(“It’s so strange,” she says again, “because of all people he should know that the one thing he really wanted, that might have made him feel secure, was something he won’t ever be able to buy, no matter how much money he makes. I think it’s sad. But you know, I don’t really like him. He keeps you away, you know? He doesn’t let anybody come close, he doesn’t share anything, he won’t let anybody help. He’s really straight. He has all these standards, I don’t know where he got them because they’re not the way Daddy wanted us to be. He must have read them or something, and everybody has to conform to them. He’s very big on proper behaviour, being polite, doing the right thing with the right fork, that sort of thing. He never seems to be with you, if you know what I mean. He’s always behaving.”

(She is upset, and is silent for a moment, struggling to be calm. “I just feel so sad for him,” she continues finally. “It’s all such a waste.”

(Katie, I can see, is different in many ways. She wants to understand, which is why she is here; she is more open, ready to talk about how everything has affected her, hesitant only in how what she says may hurt me, kind in that way but stubbornly unkind in others, ruthless almost, perhaps more like her brother than she realizes; but with different goals, wanting to be herself but not knowing what that is. I am only one of her first steps.

(She does not look ahead, she says, does not want to know how her life will move, cannot conceive of actually planning it. More flexible, obviously, than Elliott, seeing him and deliberately taking an opposite route, surely more likeable, more approachable. Determined, with the same determination as her brother, but their ends are different and so she doesn’t see it. After lunch we do the dishes, and I am remembering again and she lets me be. She says she has brought a book that she wants to finish, and I go back into my garden, where everything is the same and full of changes.)

Everything was quite different with Katie.

When Elliott was almost two years old, Stephen and I decided it was time to have another child. Everyone then said it was unhealthy to be, or have, an only child and the experts we (or I) read so assiduously recommended that children be spaced apart by two or three years.