9780140281903

Chapter One

Ellen Des Müllers Blumen

Early on the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister. I had not seen her for three years. She came into my bedroom, opening and closing the door without a sound. Her hair was bobbed short and she was dressed in plain white cotton T-shirt and knickers. Nothing else. I watched her cross the room on bare feet, and pause to touch the somewhat staid interview clothes that I had laid out on a chair the night before: navy calf-length skirt, navy lambswool jumper, cream silk shirt, paisley silk scarf, best polished boots. She paused again to stroke the foot-end of my duvet. Then she walked on towards the window, where the curtains were drawn shut. While her facial expression in life had been characteristically animated, it was now serene and fixed, like that of a person sleep-walking.

Though she made no sound, she left a five-word sentence behind her in the room. The words were in German. I heard them in her voice but, at the same time, I was aware that the voice was audible only inside my own head: ` Die Sterne stehn zu hoch .' I should explain here that I don't really speak German -- that is, not beyond the level of GCSE Grade C -- though I knew that I had come across the phrase before, and I knew enough to be able to translate it: `The stars are too high.'

As soon as she had disappeared behind the curtain, I jumped out of bed and went to the window. Nothing was there; only the cold glass panes and, beyond them, the gleaming monochrome of the garden in the minutes before the dawn. Of one thing I am completely certain. I was not asleep. I remember that the vision of her filled me with a terrible longing, and that my lack of fear surprised me. I remember that I felt honoured by her being there, and that afterwards I felt pain. I felt the loss of her, once again, like an ugly lump of flesh twisting inside my own chest.

When my sister was killed by a car in north London, her small leather backpack was thrown clear of her body. It contained nothing except a return train ticket between King's Cross and Royston in Hertfordshire, where she was still at school, her Young Person's Railcard and the extended essay she had just then had returned to her that she had written for her A level German course.

Since she had not filled in the address section of the railcard, it was the essay that had made the job of identifying her such an easy one for the police. The front cover of the essay's binder had a large adhesive label with the name of her examination board and that of her school. It also gave her name and candidate number, and the title of her essay. It was called Love and Death at the Mill: Twenty Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer .

I was in Edinburgh when she died -- I was coming to the end of my first year at the university -- but no one at home had any idea why Lydia had gone into London that day, though within the week, while going through her things, my father and the Stepmother had come upon the draft of a letter written to the middle-aged writer son of one of my sister's godmother's friends; a person whom neither I nor my parents had ever met though we were all aware that he had written a novel some years earlier entitled Have Horn; Will Travel . The place where my sister died was directly in front of his London flat.

The letter, which was long and jaunty, was one in which she had sought his advice over the essay, but it was not difficult to tell that, in its childish, girly way, the letter was a bit of a come-on. Some months after the date of it, she had submitted the essay and had been awarded an A, along with special words of praise from both teacher and moderator. The speculation was that, on having the essay returned to her, she had simply decided, on the spur of the moment, to take it into London and show it to him, her unofficial adviser. She hadn't made any arrangement to do so, and had evidently found the writer away from his flat, since he had gone home two days earlier than usual that week, to be with his wife and family somewhere in the Cotswolds, where they lived. The place in London was merely a small bolt-hole where he went during the week to work.

Though the driver had been travelling too fast, the accident was ruled not to have been his fault. A witness confirmed that, for some reason, my sister had run at speed straight out in front of the car without looking to left or to right. It was said that she had seemed distressed.

The force of contact had been such that she had been thrown clear of the road onto the grass of a park. Near to where her body had landed, there was a small man-made lake bordered with periwinkles and forget-me-nots, Vergissmeinnicht . It is difficult, in retrospect, to avoid the crude symbolism of this too blatant coincidence, since the same blue flowers -- the blaue Blumelein -- are associated with the mill girl's eyes in the cycle of German Romantic poems to which her essay relates. They grow by water and they come to deck the grave of the miller who dies, of course, of unrequited love. They are a repeating and prevalent feature of my sister's extended essay; the essay which my father has had bound in leather and which he keeps on his study desk.

After that early morning visitation, I went downstairs to the tall bookshelves in the hall where, at the top near the ceiling, are stacked some dark green box files that contain those of my sister's papers that my father chose to keep. I felt impelled right then to re-read the letter, and it brought vividly back to me all that schoolgirl bubble and silliness that she and I had shared in our capacity as each other's best friend. Once my sister was gone, these were qualities that I either suppressed or lost. Not having Lydia to bounce off, I became somebody else. When you are young enough -- and I was eighteen to her seventeen when she died -- you still, perhaps, have options about the kind of person you will become. I became, because of her dying, a more earnest, more straight-faced, more directed person. It may be that I became a bit of a bore.

It surprises me now to remember that my father -- our father -- had used to call us `Gigglers One and Two'; that he was always inclined to treat us as if we were two halves of the same pantomime horse. He has treated me very seriously ever since. People in the past were often unable to tell us one from the other. This was not only because we looked alike, but because out speech and other mannerisms were similar. It is only very rarely now that a person will call me by her name. The Lydia that once lived is dead in both of us.

My sister's letter went like this:

Dear Mr Goldman,

I don't expect you will remember me, but I met you in my Godmother Vanessa's house in Worcestershire last summer. You had driven down to drop your mother. However, you may remember that Godmother was a concert soprano in her day and that she made you sing. You sang songs from Schubert'sDie schöne Müllerin and your mother played the piano. Although, as you must know, you sing very well, I confess that, had my sister Ellie not left an hour before your arrival, we would have giggled throughout your performance. As it was, I merely yawned and played with the cat, and ate far too much of the carrot cake that Godmother had made in your honour. Godmother Vanessa is your greatest fan, and she always calls you `The Novelist'.

`My dears,' she'd said to Ellie and me, `do you know that "The Novelist" is coming to tea? I think we will make him a carrot cake.'

My point now is that when I got home I recollected your singing. After I got back I began to think about some of the things I'd half overheard you say to Godmother. You said that water was the metaphor that bound the poems together and you made some joke about its `convenient fluidity'. You said that the water, while it encouraged and sanctioned the idea of male restlessness and male wanderings, then became quite cruelly deceitful, detached and inscrutable. You said something about sex and fluids and suicide. You said what a useful thing it was for the German Romantics that the word Herz rhymed withSchmerz. ( I hope you enjoy being paraphrased like this.)

To tell you the truth, I went out the next day and I bought the song cycle on CD. I bought it twice, once being sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sings beautifully but he has irritating nursery sibilants, and once, somewhat shriekishly, by a woman called Birgitte Something. I wanted to see if the songs could cross gender, but I expect they can't.

I decided then and there to abandon my previous resolution to Improve my Mind by reading my way through theEncyclopaedia Britannica, starting with the letter A. I have opted for A level German, though my sister thinks I must be off my head. We both did GCSE German, you see, because our mother said we had to. That's because she's French and she'd always made us speak French with her at home, so we could do that quite well already. Naturally, we'd wanted to sign up for GCSE French, thinking it would be a good skive, but the tyrant matriarch wouldn't allow it. After that, Ellie thought two years of German had been quite enough. Two years of:

`Was hast du gern?'

`Ich habe Popmusik gern.'

`Und hast du eine Lieblingsgruppe?'

`Ja. Abba ist meine Lieblingsgruppe.'

She'd also had a Bad Experience during the German exchange, while I'd had the most adorable dentist's family in Munich who took me on lovely jaunts and offered to put braces on my teeth. Ellie's family, swept her off over the border into the country somewhere outside Vienna. She was stuck with these two pigmentless boys in lederhosen called Hubert-und-Norbert, who looked exactly like white mice and had not an eyebrow between them. One of them played a squeeze-box and the other one blew on this brasswind item at all hours, right under her window. On Easter morning she'd woken up to a blast, only to find that Herr Vater White Mouse was looming over her bed, clothed from head to foot in a yellow fur-fabric bunny suit with polka-dot bow-tie and handy pull-down zip.

