Free Shadows on the Nile by Kate Furnivall Page B

first ever lie to you. I do not tell you how much they can do to me with their needles.
    ‘Why do you come here?’
    ‘Christ, Georgie, you don’t give up, do you?’
    ‘Why should I?’
    You laugh. ‘You have a point. No wonder you’re good at learning things. Not lazy like me. All right, I’ll tell you why I come here.’
    You are suddenly so intense, you frighten me. I stare at the white wall and say nothing.
    ‘I come because you and I are two halves of the same person.’
    ‘That is a lie. How can we be …?’
    ‘Not literally, Georgie. It’s just a way of saying that youand I need each other.’
    I nod. ‘That is true.’
    ‘I grew up wanting to be you. Wanting my sister to love me the way she loved you, but always knowing I was second best. I could never do the things you did, the clever stuff of remembering lists and patterns and reciting pages of Sherlock Holmes stories by heart. Jessie admired you more than she will ever admire me.’
    I feel a heat in my chest, in my cheeks, in the palms of my hands. Jessie admired me. I didn’t know. ‘I thought she wanted me to be sent away,’ I say and you shake your head.
    ‘No. It was because of me that they got rid of you. I was responsible.’ You tug at your hair too hard, much too hard. ‘If our parents had not found me, you might have stayed there with Jessie and she would have taught you to behave properly. She can teach anything. She taught me to be you in many ways, to like the things you liked, to do the things you did, but I wasn’t much good at it.’
    My mind feels as if somebody’s hands are inside it, taking it apart.
    ‘Tim, did she talk about me?’
    ‘Yes. But our parents never did. They would not let your name be spoken in the house, so I knew I had to make them love me or they would send me away as well. But Jessie told me how you used to stand up to them, how you defied them, and I envied you your courage.’ You smile at me and I long to give you whatever it is you need.
    ‘You have courage,’ I say. ‘You come to this place every Saturday. I would run away.’
    You laugh and I am happy. I made you laugh. You stand up but you know better than to come close.
    ‘So you see, Georgie, I could never allow myself just to be me. For Jessie I tried to be you and for our parents I tried to be the perfect son. And I’m still doing it.’ You point a finger at me and then at my room. ‘Only here can I be myself, no pretending, no lies. Just me. Just you. With all our ugly and deformed bits on view.’
    I raise my eyes and make myself fix themon your face.
    ‘Understand?’ you ask.
    ‘Let’s have another cigarette.’

9

    Chamford Court was not what Jessie expected. Some sort of pretentious Victorian pile built by a local merchant who had made his fortune out of wool or tin mining in the last century. A dreary home built to impress the local gentry. Solid and dull. That’s what Jessie had expected and she had no patience with bad architecture. It grated on her nerves worse than sandpaper on teeth. But bad architecture wasn’t what she found.
    She drove into the village of Lower Lampton, a tired cluster of red-brick cottages with a last few roses losing their petals to the cold October wind. She enquired at the pub and was directed down a winding lane, past a sleepy church and up an incline. ‘About a mile out of town,’ the landlord told her.
    Town?
He called this dead-in-a-hole place a
town
?
    ‘Can’t miss it,’ he added with a chuckle. ‘It’s got gates.’
    It did indeed have gates. Twenty feet high. Wrought iron. Massive stone pillars on either side, with an arch spanning the gap between them and a magnificent stone stag rampant on top of it, but the whole gateway was in ruins. Rust and weeds had claimed it as their own, so that the stag was choked by ivy and the open gates hung by a thread on one hinge. Behind them a longpotholed drive cut a line as straight as a poker through rough pastureland and disappeared behind a