Jill blamed herself, but, if she’d found someone else then—twenty years ago by now—or if Constance hadn’t suddenly, after nearly fifteen years of vibrant if sometimes fragile health, deteriorated, the guilt might have flickered out. Diana was sometimes impatient with Jill, for Diana saw Constance’s life in a longer view—the accidents, the strains, the times of erotic chaos—as a complexly interrelating pattern. Jill’s guilt could seem to Diana only a self-centred claim for how important a place Jill held in Constance’s life, Constance’s grand if doomed passion. When Jill had really suffered, Diana could comfort her by saying that any number of other things could have been equally or more responsible for Constance’s condition. Now, if Diana offered the same observations, she deprived Jill of a tragic view of herself, without which her emotional life would be considerably diminished, for Jill had turned to her work with an intensity that didn’t any longer leave room for intimacy. Her lovers were much younger women with a political attitude towards lust which made them critical and casual in their affairs.

‘It’s all very convenient for me,’ Jill confided to Diana. ‘I’d otherwise be labelled a male-identified pig with notches in the butt of my rifle, but that sometimes seems to me what I am.’

Only once, in a moment of unusually vulnerable self-revelation, Jill had said, ‘I can wonder if I would have gone within a mile of Constance if you hadn’t been there already to make it all impossible.’

‘A lot of things can look like choices years after the fact,’ Diana had said to her.

Diana certainly had not chosen to live with Jill or then to become her close and finally now her old friend. Diana did know that what initially made it very difficult now made it very easy. She admired Jill’s competence, her youthful and now abiding loyalty to human rights, the hard, often discouraging work she did for minorities and for women.

‘I’d rather be right than rich,’ Jill said. ‘In the long run, it’s so much more fun.’

Diana had admired that, too, the genuine pleasure Jill took in her work which she expressed in wonderful anecdotes and long outlining of strategies. Her energy came at such a steady flow, never depending on the adrenalin of crisis, in fact not good at crisis, her forte a long-distance intelligence, dependent on being in control.

What Diana admired, Constance often had no patience for. If Jill was preoccupied with her work, let her be preoccupied and not involve Constance in the long listening required to share the preoccupation. Diana realized that she rarely brought her own work home except in explanations of changed schedules. But the triumph of childbirth was something that couldn’t easily be shared with anyone but those immediately involved. And losing a life was not like losing a case.