The only outing she'd been taken on was once to the cathedral in Vienna, whereFrau Mutti White Mouse had been so odiously smug about the Defeated Infidel at the Siege of Vienna that Ellie was moved to observe (in English) that if only the Infidel had not been repulsed at the gates of Vienna then perhaps Hubert-und-Norbert would be sporting sexy black, eyebrows and even sexier black moustaches. The episode has left my sister with leanings towards dark men called Ishmael and Quoresh, especially in djellabahs. She thinks it no accident that the word `pasha' should sound so much like passion'.

Anyway, the upshot is that I have decided to write my A level long essay on the poet Wilhelm Muller, who, as you will of course know, wrote the poems on whichDie schöne Müllerin was based. The trouble is, I know very little about German poetry -- or poetry in general, since I see now that I have Misspent My Youth reading Quite the Wrong Sort of Book. I only know German poetry if it's hymns. I know `Ein feste Burg ist Unser Gott' and I know `Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him', which is really Deutschland über Alles. So I wonder now if you could bear it if I were to come in on the train to see you and talk to you about German poetry, and German Romanticism, and Herz, and Schmerz, and especially about Wilhelm Muller? And would you mind if I were to take down absolutely every word you utter? And if I were then to submit these utterings, word for word, as my extended essay?

This letter is getting far too long. Ade. Ade. Please reply to me.

Yours sincerely,

Lydia Dent

My sister had added the obligatory adolescent postscript. It said:

P.S. I have translated one line in the poems as `Better you should have stayed in the woods ' -- `Doch besser du bliebest im Walde dazu' -- but it sounds too much like the punchline of a Jewish joke. (As in 'Better he should have been a doctor.') Is German a dialect of Yiddish, do you know, or could it be the other way round?

Yours again

Lydia Dent

As Lydia has mentioned in her letter, I was no longer with her when she met The Novelist. I had missed him by one hour, having left in order to accompany our paternal grandmother on a trip to Derbyshire which she had offered me as an eighteenth birthday treat. When I returned, Lydia reported, rather casually, that he was tall and dark, and wore a white linen shirt and steel-rimmed glasses and deck shoes, which she estimated as approximately European size 46. She said nothing about him singing.

The Novelist's mother had been at school with Liddie's godmother before and during the War. Both women were very musical. Both had married and were now widowed, though -- while her friend had had six children -- Liddie's godmother had remained childless. Liddie was completely right in her letter about Godmother's enthusiasm for The Novelist. She was a regular guest at all his launch parties and she liked to attend his readings. She was always in possession of his most recent hardback, signed and dated by the author.

I do remember that the making of the carrot cake had provoked in Lydia and me all our usual gigglings and foolings. Lydia's godmother had set us to grate the carrots while she had busied herself with the kitchen scales.

`Godmother,' Liddie said, `will The Novelist like his carrots grated finer than this?' We wrestled enjoyably for turns with the grater.

`Godmother,' Liddie said, `will The Novelist mind bits of blood and grated bones in his carrot cake?'

`Give over, Liddie,' I said, as the grater fell to the floor. `Now look what you've gone and made me do.'

`Godmother?' Liddie said, `will The Novelist mind floor scrapings in his carrot cake?'

Lydia's godmother had merely continued to regret that I was going to miss The Novelist's visit and had expressed the hope that my grandmother would be just a teeny bit late. In the event, Grandmother was punctual to the minute, and I believe that The Novelist and his mother were late. I have been told that he was somewhere in the background at Lydia's funeral.

Just as she flattered us with assumptions of consensus in the matter of The Novelist's work, so Lydia's godmother had always behaved as if we were in agreement generally upon matters of high culture. She took us to recitals and theatres and poetry readings and to exhibitions of paintings. On the whole, she affected not to notice that we tittered and fidgeted our way through all of them. If a soprano had the merest hint of moustache, or a poet a tendency to gather saliva at the corners of his mouth, or a painter appeared to us over-keen on lilac-tinted depictions of female crotch and nipple, then these would be things to set us off on our gigglers' course. If, on the other hand, the tenor were young enough or handsome enough, then Lydia would adopt a policy of staring at him fixedly with huge goose-eyes, until the poor man would resort to singing all of `On Wenlock Edge' or `Have You Seen But a White Lily Grow?' with his eyes glued to the ceiling.

Once, when Lydia's godmother had taken us to a production of Waiting for Godot , we had begun quite early on to wonder how long it would be before Godot came.

`When does Godot come?' Lydia whispered to me. I shrugged, having no idea, of course. `Godmother,' she said. `When does Godot come?'

`Oh,' said Lydia's godmother. `Oh, my darlings, he doesn't come , you see. Or perhaps he has come already. That is really the point.' After that, Lydia fell asleep.

From the start, GCSE German had made us giggle, along with more or less everything else. We giggled while testing each other's vocabulary -- and it is obvious that, for any English schoolchild bent upon rudimentary satire, a language in which the word for one's male parent coincides so rewardingly with the word in one's own language for a person given to anal expulsions of gas has blatant possibilities. We had already been disposed to it through the history class, which had offered us Martin Luther and his done-to-death Diet of Worms. Lydia informed us one weekend that a certain girl in her history class had been labouring under the misapprehension that Martin Luther had nailed, not his `theses', but his `faeces' to the church door in Wittenburg. Yet, to us, even theses had seemed bizarre enough.

`Theses,' Lydia said, `are what graduate students write. They come in huge books, about four hundred pages long. Martin Luther wrote ninety-five of them. And then he nailed them all to the door of the church in Wittenburg. The door must have been "pitted with holes the size of a sixpence".'

`Pitted with holes the size of a sixpence' was one of our automatic giggle-phrases. `It must have given the vicar "fair gyp",' I said, which was another.

One of our father's elderly one-time colleagues, now dead, had suffered a leg injury during the war. His left thigh had been peppered with bullet-holes that had never ceased, periodically, to suppurate -- a gruesome detail that his wife, an old-style staff nurse, had liked to dwell upon in detail.

`Will's leg is giving him gyp,' she'd say, `fair gyp. Pitted with holes, it is, the size of a sixpence, and each one filled with pus.'

All Lydia or I had to say when the couple came to visit was, `How's Mr Kethley's leg, Mrs Kethley?' and the response was always delightful. Even the idea of a sixpence was agreeably archaic to the two of us.

`Did you know,' Lydia said to her once, after one of her more extended septic set pieces, `Nietzsche oozed a pint of pus every day?'

`Every day?' Mrs Kethley said crossly, as if resentful of such up-staging of Will's capacity for festering.

`Syphilis,' Lydia said. `Our Sex Ed teacher told us.'

Whenever we stayed with Lydia's godmother, she would place one or other of The Novelist's books on out shared bedside table, though these were definitely not the sort of novels that Lydia and I ever read. And to confirm us in our reluctance was the fact that The Novelist had won a prize. Throughout our childhoods Lydia and I distrusted any prize-winning book because we knew it would be worthy; and for worthy, we read boring.

While our mother, before she left us all for her lover, had been inclined to abhor our philistinism in tones of despising innuendo, our father would cheerfully dish us out tenpences, chapter by chapter, as inducements to make us cast our eyes over the occasional improving volume. Or he would slip the odd superior book in amongst our Christmas and birthday presents, labelled in bold marker-pen, `This Book is NOT Literature.' Though we dismissed most of his offerings as `boys' books', he did, in this way, expose us to some shorter works of decent fiction and, just once, to an anthology of verse, containing Matthew Arnold's `Dover Beach.'

Occasionally, as we sniggered and shrieked out way through shared readings of dog-eared school stories, or through easy pulp romance, our father would oblige us by stopping to take an interest.

`What on earth goes on in these frightful books you read?' he'd say, and that was all the invitation we needed.

`Oh, but they're brilliant,' Lydia would say. `This one's completely brilliant. You see, all the teachers are lesbians. They're all kinky and butch.'

