Chapter 1

I was a post-war baby, I can remember when rationing finally finished, as I can Muffin the Mule prancing on our first TV, the Coronation, and Sputnik. I was born in January 1947 to parents prospering with the times. Dad made a bit of a fortune during the Berlin airlift, having already made a small pile during the war. As far as I can tell he was an opportunist rather than a black-marketeer, but he was definitely and unashamedly nouveau riche. He bought his way ostentatiously into a stock-broking firm, which was not the way it was done those days, and then Lloyds, ruffling a few feathers, which he enjoyed, and made even more money from that. He had the Midas touch. Mum had been a Windmill girl, a long-legged stage beauty who spent much of the war standing stock-still on a draughty stage in classic poses, with no clothes on. I was their only child, apple of their eyes, christened Gillian, called Jill thereafter, and Mum's good sense kept me from being too spoiled.

Nevertheless, Dad made sure I had the requisite pony, exchange holidays with French pen pals, a big bedroom littered with superannuated toys I couldn't bear to part with, and family holidays in the South of France or the Isle of Capri, where much to our embarrassment, Dad would sing loud duets with Gracie Fields across the village square. I went to a respectably expensive private school in Highgate, and proved to be reasonably intelligent, so when the time came, I went to the University College London, and didn't even have to leave home, as we lived in the northern suburb of Barnet, and I could get the tube to college every day.

Having the self-sufficiency of the single child, but it seemed little of the neediness, I made girlfriends easily, but tended to drop them easily too, a brief intense pash, and then moving on, losing touch when the novelty wore off. They just didn't seem to have what I was looking for in a best friend. Fickle me. I was blessed with reasonably good looks, blue eyes, blonde hair, and a figure I learned to exercise to maintain. I was self-critical, but the only things I didn't like about my body were my legs, which I deemed a bit too short, and made my bum look bigger than it was. Not too bad, and certainly enough to attract my fair share of boys.

I sailed harmlessly through life, doing all right, having fun and studying sufficiently, barely rippling the surface of my psyche, until I finished my degree in Social Sciences and found myself at a loose end, an adult without ambition, but thanks to Dad, not much need for one. I was half-finished, half-grown up, engaged in life, and yet a little bit aloof. I was known to a bit of a hedonist, not entirely undue to my current boyfriend, Ed, though he was just stimulating what I knew was there already. Sex was the one area in which I went beyond what was then thought of as the norm. I was too modern to let myself slip into an easy marriage that I would regret later - I'd had one serious proposal from Richard, the boyfriend before Ed, which turned me off him enough to finish it. But I was still too old-fashioned for real feminist ambition, despite an on and off flirtation with the radical sisters at college.

With little but a lazy summer on my mind, and my boyfriend playing at rock-band managers for a two week tour of the grim Oop North with his college mates, I had readily agreed to house-sit for my Mother's half-sister - auntie Susan to me, and her husband - uncle Eric, a businessman who did something for Pye Electronics in Cambridge. This would mainly involve keeping their seventeen-year-old daughter Sarah company. This year, deciding she was too grown up, she had chosen not to accompany the rest of the family - two boys 8 and 10 years younger than her - on holiday to a resort hotel in Brittany.

Strictly speaking there was no blood relating us, but I'd been brought up calling them aunt and uncle and cousins, so that's the way it was. Sarah was all right, she could be a bit of a stubborn lummox at times, but she was very good-hearted, always up for a laugh or a spot of adventure, and as she grew up, I became increasingly fond of her. So, it was with a mild sense of duty, and the expectation of a pleasant if slightly dull fortnight that, just a week after seeing the Rolling Stones play an amazing free gig in Hyde Park on the 5th of July, I drove up to Cambridge in my wonderful graduation gift from Dad, a brand shiny new Mini Cooper. I put my foot down when I reached the new dual carriageway section on the A10, and really flew.

I arrived after lunch at uncle Eric's large comfortable house, just over the river from Midsummer Common, to a warm and grateful welcome.

