Rating: 4* of fiveThe Story Synopsis: A birthday party attended by twins Peter and Francis Morton ends in tragedy.My Review: From the mind of 9-year-old Francis Morton:"Girls were like that. Their shoes never squeaked. No boards whined under the tread. They slunk like cats on padded claws."Francis is limned in a few carelessly artful sentences:"As a twin he was in many ways an only child. To address Peter was to speak to his own image in a mirror, an image a little altered by a flaw in the glass, so as to throw back less a likeness of what he was than of what he wished to be, what he would be without his unreasoning fear of darkness, footsteps of strangers, the flight of bats in dusk-filled gardens."A game of hide-and-seek...a fear of the dark...normal childhood stuff, nothing to alarm an adult so tone-deaf to children as people, not simply charges. No one listens to him in Francis Morton's world, except his older-by-minutes twin Peter. The bond between twins is credibly portrayed, at least to the eyes of what amounts to an only child. So credibly that I never questioned it, right up to the end of the story.It's an ending no parent, and I suspect no twin, will ever forget. Excellent, as one would expect from Graham Greene.
