Free The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain

where I’ve lived. My brother does this too: together, we can reconstruct places, object by object. I think this gift or skill of ours is not really a gift or skill at all, but merely a habit into which, as soon as we could talk, we were obliged to fall: because our father was blind. He was blind by the time we were born and he never saw us. He saw our mother for one year of their married life, and I must say that she honestly was, at that time, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Well, according to the photographs she was. We, her sons, never recognised beauty (or what I now, as a man, think of as beauty) in her. We were too young, too close to her. We loved the smell of her, especially when she wore furs, but the fact that she was a beautiful woman entirely escaped our understanding. What we did understand, however, from the moment we could read and converse and were taken travelling, was the difference between our mother’s background and culture and our father’s background and culture. Our father was French, the son of a colonel in the French army who was in turn the son of a colonel in the French army, and so on. His side of the family won so many medals, you could start a medal shop in the Rue des Saints Pères with them. Anyway, we are descended from a line of brave men. (The ribbon attached to medals is of a quality that I find very pleasing to handle: ribbed, silken and heavy. My father’s hands have the feel of medal ribbon, wrinkled and silky.)
    Our mother was English. She was born Emily Tregowan, the daughter of a self-educated Cornishman who made a respectable name in publishing. Though she spent almost all her married life in France, she never, I think, immersed herself in it, so that you could always perceive her Englishness sticking out like a flower too tall for the arrangement it’s set in. And we, sent to an English boarding school, taken on visits to our Cornish grandfather in blustery summers, spent our childhood trying to decide what we were. At our boarding school, we were known as the Frog Twins. In Paris, neighbours referred to us as ‘les gosses Anglais’. We preferred Paris to boarding school, as any boy would, but we liked the wildness of Cornwall. We knew that our father and all his ancestors had been brave, but Cornwall seemed to tell us that our mother and all hers had been wild, and we were inclined to prefer wildness to bravery. We are twins. We are now forty-two and both of us have lived, married and worked in France only. We never visit England, except occasionally on business, so time, you might say, has decided what we are: we are French. Yet our mother, and Cornwall, and what we once recognised was wild in a world of tame things have never passed out of memory and never will.
    I shall describe us, not as we are now, but as we were at the time when our mother died, and our father – five years younger than she was – decided very quickly to remarry. Our mother died on a January Sunday near to our fifteenth birthday. Our English headmaster summoned us to his smokey study to unfold this colossal tiding. He stood up behind his oak desk and stared at us over his pipe: sallow, dark-haired boys with a dusting of pimples, thin hands, legs thinner than the gym master would have liked, an identical tendency to glower. We glowered, however, out of eyes the colour of scabious flowers – an extraordinary feature in us that has conquered any number of women, and which, among the traits which made up her beauty, we inherited from our mother. The rest of us is, and was already at fifteen, recognisably our father’s: his thick hair, his small limbs, his yellowy complexion.
    The news, I suppose, travelled round the school in delicious whispers: ‘the Frog Twins’ mother just died!’ Boys squirmed with horror and delight. But we were snatched away and put on trains and freezing steamers till we reached Paris and the house in the Avenue