Diana went with him to the kitchen, a room he had not been in until now. He felt privileged to be introduced to the ample twenty-year-old appliances and relieved to see that the stove was old enough to speak English, ‘left front, right front’, rather than the dots and squares of international sign language. And there was a dishwasher, freshly emptied and ready.

‘Tell me what cooking things to get out,’ Diana said.

‘Just two pots for the potatoes and broccoli.’

‘Do you want a steamer for the broccoli?’

‘Excellent,’ David said, already fiddling with the oven control.

‘It bakes hot,’ Diana warned him.

‘The casserole isn’t temperamental,’ David said as he placed it on top of the stove, ready when the oven was heated.

The bottles and glasses and ice bucket were already out on the kitchen table, but David added his own contributions.

‘All that wasn’t necessary,’ Diana protested, but there was no rebuke in her tone, rather pleasure at his excesses.

‘Why don’t you make the drinks while I set this up?’ David suggested.

The vegetables were already prepared for cooking. He only needed to ask for a dish for the raw vegetables he’d added at the last minute, thin carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, small bursts of cauliflower, each in a separate plastic bag to make arranging quicker. The casserole was in the oven, and David had twenty minutes to enjoy his drink by the fire.

‘I must say you’re a very relaxed cook,’ Constance commented.

‘Have you always cooked?’ Diana asked.

‘No,’ David said. ‘Patricia kept the kitchen pretty much to herself. I learned when she was ill. I wanted to keep her home from hospital as much as I could. And any time she was up to it, we had friends over for dinner. I discovered I liked cooking. You have to keep enough of your mind on it to make it a real distraction, and it’s such a nice, straightforward thing to do for people, to feed them.’

‘I don’t mind it,’ Diana said, ‘but I have no flair for it.’

‘Oh, I don’t either,’ David said. ‘Patricia said a man should only be allowed to cook if he was brilliant at it. That was before she got sick. Then I demanded the right to be ordinarily good at it.’

‘I think I begin to see what you mean by “ordinary”,’ Diana said, smiling at him.

She hadn’t flinched at the mention of Patricia, and now she conceded him a point before he was really aware of having made it. It was as if an emotional minesweeper had been through the room and left it free of all the dangers he’d worked so hard to avoid on other evenings when nearly everything he said had the potential for irritating Diana and confusing Constance.