One blessing born from Lily’s never knowing her mother is that Lily never knew how selfish her mother was. Jennifer was nineteen years old and thought a lot of herself and how she looked; her smooth ponytail, the crowded patterns on her silk shifts, the shine of her go-go boots. She had a tiny replica of a yew tree that she used to hold her earrings, Perspex hoops dangling off the branches. Each month or so the little tree had to be replaced because she’d gnawed it to an aged apple core. The earring tree was the last thing Jennifer put in her bag. It had to go on top of all her other things so that it wouldn’t get damaged. Jennifer had catlike eyes that she made stranger with kohl. Her gaze was cold and self-reflective
— am I pretty? Yes
— am I pretty?
— Yes — am I pretty?
Maybe she was not really like that. It’s just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified. I opened up for her. That is to say, I unlocked a door in her bedroom that she had not seen before, a door in the wall behind her dressing table.
She exclaimed, but not overmuch. She wasn’t particularly clever. She picked up her bag and went exploring. When she was safely down the new passageway, I closed the door behind her. It was the best sort of winter morning, cold but bright. That was the only sort of light Jennifer saw after that — it came through great windows and she couldn’t find her way away from them and out of me. Not that she tried hard. She was dazed.
I am not sure if she was lonely. She smiled to herself, and played little games of dress-up with herself, pulling clothes out of her bag and repacking them, switching earrings and examining herself in window glass when night fell. When her little earring tree was gone, she bit at her fingers until I brought her branches from the garden. For years and years, yes. Her hair greyed quickly, but she didn’t notice. When her shift dresses grew too dirty and tattered to play dress up with, I let Jennifer back into the main part, where Lily and Anna lived. Lily was a teenager by then. I had to be very careful, and quick, letting Jennifer in. Jennifer thought that Lily’s room still belonged to her. She ignored the new pictures and posters and tried Lily’s clothes on. She marvelled at them. She loved them. “When on earth did I buy this?” she’d ask herself, stroking the sleeves of a suede jacket, unbuttoning and rebuttoning a pin-striped waistcoat.
Don’t feel sorry for Jennifer. Why should you? She lived long and relatively well, and she was kept safe from those fears and doubts peculiar to her times. She was safe from the war that sickened what it touched from miles away, the new kind of image that lashed the conscience to the nerves, the pictures of Phnom Penh burning with a kind of pagan festivity, the young bones in the mud at Choeung Ek, the Cambodians and yellow-skinned priests sprawled in graves dug poorly and in great fear, graves they dug for themselves. It is true that Jennifer Silver never did leave home, but she had longed for an unusual life, and she certainly had that.
Believe it, don’t believe it, as you will. Of course there is the idea that Anna caught Jennifer and tried to stop her from leaving, that the two fought, that Jennifer strangled to death in a circle made of Anna’s fingers. But that is unrealistic for a number of reasons. And besides, without a corpse there is no proof of what may have come
before
Lily died Eliot and Miranda had gone to school separately, Eliot coasting away on his bike each morning, leaving Miranda to inch sedately schoolwards in heels so high and thin that they would have got jammed in bicycle pedals. But Eliot walked Miranda to school on her first day back. As usual he had a half-pint bottle of full-fat milk sticking out of his blazer pocket. It bobbed as he walked. For some reason Eliot and all the boys he knew at school drank copious amounts of milk straight from the bottle. When they finished their first bottle, they’d all be at the cornershop at breaktime, buying more. No matter which one of the boys you asked why, he’d only knock his forehead with his knuckles and say, without smiling, “For the bones.”
Miranda asked if she could try some of the milk. Eliot obliged her without comment and nodded sagely when she wrinkled her nose and said, “It’s just milk.”
At assembly she realised she’d forgotten her hymnal at home. She looked around helplessly as the head of the sixth form approached. Appealing to him would have no effect. On Monday mornings he handed out detentions to people who weren’t holding small books covered in red leather, and that was all. Help came unexpectedly; a hymnal landed in her lap and she hurriedly opened it and sang loudly until the teacher had passed. When she searched the row of girls for her saviour, Emma Roberts, safe in an area that had already been patrolled, smiled at her and held up a little note that said: Welcome back. Emma’s hair was almost as short as Miranda’s; it made her look much less substantial than she had before; the heavy gold hearts she wore in her ears seemed to weigh her down. Miranda suddenly realised that Eliot wasn’t sitting beside Emma. She decided that he must have bunked assembly. Everyone knew that Eliot and Emma always sat together — they’d so comfortably and easily brought their mutual crush from the playground to lower school and from lower school to sixth form. You couldn’t picture Eliot with his arm around the back of anyone else’s chair, or Emma throwing fries like darts at any other boy. Eliot could be tricky, but Emma made him simpler for everyone. Miranda saw him now, two rows ahead, beside Martin. She didn’t look at Emma again for the rest of assembly, not even when the headmaster read aloud a list of upper sixth formers who’d had Oxford and Cambridge offers and she desperately needed someone vaguely friendly to lock eyes with. All the girls on Miranda’s row eyed her with great curiosity, and, when Tijana’s name was called, the same was done to Tijana in the row in front. Miranda looked at the back of Tijana’s head and felt worried. Tijana had been part of the pack of girls who had chased their car after she was released from the clinic. Tijana, sitting cross-legged in her chair, popped up the collar of her school shirt. The headmaster stood on the varnished stage, with a large portrait of the queen behind him and a marble crucifix to the right of him, and he started clapping. It took everyone a second to follow his lead. Miranda reddened and was glad that she’d chosen a more low-key lipstick that day, a dark pink that matched the inside of her mouth. She was okay intelligence-wise, but she knew that she wasn’t as clever as Eliot. One of the teachers had said that Oxbridge looked for teachability. So it must be that she was more teachable than Eliot. She could picture Tijana at Cambridge, though, grey hood pulled up over her head as she moved through the stone arches with calm eyes.
When the bell rang for lunch, Miranda unchained Eliot’s bike and rode downhill and then uphill again, feeling the wheels cling to the earth’s descent as shops shot by, and the dour water that split Bridge Street. A couple of white gulls raced her, their wings flapping about her head. The only way she could ride a bike in shoes like hers was fast, legs pumping in a way that outwitted the conspiracy of pegs and holes. She stopped when the ground jutted and sent her body leaning back, protesting the steepness. She got off the bike and drew it along behind her. She heard and smelt the water at the bottom of the cliffs, but it felt like a long time before she’d walked long enough to glimpse the sea crashing and breaking against the shore, foam eating into stone. England and France had been part of the same landmass, her father had told her, until prised apart by floods and erosion.