‘Of course you are,’ Constance said, smiling at him in a way to make him wonder if it had been a joke at herself.

‘I wonder,’ David said, not wanting to lose his opportunity, ‘if I could bring Jack and Laura over one evening for a drink. Then you could ask Jack yourself about wine making.’

‘I’m ready if you think they are,’ Diana answered much more directly than David had expected she would.

‘I’m never ready for anything,’ Constance said. ‘Diana uses me as an excuse, you know, because I’m so unpredictable, but I’m not a bad bluff when I need to be, am I?’

Diana smiled at her. ‘You’re very good at it if no one calls you on it.’

‘Let me remember something for you,’ David said. ‘When you had your gardening business, you did spring and fall clean-up for Jack and Laura. They have a house on Thirty-sixth Avenue near the bush. They already know you. Laura even remembers the board of seed packets you had in your truck to help you remember the names of the flowers.’

‘I remember that. You made it for me,’ Constance said, turning to Diana. ‘I remember things so much better than people.’

‘What does Jack do?’ Diana asked.

‘He’s a chemist,’ David said, ‘attached to the university, but he doesn’t teach very often. He seems mostly to be on loan to industry or government. At least part of what he does has to do with toxic wastes.’

‘Then perhaps he’ll be able to tell me whether the Tory feds’ taking thirty-five million out of the clean-up programme is revenge for Ontario’s returning a Liberal government,’ Diana said with some relish.

‘Perhaps he can,’ David agreed. ‘He doesn’t talk much about such things with me since I retired from the news.’

‘Do you really not even read a newspaper?’

‘No,’ David said. ‘My excuse is my eyes, but I wouldn’t if I could.’

‘Have they got that bad?’

‘My doctor doesn’t seem to think so, but I can’t keep reading. What I miss is not being able to hole up on a winter day and waste it with a good novel.’

‘Have you tried talking books?’ Constance suggested.

‘Not yet, but it’s time I started thinking about constructive solutions. It’s so much easier to complain.’

Diana asked for a second helping of fish, perhaps simply to please David, but it occurred to him that it must have been a long time since she’d tasted anything but her own cooking. They never went out to dinner. What they might have had sent in could be nothing but standard junk food. David had been so clearly directed by Diana’s first letter not to think about the confinement of her life but of their contentment that he tried to turn his mind away from such speculations, but they came to him more and more regularly.