Moving Among Strangers by Gabrielle Carey Page A

been taught that seizures were caused by too much blood pressure in the head. Bleeding Godfrey would relieve the pressure, he told Erica.
    Rachel watched from the crack in the door as her mother held a white porcelain bowl under her brother’s wrist, which dripped with blood.
    That evening Godfrey died. Erica emerged from the room and made an announcement: ‘Godfrey has turned into an angel.’ Then she instructed each of the children to go into the bedroom and kiss him goodbye.
    What did this feel like for my seven-year-old father? To kiss goodbye the image of himself, his sibling, his twin and his best friend, with whom he had spent every day of his entire little life?
    Godfrey’s headstone was ordered: over the inscription they placed a small sculpture of an angel scattering blossom petals. Henry took Alex to the funeral; the girls were not allowed to attend. At the graveside my grandfather sobbed uncontrollably while his oldest friend, Arthur Altorfer, tried to comfort him.
    Afterwards at White Peak, Erica would not tolerate displays of emotion. Kathleen, the Irish nanny that the family had employed for five years, was a ‘companion help’, which meant she ate in the dining room with the family. When Godfrey died she couldn’t stop crying. Even at the table, she cried over dinner. Erica told her to stop.
    â€˜How are we ever to recover if you go on like this?’ But Kathleen couldn’t stop so she was dismissed.
    *
    Carey and I climbed back into the Mercedes and drove away from the heat and the dust and a house that had seen so much and could say so little. Carey was clearly pleased to have placed his feet on family ground, the source of so many bedtime stories.
    â€˜Wouldn’t it be great if we could find some way of buying it back?’ he said.
    Family lore told the story of the young Godfrey as the natural inheritor of White Peak.
    â€˜Apparently he was a born naturalist,’ said Carey. ‘Even at age seven he knew all the names of the plants on the property.’
    And so the story had developed over the years, a myth that if Godfrey had lived, he would have gladly become a farmer and White Peak would have stayed in family hands.
    Back on the road, we were going to look for Godfrey’s headstone. The Geraldton graveyard had been moved relatively recently; there was a chance the headstone had gone missing – but we found it without much trouble: a small marble block with a plinth on top, where the angel, which had long since fallen off, had once stood.
    In Loving Memory of our darling little Godfrey, loved son of H. and E. Carey, died 4 th Jan, 1930. Suffer little children to come unto me.
    Standing before my little uncle’s headstone, I wondered how long it took for my father to recover from the death of his twin, a brother who was also his closest friend. Stow once said that what he strived for in his poetry was to capture ‘something like the silent communication that twins sometimes have ’ . Perhaps my father never recovered from the loss of this perfect kindred communication that has no need of language. Perhaps this might explain, in part, his deep sorrow and his final decision.

17
    Carey and I were driving back through the outskirts of Perth, when I saw we were about to drive right past my mother’s old home in Middle Swan.
    â€˜Look, there’s the sign,’ I said. The huge Houghton Winery sign signalled the road that led both to the Houghton winery and to Oakover, where Carey and I had played together as children during the summer holidays of 1969. Stow had also spent many a day around the vineyards, even occasionally helping out with the harvest.
    One year, I think 1951, I was able to repay your grandfather’s hospitality a little: there was a strike of grape-pickers for more pay, and he recruited me and another Guildford boy to help out. There possibly still exists a 1951 Houghton White in which I, and Craig Mackintosh, had