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 uniqueness, her eyes were a vivid blue shot with lavender stripes that came and went according to her mood. When she thought no one was watching her, Kitty gazed on her world with none of her twin’s tranquillity; the light in her eyes was bewildered, even a little terrified, and when things got beyond her ability to reason or control, she turned the light off and retreated into a private world she spoke of to no one, and only her three sisters understood existed.
People literally stopped and openly stared at first sight of Kitty. As if that weren’t bad enough, her mother constantly raved about her beauty to anyone she encountered, including those she encountered every day: a shrilly simpering spate of exclamations that took no notice of the fact that their object, Kitty, was usually within hearing distance, as were the other three girls.
“Did you ever see such a beautiful child?”
“When she grows up, she’ll marry a rich man!”
The kind of remarks that had led to a cheese grater, a rope, and the decision Edda made that all four of them would join the new trainee nursing scheme at Corunda Base Hospital at the beginning of April 1926. For, her sisters agreed, if they didn’t get Kitty out from under Maude, the day would come when Edda might not be on hand to foil a suicide attempt.
Because the only world children know is the one they inhabit, it never occurred to any of the four Latimer girls to question Maude Latimer’s behaviour, or stop to wonder if all mothers were the same; they simply assumed that if anyone were as ravishing (Maude’s word) as Kitty, she would be subjected to the same remorseless torrent of attention. It didn’t occur to them that Maude too was unique in her own way, nor dawn on them that perhaps a child with a different nature than Kitty’s would have relished the attention. All things being as they were, the Latimer girls understood that it was the main task of three of them to protect the vulnerable fourth from what Edda called “parental idiocies”. And as they grew and matured, the instinct and the drive to protect Kitty never faded, never diminished, never seemed less urgent.
All four girls were clever, though Edda always took the academic laurels because her mind grasped mathematics as easily as it did historical events or English composition. The quality of Tufts’s mentality was very similar, though it lacked Edda’s fierce fire. Tufts had a practical, down-to-earth streak that oddly dampened her undeniable good looks; through their adolescent years she displayed scant interest in boys, whom she thought stupid and oafish. Whatever the essence was that boys emanated to waft under the noses of girls and attract them utterly failed to stir Tufts.
There was a male equivalent of Corunda Ladies’ College: the Corunda Grammar School, and all four Latimer girls associated with the boys in the matter of balls, parties, sporting and other events. They were admired — even lusted after, in schoolboy fashion — kissed as much or as little as each desired, but things like breasts and thighs were unplundered.
Rules that were no hardship for Tufts, Kitty and Edda, though irksome for the more adventurous, less bookish Grace. Perpetually submerged in gossip and women’s magazines about film stars, stage actors, fashion and the world of royalty as represented by the Windsor family who ruled the British Empire, Grace was not above local gossip either. Her brain was self-centred but acute, she was an expert at wriggling out of trouble or work she disliked, but Grace had one inappropriate passion: she adored the steam locomotives of the railways. If she disappeared, everyone in the Rectory knew where to find her: down in the shunting yards watching the steam locomotives. In spite of her many undesirable characteristics, however, she was naturally kind, immensely loving, and devoted to her sisters, who put up with her tendency to moan as her nature.
Kitty was the one with the romantic imagination, but was saved from a spiritual beauty the equal of her physical by a tongue that could be caustic, or salty, or both. It was her defence against all those rhapsodies of praise, for it took people aback and made them think there must surely be more to her than just a beautiful face. The bouts of depression (though they called it “Kitty’s dumps”) that assailed her whenever Maude pierced her defences were an ordeal helped only by her sisters, who knew all the reasons why, and rallied themselves behind her until the crisis was over. In school examinations she did well until mathematics reared its ugly hydra heads; she it was who took the essay prizes, and expressed herself extremely well on paper.
