They could have the car, and their curfews were generous as long as they went out together. Since Diana had no interest in boys with sexual ambitions and David’s newly learned civility was focused on the elaborate taboos of brotherliness, they were both comfortable with the arrangement. A daunted boy might taunt, ‘You can’t have one, you can’t have one without the other.’ A girl used to more amorous pursuit might get bored. Diana and David didn’t care. They nurtured the impression that they were inseparable not only for their own protection but because it inspired an envy and admiration among their peers. At a time when boys and girls were in unhappy adversarial relationship dependent on each other for mutually exclusive needs, David and Diana displayed a friendship, chaste, serene and genuine.

It was a long time before Diana really trusted it. They had passed through two years of armed truce before they actually joined forces to retreat from a house that had become nearly unbearable, and both of them were at first embarrassed not only by their own behaviour but the encouragement it received from both Hugh and their mother. David would sometimes regress into surliness and Diana would retire to her room when they were at home. So his gallantry in public and her amiable response to it seemed an act they were putting on, a milder and less threatening form of the clumsy courtships that were beginning all around them and falling apart after the first date or the fifth, anatomical gossip always raising the stakes for both success and failure. David and Diana were the only boy and girl playing by the same rules in either the front or the back seat.

David initiated each new interest they took up. Tennis, because it was the one sport Hugh mistrusted for vague social reasons, became David’s passion. When he couldn’t play the piano, he drove balls against the garage door, a sound rhythmic enough not to disturb a sleeping child which could, nevertheless, get on adult nerves. Diana learned for David’s sake, and they played against each other to practise. Otherwise they were a doubles team who outplayed others not with superior skill so much as instinct, a complementary, intuitive balance.

Hugh was a poker player. David and Diana took up bridge. But their friends objected to their being partners because they were perceived to read other’s minds. What other teenagers lacked—a trusting familiarity with habit of mind and address—they saw in David and Diana as a mysterious power.

David discovered chess, for which they didn’t need other people. They could sit for hours in the same room with Hugh and their mother, ignoring them, and David fancied it was also a silent rebuke to Hugh’s lack of subtlety of mind.