Читать книгу The Other Half of Augusta Hope - Joanna Glen - Страница 19

I first heard the word España when Diego moved into Willow Crescent. If somebody had told me there was a word for a country which sounded as light and airy and beautiful as this, I might never have chosen Burundi.

I thought (obviously) that the country which joined on to France had the name of Spain, which rhymes with pain and plain and rain.

We’d ventured as far as France on our August holidays, which we documented in sticky photo albums, covered by cellophane, annotated by my mother and arranged in date order.

People loved to comment on the differences between Julia and me, never looking through the albums without saying which one of us was taller, smaller, thinner, fatter, paler, darker.

This is what happens with twins.

I quickly became the clever one – and Julia was obliged to oppose me. Julia quickly became the pretty one – and you see where I am going with this. And, in seasons, being objective, I was not an attractive child.

There I was, knobbly-kneed and squinting on the beach in Benodet, twenty kilometres from Quimper, where we were staying, and where my mother bought the lasagne dish.

There I was in Wales, skinny and tall, with slightly lank hair.

It rained a lot on that holiday, but we swam in the pool anyway. My father stood under an umbrella with our towels over his arm, and my mother stood next to him, holding my glasses and intercepting me as I climbed out, so that I didn’t bump into anything. My grandmother sat in the pool café, storing up criticisms of our fellow guests to share with us later.

‘Far too much squinting at books,’ said my mother, hooking the spectacle arms around my damp ears, then trying to pat me on my upper arm. I wriggled from her touch. I didn’t like my parents to touch me, and because I wriggled, they gave up trying and lavished their touch on Julia.

In our tiny pinewood bedroom, I read Julia poems, which she tolerated, and excerpts from a book called An Instant in the Wind which I’d found on my grandmother’s shelves. I’d marked the sex scenes between the white woman and her black slave with shop receipts so I could read them aloud to her in bed.

My mother followed us around the damp log cabin camp, ‘keeping an eye’ because Amanda Dowler went missing on her way home from school and her body was found in the River Thames. Then, would you believe it? On the fourth day of the holiday, two girls called Holly and Jessica went missing in a place called Soham. Julia and I prayed so hard that they would be found safe and well. But they weren’t. Their plight sent my mother nearly over the edge, and she started saying that she didn’t want us to walk to school any more. We would be kidnapped and sold to traffickers and turned into prostitutes.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said my grandmother.