When Moira goes home to Wales for holidays, she never fits inĪt the house or anywhere else, and she's probably more irritated than pleased to see little Baby Amy. She sporadically receives letters from her mother and the occasional card from her elderly neighbors who remember her birthday, out of sadness and perhaps also out of guilt. She eventually finds comfort in scientific study with only her memories from home to keep her company. Moira seems to ease into the steady rhythms of Lockham Thorpe, but the other girls frequently pick on her.

So begins the sad and bitter vigil of this young girl who must now try to find a way through the empty years that lie ahead. 'I'd have bore you with far better grace and I might have enjoyed you if I had stayed in Wales.' The problem was that she kept seeing her younger sister as a rival for her parents' affections: 'I thought it would always be just us three – my parents, and me,' she silently confides.Ī straight-A student with a unique aptitude for science, her fragile existence is also thrown into peril when she obtains a scholarship and is eventually packed off to Lockham Thorpe, a lonely, overcast boarding school far away on the Eastern side of England. Moira ultimately blames herself and is torn apart by the fact that she wasn't a more caring sister and more at hand when Amy was growing up. Indeed, she was almost left for dead to slowly bleed to death on top of Church Rock. Moira never imagined that her sister could fall from such a great height, nothing so brutal, with the gulls screaming, the sharp hard drag of her knees across the rocks, and 'later the doctor plucking a muscle out of her skull.' 'It is in you then, the sea, it's a part of you,' laments twenty-seven-year-old Moira Stone as she sits next to Amy, her teenage sister who lies on her back in a coma in a hospital bed with her eyes permanently closed, 'held forever silently beneath the surface.' Wracked with guilt and regret, Moira tells of how her days are now spent in a white, west-facing house on an English coast with Ray, her landscape artist husband. Book review: Susan Fletcher's *Oystercatchers*

Oystercatchers by Susan Fletcher