Turning the Stones by Debra Daley Page A

to Em, while she shaves me a nib.’
    You see Eliza’s mettle? She ploughs on undeterred, although it requires dragging out a dog-eared tale that Miss Broadbent and I both had heard often before in several inconsistent versions. The gist of it was Eliza’s unexplained fall into a river followed by a heroic rescue by her brother. The story ends with Johnny wringing his hands with concern, while she hovers between life and death in his rooms in Cambridge, wrapped for comfort in the skin of a lion, or sometimes a tiger, that he happened to have ready for just such an occasion.
    Eliza had a fund of preposterous accounts of things that never happened between her and Johnny. You were bound to feel sorry for her, because even a lugworm could see that her brother did not give a fig for her. By the time she was born he was gone away, at first to Charterhouse School and then up to Cambridge, and if he ever wrote an actual letter to her no one has laid eyes on it. She, however, sent him frequently her thoughts from the nursery, written in a blotchy hand. Whenever he sojourned at home we saw little of him except for a blur of blondness and lanky limbs striding by in a hurry, pockets jingling, while Eliza and I dropped our crooked curtsies. He was inclined to reckless driving and to going abroad in a blaring way with firearms and dogs, reports of which I had gleaned from the servants’ hall. It seemed unlikely that he had ever decided, ‘Let me leave off this jigger of gin and interest myself in the musings of my juvenile sister.’ He lived in Rotterdam at that time and what his undertaking was there I did not know and neither did Eliza, for all her pretence that Johnny was her zealous correspondent.
    It would not surprise me if you found these observations to be somewhat tart in nature. I have to confess that mycompassion for Eliza, which is heartfelt, is at the same time flawed by a dark little seam of envy that runs through it, for she was born to the house and is entitled to the security that I lack. Perhaps I was so dismissive of Eliza’s fantasising because I saw in it something of my own woeful neediness.
    She had a habit of wrapping her arms around herself and I can see her now in that self-embrace, complaining, ‘Bah! This fire gives out scarcely any heat. I wish I had Johnny’s lion skin now. Em, fetch my waistcoat!’ To which I am sure that Miss Broadbent would have replied something like, ‘Eliza, you may fetch your own waistcoat. Either that or sharpen your nibs. Em cannot undertake two tasks at once.’
    Eliza must have gone into her dressing room then with a lot of groaning and sighing in order to convey the onerous nature of life, because I remember we heard her galloping across the floor as she used to do with her hobbyhorse, when she was little. She was a great one for bashing and crashing and games of skittles, hoops and diabolo.
    As soon as we were alone, Miss Broadbent offered me one of her amiable, leaning-forward-to-help smiles and said, ‘You do not seem to be yourself this morning, child.’ I got up and joined her at the window. She liked to position herself on the margins of a room. She made a point, you know, of taking up very little space. There was hardly anything more to her than to the bundle of slender sticks and pleated silk that was Eliza’s folded-up kite. She had quite a knack for invisibility, in fact. Whenever she brought Eliza and me to perform for Mrs Waterland, she seemed able to disappear even while remaining in the room. I suppose that facility owed something to the gowns of drab linsey and light-suckingbombazine that she wore, which blended easily into the background.
    Her looks too were fugitive – hair not exactly brown and not exactly dark blonde, nose and mouth neither large nor small. What colour were her eyes, do I recall? Hazel, perhaps, or the grey of a drizzly sky. Yet the interior of Miss Broadbent was another prospect altogether. If you looked into her, you would find a