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  As the twins’ third birthday approached, Flora was speaking in whole sentences but Rory was still verbally silent. Dora worried aloud that he was deaf or mute although she knew he was neither. Ettie pointed out that Rory scarcely needed to talk with such a vocal twin to interpret his every wish. Rory had only to look up, point at a toy and Flora would interpret: ‘Wor want his teddy.’

  Flora observed her brother closely as if he were an object of fascination, like an animal at the zoo. She kept up a kind of running commentary on his every move. If Rory rubbed his eyes Flora would announce, ‘Wor tired now.’ If a look of pained concentration stole over his face, Flora would exclaim, ‘Wor want his potty! Quick!’

  Flora could pronounce neither of their names and they emerged as ‘Wor’ and ‘For’. Sometimes the two monosyllables were indistinguishable and it was unclear whether Flora was talking about herself or Rory. Since she eventually seemed able to interpret most of his needs without even looking at him, it was often unclear which twin she was referring to, or even if she herself made a distinction.

  The family tended to address Flora as spokesperson for the twins. They tried to talk to Rory through her but eventually they just talked to Flora. Rory retreated still further into his impenetrable musical world. Dora fretted but Archie said it was mere laziness and cited an older brother of his who hadn’t said a complete sentence before starting school but who’d made up for lost time by becoming an MP. Dora was not reassured.

  Ettie suggested separating the twins for a day to see what happened. Only then did it occur to Dora that the twins had never been apart for more than a few minutes at a time. She agreed readily. Ettie took Flora out in the pushchair doing her best to ignore the child’s increasingly frantic cries as she looked at the empty space beside her, aghast.

  ‘Where’s Wor gone? Aunt Ettie, where’s Wor?’

  Dora sat on the hearthrug with Rory, surrounded by a battery of toys including a new wooden xylophone. He looked round the room, his eyes darting, his head swivelling at the slightest sound, his ears cocked for Flora. Dora tried to distract him. Rory’s head movements increased in their rapidity, taking on the appearance of a nervous tic. His droning hum began, soon punctuated by heartbroken gulping sounds as he cried in his own distinctive, almost silent way. Dora picked up the small hammer of the xylophone and picked out a tune, singing unsteadily.

  ‘Three blind mice…

  Three blind mice…’

  Rory took no notice and started to make a new sound, pressing his lips together and blowing, as if he would burst. The sound that emerged was ‘Fff… Fff…’

  Dora paused, the little hammer in mid-air. ‘Flora? Are you trying to say Flora, Rory? For?’

  The boy looked round the room and pointed at the door, still puffing at his lips. ‘Fff…’

  ‘Flora! Say “Flora”, Rory!’

  His head jerked back and he sobbed, a terrible groaning sound that appeared to come from his stomach. Dora felt uneasy but lied cheerfully about Flora’s imminent return. She beat out Three Blind Mice again, singing the words loudly in an attempt to drown Rory’s cries, then, dropping the hammer, she gathered him into her arms, unable to bear his distress. She rocked him back and forth, stroking his thick fair hair back from his forehead until he seemed a little calmer. The child pointed to the hammer on the floor, then looked round for Flora. As he started to cry again Dora reached hurriedly for the hammer and put it into his hand.

  Rory looked at the spherical head of the hammer, his silky golden brows twisted into a frown, as if the hammer itself had been the source of the music, now fallen strangely silent. He turned his head quickly and looked up at Dora. Another jerk of the head as he stared at the door, then his eyes settled on the hammer again. He heaved a deep, shuddering sigh. His mouth opened but at first there was no sound. Then to the tune of Three Blind Mice Rory sang, ‘Where - For - gone?’ He looked up at his mother, startled, as if it were she who had sung. Dora was too astonished to answer and Rory sang again. ‘Where - For - gone?’

  Breathless, Dora sang tentatively in reply, ‘For - gone - out.’ Then, more confidently, ‘For - back - soon!’

