It was so much impersonal intimacy which had spoiled Diana for social life, made her impatient with the inconsequence of it. But she was lonely now, she admitted it, and David had seen that and reached out to her with the only thing he had to offer, his own loneliness. If she was going to be good company, he would have to teach her to be as he had so diligently taught her when they were young. Could he also teach her to be an aunt, a great-aunt? She had long since lost count of the children who had been named for her, a gesture which had little more meaning for her than the children who would now go on being named Diana for the Princess. She’d had even less to do with children than with men, once she had brought them into the world.

Diana wondered how David would flesh out that old skeleton and bring it back to life. Would he, when he faced the real difficulties, even try? Diana was not at all sure she wanted him to.

— 5 —

THE APARTMENT DAVID HAD set up so comfortably began to get on his nerves in the darkening days of November. His study turned into a cave, and he found he couldn’t read for more than half an hour at a time before he had trouble finding his focus, distracted by the floaters which had begun to develop years before. Generally David was absent-minded about his health. It was Patricia who made appointments for his routine check-ups, who told him it wasn’t young people’s mumbling but his own increasing deafness that was the problem. But, once his eyes had been declared so defective as to render him useless to his country, he had been neurotic about them. He would have gone to his ophthalmologist every six months if Patricia had let him, and he would have changed doctors every other year, unreassured by the bland diagnosis that he was in no danger of losing his sight, that floaters were a very common condition without significance, that everyone aging had increasing difficulty with changing focus.

Patricia insisted, once he became Dr Thomlin’s patient, that he should be satisfied. Dr Thomlin was the best eye man in town. She looked into those things. Sometimes David teased her for using a cocktail or dinner party like a research project or a polling opportunity.

‘People are my resource,’ she said.