Bittersweet Read Free Page A

their marriage, her husband regarded matrimony as a sacred and lifelong contractnever to be broken or sullied. No matter how unsuitable a wife Maude was, Thomas Latimer hewed to her. So he dealt with her patiently, humoured her in some things and manoeuvred her out of others, bore her tantrums and megrims, and never once contemplated even the mental breaking of his vows to her. And if, sometimes, a tiny wisp of a thought popped into his mind that it would be wonderful if Maude fell in love with someone else, he banished the thought even as it formed, horrified.
    Neither pair of twins was quite identical, which led to fierce debates as to what exactly constituted “identical” in twins. Edda and Grace had their mother’s height and slenderness as well as their father’s ability to move beautifully. Both lovely to look at, their facial features, hands and feet were identical; each had hair so dark it was called black, highly arched brows, long thick lashes, and pale grey eyes. Yet there were differences. Grace’s eyes were widely opened and held a natural sadness she exploited, whereas Edda’s were deeper set, hooded by sleepy lids, and held an element of strangeness. Time demonstrated that Edda was highly intelligent, self-willed and a little inflexible, while Grace was neither a reader nor a seeker after knowledge, and irritated everybody by her tendency to complain — and, worse, to moan. With the result that by the time they started to train as nurses, most people didn’t see how like each other Grace and Edda were; their dispositions had stamped their faces with quite different expressions, and their eyes looked at dissimilar things.
    Maude had never really liked them, but hid her antipathy with subtle cunning. On the surface, all four girls were kept equally neat and clean, clothed with equal expense, and disciplined fairly. If somehow the colours she chose for her own twins were more flattering than those bestowed on Adelaide’s — well … It couldn’t — and didn’t — last any longer than mid-teens, when the girls appealed to Daddy to choose their own styles and colours. Lucky for Edda and Grace, then, that after this adolescent fashion revolution was over, Maude’s selective deafness allowed her to ignore the general opinion that Edda and Grace had far better taste in clothes than Maude did.
    Tufts and Kitty (Tufts was born first) were simultaneously more and less identical than the senior set. They took after their mother, a pocket Venus of a woman: short, with plump and shapely breasts, tiny waists, swelling hips and excellent legs. Owning the perfect kind of beauty for girl children, they were genuinely ravishing almost from time of birth, and it thrilled people to realise that in the case of Tufts and Kitty Latimer, God had used the mould twice. Dimples, curls, enchanting smiles and enormous round eyes gave them the bewitching, melting charm of a kitten, complete to domed forehead, pointed chin and a faintly Mona Lisa curve of the lips. They had the same thin, short, straight noses, the same full-lipped mouths, the same high cheekbones and delicately arched brows.
    What Tufts and Kitty didn’t share was colouring, and that was the difference between Kitty’s sun and Tufts’s dim moon. Tufts was honey-hued from the amber-gold of her hair to the peach glow of her skin, and had calm, dispassionate, yellow eyes;she toned in a series of the same basic colour, like an artist with a severely limited palette. Ah, but Kitty! Where Tufts blended, she contrasted. Most remarkable was her skin, a rich pale brown some called “ café au lait ” and others, less charitably inclined, whispered that it showed Maude’s family had a touch of the tar-brush somewhere. Her hair, brows and lashes were crystal-fair, a flaxen blonde with hardly any warmth in it; against the dark skin they were spectacular; only time scotched the rumours that Maude bleached Kitty’s hair with hydrogen peroxide. To cap Kitty’s