  Rory smiled and chuckled. Dora hugged him tight and kissed his cheek. ‘Clever Rory!’ She grasped the hammer and beat out the four notes of Big Ben’s chimes on the xylophone, singing boldly, ‘Where - has - For - gone? - She’ll - be - back - soon!’ Rory laughed again. Dora repeated her improvisation to Rory’s increasing delight. He nodded his head vigorously to the beat of the music. As he grabbed the hammer from Dora the front door slammed. Rory’s head jerked upwards, catching Dora painfully under the chin. He fixed his eyes on the door, scarcely breathing. The handle rattled and Flora charged into the room, her face grubby and tear-stained. Ettie followed, looking exhausted. ‘I’m sorry, Dora. She was quite inconsolable. I thought we’d better come back. She was making herself sick with crying. Did Rory fare any better?’

  Flora threw her arms round her brother and squeezed. ‘Wor!’ She caught sight of the hammer in his fist and snatched it away. ‘What’s this for?’ She tapped him on the head with it. Rory beamed.

  Dora whispered, ‘Give it back to him and he might show you.’

  Reluctantly, Flora handed the hammer back to Rory. He stared at the end again, then at his sister. Grasping the hammer tightly, he opened his mouth and sang softly, to the tune of Big Ben’s chimes, ‘Where - you - gone - For?’

  Flora’s jaw dropped and her eyes widened. For the first time in her short life, she was speechless. Rory laughed delightedly and tapped her on the nose with the hammer.

  Rory and the xylophone were inseparable thereafter. His speech, once started, developed quickly but it was many months before he could speak without singing. Thus, at the age of three he started to compose his own music so that he could talk. When many years later he said in an interview that he had learned to compose music before he had learned to talk, the claim was dismissed as artistic licence on the part of an eccentric musician, but in fact the statement was quite true.

  They said that was when I started to feel jealous of my Wunderkind brother. Attention-seeking Flora, little Miss Look-at-Me couldn’t cope with the competition. But that wasn’t it at all. Jealousy wasn’t the problem, but they didn’t have the words to describe what was really going on. It was the first time Rory had seemed separate from me and I couldn’t handle it. My brother was me and I was him, we came as a package, an indivisible whole. Or so I’d thought.

  The tantrums and spitefulness weren’t sibling rivalry or even just plain naughtiness as my benighted father thought. It was a form of grief. They’d probably call it “separation anxiety” nowadays. I was trying to cope with having half my self amputated, without anaesthetic. I was a Siamese twin forcibly separated when I’d thought we’d been doing quite nicely, thank you.

  Rory survived the operation. I didn’t. I just took a long time - a lifetime - to die.

  1948

  Flora’s performance as the Virgin Mary was perhaps the first and last time she felt herself to be the star of the show that was to be her life. With her fine, pale blonde hair, her large blue eyes and air of intelligent composure, there was no question but that Flora Dunbar should play Mary in the St Ethelred’s Elementary School nativity play. As Miss Stapleton remarked in the staff-room, puffing on her Craven A, ‘That child has presence - and she will look lovely in blue.’ She didn’t add that unless they put the Dunbar girl centre-stage in a spotlight, she would find some other, less acceptable way of drawing attention to herself. Damage limitation was a concept that hovered on the outskirts of Miss Stapleton’s mind, but she was too kind-hearted to acknowledge it.

  Equally easy to cast was her brother Rory as the Angel Gabriel. Apart from his golden hair and an appropriately solemn expression, Rory had a beautiful singing voice and would cope well with the angelic solo Miss Stapleton had in mind, informing Mary of her impending happy event.

  The staff all agreed they’d be sorry to lose Rory. ‘A c
rying shame,’ was the general consensus. That some of the best boys were sent away to public school was neither kind to the boys nor fair on the girls but, as Miss Stapleton pointed out philosophically, brushing ash from her lap, that was the way of the world for those who could afford to choose.

  But she did wonder how the Dunbar lad - strangely aloof, yet somehow vulnerable - would cope with the rigours of boarding school. It was hard to imagine him separated from his more robust sister. Miss Stapleton, with her many years’ experience of young children, thought there would probably be trouble.

  1949

  Rory was making his preparations to run away from school.

