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I t was January when we came to Brussels, my sister and my aunt and I, although the War had ended in November.

My father had gone ahead of us, saying he would have a place ready, and indeed he had taken a house.

But he had no notion of housekeeping or organization, and so we were none of us surprised to find the house – while surprisingly large and surprisingly grand – to be nearly bare of furniture, except for a few pieces half-buried in grime, their dust sheets long since hauled away for bandages.

Susan, of course, was enchanted by the vast, echoing spaces, and the dust did not make her sneeze.

She danced round the ballroom, startling three bats out of their roost, leaving footprints in the slippery dust, curls round as candlesticks coming loose and looping down her back. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said.

Honestly, I couldn’t see it; I had been sneezing from the moment I set foot in the house, my eyes were streaming, and it was dark to begin with.

The January dusk came quickly, and in those lean days of rationed oil, the streetlights did not come on.

When I put a hand to the light switch it rattled and clicked and spat and flickered, showing the ballroom in uncertain pieces: molding and cornices, peeling gilt and the shredded remains of rose-trellis wallpaper, a floor of glorious parquet, splintered and softened and scraped by careless, booted feet, with electric lines and phone lines stapled higgledy-piggledy to the moldy wall.

In my wavering vision, it looked cold, and sinister.

“Wretched man, that father of yours,” said Aunt Irene, who had sneezed twice, tidily, and then put her handkerchief away.

I was still leaning on the doorframe, not so much sneezing as attempting to expel the contents of my skull through my nose.

“Tells us he’s let an historic house. Well, historic it is.

Historic enough to choke on.” She patted me on the back while I wheezed.

“There, there dear, it will pass soon enough. Sue, come back this instant!”

Susan was already darting back across the floor, dancing a wild waltz with her shadow, and the unshaded light, still crackling and flickering, turned her high-colored face garish, made cobwebs of her swinging hair.

She was smiling. “I think it’s lovely,” she said. “Did Father say why it was historic?”

“No,” said Irene. She sniffed. “You know how he is. Too busy planning the fate of the world.”

Our father was a diplomat, and young to have a pair of grown girls – I was twenty and Susan was hardly younger.

He’d married young and lost our mother young and with the excuse of his grieving widowhood, buried himself, with some relief, in work.

He had always been easier with his colleagues than with our mother, and I never saw him happier than when he had them over for dinner in Washington, in our big house on Church Street, bought with Mother’s money.

We had a series of stand-in parents, mostly from our father’s side, in the years after Mother passed, with varying degrees of discipline; from Aunt Agatha, who wore pearls and strong scent and had been on the stage long ago, and who let us streak our faces with rouge and play mad games about the house, to Cousin Lettie, who did not like children at all and considered it her duty to change us into properly dressed waxworks, demure and preferably speechless.

The result of all this was that we went from a little haphazard to absolutely ungovernable, until finally we humiliated our father before his particular friend, Colonel Cooper, and Aunt Irene came to take charge, and told us she would not leave again until we were grown.

We hated her, of course, and spilled out all our spleen at feeling unwanted upon her, but she was perfectly unmoved and after we stopped complaining, we benefited greatly from the settling-down of the house.

Susan was the great beauty of the world; as like a kitten as any girl could possibly be, the kind of girl who looks a coquette well before she is one, and must be ferociously defended by all her relatives against the sort of wretches who read coquetry in the easy manners and rosy cheeks of a girl not yet fourteen.

So Irene watched over her fiercely, and I did too.

No one has ever yet read coquetry into my long-nosed face, framed with spectacles, a book always clasped before me like plate-armor, and besides, since my sister was beautiful, and easy in company, it comforted me to think that I was the clever, worldly one, who must keep her from the evils of society that I had read all about.

Perhaps predictably, Susan turned eighteen and made a mockery of all our hovering by falling in love.

He was a secretary in our father’s office, older than us, but not old enough to be a proper catch with money and position.

Susan spent three weeks avoiding me and Aunt Irene, creeping in at odd hours and getting away with it, adroit as she was and quick-tongued and of course ravishing.

To be ravishing makes everything easier, and whoever says not is lying.