`All of them?' Father said. Our father was, and still is, the headmaster of a public school. We had lived in some stone splendour in the headmaster's house for most of our lives.

`They all believe in sensible haircuts and sensible shoes,' Lydia said, as though that clinched her assertions.

`And punishment,' I said.

`Oh, lots of punishment,' Lydia said. `Well, that's except for the French teacher. She's a weed, of course. And she's always got her hair in "curl papers". What are curl papers, Father dear? Are they like cigarette papers?'

`Search me,' Father said, who claimed never to have encountered a curl paper in his life.

`Anyway,' Lydia said, `she's always got them. Not in class but at night, when she's woken up by a mouse coming into her bedroom. The French teachers are always terrified of mice. I expect you'd call the rat-catcher if your school had mice, wouldn't you?'

`Dear me,' was all Father said.

`And the American girls,' I pitched in. `They come to English schools so that they can learn to speak properly.'

`And their fathers are called "Pops", and they drive huge cars, and they're all road hogs,' Lydia said.

`And they never ever get out of their cars at all,' I said. `They're surgically attached to them, we think.'

`And if there's a Spanish girl,' Lydia said, `then she always swings upside down from trees, sort of like a primate, and her parents work in the circus.'

`Big top,' I said, `it's brill. And the French girls are always cheats.'

`They have to come to English schools to learn a Sense of Honour, but they never do, they can't,' Lydia said.

`Why can't they?' our father said.

`Because they're French,' Lydia said, `of course.'

`And the teacher's job is to make everyone into "ordinary little schoolgirls",' I said. `The teachers are all bombed on ordinariness.'

`There's this girl,' Lydia said, `and she wants to be an opera singer, so she runs away to an audition because she's not allowed to go. But then it pours with rain and she loses her voice and she gets very ill and then she can't sing any more, and Matron says' -- here we both chanted gloatingly in unison -- `"Mavis can't sing at all. She can only croak." `

`After that,'. Lydia said, `Mavis becomes an "ordinary little schoolgirl". She has pigtails and she croaks "Play up!" at the school hockey matches.'

`Do you two learn these books off by heart?' Father said.

`No,' Lydia said. `It's just that they're so good they stick in our minds.'

`They're fantastic,' I said. `There's this other girl, who wants to be an Olympic swimmer but she's not allowed to train, you see, so she strikes out --'

`In the rain?' father ventured, half rising to go.

`Well, yes,' I said. `There's a storm and she's dashed against the rocks and she's paralysed.'

`You see, it's all right to swim for your school,' Lydia said, `but the Olympics is a bit too ambitious -- for an ordinary little schoolgirl.'

`Tell me,' Father said, `aren't you two getting a bit too old for this sort of stuff?'

`Never,' Lydia said. `You can never be too old. Anyway, there's lots of sex and bondage. We're probably far too young for it.' Father raised an eyebrow.

`No, truly,' I said. `There's this bit when this girl who's bombed on horses keeps sneaking out to see this horse that's sick. But then there's this horrible teacher that captures her and keeps on punishing her.'

`She's not horrible. She's strict-but-fair,' Lydia said.

I ignored her. `She keeps on gating her and giving her lines and stuff,' I said. `But she still goes on sneaking out.'

`In the rain?' Father said.

`Yes,' Lydia said, `that's right.'

`I really don't think I can take any more of this,' Father said. `So if you will excuse me --'

`Anyway,' Lydia said quickly, `she sneaks out in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, and suddenly while she's there the teacher is right there behind her -- because the teacher is really a Good Sort and she likes horses too.'

`That's the bond,' I said.

`Bond-age,' Lydia said. `See, they stand all huddled together in the pouring rain and the teacher says --' We did the next bit again in unison, dropping our voices an octave and putting on Marlene Dietrich voices -- `"I zink I vill never haff to punish you again."'

`So you see,' Lydia said, `it's all about SM and rubber macs. We need these books, Father. They're sex manuals for us.'

` And our mother's not here to tell us anything,' I said.

`And you thought they were just school stories for "ordinary little schoolgirls", didn't you, Father?' Lydia said.

Our father laughed. `Spare me,' he said. He made attempts to leave. `I really have things I must attend to,' he said.

`Well, I think you should punish us more,' Lydia said, getting up and standing in his path. `Go on, punish us. Punish us now.'

`My dear girls,' he said. He held up his hands in mock surrender. `My dear girls.' And so we let him go.

I remember just a little bit later how hard we tried to embarrass him in front of the Stepmother, who was, at that time, not yet the Stepmother. She was Father's new woman. It was during a Sunday lunch. Father had bought the lunch entirely in Marks & Spencer's food department, because he was unable to do any sort of cooking except for what you did over camp-fires, and Liddie and I could only do jam tarts and cheese straws and convalescent diets and the sort of useless rubbish they'd taught us to make at school.

Liddie and I had been reading a trash romance about the Regency period.

`We've read this historical novel,' Liddie said to the new woman. `It's educational. It's all about this French convent girl.'

`She's not French,' I said, `she's an English convent girl. Her fiance's French, that's all.'

`OK,' Liddie said. `Sorry. She's English, but she's supposed to marry this Frenchman, you see. Arranged Marriage. He's kind of experienced and wicked and all that. Well, he would be. He's a French comte .'

`But this girl,' I said, `she doesn't want to marry him because she's in love with someone else, so her friend says she'll marry the comte instead, in disguise.'

`So she does,' Lydia said, `and the comte doesn't even notice.'

`Why doesn't he notice?' said Father's new woman, while Father helped her to a carefully calculated twenty-five per cent of the M & S salmon en croute that he'd somewhat high-roasted in the oven.

`Oh, veils and stuff,' Lydia said vaguely. `You know. Anyway, he doesn't notice and then after the ceremony they go gallop-a-gallop all the way to Dover. And then they go on a boat. But he reads his book all the way and --'

`What does he read?' asked Father's new woman.

`Oh, well, never mind,' Lydia said. `Some Black Lace number, I expect. But anyway, she's too sea-sick to raise her head and he orders his manservant to see to all her needs.'

`Not quite all her needs, I hope,' the new woman said, a little saucily.

`And then they go all through France,' I said, `bumpety bumpety in a golden coach, until at last they get to his chateau .' Father's croute had become so papery-dry, it was hard not to puff it about the room as one spoke. It was like those amaretto papers that used to make floaty angels in the air when you set them alight.

`And still he hasn't noticed,' Lydia said. `It's so exciting.'

`One of the maids meets them in the hall,' I said. `And she does lots of curtseying and bowing and scraping. And then she takes the convent girl up vast flights of stairs, and bathes her, and brushes her hair with a hundred strokes, and anoints her with perfumed oils, and puts her in a silk nightie, and tucks her up in a four-poster bed hung all around with tapestries.'

`And then,' Lydia said, `after a few tankards of brandy, the wicked, experienced comte turns up and they do the business, and --'

`I beg your pardon?' Father said.

`They do it,' I said, `and all is Confessed and Revealed.'

Father was attending to his new woman's wine glass.

`And next morning I suppose she's got cystitis?' ventured the new woman.

`No, of course not,' Lydia said confidently, though I don't think either of us had heard of cystitis at that point in our lives. `He forgives her because he's wild about her. Because she's so snowy-white and inexperienced. You see, men always love virgins.'

`Broccoli for you, my dear?' Father said, offering his new woman the M & S veg au gratin that he had decanted from the oval-shaped foil dish into one of our mother's oval-shaped Alsatian ceramics, thus causing the gratin to present itself upside down.

`You can tell she's inexperienced because she always speaks in dots when she's in bed,' I said.

`You mean she speaks in morse code?' Father said.

`Oh, don't be silly,' Lydia said. `It's sort of like this. Like she'll say --' and here Lydia clutched her bosom and talked in a higher, girlier voice than usual `-- "Oh," dot, dot, dot. "My dearest comte ," dot, dot. "My beloved husband," dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. "Take me," dot, "all the way up to heaven again ," dot, dot, dot.'