  His letters home had been censored; his painted measles had failed to convince Matron and had simply earned him a stern lecture from his Housemaster. Refusing to speak had disconcerted staff and pupils alike for a week but had achieved nothing beyond an even sterner talk from his Housemaster, to which Rory had made no reply. He’d refused to make a sound even when being beaten.

  So there was nothing for it now. He was going to have to run away if he was ever to make them understand.

  Dora answered the door to a police constable accompanied by an urchin whose face and clothes were so filthy she stepped back in alarm. Then she recognised the badge on the boy’s blazer and gasped. As she enveloped Rory in her arms the constable explained that the boy had evidently been sleeping rough and had collapsed in a neighbouring village. A doctor had been summoned and pronounced the child to be suffering from exhaustion and dehydration. Rory couldn’t - or wouldn’t - speak and had nothing on his person to identify him, but someone at the surgery had recognised the school badge. The receptionist had rung to enquire about absconders and Rory had been identified at once. Matron, much relieved, confirmed that there had been ‘a spot of trouble’ recently. She’d suggested the boy be sent home for a few days to recover from his ordeal.

  Later, when Rory was in the bath, Dora asked him why he’d run away. He was silent for a while then said, with a croak, ‘Because they found the tunnel.’

  ‘Tunnel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were digging a tunnel?’

  ‘Yes. Me and Parsons. So we could escape. But Mr Abbott - the gardener,’ Rory explained, ‘fell into it with his wheelbarrow.’ Rory’s thin frame heaved a sigh. ‘It was taking far too long anyway… Parsons was useless at digging.’

  ‘What I actually meant, Rory,’ said Dora, as she applied plasters to his blistered feet, ‘was why did you feel the need to run away from school? Why did you want to come home?’

  Rory blinked at his mother in astonishment. ‘To see Flor, of course. I thought she’d be missing me.’

  1987

  Flora sat on the stairs, clad in an old pair of pyjamas and a raincoat, waiting. A mouse appeared from behind the skirting board and scurried across the hall floor. She watched it without interest, her eyes unfocused. The rain had started up again and she could hear the penetrating drip-drip as water fell through a hole in the roof and landed in the bucket. She rubbed at her knee. The damp was making her joints ache. Pulling her raincoat around her more tightly, she poured the last of the vodka into a grubby tumbler. Beyond the heavy rain Flora thought she heard a distant car engine. She stared fixedly at the front door.

  A car drew up outside the house, braking suddenly. Flora listened for the door opening but there was no sound apart from the accelerando of dripping water. Eventually a car door opened and shut. A firm knock on the front door sent it swinging on its hinges.

  Rory stood on the threshold, his hair and clothes unkempt, his face drawn, his features blurred by a two-day growth of beard.

  ‘Hello, Ror.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You look as if you’ve been sleeping in ditches.’

  ‘No… In the car. I didn’t want to stop.’

  ‘You’ve driven straight here? From Suffolk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus! Have you eaten?’

  ‘I had something…’ He cast his eyes upwards as if trying to remember. ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Well, there’s not much here. Only tins.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Did you bring booze by any chance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pity. There’s no kindling left either. It’s bloody cold. How did we use to bear it here?’

  He shrugged, his shoulders tense. ‘We were kids.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Flora…’

  ‘Yes?’

  Rory’s gaze was level but his chest rose and fell as he tried to control his breathing. ‘You know I will never forgive you for this.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Flora said mildly. ‘But you see, Ror, I’m past caring if anyone forgives me. Even you. The only thing that matters to me now is that you’re here. Come in and shut the door. Mind that hole in the floorboards. The dry rot’s got a lot worse.’

  Rory pushed the door shut behind him and stood shivering on the worn coconut mat. He looked down at the filthy floor and said absently, ‘Those are bat droppings.’

  ‘Yes. We’ve got bats, mice, a barn owl and a nest of robins. And that’s just indoors. Outdoors we have a pine marten.’

  ‘Really?’ Rory’s face was slashed by a sudden bright smile.

  ‘Yes. I put scraps out for him and he comes out of the woods at dusk… It can’t be the same one, can it?’

