly and then rushed into the story of Constance’s being buried alive, her mother and sister dead, as if that extraordinary experience had anything to do with the relationship between his sister and Constance.

‘How awful!’ Laura said. ‘Was she badly hurt?’

‘It didn’t seem so at the time, but either the shock or some damage to her head, no one’s really sure, cropped up years later. She’s got nearly no present memory at all.’

‘She could never remember the names of the flowers,’ Laura said. ‘She made a joke of it, but she kept a flower book in her truck so that she could point them out. No, it wasn’t a flower book. It was a large board of seed packets.’

Diana would have thought to make her that. David was a little thrown off balance by this focus of interest on Constance, about whom he hadn’t thought he would speak much just at first. He was not even sure he was ready to talk about his sister.

‘What was it like to see your sister after all these years?’ Jack asked.

‘Oh, it isn’t that I haven’t seen her. I always went to see Diana on our birthday. We’re twins.’

‘Twins!’ Laura exclaimed. ‘I can’t get over this.’

‘Is there something you’re cremating for dinner, Mother?’ Mike asked.

‘Oh dear,’ Laura said, hurrying out into the kitchen where the peas had just cooked dry.

‘Next time your good nose smells the alert, follow it yourself,’ Jack said to his son.

‘Yes sir,’ Mike said, flushing, and he followed his mother to the kitchen.

‘Are we going to meet … Aunt Diana?’ Ben asked.

‘I’d like that,’ David said, smiling. ‘I’d like that very much.’

In a way it might help, this coincidence of their knowing Constance already. It might reassure Diana that at least this part of the family took a real interest in her. Constance would, of course, not remember them, but that didn’t so much matter.

‘Do you remember, Daddy, when I was first pregnant with Ben?’ Laura asked once they were seated at the table, ‘and I saw there was an obstetrician named Crown? Mother got really angry with me and said you didn’t choose a doctor out of a phone book for a silly coincidence like that, and I’d go where my GP referred me.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ David said.

‘Whatever happened between them? Was Mother jealous, or what?’