`The comte is terrifically lechy and sexy,' I said, perhaps extraneously.

`Please can we have arranged marriages, Father, with sexy Frenchmen?' Lydia said.

`Oh yes, please,' I said, `with wild, bad, experienced comtes . And then we can swap. Liddie can have my comte and I can have hers.'

`That happens in a Mozart opera,' Father's new woman said -- a remark which we instantly found more deeply embarrassing than she had found any of our prattlings. `The men come back in disguise,' she said, `and the women don't recognize them.'

`Pudding,' Father said firmly and he got up and was away for some minutes. He had bought four tea-cup-sized M & S Treacle Puddings and a half-litre carton of M & S English Custard. He had heated the puddings, two by two, in the microwave and had inverted them onto Grandmother's Crown Derby pudding plates. The custard was still inexplicably in the carton, wrenched open at the side that said `Open Other Side'.

`Bravo,' said the new woman, who had grown up in America. `Oh, I just love these little boarding-school puddings.'

It was not long afterwards that the new woman became the Stepmother.

Lydia and I were fond of the Stepmother and pleased to see our father become so happy. A lot of our knockabout clowning had been our clumsy, unwitting attempts to cheer him up, I think, because he'd been so shut in and grave in the two years since our mother had left. We had each other, we reasoned, while he had only himself, now that we were away at school.

Our father, by necessity, often ate in the school dining-hall, enduring, maybe even enjoying, the pomp and the gowns and the Latin grace -- Omo Lux Domestos Brobat , as Liddie and I had sometimes chanted -- but we tried, when we came home to him, during our half-terms and holidays, to do our best over the catering for his sake. We were, I think, unique in being able to make lumps even in instant mashed potatoes and gravy mix and powdered custard. Usually we gave up and opened tins of beans and soup and delicious Patak's Kashmiri Lamb Curry. We saved our creativity for making him fudge and cocoa and peppermint creams.

Liddie had a project for us to work our way through all the `serving suggestions' that we saw on the tins and boxes from the supermarket. The cracker boxes had illustrations labelled `serving suggestions' that showed a row of four savoury biscuits, the first with a sliver of cheese, topped with a small stick of celery.

`Now that's a good idea,' Lydia said. The next picture depicted an identical biscuit decorated with a small, half-moon shrimp on a blodge of cottage cheese. Once we found a box of Tesco's Coconut Cakes where the `serving suggestion' invited us to place the cakes on a silver platter daintily laid with a doily.

`Let's do it, Ellie,' Lydia said. `Only we don't know how to make doilies.'

`Yes we do,' I said. `You fold up a sheet of paper into quarters and cut bits out of the sides. It's like making snowflakes at playschool.'

`Brilliant,' Liddie said. `Get the scissors there, Ellie.'

If we weren't floating on `serving suggestions' we immersed ourselves in the `perfection recipe' that adorned the label of an old cocoa tin we had found at the back of the larder. I expect our mother had banished it there in her time. It not only told you how to make cocoa boringly everyday wise, but it offered a de luxe alternative; it offered perfection. For this, one mixed the cocoa with a modicum of cold milk, then turned the blend of both into a saucepan containing the bulk of the milk before heating through. The method was intended to produce the sort of cocoa that didn't leave your teeth on edge, and it allowed Liddie and me to feel like connoisseurs for having chosen it -- though Father, who is from an old army family, is always happy to eat and drink almost anything, including the sort of cocoa in which the spoon will stand up in a half-inch of silt on the bottom of the mug.

Only once did we have a go at a seriously ambitious pudding: an Austrian torte , which we tried to make shortly after my return from the Hubert-und-Norbert experience. The recipe called for fifteen eggs and a whole pint of cream. There were only two eggs in the larder, but Lydia had once read, in a wartime cookbook of her godmother's, that a tablespoon of vinegar could deputize for an egg, so we made the Austrian torte with two eggs and thirteen spoons of vinegar. I must admit that not even our father could be prevailed upon to believe that the resulting mess was how the Viennese liked their cakes.

During term-time weekends, when we were swept off to stay with our mother and her new man in Cambridge -- and where we were expected to pull our weight in the kitchen with regard to a daunting range of distinctly unskilled chores -- our sessions never took on this dotty, Blue Peter -ish quality. We were always much too subdued to fool about in the male usurper's house and we felt not a little like Cinderella girls, or perhaps like sorcerer's apprentices, left to peel potatoes and wash down surfaces, as we watched our mother, through the wide glass door, with her Garbo-like aura and her distinctly more townish clothes, making languid eyes at the encumbent.

My mother's new husband was one Hugo Campbell, a person who, to Liddie's eyes and mine, was a somewhat precious and foppish scholar, not notable for his emotional warmth or easy humanity. He and my mother had fallen precipitously in love -- or had, at least, been precipitously enchanted by each other's air of calm, egotistical detachment. From that moment on, her life with us in the Worcestershire countryside had simply become a closed chapter; a thing that ceased to exist.

Her going had occurred when Liddie and I were twelve and thirteen, a time when one tends to change schools, and our father -- perhaps typically of him -- arranged, in response to this distressing new development, for us to be placed in a boarding school some ten miles from our mother's new domicile. His action was, I think, built on the assumption that girl children had a greater need of their mothers, though, at the same time, he was adamant that he would not have us as day-to-day residents in Hugo Campbell's house. My mother had us for weekends only and, during the holidays, we returned home to him.

The arrangement did not suit any of us terribly well. Lydia and I missed our home at a time when our lives had been turned upside down, and we resented the way we were coerced into spending weekends in Hugo's house when what we wanted, if we couldn't be at home, was to party with our new schoolfriends. And our mother, who had, I think, never really adjusted to life in the country after her life in Paris, had by now returned to work with gusto. Her mindset had reverted to that of a full-time professional woman, and Lydia and I sensed her impatience at the weekly prospect of having to play mother to us on her precious days off.

Meanwhile, for us, it was positively unnerving to watch her negotiate a different kitchen in order to serve up our food on different plates. It was as though we'd landed ourselves in some ghoulish self-catering holiday house where, by horrible oversight, the landlord was permanently in residence as part of the package. And I think it was in order to reassure Hugo that she did not come trailing two great parasitical appendages, that our mother went in for such a rigorous show of delegation and insisted on our exhibiting company manners, especially at mealtimes.

Hugo was evidently quite freaked by children and engaged with us only to fire the same round of dead-end questions at us across the table about our `O Level' subjects -- an examination system that was, by then, already two years defunct.

`Speak clearly, Ellen. Don't mumble,' Mother would say and she'd pull us up for not eating with sufficient enthusiasm. She was going in for a different style of cuisine, now that she was no longer in the house in which we had started out as little girls. The message we read from this was that she was cooking, not for us, but for Hugo, who evidently had a more sophisticated and adventurous palate than our father. I admit that we were probably silly and bigoted, but our altered situation made us wish to regress at weekends, not advance, and what we longed for, in place of all the monkfish and okra and whiffy foreign cheeses, was roast chicken and gravy, and apple crumble for pudding.

In front of Hugo, our mother always referred to our father as `the Headmaster' -- a mannerism that we found both belittling and weird. And, when we balked at eating anything we'd deemed a touchway out, she'd say to him, `You see. The Headmaster's children.'

It was shortly before the advent of the Stepmother that Lydia and I had conceived the idea that Father needed a dog. The truth is that, having gone to the dog rescue bent upon any sort of puppy just as long as it was fluffy, we had quickly been persuaded that what our father needed was a retired racing greyhound. It was our good luck that, in the event, Father and the greyhound bitch fell in love at first sight -- though, of the two, Father was the less demonstrative.

`Dear girls,' he said, `you bad, unforgivable girls. How could you have taken a decision like this without consulting me?' The greyhound merely watched him fixedly. Every time he opened his mouth to speak she dived in with her tongue and gave him sexy, wet French kisses.

