‘Oh, Daddy, I’m sorry,’ Laura said, putting her arms around David. ‘It’s awful for you. I can see that. I didn’t mean to make it worse.’

It was more reassurance than David by now expected. His several encounters on this day had held more potential for disaster than reconciliation. Why had he ever thought that his daughters might be more enlightened than their mother when he had allowed her prejudices to dominate their lives? David Crown, the bearer of bad news, hadn’t after all retired; he’d simply transferred his talents to the private sphere.

‘I’ll take you home,’ Jack offered.

In the car, Jack said, ‘These daughters of yours are too sheltered by half.’

‘Yes,’ David agreed glumly.

‘It’s not all your fault, you know. I go on doing it. So does Ted. We like being married to “good” women.’

‘But do “good” women have to be fixed in stone?’ David asked.

‘No, and Laura isn’t. It was a shock to her, that’s all. And shocks come to her in black and white, not like Mary’s off-the-wall technicolour, thank God.’

‘I wish I’d never gotten into this,’ David said. ‘It’s not even like me.’

‘She’s your sister after all,’ Jack said.

‘A point far more important to me than it is to her, understandably. If I said to her tomorrow, “Look, this is a bad idea,” she’d give me credit as a slow learner.’

‘Pretty tough old bird, is she?’ Jack asked.

David look over at Jack’s amused profile and suddenly laughed.

‘She was a tough young one, too.’

‘What I’m going to tell Laura—well, maybe not tonight—is that anyone who caught and kept Constance Crowley’s fancy for forty years is someone I want to meet because I very much doubt it’s what they do or don’t do in bed.’

‘Thank you, Jack,’ David said. ‘For the ride, too.’

‘Bomb shelter,’ David recalled Constance remarking on that first evening he was with them. As he turned the key in his basement door, his own shelter felt frail protection from the war that had been declared upstairs though, for the moment, it was quiet. He would have been a wiser man to stay in it, live out his guilts and regrets without involving all these other people who couldn’t help, who didn’t want to be helped. They were sheltered, good women, his daughters, and he really had no right at this late date to be confronting them with the hypocrisy and ignorance from which their shelter had been constructed. Did he expect them to make something useful out of the wreckage? At best, Laura might, for his sake, be persuaded to meet this monstrous myth, his sister, but Laura couldn’t get beyond fearful curiosity without help from Diana, who would not trust her not to be her mother’s daughter … and shouldn’t.