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doubtless she’ll be over later,’ a temptation which she resists with difficulty.
    ‘We were just speaking of Sarah and Catherine’s mother. The girl’s the image of her, isn’t she?’
    ‘Remarkable likeness,’ says Peter, not smiling and not greeting Catherine, in fact barely glancing at her as he cuts a slice of cake for himself. Catherine correctly recognizes the words as a veiled insult, for she knows that Peter disliked her mother, finding her distant and cold, and he thinks that Catherine is in the same mould.
    ‘Now Sarah’s a different matter altogether,’ Ellen begins, but Catherine interrupts her rudely.
    ‘We’re twins,’ she flatly says. ‘Identical twins.’
    Ellen purses her lips and then says coldly, ‘Well, yes. I suppose you are … in some respects.’
    Catherine rises to her feet. ‘I must be going,’ she says, and in her haste to leave she almost shatters the frail little teacup. She knows that her departure is too abrupt to be politic; and in the last look Ellen gives her there is both bafflement and barely veiled hostility.
    Now Catherine wonders nervously if Peter will mention her odd behaviour to Sarah when she goes to the cottage that afternoon. She knows that Sarah will go, for even as they lift the boxes to carry them upstairs for storage, Catherine sees her sister look out of the window again, and then glance at her watch.
    *
    A short time later, Sarah stands by her bedroom window watching the cottage. Every Saturday afternoon Ellen goes to the next town where she spends some hours giving music lessons in a rented room. Sarah waits patiently, as she waits every week for Ellen’s departure. As she stands there she idly takes in her hand the tiger cowrie shell which Peter gave to her as a Christmas gift. Bright, smooth, cold as a stone, she turns it over in her hand and watches it catch the light, then strokes it gently against her face. She likes the colours: soft and dark and dun, yet still it is hard and bright.
    She finds it hard to believe that this is a natural object, a thing from the sea; hard to believe that there are places where such things can be picked up along the shoreline. She looks at theshell and thinks, What have we to touch this ? The image of a gull’s egg drifts unbidden into her mind. Once they had gathered gulls’ eggs out on an island, and she remembers them vividly: dun, like the cowrie, but duller, frailer, and weighty with the life of the bird within. She sets the sea shell on the window-sill and she folds her arms.
    She hates her eagerness to go to the cottage. Week by week the importance of these visits has grown, until now they are the only things which make her life bearable. She wishes this were not the case. She knows that Peter does not realize how desperately she needs to visit him every week. While she resents his obtuse failure to see this, she is relieved too, for she knows that as soon as he notices her dependence he will also realize the power which he has to control her happiness. She fears and dreads that.
    He must know that she will come to him that afternoon, for she goes without fail, and she wishes that for once she had the courage to stay at home. But even as she thinks this she sees the door of the cottage open, and Ellen comes out, bundled up against the cold and carrying a flat music case of tan leather. And as soon as Sarah sees this, she goes from the room to fetch her overcoat and boots.
    *
    Unlike her sister, Sarah loves the little cottage in which so little has changed over the years. The bobbled red cloth across the overmantel, the long brass fire-irons lying in the fender, the curtains of heavy silk and the tiny china cups: all these she remembers from her childhood. The self-consciously gentrified air of the place appeals to her, and she is glad of the absence of all things concerning farm life. Looking over to the window when she enters, she sees a table stacked with blue-backed school exercise books.
    ‘Am I