"Sarah's such a teenager these days, we don't see much of her, what with all her friends, and going off for weekends. It's a shame she doesn't want to come with us this year, but if I was her age I'd probably be the same," said auntie Susan understandingly as she prepared me a sandwich. "We're so glad you can do this for us. Much as she's growing up, I really wouldn't want to leave her to her own devices for a fortnight. She was so thrilled when she heard you could come!"

A couple of hours later my cousin Sarah gangled and galumphed into the sitting room and threw herself heavily onto the sofa, raging hormones and adolescent passions making her features twist and glower. She was still wearing her school uniform, navy blue skirt and pale blue aertex shirt, white socks and black shoes, her thick wavy dark brown shoulder length hair was gathered in two tight plaits, the fringe long, and in need of a trim. The heat of the day left a sheen of perspiration on her mercifully acne free cheeks. Puberty and growth had hit her late. Not long ago it was hard to believe she was sixteen, but when I saw her that day, four months short of her eighteenth birthday, beneath the uniform anyone could see that she had blossomed most of the way into womanhood.

From her impulsive facial expressions and gestures, she still seemed to be part-adolescent, but physically she was Amazonian, having shot up to 5' 9", with a figure only slightly over proportioned to her height, which she complained to me, even before saying hello properly, was mostly fat. She had always lacked confidence over her appearance, though her mother and I had often tried to reassure her that she looked fine and would grow into herself.

'Something more than fine, ' I decided, as my gaze took her in and I felt an almost familiar but mostly brand new frisson; fine in a way that I had not anticipated, from which I instinctively recoiled at first, because she was my cousin, because she was too young really to be a friend to a mature adult like me, because the way she looked made me feel odd, and just a little bit scared. Fine? No, actually, to my swiftly unveiling eyes she looked amazing.

The previous summer I'd become aware of Sarah as not just a noisy, clumsy, good-natured teenager, but as an increasingly attractive young woman; someone I found I liked so much I couldn't help myself thinking about her. I even daydreamed about her as a companion, sidekick or just pal; long after the shared family holiday had ended. I shrugged it off as just a throwback to my schoolgirl crushes. I seemed to have grown out of all that with my definite attraction to boys, but Sarah had somehow come to embody all the girls I'd wanted to be with, and emulate, back then. I'd just slipped back to my old behaviour for a while; that was my reasoning, and it seemed acceptable at the time.

Was schoolgirl nostalgia why I leapt with such alacrity at the idea of staying with her, chaperoning her in a boring house in a sleepy suburb for two whole valuable weeks while the rest of her family went to France? Perhaps not, perhaps my subconscious had divined something deeper and more complex. I felt myself tingling and flushing. Sensations with which I was familiar in an entirely different context were brought into a brand new focus with a clarity that was almost unbearable.

Last year, I remembered feverishly as I wiped an uncomfortably hot brow with a hankie, when I caught a glimpse of unintentional her cleavage, or a flash of her strong thighs, and especially when I had found myself one day ogling her in a swimsuit, I had been slightly shocked to find myself furtively watching for more. I liked her very much, but more than that, I found her fascinating, like I would a beautiful horse, or a film star. She had a certain charisma that just seemed to draw me in.

Today, as Sarah flapped her skirt to circulate the humid air, I caught a glimpse not just of her thighs but plain white knickers too, and suddenly I found myself unaccountably short of breath, dizzy with the completely unexpected, but somehow entirely logical shock of physical desire! This was ridiculous! I was supposed to be looking after Sarah; I was supposed to be mature, a grown-up twenty-one year old woman taking a breather, and considering the next step in my life. I was unable to acknowledge, let alone accept the evidence that there was a startlingly different truth about myself than the one I had always believed. I was unselfconscious enough to know I was pretty, and even though I had slept with most of my boyfriends since I was sixteen - One or two tried before that, but I was a good girl and followed my mum's advice - even though I enjoyed sex very much, more than most girls, according to my current boyfriend, and even though I really thought I might be in love with my lovely Ed, latest and longest-lived of my suitors; this was the unforgettable summer afternoon when Sarah Byers looked at me and smiled in her sweet lop-sided way, and I dissolved into a pool of the purest sweetest goo.