‘I didn’t even feel sorry for him then. All I could think of was what a horrible burden he was going to be for Mother. I wanted to shake that poor, broken bastard and shout at him, “Why did you have to be so damned careless?”’

Constance laughed and David looked over at her in earnest surprise.

‘It’s the way everybody felt,’ Constance explained, ‘furious with the dead. There they are right there, lying in the road or in the rubble and won’t get up and walk away. We were careless, all of us.’

‘I’ve always thought of it as a masculine trait,’ David said, ‘one of the worst.’

‘You don’t seem much of a man to me,’ Constance said.

‘That’s supposed to be a compliment,’ Diana said, smiling.

‘Not really,’ Constance said, ‘an observation.’

‘I used to be sorry I didn’t have much opportunity,’ David said. ‘The war defined all our generation, even those of us who were left out.’

‘Not defined, surely. Damaged,’ Diana said.

‘Did you feel damaged?’

‘Of course I did, and it disgusts me now, all this is nostalgia forty years after the fact. What can it teach your grandsons but that they’ve missed the great adventure, that ordinary life isn’t enough?’

‘She has a great affection for “ordinary life”,’ Constance confided in David.

‘Well, ordinary death, if you prefer it,’ Diana said. ‘Why isn’t it challenge enough to be one of the eight out of ten to live beyond seventy?’

Diana was impatient with the conversation, as she often was, out of the habit of the reminiscing and free association that stalled into platitudes which made her argumentative. But her impatience was more particular than that. David seemed always to invite criticism of himself, not to start an argument but to be confirmed in all his inadequacies. That was unfair to him, she knew that. The source of her impatience was inside herself, but she didn’t know what her real quarrel with him was, an interior itch out of reach of scratching.

David was now speaking about the value of being ordinary, which wasn’t what Diana meant at all.

‘Surely you can’t think of yourself as ordinary!’ she burst out. ‘You have nearly nothing to forgive yourself for, which is extraordinary in itself.’

‘I see. Even when I claim to be ordinary, I’m self-dramatizing,’ David said, amused.

‘Diana, don’t be so hard on him. It’s extraordinary to think of oneself as ordinary,’ Constance said. ‘It’s quite saintly.’

‘How can you say I have nothing to forgive myself for?’ David was in earnest again.

‘I could have forgiven Patricia,’ Diana said. ‘It was my profession to forgive people like Patricia. But first I had to forgive you for marrying her, and I didn’t even get round to that until after she was dead. You want it on your conscience. I don’t.’