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Our great-grandmother, GrandAnna, the one who left the house to Lily, was named Anna Good. There’s a cupboard in the attic full of her things, or at least the things that Lily didn’t give to charity shops. The cupboard was a treasure trove for Miri — Miri found things in there I couldn’t even see until she brought them out — white kid gloves, silver hair ornaments, fans. One day I found a sheaf of newspaper cuttings from the ’40s in there — pages of The Dover Post collected without a theme until I noticed, halfway through the pile and checking back, that each page had the same number in its corner—25. Page 25 always had a patriotic cartoon on it, all on the theme of plucky Brits defeating the enemy by maintaining the home front — a stout housewife planting her own potatoes and taking a moment to smack a potato that looked just like Hitler on the head with her trowel, that sort of thing. They were drawn by an artist who worked in curved lines and harsh scribbles to indicate shade. The biggest cartoon took up a quarter of the page: Be careful what you say — you never know who’s listening. Two sweet-faced teenage girls talked avidly on a bus, while behind them, two men grinned with their teeth and leaned closer to the girls, closer, closer, more as if they were about to devour the girls than eavesdrop on their conversation. One man was a fat soldier covered in swastikas, the other was slit-eyed, uniformed, with a moustache that fell to his knees. You don’t have to be that close to someone to listen in on their conversation. You don’t have to be licking the person’s neck. The horrible hyperbole of it — it was a brilliant cartoon. None of the page 25s collected in GrandAnna’s folder were dated later than 1943. They had begun in 1940. Three years worth of cartoons. And it was on the biggest and best cartoon that I made out the signature: Andrew Silver. My great-grandfather, whose RAF plane had gone down somewhere over Africa before the war was even halfway through.
GrandAnna’s hair was very white and came down over her shoulders in a great mass. Lily used to have a photo of GrandAnna, Miri and me in her purse, from when we went to visit GrandAnna on our seventh birthday. In the photo Miri is on Anna’s lap and has her arms around Anna’s neck with the sober confidence of someone adored. GrandAnna and Miri are looking at the camera, at Lily the photographer, and they are very poised. I am beside GrandAnna, leaning an elbow on the back of her chair and looking at her with an apprehensive expression.
The room under the trapdoor downstairs was her bedroom. “After the war she was scared of bombs for the rest of her life. It was the noise, she said. She couldn’t sleep anywhere else,” Lily told us. It was the Christmas before Lily died and she was sitting on my bedroom floor with handmade notepaper spread across her knees. She had a tinsel flower tucked behind her ear and she was writing thank-you notes for our Christmas presents. She liked to do it and we liked her doing it.
“Where did you sleep, then? Not down there?” I asked.
The psychomantium used to be Lily’s room. There was a dressing table in there, and a velvet, high-backed chair, faint smudges on the walls where posters had been, and a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri’s room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall. Sometimes I talk to her reflection instead of her, and she doesn’t seem to find anything strange in that. As a child, Lily had had the whole floor to herself.
“Weren’t you scared?” Miri had asked.
Lily shook her head. “I liked it. I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”
Miri and I looked at each other. “Alive,” we said. “Alive like how?” I added.
Lily laughed. “Alive like they were alive. They talked and moved and told me who I was. I’ll never forget.”
“What did they say to you?” I can’t remember which of us asked that.
“Lily Silver, you are more precious than gold,” Lily chanted, and she looked a little bit different, the lines of her face were finer, she looked like a drawing herself. Miri yawned.
“Is that all they said?”
“Yes.”
“Booooooooooring.”
Lily gave me a handful of notes to sign; I scrawled my name and passed them to Miri.
“It was all I needed. I’m not even sure if they spoke out loud. I was very lonely. Nobody’s fault, though. I hate blame culture.”
I didn’t say anything, but I knew what I thought; it was her mother’s fault for abandoning her. Babies get me down, but I’d seen photos of Lily as a baby and she looked robust and fun. There was a consciousness in her eyes that made her pudgy helplessness seem sarcastic. She looked as if she could easily have been adapted into an accomplice for many practical jokes. And she’d only been a year old. Our grandma Jennifer was pretty, an indifferent student (we’d seen her photographs and report cards bound with pink ribbon) and she’d run off with someone dashing and foreign, a different dashing and foreign someone to whoever Lily’s dad had been.
Miri and I wanted to know what they looked like, the people that Lily drew. Lily laid five stamps on her palm, licked them all in one go, and flicked them onto envelopes. “People,” she said. “Just… people. No one I’d ever seen. People I made up. They looked the way I felt they should look. I stuck them on my walls. In fact I left them there when I went to college; when I brought you two back to visit your GrandAnna here, I sort of expected the pictures to be still there.”
“We used to visit? Here?”
“We did, and your dad too. Then when you were three, your GrandAnna had a crack-up. A… well, a really big crack-up, and she had to go into a home. You wouldn’t remember,” Lily said.
“I remember,” my sister said. This was news. I stared at her but she didn’t look up from the cards on the floor in front of her. She dotted the i’s in her name with sharp hearts.
Lily stretched her legs out in front of her and cricked her neck. “Oh yes? What do you remember, my Miranda?”
“GrandAnna’s crack-up. It was like the heraldic pelican,” Miri said. She put her pen in her mouth, the inky end on her tongue, then hastily removed it when Lily narrowed her eyes.
“Oh was it… was it like the heraldic pelican?” I said.
Lily tugged my earlobe. “Let your sister speak.”
“It was,” said Miri. “The bird that pecks itself to death to feed its children. She tried to give us her blood but we didn’t want it.”
I looked at Lily. “I did say you wouldn’t remember,” Lily said, calmly. “I can’t think where you got that from.”
Miri turned to me. “She rubbed it on our lips, Eliot, but you wiped it off.”
“Er… I think I’d definitely remember that,” I said.
“Miranda,” Lily said, and we knew she was getting annoyed because the music in her voice was stronger. “I did say you wouldn’t remember. You were three. You can’t remember everything.”
“Her whole hand was covered with blood, and she had her hand over her face and we could see her looking through her fingers, and she got down between our beds and—”
“There is nothing… mysterious and gothic about a crack-up. If anything it’s just… sad.” Lily was so angry she was almost singing, her temper changing the stress she put on her words. “There is no need to make up stories about it.”