`Her name's Dilly,' we lied, because her registered name was Lady and we didn't like it. It lifted our hearts to watch Father take off across the fields in his green wellies with the greyhound running in huge wide circles as though programmed by the racetrack to proceed in spiral movements. Sometimes, as she got scent of a rabbit, she would break her pattern and zigzag wildly, bringing all four feet together in the air.

The following year we chanced our arm still further and found the greyhound a husband. The result was eight greyhound puppies, most of whose infancy I missed through my being away at university, but Lydia told me that they made it their business to bite the heads off all the wallflowers and to see to it that not a lupin was left standing. After that, she said, they had uprooted all the climbing plants and piddled on the grass until it yellowed. Our grandmother had then recommended the placing of a notice in the pages of Horse and Hound , which had resulted in queues of sensible country types -- exactly Father's sort of people -- who turned up in Range Rovers and talked with Father about the escalating price of gundogs.

And then the puppies were gone -- all but one, whose home had fallen through in the last minute. Another home was found, but the delay, in the event, proved vital. Four weeks passed before the family concerned were scheduled to return from a holiday and collect her. This meant that the puppy was still at home on the evening I was suddenly summoned from Edinburgh. It meant that the puppy never left us. It meant that the puppy was still with us on the day that my sister died.

When Lydia died, my father and the Stepmother had been married for only twenty-five months. They were in many ways an incongruous couple. She was tiny and more than twenty years his junior, and, to us countrified, boarding-school types, she seemed quite a radical progressive. Having got herself a degree and a teacher's qualification, the Stepmother had pointedly acquired her first teaching job in a large urban comprehensive school in an area of social disadvantage.

Every morning, before anyone else got up, the Stepmother, sluiced, dressed and ready for work, would leave the house with its tall chimneys and its two wide staircases, its inlaid clocks and polished brass and whatnots and tallboys, and she would tiptoe through the vines of the kitchen garden to where she kept her rusty little VW Beetle. Then she would head out for what Father, somewhat archaically, called `the Smoke'.

Nonetheless, because, as was evident to Lydia and me, she loved him dearly, she had very soon got pregnant, at a time that must have been most inconvenient to her as a determined and energetic young teacher wanting to make a career for herself. Father's somewhat fuddy-duddy reasoning was that he did not wish to deny her the experience of motherhood, even if at her age the matter did not seem pressing. By the time she had reached an age to be afflicted with maternal longings, he argued, he would be so advanced in years that the child would have an old age pensioner for a male parent.

When Father said `the child', Lydia and I were fairly sure that, in his heart, he meant boy child. He meant a person who would depend upon him to assist with the construction of model aeroplanes and to guide his bowler's arm. Admittedly, he has a stepson, Peter, who is the child of Liddie's and my mother by her first marriage -- a boy who was four years old when our parents met and who is almost six years my senior.

But Peter does not exactly meet my father's case. Peter is a strange, dreamy type of whom, throughout our early childhood, Lydia and I made nothing, but we gradually came to admire and love him devotedly. He is a small, blond, balding homosexual who runs a dog rescue centre in Sussex. He runs it with his beautiful, crop-haired French lover, who is an undisputed Übermensch . The Übermensch is almost perpetually in waistcoat and designer stubble and grandad shirt. He stands six foot two in his socks and has alluring dimples that play around his mouth. Sometimes, if he wears braces or dungarees, and if he leans on a baling fork, he looks exactly like one of those hunky, dancing wife-abductors in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers . And how fervently Liddie and I longed to be abducted by the Übermensch.

Once, when Peter and the Übermensch had first asked us to spend a half-term holiday, Lydia and I had come upon an unexpected barrage of resistance from both our parents; on Father's part, a po-faced, unexplained reluctance that I see, with hindsight, had to do with our half-brother's sexual orientation and, on our mother's, with an unambiguously expressed sniffy conviction that we would come back flea-ridden and probably afflicted with rabies, tick-bite fever and mange.

In the event, they let us go: two little girls and a quorum of love-starved canines. The holiday was bliss. Our best thing, however, and one we never disclosed, was that from our bedroom, adjoining the men's, we were able to lend an ear to the sounds of our half-brother's sexual activities. These were nothing like the smoochy gasps and groanings we had occasionally overheard from adult heteros -- noises that we always found embarrassing and invasive. These were far more like the noises of two boys fighting. Not gutter stuff; not flick-knife and broken bottle stuff; just the sort of thumping and wrestling entanglements that schoolboys enter into among friends and that always look so alarmingly physical and violent to uninitiated members of the female sex. Peter and the Obermensch made those POW! BASH! BAM! noises that emanate from Asterix and Obelix in uppercase balloons. (Or, as they say in the original French, TCHAC! PAFF! CLONC!) To us, with our background in a boys' school, these were undisturbing and manly sounds; not groping but jousting. They were easier on the ear than the hetero stuff.

It was Peter whom Lydia and I had approached in the matter of Father's `puppy', and Peter who had instead steered us towards the greyhound bitch. She was a dog in a million, Peter said, and if our father didn't like her, he would personally eat his hat. Peter's hat was one of those panamas that you can roll up and put in a tube. He had even been able to piece together bits of the greyhound's biography, since she had been quite a winner in her day, before she -- and presumably her owner -- had fallen on hard times. All Peter knew was that, at some point, the greyhound had fallen into the hands of a party of New Age travellers, because she'd been reported, abandoned and tethered among the burnt-out debris of a summer camp in Hove, where all she had found to eat were plastic bags that had blown her way in the wind. For her first days in Peter's care she had passed sections of soiled plastic bag bearing vestiges of the exhortation to `Collect a Sainsbury's Reward Card from the Homestore in Truro'. Yet here she was -- confident, elegant, sociable and infinitely capable of love.

`I run the dog rescue,' Peter once said to the Stepmother in my hearing, `because every day I'm reminded that characters like me can land with their bums in the butter.' By then I was just old enough to understand that dearest Peter might not have been speaking exclusively in metaphor.

As my sister and I had left to return to school after that glorious half-term holiday, Lydia had extracted a promise from the Übermensch.

`When you and Peter get married,' she said, `can Ellie and I please be your bridesmaids?'

` Mais oui ,' said the Übermensch. `One of you the bridesmaid and one the best woman.' He had declared Lydia and me to be the finest entertainment in England; better than those stupid comedy shows on the television. He slung our bags into the car and settled us inside. Then he blew us several saucy kisses as Peter drove us off.

And then my life, our lives, everything, went black. Not black like not remembering. Black like being lost in a dark place very far from home. I regret bitterly that I never saw my sister dead, but when my father left to identify her body, I was not at home. At the time I felt relieved. I was struggling to blink away an image that had kept recurring as my friend Pen had driven with me to the airport that night so that I could board the last plane out of Edinburgh; an image of Lydia's face, like that of a cat she and I had once seen, struck by a car and lying dead in a gutter. All the planes of its face had been pushed sideways into stiff, ghoulish parallelograms.

At home, I pleaded for my sister not to be cremated and I begged to be allowed to take the greyhounds to her funeral. Strange priorities, perhaps, but Father conceded both. Lydia and I, having all too recently attended the funeral service of poor old Mr Kethley in the chapel of what was locally known as `the Crem', had watched the box containing the remains of Mr Kethley slide -- presumably at the touch of an invisible button under the clergyman's foot -- through a chute in the apse behind where the altar ought to have been.

The building had appeared to us until that moment much like any other rather boringly modern church, but there, where one might have expected a depiction of Christ in Glory, was a dumb waiter's hatch, an automated conveyor belt, a railway line for the ghost train to the burning fiery furnace. We thought it a trompe l'aeil of bad taste; the ultimate last laugh. So I could not cope with the idea of Lydia entering that furnace -- and yet in the event, I think that the grave was just as difficult.

The Stepmother reacted differently. She was disproportionately upset by the hideousness of all the coffins that the undertaker had on offer and thought them a violation. In these ways -- while my father appeared bleakly, miserably undemonstrative -- did we two women process the first stages of our shock and grief. We wept and screamed about cremations and coffins.

