‘She doesn’t wait for me to ask. If you didn’t have your damned private line, I could have buzzed you and made you cope with the old bitch. Why me? Why always me?’

Mary burst into tears, a child wanting her mother, no matter how often she’d fought to be free of her. But David could comfort her because he always had. He was far more familiar with her remorse than Patricia had ever been.

‘Why don’t you miss her the way I do?’ Mary wailed.

‘Because I was happier with her,’ David said quietly. ‘I don’t feel guilty. I felt the way you do when my mother died.’

‘Laura doesn’t.’

‘Laura was a better child than you and I were.’

‘I don’t believe you weren’t a good son. You’re so good you sometimes make me sick!’

David smiled at her. It was the sort of thing Diana might say to him and mean it in the same way, both loving and furious.

‘I won’t get into a contest about it with you,’ he said.

‘I’m just not ready for one thing more than I already have to cope with.’

‘Then ask for more help with what’s already on your shoulders,’ David urged.

‘I did love Mother,’ Mary said, and her tears started afresh.

‘Of course you did, and she loved you.’

‘Why can’t Ted understand what I’m going through?’

‘He hasn’t lost his mother,’ David said. ‘And I think he does understand, but you have to realize that it threatens him, too.’

‘Why should he be threatened?’

‘It took me years to break down the walls your mother built after little David died. I didn’t ever entirely succeed.’

‘I can’t just stop feeling.’

‘You can stop a lot of other kinds of feeling, for Ted, for the children, and you’re the centre of their life.’

‘I’ve been wondering if I should see a shrink,’ Mary said, calmer again. ‘But I don’t really want to be made into some other kind of person. I just want to like myself better.’

David didn’t speak.

‘Do you think I ought to go?’ Mary asked.

‘Only if you think so.’

David had a basic suspicion about psychiatrists. The people he knew who made a habit of them were more self-absorbed than ever.

‘You think I shouldn’t,’ Mary decided as she studied his face.

‘I’m sure there are good ones,’ David said, ‘who know both how simple and at the same time how hard to see most human problems are. But a lot of them seem to break more than they mend, or at least that can be the result.’

‘You don’t think I have a bunch of kinky hang-ups about Mother?’

‘No,’ David said. ‘I think you’re baffled by how to go on growing without her measure.’

‘But I never wanted her measure!’

‘I know,’ David said.