Why did both his daughters so often call him ‘Daddy’ as if they enjoyed infantilizing their relationship with him? They were grown women of a generation supposed to be far better informed and therefore more tolerant. They should be encouraging him out of his conservative shell rather than frantically stuffing him back into it.

David recognized the ironic look in his sister’s eye. A part of him was maddened by it, but just behind that look there was also a question. He was someone she could need, and he had somehow to prove it to her, for his sake as well as her own.

‘A lady commands trust,’ David said aloud in the pompous tone of his stepfather.

David taught that lesson to his own daughters: if you don’t look around you, the chair will always be there. Now in his perversity he was pulling it out from under them.

Guilt and self-righteousness, those common incompatibles, were the rewards of this ridiculous day. David’s anger bounced around like a pinball, lighting up now this figure, now that, until all the women in his life blazed at him, the smallest and brightest of them Constance with her pitchfork, saying, ‘Get off this property!’

— 4 —

DIANA WAS OUT IN the kitchen, getting out cheese, sausage and crackers, not because Jill Carlysle or Constance would be hungry so much as because she always liked to give them a little time alone together. She shook her head to remember how often Jill or she herself had invented not only purposeless little tasks like this one but whole evenings of pointless excursions to give the other time alone with Constance. If it had been Constance’s problem, she would have solved it with imagination and pleasure. Both Jill, who was a lawyer, and Diana were far too straightforward, too directed towards clear goals to handle emotional detours with any grace. They both had gone alone to movies which bored them, arranged to have dinner with friends whose conversation was never enough distraction. Diana wondered if Jill had ever also been as badly reduced as Diana was to join the periodical readers at the public library who would otherwise, like herself, be out in the cold.

Jill and Diana were both women strongly self-disciplined and naturally forbearing where they loved. But no matter how much they denied they were competitors—and they played their game by such subtle and strict rules that even people close to them might have denied it—they could not become friends until Constance’s breakdown united them in the mutual fear of losing her. Even that bonding might not have occurred if Jill hadn’t conceded defeat. She had moved out of this house which the three of them had chosen together for its uncommon arrangement of private spaces, long before Constance came home from hospital.