Ihad forgotten how well I remembered her. But I hadn't forgotten her. It was, naturally, a shrink who brought it all back and put it in perspective. A rather good shrink: the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. She did it for free. In public. On the radio. A discussion programme about sibling relationships, chaired by Laurie Taylor. I talked a bit about how I'd never really properly invested, on an emotional level, in my relationships with my sister or indeed, come to that, my parents. Or my family in general.
"You should come and consult me professionally," said Susie; "get to the bottom of it. I mean, if you mind about it, of course."
If I mind about it. Christ. I remember once on the Provençal terrace of a friend's house, bathed in the smell of the lavender – and melon-fields, towards twilight, after dinner. A fellow guest said that she supposed it was always a comfort to know that, if things got really bad and everything went wrong and she failed utterly and the world turned against her, she could always go home and they'd be pleased to see her and would comfort her and tuck her up and it would be all right again. And I thought: what on earth is she talking about? For me, it was quite the opposite. It was closer to Lady Thatcher's definition: "Home is where you go and they have to take you in." Have to. But not necessarily want to. In the end, I realised I was wrong. But it had always felt as if home was where you went when there was no chink in your armour, when there were no lapses or guilty secrets, no failures or defaults, nobody cross with you or out to get you. Home was where, if the secret police rang the bell, they'd lock the back door to prevent you getting away. Home was profoundly unsafe.
Mind? Of course I minded. It was like football: a common, unifying experience which I simply didn't get. Football didn't matter, though. This did.
Then Orbach said something – I don't remember what – and I remembered my memories. I remembered the first time I saw her – this was in the late 1950s. I remembered her dark hair, her deep brown eyes, her watchful stillness, her intelligent gaze. I remembered that when she looked at me for the first time, she smiled. I remembered something like falling in love.
"I had another sister once," I said. "They sent her back."
For once, the studio – normally a civil sort of a bear-pit, everyone anxious to say their piece – fell silent.
"I was ... three and a half? Four? They adopted a baby. I remember her name. Beverley Henderson. 'This is your new sister,' they said. And then after a few weeks – I don't know how long in reality – she was gone. They sent her back. I never saw her again."
After the broadcast, walking to the lifts, Susie Orbach said: "You know what I said about coming to see me? Forget it. We've got to the bottom of it, on-air. No wonder. What a thing to do to a child."
"Send her back?" I said.
"No. She was probably fine. I mean to you. To give you the idea that it could happen to you, too. That you could be sent back. For no reason. Just ... sent back."
There was no reason, either. None that I could ever find out, once I had remembered it all. After my mother died, I asked my father. "I never got to the bottom of it," he said. "but I think it was because Mummy thought people would realise it wasn't her own baby. She was very dark."
The dark hair. The dark eyes. The locus of this infant's beauty and the source of her rejection? Absurd; yet not absurd to think that that would seem reasonable to my mother who was, bless her, afraid of so much. Afraid, particularly, of being found out. Found out in what? Your guess is as good as mine. Just as she was ashamed, though of what I don't know and never will. Yet her shoulders, designed as far as I can tell centuries back in some poxy shtetl to carry the burdens of the world, had devolved into a huge support system for her chips. I'll never know what was going on in her mind. I don't think she ever did, either. But she sent my dark sister back.
drive from www.independent.co.uk