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because he was sent off to school when our mother died and he hardly saw Freddie at all after that. People always asked if Edmund and I were twins because we were so alike, but Freddie didn’t look like us. He was fat, and he had freckles and lots of stiff little orange curls like springs. The more I think about him—and I have thought about him a great deal over the years, a
very
great deal—the more I can see that he didn’t really ‘fit’. We looked like our mother, but Freddie didn’t look like anyone, certainly not my father, who was very handsome as a young man. I don’t think Freddie would have made a handsome man. He would have been petulant looking and that’s horrid. And he had the most strange eyes. They were swimmy and milky, and he never seemed to look directly at anything. I don’t think he could see very well, because he was always bumping into things and tripping over—infact that’s how I remember him best, sitting on the floor bawling when he’d just taken a tumble. I asked our nurse about it once and she said, ‘First cast the beam out of thine own eye,’ which was absolute Greek to me. But Freddie was her favourite. I came a very poor second.
    I have actually considered whether Freddie might not have been somebody else’s child. Somebody other than my father, that is. I don’t have anything that one could call evidence—just the lack of photographs, I suppose, and the way he looked… I don’t say my father knew this or suspected it, although he may have done, but it has crossed my mind on more than one occasion. Because of what happened, you see, what happened later… People are very stupid on the whole, they want to have black and white, everything to be black and white. That’s good, that’s bad, that’s right, that’s wrong, you love someone or you hate them. But you can’t, you can’t turn it on and off like a tap. You continue to love, even though you know it’s wrong or you have been harmed by that person—one goes on loving because one simply can’t help it. I don’t think my father could have stopped loving my mother, whatever happened, any more than I could have stopped loving him.
    Edmund thinks our father was an ogre, but I don’t agree. It was simply that he loved my mother very much, far more than he loved us. I think he had very extreme emotions and what he felt for her was a sort of worship. It was unfortunate that we—Edmund and I— both looked very like her and I think that was why he sent us away. Edmund would have gone off to school in any event, but there I was and worse, of course, being a girl… which is why I was parcelled up and sent off to Dennys, and Freddie with me. The servants told us that Father was working dreadfully hard and that waswhy he could never come to see us, but I think the truth was that he couldn’t bear to have us near him.
    I often wonder, if things had been different, would my life have been happy like Louisa’s? One can’t help but admire that certainty—well, there’s got to be something and you can hardly expect me to say I admire her dress sense. But that firmness, that steadfastness… That’s what we’re meant to have, people like us, that’s what makes us happy. But of course the more one knows, or suspects, the less likely one is to have happiness. Only ignorant people can be happy. I suppose that is why I have never discussed my doubts about Freddie with Edmund. Or our father. And I have never spoken to Edmund about our father, either. I didn’t want to make him unhappy. Besides, there’s no point in sitting here wondering about it all. It’s too late now. Far too late.
    This is why I say people are stupid, they could never understand this: when I was young, to please my father was the most important thing in my entire life. Because I adored him, you see. My mother had his love, but she didn’t have to do anything except be herself; and I wasn’t her, I couldn’t become her. My father was a very big man: