“This isn’t Heaven,” I said. “In case you haven’t noticed. Anyway, you certainly put the wind up her.”

“I was just telling the truth.” She was pushing back her cuticles with my orange stick. “I guess now she’ll start introducing me to people. She’s always putting her oar in.”

“She’s just afraid you might ruin your life. If you go in for love, I mean.”

“Did getting married keep your life from being ruined? Or is it too soon to tell?”

I ignored the tone. “What do you think, though?”

“You’ve got a new perfume. Did Richard give it to you?”

“Of the marriage idea, I mean.”

“Nothing.” Now she was brushing her long blonde hair, with my hairbrush, seated at my vanity table. She’d been taking more interest in her personal appearance lately; she’d begun to dress quite stylishly, both in her own clothes and in mine.

“You mean, you don’t think much of it?” I asked.

“No. I don’t think about it at all.”

“Perhaps you should,” I said. “Perhaps you should give at least a minute of thought to your future. You can’t always just keep ambling along, doing…” I wanted to say doing nothing, but this would have been a mistake.

“The future doesn’t exist,” said Laura. She’d acquired the habit of talking to me as if I was the younger sister and she was the elder one; as if she had to spell things out for me. Then she said one of her odd things. “If you were a blindfolded tightrope walker crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, what would you pay more attention to—the crowds on the far shore, or your own feet?”

“My feet, I suppose. I wish you wouldn’t use my hairbrush. It’s unsanitary.”

“But if you paid too much attention to your feet, you’d fall. Or too much attention to the crowds, you’d fall too.”

“So what’s the right answer?”

“If you were dead, would this hairbrush still be yours?” she said, looking at her profile out of the sides of her eyes. This gave her, in reflection, a sly expression, which was unusual for her. “Can the dead own things? And if not, what makes it ‘yours’ now? Your initials on it? Or your germs?”

“Laura, stop teasing!”

“I’m not teasing,” said Laura, setting the hairbrush down. “I’m thinking. You can never tell the difference. I don’t know why you listen to anything Winifred has to say. It’s like listening to a mousetrap. One without a mouse in it,” she added.

She’d become different lately: she’d become brittle, insouciant, reckless in a new way. She was no longer open about her defiances. I suspected her of taking up smoking, behind my back: I’d smelled tobacco on her once or twice. Tobacco, and something else: something too old, too knowing. I ought to have been more alert to the changes taking place in her, but I had a good many other things on my mind. I waited until the end of October to tell Richard that I was pregnant. I said I’d wanted to be sure. He expressed conventional joy, and kissed my forehead. “Good girl,” he said. I was only doing what was expected of me.

One benefit was that he now left me scrupulously alone at night. He didn’t want to damage anything, he said. I told him that was very thoughtful of him. “And you’re on gin rations from now on. I won’t allow any naughtiness,” he said, wagging his finger at me in a way I found sinister. He was more alarming to me during his moments of levity than he was the rest of the time; it was like watching a lizard gambol. “We’ll have the very best doctor,” he added. “No matter what it costs.” Putting things on a commercial footing was reassuring to both of us. With money in play, I knew where I stood: I was the bearer of a very expensive package, pure and simple.

Winifred, after her first little scream of genuine fright, made an insincere fuss. Really she was alarmed. She guessed (rightly) that being the mother of a son and heir, or even just an heir, would give me more status with Richard than I’d had so far, and a good deal more than I was entitled to. More for me, and less for her. She would be on the lookout for ways to whittle me down to size: I expected her to appear any minute with detailed plans for decorating the nursery.

“When may we expect the blessed event?” she asked, and I could see I was in for a prolonged dose of coy language from her. It would now be the new arrival and a present from the stork and the little stranger, nonstop. Winifred could get quite elfish and finicky about subjects that made her nervous.

“In April, I think,” I said. “Or March. I haven’t seen a doctor yet.”

“But you must know” she said, arching her eyebrows.

“It’s not as if I’ve done this before,” I said crossly. “It’s not as if I was expecting it. I wasn’t paying attention.”

I went to Laura’s room one evening to tell her the same news. I knocked at the door; when she didn’t answer, I opened it softly, thinking she might be asleep. She wasn’t though. She was kneeling beside her bed, in her blue nightgown, with her head down and her hair spreading as if blown by an unmoving wind, her arms flung out as if she’d been thrown there. At first I thought she must be praying, but she wasn’t, or not that I could hear. When she noticed me at last, she got up, as matter-of-factly as if she’d been dusting, and sat on the frilled bench of her vanity table.

As usual, I was struck by the relationship between her surroundings, the surroundings Winifred had chosen for her—the dainty prints, the ribbon rosebuds, the organdies, the flounces—and Laura herself. A photograph would have revealed only harmony. Yet to me the incongruity was intense, almost surreal. Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown.

I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire.

“Laura, I wanted to tell you,” I said. “I’m going to have a baby.”

She turned towards me, her face smooth and white as a porcelain plate, the expression sealed inside it. But she didn’t seem surprised. Nor did she congratulate me. Instead she said, “Remember the kitten?”

“What kitten?” I said.

“The kitten Mother had. The one that killed her.”

“Laura, it wasn’t a kitten.”

“I know,” said Laura.

Beautiful view

Reenie is back. She’s none too pleased with me. Well, young lady. What do you have to say for yourself? What did you do to Laura? Don’t you ever learn?

There is no answer to such questions. The answers are so entangled with the questions, so knotted and many-stranded, that they aren’t really answers at all.

I’m on trial here. I know it. I know what you’ll soon be thinking. It will be much the same as what I myself am thinking: Should I have behaved differently? You’ll no doubt believe so, but did I have any other choices? I’d have such choices now, but now is not then.

Should I have been able to read Laura’s mind? Should I have known what was going on? Should I have seen what was coming next? Was I my sister’s keeper?

Should is a futile word. It’s about what didn’t happen. It belongs in a parallel universe. It belongs in another dimension of space.

On a Wednesday in February, I made my way downstairs after my mid-afternoon nap. I was napping a lot by then: I was seven months’ pregnant, and having trouble sleeping through the night. There was some concern too about my blood pressure; my ankles were puffy, and I’d been told to lie with my feet up for as much as I could. I felt like a huge grape, swollen to bursting with sugar and purple juice; I felt ugly and cumbersome.

It was snowing that day, I remember, great soft wet flakes: I’d looked out the window after I’d levered myself to my feet, and seen the chestnut tree, all white, like a giant coral.

Winifred was there, in the cloud-coloured living room. That wasn’t unheard of—she came and went as if she owned the place—but Richard was there too. Usually at that time of day he was at his office. Each of them had a drink in hand. Each looked morose.