I was spending more time with Sue. She seemed to like me, or at least was prepared to ignore me. She passed much of her time at home reading in her bedroom, and she never objected to me lying around in there. She read novels about girls her own age, thirteen or so, who had adventures at their boarding schools. From the local library she borrowed large, illustrated books about dinosaurs or volcanoes or the fish of tropical seas. Sometimes I thumbed through them, looking at the pictures. None of the information interested me. I was suspicious of the paintings of the dinosaurs, and I told Sue that no one could really know what they looked like. She told me about skeletons and all the clues were there to help in a reconstruction. We argued all afternoon. She knew far more than I, but I was determined not to let her win. Finally, bored and exasperated, we became sulky and left each other alone.

But most often we talked like conspirators, about the family and all the other people we knew, careful scrutinies of their behaviour and appearance, what they were ‘really like’. We wondered how ill our mother was.