`It's an outrage,' the Stepmother said. `An OUTRAGE ! I don't believe it. They're all plastic mahogany veneer. They're like those horrible seventies kitchen units.' Lydia, she said, could not possibly be nailed up in any monstrosity of formica and polished brass like that.

The Stepmother threw herself into a frenzy of specialist consumer activity, until she discovered the Green Burial Service, which provided my sister with a beautiful, understated, manila cardboard coffin, its shape mercifully cuboid, like a large croquet box. It came with undyed hemp ropes made by a fair-trade collective in the Philippines and, with these ropes, my father and Peter performed the appalling task of lowering Lydia into the ground.

It feels to me still as if that lowering happened in slow motion. So too the throwing of earth and flowers. And all the time I felt myself drawn to the idea of jumping into the grave. I wanted the inexorable event to stop rolling. Had I been brave enough and expressive enough -- had I perhaps been more genuinely like Lydia -- I might have done what I felt impelled to do. Instead, I stood there, staring and staring into the hole, with the greyhounds beside me on their leads. Curious how, until that time, Hamlet had seemed to the two of us such a melodrama. In the event, jumping into the grave was exactly what I most wanted to do. Would I or would I not have gone crashing through the sturdy manila card to clutch at my sister in a last embrace? Would I have raised her? Would I at least have seen her face?

Instead, I began to shiver and scratch my arms. Then I left. I turned silently from the graveside and took the path through the churchyard to the lych-gate and I walked up through the village.

As I arrived at the crossing opposite the pub, a decrepit-looking wino whom I had never seen before began to yell something at me, from the other side of the street. He was calling me `lady' and waving his arms. I could tell that Dilly was becoming restless and I knew that Lydia's burial had distressed her. Greyhounds have small narrow heads and easily slip their collars. Dilly, at this moment, chose to slip her collar. She bounded hazardously across the street and leapt at the wino. I remember screaming and screaming her name, as a small bus narrowly missed her and swerved in to pull up at the bus-stop. For a moment there was a van blocking my view and it was only when it moved forward that I realized the wino and Dilly had made a pact. I saw the two of them simply moving off towards the bus and all I could do was stand and scream. I suppose I was hysterical. Just then, a man who had emerged from the phone-box alongside the pub made a grab for Dilly and held her until I and the puppy had crossed the street. I tried to fit her collar, but my hands were shaking so violently that my rescuer was obliged to take it over.

Meanwhile the old wino merely hovered and gabbled. He was still calling me `lady'. `Lady, you're a fine one,' he said. `Aye, you're a fine one. Isn't she a fine one?'

I was not in a frame of mind to give him my attention. I didn't even look at him. `But lady, you're a fine one,' he said. `Aye, but you're all right.'

`Are you OK?' said the phone-call man. I think I nodded ungraciously before I fled.

Once at home, I kept on shivering and scratching. I'd developed a sort of psoriasis which still plagues me from time to time. The skin on my arms and legs became a meshwork of goosebumps and then of red weals. I had disfiguring patches on the right side of my face.

Recollecting Lydia's funeral in the weeks that followed, I became aware of strange, disturbing things. It occurred to me, but only after the event, that my mother had almost totally ignored me. I suppose this is called disengagement. She had also ignored Peter. Yet we two were so much preoccupied with loss and grief that we didn't immediately take her rejection on board. Conversely, she seemed once more to be powerfully drawn towards my father; drawn, no doubt, by the torment of the shared dead child. There she was, pale, beautiful and alone, since, perhaps understandably, her new husband had not accompanied her. Her grey eyes were huge and haunted as she clung to Father's arm.

My mother has ignored me ever since. I have become the expendable half of something that once was whole. From that day all semblance of her custodial role in me has lapsed. I have since then heard newly single people say that after separation all invitations cease; that friends, accustomed to a couple, are not able to take on board the singularity of their oneness. This is something I am able, from experience, to understand.

At the funeral, while Father behaved supportively with my mother, I and the Stepmother had both of us clung to Peter. The Übermensch had hung back, weeping copiously, wetting the front of his shirt. He, too, has since then found me something of an affront. He does not care for me without Lydia since I do not entertain him. Our value for him was as a double-act and now I am minus my partner. I tend to wear a February face, for which he has no use.

It was months, too, before it dawned on me that the old wino for whom Dilly had displayed such enthusiasm had not been addressing me, but the dog. He had been calling `Lady', not `lady' and she -- as dogs will -- had entirely failed to judge him for having reduced her to the ingestion of supermarket plastic bags on an abandoned camp-site.

Within the month, just as I had at last begun to stop shivering, the poor little Stepmother miscarried. She did so at a time when the space for grief was consumed by the greater loss of Lydia. The worst of it was that she miscarried, not once, but twice within five days. The first miscarriage happened at home over a weekend, when the Stepmother passed a perfect four-month-old male foetus, which she buried at nightfall, wrapped in a scrap of blanket, under an oak tree in the garden. For this purpose, my father, at her request, dug a deep hole. Afterwards, as the two of us women watched, he dragged a weighty stone paving slab over the grave.

The second miscarriage happened suddenly during the following week, when the Stepmother was taken acutely ill during an end-of-term theatrical performance at her school. This time she was rushed into whichever down-at-heel female surgical ward `the Smoke' still had on offer, and there it was that she passed a foetid brown object, a poor wizened reptile of a thing, a hapless twin, who had evidently lain dead and undiagnosed within her for some days before the first miscarriage. According to the doctors, it was this, the second twin, whose dying had caused the toxins that had proved fatal to that more amiable foetus that now lay beneath the slab under the oak tree.

After that, a silence enveloped the subject of the Stepmother's maternal needs and she became quite as besotted as I was with the greyhound and the puppy -- though the latter was an apprehensive little thing, who always piddled on the hall rugs in deference to the Stepmother's daily return from `the Smoke'.

I don't suppose that Lydia's dying could have done much for the Stepmother's newly-wed sex life. They were, in themselves, so very different, my father and the Stepmother. Now, after my four years away at university, I can see that my father is conservative by nature. He honours, more than is fashionable, the traditions of family, church, state and monarchy in which he was, perhaps anachronistically, reared. The Stepmother is by nature an iconoclast. She is against religion, perhaps because her parents were practising Catholics. She is against eating meat, perhaps because her father was a gourmet carnivore. She is a rigorous egalitarian, perhaps because her parents are very comfortable.

Some months after Lydia's dying, the Stepmother announced, towards the end of one of the horrible, plate-scrapingly silent meals we went in for through that summer, that she had been exploring the possibility of us going to Italy for a break.

`Just the three of us,' she said. `Come on, it couldn't hurt, could it? It couldn't make us feel any worse.'

`What about the dogs?' was all that Father said. He forked up some limp, waterlogged cauliflower as he spoke, because the Stepmother couldn't cook either. It was giving off that unpleasant armpit odour.

`There's Peter,' said the Stepmother. `I've already asked him, and he's game.'

`Yes,' said Father, `that's true. There's Peter.'

The Stepmother would doubtless have appreciated a more committed response. She has a married sister who lives with her family in Fiesole. Furthermore, the Stepmother speaks a more than adequate Italian through her paternal connection with ethnically conscientious Italian Americans. The sister had expressed a wish -- had positively pleaded with the Stepmother -- to have us come as guests for a week, and had already followed up this suggestion by procuring a flat for us thereafter, rent free, in Rome. Not any old flat, but a beautiful apartment belonging to a friend in the Via Sistina. It lay between the Quattro Fontane and the Spanish Steps, the Stepmother said. Pearls before swine. To our shame, this coup meant nothing to Father and me. We had neither of us ever been to Rome and we simply continued to stare into our plates.

`So?' said the Stepmother after a moment, when she ought to have thrown the cauliflower mush at us. `So, is it yes?'

