David often joined Mary in the garden, a pleasure they had shared in her childhood and renewed now that she had returned to the childhood place, but David encouraged Mary in making new decisions so that the garden would become her own. More than once she had said, ‘I don’t think Mother would like that,’ and David was careful not to confront that sentimentality directly, counting on time to loosen the hold Patricia’s memory had on her daughter.

They were in the process of dividing the large iris bed, the prize corms which had been ordered yearly from Oregon carefully marked so that they would be divided rather than thinned.

‘I haven’t really meant to make a mystery of my social life,’ David began as they squatted together at their work.

He felt Mary look over to him, but he kept his eyes on his busy hands.

‘I’ve been going to see my sister.’

‘Your sister!’

He repeated the details and explanations he had offered the night before with one exception: he did not mention Constance Crowley.

‘But what could have been that awful, Daddy, that we couldn’t even know she existed?’

‘Only their inability to apologize and accept their differences. Perhaps Diana could have if your mother had made the first gesture, but she couldn’t.’

‘Do you blame Mother?’

‘I don’t suppose it’s a matter of blame,’ David said.

‘You don’t expect us to see her, do you?’

The question did not surprise David, but it discouraged him.

‘I don’t expect anything,’ he said.

‘It’s just that it would be so embarrassing,’ Mary said, alerted by the tone in her father’s voice.

‘Initially,’ David agreed.

‘And somehow, I don’t know, offensive. You don’t want me to tell the children, do you?’

‘Their cousins know.’

‘What will they think? After all these years?’

‘The boys seemed no more than curious. I don’t think old troubles mean very much to them.’

‘Well, they’re certainly upsetting to me,’ Mary said. ‘It’s as if you’d done something awful to Mother, now that she’s dead.’

Her tears came as easily as his own, and he was irritated with them for that reason, but he stood up and went to her, putting a gentle hand on her bowed head. This was the scene which he should have played out with her mother long ago. It seemed to him now uselessly painful.

No explanation or argument would alter Mary’s gut reaction. She couldn’t see the revelation of Diana’s existence as anything but a requirement to shift sides, a betrayal of a mother she loved for a complete stranger, and David was not sure that Mary, even in good will, could ever warm to Diana. He felt as sorry for Mary as he had for his wife, trapped in such narrow loyalties.