On holiday in St. Ives we do not keep to our rigid London schedules. Guests come and go according to the dictates of the trains and not the immutable pattern of meal and visiting times we live by at home. Even Father appears released from the relentless burden of work that oppresses him in London, finding time for walks, outings, games. We are given an unprecedented freedom to roam the garden and neighboring beach almost at will. The house is light and airy, the rooms opening out of each other like origami boxes. Somehow Mother makes all the piecemeal arrangements coalesce.

It is here that I come alive. Shut up all year like Persephone, it is as if my reward for the sacrifice, the absence of horizon, is a sudden baptism of light. Like a starved prisoner I drink it in. All summer long I try to bottle the light, store it up, capture it in my sketches, so that I can take it back to London with me and feed on it during the dreary winter months. In St. Ives I am at liberty to draw and paint all day. It is here that I do my first serious exercises, Stella guiding my hand as I discover new shapes to fill the dark.

Thoby looks preposterous in his suit, as if he is trying to impersonate a grownup. Mother tucks a clean handkerchief into his pocket and pulls his collar straight. Then she beckons us forward. We shake hands, conscious of our awkwardness. Father appears at the top of the stairs and adds a final injunction to the leave-taking. We watch Thoby vanish into his carriage and I feel your fingers clutch mine. It is beginning to dawn on both of us that our beloved brother will not be home for some time.

Did we long to follow Thoby to school? It is a complicated question. Part of me yearned to break free from that dark, imprisoning house and discover life for myself, while another part drew back, reluctant to relinquish the familiar template. There is no doubt that his going sealed us even more completely into our pact. We became each other’s mirrors, as our lessons and walks marked the contours of a day in which we were required to depend largely on ourselves. We spent hours alone together in the small conservatory, you reading aloud while I sketched, hours open-eyed in our adjacent beds at night, your tales the only glow in the unremitting black. To this day, when I read it is your voice and not mine that I hear, your pitch inflecting the thoughts that beat in my head as I drift off to sleep.