But the more she crept around, the more I wanted to know what she was doing, and it was I who caught her, in the end.

She’d invited Mr Lewis into her own bedroom, sneaking him up by the stairs, and when I went up to borrow some thread, I found the door locked.

But there was no key in the keyhole and so when I looked in, I saw them there, clasped together on the bed, his hands in her hair, hers tangled in his clothes.

I did not cry out at once, only stared in shock – I felt a jolt all through me and perhaps a little envy, for they looked as passionate as anyone in my beloved fictions.

And then I was just angry at the wretch for imposing on my sister’s innocence, no matter how happy she looked.

I meant to creep away and tell Aunt Irene at once, but must have made some sound at the keyhole, for my sister gave a soft cry, and Mr Lewis strode across the room and flung open the door.

“Alice,” said Susan, straightening up on the bed, drawing the front of her dress together. “What are you doing?”

I could not find my voice. She’d undone the buttons of his shirt, and his tie was loose; his jacket was thrown crumpled over a chair.

The notch of his clavicles, the smooth skin above her breasts, were glossy with sweat.

Susan got to her feet, straightening her skirt, her white face going red.

“Alice, go away.” A mark like a strawberry showed below her collarbone, where his mouth had drawn the blood up near the surface of her thin, fair skin.

Mr Lewis took Susan’s hand, and said placatingly, “Alice, I see you are angry. But there’s no offense meant. I love your sister.”

Finally I found my tongue, although perhaps it would have been better if I stayed mute.

“Love?” I said, drawing myself up. “This is not love but – but animal fornication—” which was a phrase I’d read in a book and chased eagerly through several more, “And you, sir, are taking advantage of my sister’s innocence! ”

I spat this out, full of righteousness, arms crossed, my feet planted in the doorway.

But Mr Lewis made no answer. His lids only dropped a fraction, as though my opinions were not worth his reply.

Susan didn’t say anything either; they looked at each other like I wasn’t even there.

Mr Lewis put a hand up, very carefully, and laid his palm across the scarlet mark on my sister’s breastbone, and she raised both her hands to hold him.

“I’ll talk to my father,” she said, smiling.

“I’ll come back when you do. Or when you call. Or even if you don’t,” he said. They didn’t even look ashamed, they looked mischievous , and I felt my outrage climbing again.

“Sir, I will scream,” I said, rather desperately, thinking of books again; a little old-fashioned maybe but to scream was a proper response to an interloper, according to my reading.

But I was still thrown off by their faces.

They ought to have looked guilty instead of giddy, and I hesitated in a sort of childish incomprehension.

Mr Lewis just touched Susan’s flushed lower lip and smiled at her, and I felt like a joke standing in the doorway, gawky, unlovable, and torn between simple outrage and the desperation to be desired myself.

He said to Susan, “I could go to your father tonight.”

“He’s at Colonel Cooper’s; he often stays the night when they get to jawing,” said Susan, which was true.

“Alice, would you leave now, please?” She was using the coaxing tone that I’d yielded to all her life, but that night my indignation was stronger than my affection, so I opened my mouth and screamed like a teakettle.

Mr Lewis swore and laughed and kissed Susan, whispering something in her ear, before snatching up his coat and tie and shoes and jumping, still laughing, for the window.

In that moment, he was as far from the rather colorless young man of my father’s office as could possibly be imagined, and I was jealous all over again.

Susan watched him go, just as Aunt Irene came running up and her reaction was exactly as I could have wished; she took one look at my flushed, radiant sister, with her blouse askew and her hair lifting in loose curls in the wind from the window, and she cried out, in throbbing tones just suited for one of my romances, “What have you been doing ?”

“Oh, I’m tired of both of you,” said Susan. “I am going to talk to Father in the morning.” And she walked across to the bedroom door, pushed us out, and turned the key. This time she left it in the lock, but although Irene and I waited for what felt like hours, Mr Lewis did not come back.

***

Susan never had a chance to speak to Father. For war was declared three days later and the first I heard of it was from Susan sobbing in her room the day after that. “Dearest,” I said, running in, “are you all right?”