  Rory shook his head. ‘After thirty-odd years? No, of course not. It’s probably a descendant. Can it peel hard-boiled eggs?’

  Flora smiled, her face radiant. ‘Yes.’

  ‘There you are then.’ And with that Rory covered his face with his hands and started to cry silently.

  Flora rose unsteadily from the stairs, raised her glass and said, ‘Welcome back, Rory.’

  Chapter 2

  1953

  Flora slapped her book shut, irritated. Rory’s playing didn’t usually annoy her, she didn’t usually even register it, but today he was playing scales, faultlessly but repeatedly, shredding her nerves. The Naughtiest Girl in the School could not compete. Flora leaned back in her armchair and put her fingers in her ears but she could still hear the relentlessly ascending and descending octaves. She jumped to her feet and, for want of anything better to do, decided she’d go and annoy Rory.

  He didn’t look up as she entered the music room. As Flora approached the grand piano she could just see his eyes above the music stand, concentrating fiercely. His head swayed slightly as his hands travelled back and forth over the keyboard. Flora walked round and stood beside the piano stool. On the music stand in front of Rory was this week’s copy of The Eagle, open at a double-page spread of Dan Dare’s adventures in outer space. Flora wasn’t surprised. Rory quite often read while practising. She began her inquisition.

  ‘How can you read and play at the same time?’

  Without breaking his rhythm or moving his head Rory replied, ‘Easy. I’m not thinking about the scales. My hands do them on their own.’

  ‘How can you talk and play at the same time?’

  ‘How can you talk and breathe at the same time?’

  Flora thought for a moment. ‘Don’t know. I never think about breathing.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s different parts of the brain. What I’m doing with my hands is just mechanical. They’ve got a life of their own.’ Flora watched his hands moving up and down like elegant crabs and could see what he meant. ‘I’m not doing it - they’re doing it.’

  Flora hated it when Rory talked like that. It gave her the creeps. His hands continued relentlessly and she thought briefly of slamming the piano lid shut, of smashing Rory’s fingers. She laid her hand surreptitiously on the lid, luxuriating for a moment in her power, in the possibility of wickedness.

  ‘Turn the page for me, Flor.’

  Startled by Rory’s voice, she did as he asked, automatically, because in the end Flora always did what Rory wanted. The moment to destroy her brother’s hands seemed to have passed and so she
left the room, consoling herself with delusions of power and her own magnanimity.

  1950

  Flora was never sure exactly when she realised she was bad. She couldn’t actually remember ever having thought she was good. ‘Flora! You bad girl!’ was a phrase she’d grown up with, had heard so often it had come to seem like an additional name, like her middle name, Elizabeth. Flora wasn’t sure what it was about her that was so very bad but it seemed clear she was worse than Rory, who didn’t often do bad things, largely because he could get Flora to do them for him.

  Some of the things that made Flora “bad” didn’t seem fair at all. Rory would come in from playing football, covered in mud, even bleeding sometimes, but he was never told he was “bad”, yet when Flora fell over on the grass when she was skipping and got grass stains on a new frock, she was told she was a bad girl for spoiling it. Flora didn’t understand.

  Once, on a rainy day, she’d accepted a ride home from the park from a nice man in a car and her mother had thrown up her hands in horror and shouted. When Dora asked if the man had touched her Flora said no, he’d just given her a sweet. This wasn’t true, but Flora hadn’t wanted to upset her mother any further by saying that the man had touched her, had laid his warm, rough hand on her bare legs and slid it up her skirt and touched her knickers. Flora hadn’t understood why the man had done this, but it hadn’t hurt and the sweet - a barley sugar - was very nice, so Flora hadn’t really minded. But when her mother shouted, she felt bad.

  Dora had said the friendly man was bad, but she didn’t say why. She’d said he might have hurt her, but as he hadn’t, Flora couldn’t see what was so very bad about him, especially as he’d given her a sweet. Flora thought that seemed kind, not bad. It was all very confusing. But Flora could certainly see that if the man was bad, she must be worse. He hadn’t actually done anything bad, but Flora had. She’d told a lie.