‘What gave you the drive to do all the work of being a doctor?’

‘I had the chance,’ Diana said, ‘and I suppose I had something to prove. To myself anyway.’

‘Going to college never occurred to me,’ David said.

‘There wasn’t the money for it, once Hugh went.’

‘I suppose I could have found a way, but I would have felt silly, even sillier than I did with so many other people in the war. I did read, but not the sort of books you read,’ David said, nodding at the bookshelves. ‘I read novels and plays, occasionally even some poetry. I used to think that, if I’d gone on to study history and politics, I might have made something—for myself anyway—of that daily wash of disaster we call the news, and felt less simply drowned in it. But I didn’t really have any faith in that notion, or not enough to make the effort and I finally lost my respect for the fellows who were supposed to do the analysing. Blarniers they were, all of them, and in the end I’m grateful that at least I wasn’t one of them.’

‘The messenger is a rough part, isn’t it?’ Diana commented. ‘I used to turn on the radio and say, “Well, D, how about a bit of good news tonight?” As if you had some control over it.’

‘Well, I wasn’t killed for it, which in simpler times I could have been, if those old plays are accurate.’

‘You can be killed for doing nearly anything,’ Constance said. ‘But most of us get killed for no bloody reason at all.’

As if it were a clue, Diana got slowly up to put on a record.

‘Let me do that for you, shall I?’ David offered, hating to see the pain in her moving, so increasingly noticeable to him, perhaps because she made fewer pretences about it now or because the winter was settling into her joints.

‘No, thank you. It’s good for me to move about; otherwise I set, like cement. I do miss getting down to the desert.’

‘Where did you used to go?’ David asked.

‘Various places—Phoenix, Palm Springs. Our favourite was a little place called Borrego Springs.’

‘Couldn’t you go back?’

‘She tells me I get lost in airports,’ Constance said with a show of irritability.

‘It isn’t just that,’ Diana said. ‘I’m as much past travelling as you are.’

‘Why couldn’t we go down together?’ David asked.

‘David, it’s one thing to deal with us on home ground, quite another when we’re let loose in the world,’ Diana said.

‘Think about it before you say no,’ David said. ‘We might go down for several weeks in January or February. If you know where to go, I don’t know why I couldn’t simplify the airport for you.’

‘I think you should think about it,’ Diana said.