`My dear,' Father began, `my dear Christina --'

`Yes?' said the Stepmother.

Father sighed. `Very well,' he said. Perhaps it was that neither he nor I wanted to put the sea between ourselves and Lydia's grave. The poor woman might have been proposing a trip to the chiropodist, for all the enthusiasm she provoked. `That,' said Father, `is if Ellen has no objection.'

`I don't mind,' I said, and I continued to stare into my plate.

The Stepmother took us first to stay with her sister's family in Fiesole, the most magical of old towns, from which the boy Fra Angelico would have been able to see the skyline of Florence as the golden beckoning cupolas of the heavenly city. The dear couple could not have been kinder to us, nor more solicitous. They laid tables before us on their little roof terrace under a vine and, unlike the Stepmother, they could cook. They sat with us in the shell of the ancient Roman theatre while their two small children, Bruno and Cosima, romped happily on the grass against a backdrop of the Etruscan city wall. They led us through ancient cypress trees, past a tiny chapel in an orchard, to an extraordinary old convent where a friar, dressed in sackcloth and sucking upon Tic-tacs, led us past a dimpled della Robbia madonna and several terracotta saints. They ascended with us into a steep, strange woodland, featuring the cells and grottoes of long-dead hermits.

In Florence, they steered us skilfully away from the summer crowds around the Uffizi, to the quiet of the Brancacci Chapel and the monastery of San Marco. Yet of the latter I have a single memory: that of my father, sitting glumly in the courtyard beside the great bell that rang out the execution of Savonarola. And, in the former, I remember that the Stepmother took hold of Father's arm and planted him four-square in front of Masaccio's The Tribute Money .

`There,' she said, as brightly as she could. `The best Sunday-school picture ever painted. Admire it, please.' She pointed its stages for him. `See,' she said. `Here are the Lord and his disciples with the taxman. But, look, they have no money to pay him. Here Jesus tells Peter, "Go to the lake and pluck out a little silver fish. In its belly you will find a coin."' With her hand she echoed the gesture of the Christly indicating arm. `Now,' she said, `here is Peter, crouching by the lake. And, bingo, he has the fish. See him, with his little slippery silver fish? And here they are, handing the coin to the taxman. Now they can enter the city.'

I stared at the taxman, who, with his back to us, was exhibiting Nureyev legs and the sort of shell-pink blouson that male Florentines of the time evidently went in for. Father was nodding and nodding, saying nothing.

`There's no such story in the Bible,' I said. I saw the Stepmother and the sister's husband exchange slightly arch looks.

`But there are plenty of fish stories in the Bible,' said the husband. `One more, one less. What the hell, Ellen? There is a noble family in this country,' he added, hoping to amuse me, 'which claims descent from the sexual union of Our Lord and Mary Magdalene.'

`Lighten up, Ellen,' said the Stepmother, showing a moment's irritation with me. `It's a propaganda piece for tax gathering. God pays his taxes, and so must all good citizens. Now you can't say there aren't any tax gatherers in the Bible.' Then, to curry my favour, she said, `But look at the beauty of St John, Ellen. Isn't he a gorgeous man?'

I stared sternly at St John, with his corkscrew blond curls, and his profile, and his clear, sea-green eyes. I thought he looked like a celebrity footballer, with a styled perm and highlights.

`I don't like blond men,' I said. As we left, we all walked past the expelled Adam and Eve, pretending not to register the howling, inconsolable depths of their loss.

The Stepmother's sister had taken two days off to guide us round Pisa and Lucca, where we walked through a maze of moonbright squares, their strangely Moorish white lace buildings like mirages. It was like dream-wanderings choreographed by Peter Greenaway, but Father and I, having established, ploddingly, that the Leaning Tower leaned, unwrapped our crusty sandwiches glumly on the grass outside the great Duomo, and longed for Allinson's pre-sliced stoneground. Bread wi' nowt tekken owt.

Finally, poor things, the sister and her family put us on the train for Rome, with a bag of star-shaped bread rolls, and a whole salami, and a paper carton of nectarines, and a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino.

`Skip the churches,' said the sister's husband astutely into the ear of the Stepmother. `Take Himself straight to the Forum.'

There were kisses and hugs on parting; there were tears in the Stepmother's eyes -- but, once at the Forum, Father stared out over that awesome vista of tall palm trees and colossal broken columns, and sighed, and said nothing. It was evident that what the columns confirmed for him was that all good things had passed away from the earth.

For the next few days we stared at several fountains, as directed by the Stepmother. We remarked upon the thickness of the Pantheon's walls. We observed that the buses and the taxis were bumpier because the streets were cobbled. We were impatient with the crowds near the apartment.

After a week we were all agreed that we were still missing the greyhounds. None of us dared quite to say out loud that we were most of all missing Lydia. Then the Stepmother surprised us.

`Look,' she said. She spoke bravely but with several pauses and gulps. `I know I ought not to, but I feel that I'm an intruder. I'm the gatecrasher on your grief.'

`Christina, please,' Father said.

`It's a fact,' she said. `I know this is my own marriage. I know this isn't what I ought to be feeling, but that's the way it is. Lydia was a honey. Lydia was the sweetest thing. I don't say I don't miss her. I don't say it doesn't hurt. But there's no way I'm going to feel about her the way you guys feel. It's not like having a part of my body lopped off. It's not like amputation ...' She was evidently holding back tears. She stopped and reformulated: `I feel that I owe it to the miscarriages,' she said, `that I have any rights here at all.'

`But this is appalling,' Father said. The Stepmother sniffed and wiped her nose and her eyes with her hand.

`I know that the dead babies are not comparable,' she said. She held out her hand to prevent any approach or expression of sympathy. `But I need to go away and be sad about them someplace where that doesn't make me feel so unworthy.'

`We've failed you,' Father said miserably.

`Please,' she said. `I'm going back to my sister's. I'm packed. The thing's all fixed. I'll stay there just as long as I feel I need to.'

Father and I looked helplessly at each other. I sensed that alarm bells were ringing in his brain.

`See out the fortnight here without me,' she said. `You'll manage. There's really no sense in us bouncing our miseries off each other.' There was nothing more to be said. She went into the bedroom and got her bag. `I'll see you guys back in England,' she said. She kissed us both once and walked over to the door. `I will come back,' she said. `You needn't doubt me.' Then she was gone.

Without the Stepmother, things were suddenly easier. The two of us stopped feeling the need to put on faces for each other. On our own, we just mooched. We mooched for days. And, all around us, the privacy of the alien language soothed us like a balm. It is the closest I have ever been to my father; the closeness during that time, when we developed our own half-life rhythm. We became more like siblings. In the absence of Lydia, I became my father's older sister. This is perhaps not surprising, since he is the youngest in a family of sisters and I am the elder of what was once two.

Some days we didn't go out at all; some days we did no more than find the nearest supermarket and throw food into a basket, and pass without words through the checkout. One day we sat at the very top of the Spanish Steps near the apartment, staring far down at the ant-sized tourists clustered around the ice-cream vans. We sat with our heads propped in our hands, our elbows on our knees.

`Ellen,' Father said eventually, `I must tell you that I am really rather at sea.'

I stared at the stones between my feet. Then I remembered `Dover Beach'. It came back to me, wearing a label that said, `This Book is NOT Literature' from a Christmas morning many years earlier. Off the top of my head, I began to recite the poem with its exhortation that we be true to one another, because the world that lies about us like a world of dreams, is in reality, nothing; null and void, a darkling plain. I recited it deadpan, having always shared with Lydia a horror of poetry recited `with expression'.

`There,' I said when I'd finished. `Perhaps you paid me to learn that off by heart.' Father put his arm around me. `Does it bother you that I look so much like her?' I said.

He turned his head and stared at me. `You don't look like her,' he said. `Strangers always thought that you looked alike. You never did to me.'

Then we kept on sitting there until our buttocks were numb and cold. We must have sat there for well over an hour. The Fiats and taxis way down below us had gradually leached their colour into the encroaching dusk.

