‘She was in a good many ways a wonderful woman.’

‘I hope she was,’ Diana said.

‘What a lot of qualifiers!’ Constance said. ‘Did I know this woman?’

‘Briefly,’ Diana said.

‘She was my wife,’ David said.

‘A hard thing to be, a wife. I never could have managed it.’

‘I think on the whole she liked it,’ David said, lightly mocking.

‘And you?’ Constance asked in the same tone.

‘On the whole,’ David said again.

‘Do you still play the piano?’ Diana asked.

‘Occasionally, when Mary and Ted are out for the evening.’

‘We have a new Liszt,’ Diana said, ‘with Jorge Bolet.’

‘Did you hear him last fall?’ David asked.

‘No,’ Diana replied, as she got up to put on the record. ‘We don’t go to concerts any longer.’

‘He’s got so thin I wondered if he was ill, but I never heard him play better. He must be nearly eighty.’

Diana had bought the record, as she had bought the roast they’d had for dinner, to please her brother, but she managed to present it as a rebuke. He knew she might just as well have said, ‘Do shut up. I can’t stand another minute of this,’ but instead he stayed on the surface, turning his attention where she directed.

It was Constance who had introduced Diana to classical music. No wonder David had imagined her life during the war as filled with concerts and plays. She wrote about what she heard and saw in passionate detail as a way to share her experience of Constance, who was inextricably involved in every pleasure Diana had. In love she was newly open to receive any gift, any wonder, for London was Constance’s world, that great, fragile city, exploding and burning before them even as it offered up its treasures. Diana had never loved Vancouver, so puny a human clutter set against the reaching waters, the rising mountains. In London, loving Constance, Diana had learned to love human accomplishment and to hate how nearly casually it was falling into ruins all around them, how casually Constance’s life had almost been taken. At the end, there had been no question of staying there, for the city was nothing more to Constance than a grave.

Then Diana had to write about Constance herself, her closest friend, without family of her own now who would, Diana hoped, become a part of theirs. David answered that letter with the news that he was married. Diana’s first reaction was that David was far too young to marry. Only then was she aware that she had left him behind where he had been at war’s beginning, a boy.

‘It will make it much easier, won’t it?’ Constance had asked.

It could have.