With Hugh’s death, her mother’s fiction of family collapsed for a second time, and she was left again with two growing children, in their turn despising each other. Until she died, there was always an awkwardness around holidays, but gradually David’s children provided a comfortable reason for choice, which had nothing to do with taking sides.

As nothing but a skeleton in David’s closet, Diana could focus her full attention on the way she wanted to live her own life with Constance, to whom she could now never say, ‘But what will people think?’ as a substitute for doubts and fears which were her own.

‘We’re not married,’ Constance insisted. ‘We’re two very separate fleshes.’

All the more so now as Diana sat in the dark, long into the night, with only Constance’s even breathing to accompany her musing. Diana didn’t imagine that a rehash of all those sexual conversations would interest Constance even if she had a mind for them. She had never engaged in them by choice but of necessity to dismantle the conventions of Diana’s wisdom.

‘It seems to me peculiar to have to explain to you in your line that what we’re doing has nothing to do with making babies. We have no excuse. And it’s a terrible waste of pleasure to spend energy trying to invent any.’

Long before the rhetoric of women’s liberation, Constance took the view that linking sexuality with procreation was as misused a piece of information as the splitting of the atom. In the midst of a population explosion, peaceful uses of sexuality should surely finally be considered.

Had Diana not been insulted and outraged by the moral piety of her sister-in-law, and had she not lived with a lovely iconoclast who refused a pious prison of their own, she knew she would not have been as good a doctor as she had been. Patricia and Constance, each in her own way, had taught Diana that passing judgment on her patients was something she had neither the right nor the desire to do. But she had often wished for more time to teach them to protect themselves from so much harm. Sometimes what she saw in her office made the war between the sexes all too literal. She had also seen more women, and not just young women, turn from bad marriages to better relationships with other women. But that would never be the solution for the majority of women as some utopians now liked to suggest.

There was the other half of the human race, whom Diana had seen little of for years, except in hospital waiting rooms and at medical conventions. On the whole, she preferred young fathers to male doctors, even in the delivery room, into which they increasingly came to learn the lessons of birth, most of them with the proper humility.