`Ellie,' Father said, `your mother has an extraordinary notion. She wants to come back to me.'

`To you, maybe,' I said, a little bitterly, `but certainly not to me.' I spoke before I had quite assimilated what he was saying.

`It's nonsense, of course,' he said, `but we must go carefully. Liddie's death has unlocked something alarming. I must tell you that she writes to me and telephones constantly.'

I got up. `Well, she can't come back,' I said. I surprised myself with my own anger. `How dare she even suggest it?'

`No, of course not,' Father said. `Water under the bridge. It's absolutely not on. It's distressing, that's all. I have told her that the calls must stop.' Then he said, `She's always been so controlled, Ellen. I wonder now if you could possibly think of going to see her?'

` Me? ' I said, ` I'm not going to see her. I'm not. She doesn't even like me. She probably wishes it was me that was dead.'

Father paused. Then he said, `You must understand that she is not at all herself at the moment.'

`Good,' I said. `And what about Christina? How dare she do this when Christina is your wife now? Does she have the faintest clue about what has happened to Christina?'

`She knew that Christina was pregnant,' Father said. `I dare say she has come by the rest of it somehow, through the ether.'

`Well then,' I said.

`Yes,' Father said. `Ellen, depressed people can become quite incapable of seeing beyond themselves.'

`She never could,' I said and I started to cry.

`I take your point,' Father said. `Look, dearest. Don't worry about visiting. Not if the prospect is too upsetting.'

`It is too upsetting,' I said. I thought about my mother; about with what apparent ease she had left him and moved on. Now she had entirely moved on from Peter and me. So let her, if that was how she wanted it.

Then I thought about what Lydia and I had seen of the brief, but quite different interaction our father had had with the Stepmother -- before bereavement had got in the way.

`But you love Christina,' I said. `You don't even love her.'

Yes, he said.

`You don't love her,' I said again.

`Ellie,' he said. `Don't belittle the past. It's your past as well as mine. And it's Lydia's. I ought not to be talking to you like this. I'm sorry.'

`Yes you ought,' I said. `Because I'll tell you why Liddie and I were so giggly over that M and S lunch. Do you remember? We could tell that you loved Christina. I mean loved her. We could tell by the way you took her coat. We could tell by the way you filled her glass. It embarrassed us, don't you see?'

Father got up and joined me as I made ready to go. Then, on the way back, I said, `Are you sad about the twin babies?'

He was a long time in answering. `Ellen,' he said, `it has come to me recently that you and I have been trying so hard not to feel the loss of Lydia, that we have ended up scarcely able to feel anything at all.'

`Phone her,' I said. `Tell her to come back. Tell her to join us -- just for the weekend.'

`Do I have the right, I wonder?' he said.

`Phone her,' I said, still in my big sister mode, but I had been feeling very unlike a child of late, and certainly not young. It is odd that the death of my sister should have had this effect upon me, because while Lydia lived, I think we were always far more like twins.

The three of us spent that last weekend in Rome together. The Stepmother met us among the Saturday morning crowd in the Piazza Navona. She had had a very short haircut and she wore stylish new jeans that stopped six inches above her ankles. On her ridiculous size two feet she had new shoes -- tiny red shoes like ballet pumps. She wore a red spotted snuff handkerchief tied around her throat. She looked unburdened and very much happier. She looked very Roman Holiday .

The Stepmother mimicked the flamboyant gestures of the men on the Bernini fountain as we passed it on our way to the cafe. She was buoyant from a week with her sister's small children. Her head was full of Dr Seuss books. She and I could bounce them off each other as we walked.

`This one has a little star.'

`This one has a little car.'

`Say! what a lot of fish there are.'

She kissed Father smoochily, jumping up at his jaw. `Sit down, Roland,' she said. `I can't kiss you if you stand up. You know that. Have pity on the vertically challenged.'

Then, after the cafe, we made our way back to the apartment. At the entrance, I changed my mind. I employed an adult's tact.

`I'll go for a walk,' I said.

Once back in the piazza, I took note of a small severe church -- quite different from the extravagance of its surroundings -- and I entered the graveyard, finding it quite by chance. I discovered this to have a series of underground chapels decoratively laid out with the bones of dead monks. It brought home to me how much Father and I were lacking in any assuaging flair for the theatre of death.

When I got back, the Stepmother was making bathroom noises in the shower. My father was jauntily whistling `The Battle Hymn of the Republic' in the kitchen, where he had made a pot of tea and laid a tray. That is to say, he had made a pot of tea in a saucepan because the kitchen had no teapot. Neither did the cups have any saucers.

`Alas, poor foreigners,' I said. `What do they know about tea?'

He smiled at me. `Thank you, Ellen,' he said. He did not say what for. `You are a wise and wonderful girl,' he said.

On our last day we did the corny thing. The Stepmother coerced us. We went to St Peter's where she made us light candles for Lydia and also for the dead babies. The approach was an avenue of outrageous kitsch where I observed that the tourist shops were selling indulgences. It brought to mind Martin Luther: ninety-five faeces nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg. Faeces, theses, bones and pus. Will's leg is giving him gyp. Fair gyp.

`Did you know,' I said, `that Nietzsche oozed a pint of pus every day?' Father and the Stepmother looked at me, then they looked at each other. Syphilis, I said. `Lydia told me that.'

A little later, I thought of the Übermensch while staring at the gorgeous naked boys on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; boys bursting acorns from horns of plenty; boys with curls falling into their eyes; boys with sweatbands and bedroom glances, their accoutrements the colours of mango and pistachio ice-cream.

`Now why do I think of Peter?' said the Stepmother, as the crowd jostled us forward. I glanced back towards the altar where I saw that my father was staring hard at the great painting of the Last Judgement. Fire and Sleet and Candlelight. And cardboard. And bones. And hemp rope.

`What did you bury her in?' I said, as we left. `I mean, what was she wearing?'

`Oh,' Father said. `Oh --'

`White T-shirt and knickers,' the Stepmother said. `I thought you'd never ask.'

After that, Ellen's stepmother went back to her sister's in Fiesole, while Ellen and her father returned home, where the greyhounds were very pleased to see them. In the autumn, just as the Stepmother returned, Ellen went back to her student digs in Edinburgh and entered the second year. In the circumstances, she occasionally wished herself closer to home. Yet the city, as it had done through her first year, enchanted her and sustained her with its cold and stony grandeur; with its clear and crystal light. No one would have called her a frothy person. She was no longer a particularly sociable person. She was a person who -- as her stepmother had put it -- had experienced amputation. But, of course, that didn't show.

She began to work very hard. She had a few sedate, strictly ungiggly friends. There was nobody there for her like Peregrine Massingham, the great friend of her first year, or even like Izzy, or Stella, her housemates of the previous year. They had all gone. Peregrine, her favourite companion and indispensable cooking person, had graduated and left. Izzy Tench, the painter boy, likewise -- though, to her annoyance, he had left her one of his drawings in place of a cheque, as his contribution to the previous quarter's electricity bill. The drawing had been done in red chalk on grey paper and was of his beautiful girlfriend Stella; she of the cello and the mass of orange hair.

What puzzled Ellen was that Stella had not come back either, though she had only completed two of her four years. Someone else was due to take occupancy of the room that Stella and Izzy had shared. Yet all Stella's stuff had been left in the storeroom as if she'd meant to come back. It was bagged up in black plastic dustbin sacks and marked with her name. And on what had been Izzy's cruddy bedside chair, Stella had left her copy of Heart of Darkness , which Ellen took up, on that first night back, and read until four in the morning. And when she'd finished it, she read it again. And again.

Des Mullers Blumen: The Miller's Flowers
Das Wandern: Wandering
Morgengruss: Morning Greeting
Wohin?: Where to?
Tranenregen: Rain of Tears
Die liebe Farbe: The Beloved Colour
Danksagung an den Bach: Grateful Address to the Millstream
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

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The Travelling Hornplayer

0140281908

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