And David, gleeful, said, ‘I told you there was something you wanted.’

Diana was looking at the discs.

‘Can you just go into a store and buy them?’ she asked.

‘That’s right,’ David said, ‘and I’ve put you on the Magic Flute mailing list for their newsletter; so you can just phone and order if you like.’

David had not thought of a present they might give to him. The matching extravagance of their exchange spoke a balance of care that they all wanted to make plain in a season which invited but often failed to deliver such messages.

‘Now,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘I’ve stayed longer than I said I would by nearly an hour. It’s time for me to disappear into the bosom of my family.’

Before he left, he showed them both how to use the player, thanked them again for his chair, kissed them soundly and fled down the front steps before he made a fool of himself. He needed the length of his bus ride, shared tonight with exhausted late shoppers burdened with offerings, to put himself in a mood to deal quietly with the complexities of the day to come.

— 8 —

COOKING HAM FOR THEIR Christmas breakfast, Diana remembered, as she did every year, the first Christmas she had spent with Constance. Diana’s mother had sent a tiny canned ham. Constance had two fresh eggs from a friend in the country, and the butcher had given her a bit of liver. How extravagant they felt in their London flat as they ate ham for breakfast, liver for lunch, and ham and eggs for dinner. They hadn’t exchanged presents. It was a time when things led too much of a life and death of their own to hold personal meaning any longer. A teapot could as easily be found in the middle of the road as on a kitchen counter, a desk upside down in a back garden, and valuables could melt like snow in the heat of the fires. Constance’s way of dealing with the loss of all her few belongings was not to care.

By eating each year what had been such a feast, they kept Christmas as a private anniversary, something of a joke, and it had never been a time for exchanging important presents—this year a collapsible cane for Diana, for Constance a timer which she could hang around her neck to compensate for the loss of her inner clock. Diana could now add on the memory board the appropriate timing for each activity, and Constance could set the device for herself.

‘Will it send me rushing to the stove?’ Constance asked.

‘I hope not,’ Diana answered.