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by finding Dr. Wolfe.”
    “There’d be no argument then,” agreed Anna.
    “Don’t, please, say anything about this to anyone else.”
    “Certainly not.”
    “Not even to Kevin.”
    “All right. Not even to Kevin. Though I share most secrets with him.”
    They walked down the hill toward the road. In a curious way Peter felt that the last few minutes had broken down all restraints between them. It seemed perfectly natural that they should find a sheltered dip in the hillside and sit down in it. He had no wish – or no immediate wish – to do anything but talk.
    “Is Kevin your twin?”
    “He was born five minutes after me. In a lovely, decrepit old mansion house in the north of Donegal, under the Derryveagh Mountains. It’s a peaceful corner of northern Ireland even now, so I’m told, though we haven’t been back in the last five years. Don’t you think it’s a mistake to go back to somewhere where you’ve been very happy?”
    “Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, I do.”
    “My mother died when we were born. Perhaps the local midwife wasn’t very clever. I don’t know. It must have upset Father badly, but he never let it worry us. We had a succession of women who were called housekeepers. I think Father slept with most of them. It didn’t worry us at the time and it doesn’t worry me now. It wasn’t an eighteenth-century sort of household. Father taught us the important things, like how to ride properly and handle a gun or a fly rod. We went to school later and hated it. I ran away three times.”
    Peter willed her to go on talking. She was lying back, propping herself on her elbows. The shirt she was wearing was made of some thin material which looked like cheesecloth. It was biscuit coloured, with a thin blue stripe.
    “Father never seemed to worry about anything. Certainly he never worried about money. There was enough, that was all that mattered. I gather it came from a family brewery which his father and his uncle had set up. Money was made for spending, not keeping. What would have happened in the end, I don’t know. He was killed out hunting, and lawyers took over and looked grim and talked about insolvency and the workhouse, but it didn’t happen, because that very year they found enormous deposits of bauxite on our property. That’s really all there is to tell. Kevin and I are a hopeless pair. We’ve not been trained to do anything useful, so we wander round enjoying ourselves. Now tell me about you.”
    “It won’t be nearly as interesting as yours.”
    “I hope it was happy, because I don’t really enjoy gloomy stories.”
    “Then I’ll tell you about the happy part. It was when I was ten and my older brother was twelve. We had a bungalow on the Thames at Laleham. That’s a little place about fifteen miles outside London. We were both at boarding school, but we spent all our holidays there, winter and summer. In some ways the winter was best, when the river was high and there weren’t too many people about. We became real water rats. We had a punt and a dinghy and a canoe, and we took them out in all weathers. There wasn’t any trick of watermanship we didn’t know and improve on. Once, for a bet, I took a canoe across the river standing up in it and using a punt pole, and if you think that’s easy, you ought to try it. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had fallen in, I was only wearing bathing trunks.”
    Anna laughed and said, “I can just see you, Peter, looking like a long, skinny spider.”
    “I was rather skinny. Another thing we used to do was take the punt upstream, dive out of it, and let it drift down empty, with us swimming behind it and almost underneath it. People would see it was adrift and get very worried and come out to catch it, and we used to pop out of the water like seals and grin at them, which made them furious. And sometimes we’d come home blue with cold, and Mother would make us have a hot bath and cook great plates of porridge for us. It was a