Sarah lived in her own flat in Brighton, round the corner from Mum, whom she looked after as well as any working daughter could — and better than many an upwardly mobile daughter would. Every day she travelled to and from London by train, getting in a couple of hours' work, like most of her fellow-passengers. But there was one place just south of the Hayward's Heath Tunnel where her eyes always lifted from the balance sheets and company reports to stare out at the scenery. Well, not so much at the scenery as at this particular house. There was nothing remarkable about it — a standard, four-up-four-down country cottage, all on its own in an orchard between a wood and a wildflower meadow — but, from the moment she had set eyes upon it, the place had seemed special to Sarah.
And the years of familiarity with it had not tarnished that aura of magic, of desirability, which invested the house and its garden. And especially the woman who lived there. Of course, she saw no more than a passing flash of her each day. But 270-odd flashes a year adds up to a familiarity that is more than passing.
Like Sarah, the woman was in her mid-thirties. Like Sarah, she was tall. Like Sarah, she was dark, with long, curly hair — at least, Sarah's hair would also have been long and curly if her company did not more or less require that she keep it short and businesslike.
Shortly after that first glimpse Sarah began to fantasize — and then to suspect quite genuinely — that the lady of this house might be Leone, her lost-forever twin. Destiny, she felt, would not have brought them so close each day for nothing. She so wanted Leone to have found the happiness that had eluded her; and it seemed to her that the cottage lady led a life that all sensible women would enjoy. Sometimes she was hanging out baby clothes to dry. Sometimes she was giving young children pushes on the swing under the apple boughs. Sometimes she sat there, golden in the evening sun, shelling peas into a colander between her knees and throwing the pods to a pair of geese. And Sarah would just stare at her twin and her heart would almost burst with joy that Leone had found such happiness. How drab her own mechanical routine was by contrast.
The cottage wife, whose name was Joan, soon began to notice the fashionable town lady who was always at the same window of the same up-express in the morning and the same down-express each evening. Such a smart lady, with her neat suits and her sensible, well-groomed hair. What a wonderful life she must lead, she thought. Up to London every day, meeting new people, facing new challenges, making new deals, being first with all the tittle-tattle. She didn't have a husband to tend and feed, day after unremitting day — lovely fellow though John was. Nor kids and all the work and heartache they entailed — not that she regretted one of them, mind.
It so happened that Joan, too, was an identical twin, separated at birth and given for adoption. Beyond that elementary fact she knew nothing of her lost sister, Moira. But once, when a crazy notion had entered her mind, she crouched down unseen behind an unpruned blackcurrant bush at the bottom of the orchard, right below the railway embankment, and gazed up at the town lady as she flashed by. She had repeated the action several mornings running, imprinting a kind of composite photograph in her mind's eye. And, sure enough, she, too, was tall, dark, thirty-something, and had hair that looked as if it might well grow long and curly if she stopped cutting it so severely. She was Moira beyond a doubt — although her adoptive mother might well have given her a different name.
After that, Joan started to wave at Moira
And then Sarah began to wave back at Leone.