She was referring, of course, to his loyalty to Patricia, which could, presumably, be transferred to any other member of his family, like his unreasonable and beloved Mary.

‘I won’t ever hurt you again, D,’ David said earnestly.

‘You may not be able to help that,’ she said. ‘I hurt you simply by being who I am.’

‘That isn’t true.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No,’ David insisted, but at that moment he resented her as fiercely as he had as a boy when she wouldn’t accept his view, the world’s view, but persisted in her own.

‘Oh David,’ she said wearily, ‘there’s so much I don’t want to think about any more … or deal with. It isn’t you but all you call up.’

‘I know that,’ David said.

‘And I really don’t want Constance to run you through with a pitchfork just because I didn’t know you were coming. There may come a time when she knows you, but we’d never be able to count on it.’

‘You don’t really think she’d have. …’

‘No,’ Diana said, ‘I don’t. But don’t you see how difficult this is? You can’t even know when I’m joking, and I’m so used to Constance I don’t know what to explain.’

‘I’ll learn Constance,’ David said. ‘I’ll phone next time … or you might phone me.’

‘Do you have your own phone?’ Diana asked.

‘My own extension,’ he said. ‘I’ll phone you.’

Diana would make no move into his life, not even so slight a thing as a phone call, and, though it pained David, he knew she was right. If there was to be a reconciliation, he had to do the work of it and offer it to her as an accomplished fact to accept or refuse.

Meanwhile, he would get a phone of his own to be accessible to her. Even that simple resolution, however, daunted him. He could hear Mary’s protests, exaggerating this small privacy until she would make it into a betrayal of her trust. Though the family byword had always been, ‘Don’t give in to her; ignore her,’ everyone in the family was guilty of evasions with Mary. If David had been sure he could smuggle a new phone into the house without her knowing, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do so.

David signalled his stop almost too late for the driver to pull up. The sharp breaking caught David off balance, and he would have fallen if a young college student hadn’t reached out a hand to steady him.

‘Thank you,’ David said.

His legs felt a little shaky as he got himself to the ground.

‘Dad?’

David looked towards the call and saw Laura leaning out of the driver’s window of her car, parked just beyond the bus stop.