‘Don’t they keep you awake?’ I asked her.

‘No, silly. I cover them up and they go to sleep on their perches.’ Even this made us laugh.

Best of all, though, was Olivia’s little dressing table with its dainty drawers, its embroidered mats on the top and its bright, slanting looking-glass. The ones in our house looked as if someone had gone over them with sandpaper and they made your face look squiffy. The top of the dressing table was covered with all her pretty things, her silver-plated brush and comb, her jewellery box from which tumbled a muddle of hairslides and combs, necklaces, rings, and a little woven basket with a few of Elizabeth Kemp’s discarded lipsticks and powder compacts. She had perfume and ribbons, she had cushions on the bed and pretty prints on the walls of flower fairies and some chubby children playing with a spaniel pup.

My own room was comfortable enough, but very plain. Candlewick bedspread, my old doll and my favourite teddy, Bosey. A small table, books . . . And usually the only other rooms I saw were William’s, which was very dull, and Angus’s, with his model aeroplanes everywhere and the smell of adhesive. Olivia’s room seemed a place of enchantment.

And she made me feel like a girl.

‘Come on, Katie,’ she’d say. ‘Let’s make ourselves up.’ She’d daub my face with rouge and powder, pencil in wobbly lines along my eyebrows and smooth on lipstick with a flourish. Then I’d do her, once she’d taught me how. My mother never wore make-up, except the odd dab of powder which she applied as a kind of nervous habit like some people smoked cigarettes.

Then we’d sit squeezed side by side on the silky-seated stool in front of Olivia’s toilet mirror, our faces close together, admiring the effects we’d created. At other times we did clown faces. Or Livy would just paint her lips thickly with scarlet, and pout and roll her eyes at the glass until we were both laughing so much we couldn’t paint anything straight.

We played the piano together. We helped each other with our prep from school. Although she was usually top of the class I was sometimes able to help her, especially with arithmetic, which boosted my confidence no end because William was always held up as the one with the brains.

And most importantly, I could tell Livy anything.

‘You’re so lucky having a brother,’ she said to me wistfully one day.

‘No I’m not. I hate him.’

‘You don’t.’

‘All right. Not hate. But he’s such a smug boots. He’s always got to have done something marvellous all the time. He has to be best. And he’s smug to Angus too, and Angus is really good at some things and much kinder than William.’

‘Well I think it’s nice. Much better than being the only one all the time, like me.’

But I felt that being on your own would be quite all right if you had parents like Olivia’s: a beautiful, sweet mother like Elizabeth Kemp with her soft, blond looks, and Alec Kemp. The amazing, glorious Alec Kemp. He was the most exciting man I had ever met. For the first time in my life he and Olivia made me feel pretty. Since I met the Kemps I felt I had become a different person: more appreciated and contented than I had been since I was a very small child.