David was under no illusion that he and his family could survive, intact, in a general financial disaster. His own needs were so minimal that it hardly mattered to him, and Jack and Laura had so many survival skills that they’d enjoy the challenge, but Ted and Mary were another matter. David sometimes wondered if it had been sensible to move them into a house they could never have afforded instead of selling it and paying off their morgage for them. He could not have lived with them in their old house.

It had seemed practical, but David knew he was also fulfilling an idle fantasy in these rooms he had once so thoughtfully prepared for a student who would be a built-in babysitter. He had thought how simple and pleasant it would be to retire from the main floor of life, its requirements and alarms, its busy griefs, and, though he wasn’t as detached as he had been in his imagination, he enjoyed his reduced space, its self-containment.

‘Did you ever,’ David asked his sister on their now firmly established Wednesday evening, ‘think of us as poor before Mother married Hugh?’

‘Not poor, no,’ Diana said, ‘but I remember being puzzled at how much she insisted we were dependent on him once she did marry him.’

‘She only told me after he died how nearly stone broke she had been.’

‘I know,’ Diana said. ‘It certainly confirmed the independent streak in me.’

‘It didn’t have any effect on me at all,’ David said.

‘We were poor as church mice,’ Constance offered. ‘When my father wouldn’t marry my mother after my sister was born, she had me, thinking two would surely shame him into it. She always said I was just like him, and I’d pay for it. “Why?” I’d ask her. “He never did.” “He was a man,” she’d say. Poor old Mum. She was a charwoman, and she used to steal food off the shelves of the people she worked for and tell us she was given it. After a while we realized she must be stealing because she changed places so often. Nobody ever called the police in, not for food; they’d just let her go.’

It fascinated David how many great chunks of her past were sometimes available to Constance.

‘Did she ever marry?’ he asked.

‘Mum? No. With two when she couldn’t catch the father to feed them, she pretty well gave up. Now and then she found someone to buy her a pint; that’s about all. She was a good soul, me Mum, but not what you’d call bright.’

David would have liked to ask other questions, but he had learned to be careful with Constance in that regard. If he’d asked her where her ambition had come from to go into business for herself, she could not have followed him there. He turned to his sister instead.