Diana had never turned to her mother for attention when she was old enough to be aware of it, after she and David had started school. She felt her mother’s other child, not necessarily less loved but somehow one too many for her mother’s attention since David demanded more and more of it, often if only to make their mother cross or disappointed in him. Diana trusted her mother to take care of them both, but it never occurred to Diana to trust her mother to understand either of them. By the time Diana was six and her heart had retreated from her brother sufficiently to clear her eyes, she understood him—that is, she saw through him—as their mother never would. He had figured out that boys were monsters, so he had to turn himself into a monster, at least when anyone was watching.

David at his worst was never quite able to kill Diana’s love. He drove it off far enough so that it, too, had to be nourished in her fantasies, which were nothing like those she invented for black curls and taskmasters. In them Diana and David were brother and sister as they had been, inseparable and unself-conscious, playing together in a world—this was the only unreality—where there were no other children whose cruel games she had always hated.

The day Diana had actually wanted to kill her brother, had her hands around his throat, what she wanted to kill was the idiot monster who possessed David, in order to set him free, to give him back to her. She had been differently afraid of him after that, not for what he could do to her, but of what he could change her into, a person capable of killing. She was certain Hugh had saved David’s life, not only on that occasion but in the discipline he had imposed.

Diana hadn’t actually disliked her stepfather as much as felt a distance from his large, male body, the natural menace of it even in repose. There was a different smell in the house after Hugh came, not the acid sweatiness of her brother or the fug of his room. Hugh was like one of those deodorizers that obliterate all the smells one expects (for Diana her mother’s smells: bath powder, baking, flowers) and leave something foreign and unnatural in their wake.