White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.
Four years later Anna Good put the cream dress on again, and an expensive white coat that Andrew had bought her, and she did some witching.
Andrew Silver was a Dover Queensman, one of the “buffs,” as they were called, a brave man in brown who flew a plane to Africa to fight the Germans there. One morning someone knocked on my door and gave Anna a telegram, which said that her husband was dead. She looked at it and then she wandered up and down my staircases, in and out of my rooms, flinching, hearing bombs far away. I curved myself into a deep cup, a safe container for her. I did not let her take any harm to herself, I did not let her open the attic window to jump. I was like a child with its mouth obstinately closed, refusing speech, refusing air. She had bought some rat poison the week before, and though she did not turn to that, I shook the pellets so that they fell deep into my recesses. Just in case. She was pregnant, you see. It was two Silvers at stake. My poor Anna Good, my good lady.
“They killed him,” she wept. I could not respond. Her fear of her pica and the whispers and her fear of shrapnel and fire and, yes, her fear of me, of being left all alone in a big silent house. Her fear had crept out from the whites of her eyes and woven itself into my brick until I came to strength, until I became aware. I could keep Anna Good from killing herself and her child, but I had no other gift.
“I hate them,” she said. She sat down on the kitchen floor, the telegram rumpled on her lap. A rat scampered past her, putting its feet on her white coat. Her hair fell from its pins. She was supposed to go to the newspaper office and type, but she would not that day. Instead she gave me my task.
“I hate them,” she said. “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty… dirty killers. He should have stayed here with me. Shouldn’t have let him leave. Bring him back, bring him back, bring him back to me.” She spoke from that part of her that was older than her. The part of her that will always tie me to her, to her daughter Jennifer, to Jennifer’s stubborn daughter Lily, to Lily’s even more stubborn daughter Miranda. I can only be as good as they are. We are on the inside, and we have to stay together, and we absolutely cannot have anyone else. It’s Luc that keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is not welcome (if he doesn’t know this he is very stupid). They shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually I make them leave.
•
Since GrandAnna’s washing machine was there, the ration-book larder became a mini-laundry, washing powder scattered over its tiles, its shelves stocked with small piles of clothes. If you were a guest and had booked in for three days or more, you got your clothes washed, dried and delivered back to you for free. “Just human kindness,” Luc said. The clothes on the shelf were sorted according to whether they had been washed but not dried, or whether they had been both washed and dried and were ready to be returned to their owners. There were no tags or coloured dividers; Miranda had no idea how Sade managed to keep track, but she did it effortlessly.
From her place by the door, where she sat with her course-work notes spread over her knees, Miranda watched as Sade picked up a pair of Eliot’s jeans and laid them over the ironing board. “Please, you mustn’t iron Eliot’s denim, he hates it.”
Sade looked up from the ironing board with eyes like liquidized stars.
“Are you — are you alright?” Miranda stammered.
Sade seemed to laugh; at least, her shoulders shook.
“I’m thinking of the shame. To make a man hang himself. That place is a prison. You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and then when you arrive they put you in prison, and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered, they send you back. That place up there is a prison. He didn’t deserve that.”
“Yes,” said Miranda. She touched her own cheek, expecting it to be wet. It wasn’t.
Sade laid her hands down on the ironing board and stared at the plasters on her fingers. “I hate them,” she said, in a voice that seemed to include Miranda.
Miranda picked up her notes and said she was sorry from behind them. She left the larder quietly, walking backwards. She knew then that Sade had not personally known the dead man. Her grief was almost theoretical. It didn’t mean any less, but it was a different sort of grief from Miranda’s. It was the sort of grief you didn’t have to suppress because letting it out made it smaller instead of bigger. The sort of grief you could say something about because you instinctively understood that it could not continue, rigid inside your breathing apparatus like a metal stem. Miranda made a face at herself in the hallway mirror. Deep thoughts. Why didn’t she just draw a diagram of the different kinds of grief?
•
June was bread and nuts and berries. It was also uncharacteristically hot, but Eliot and Miranda didn’t let thoughts of summer come until after exams. Before exams came limbo, spent on the roof, squinting at old notes through sunglasses. Neither of them tanned in the slightest, though the sun’s heat brought into view messages they’d written to themselves in lemon juice on the margins of their pages. Miranda rotated her three halter-neck dresses. Eliot didn’t stoop to shorts, but folded up the bottoms of his jeans and wore flip-flops.
He got through the exam period on the “brain bread” that Luc baked — the loaves were round and coarse and filled with all sorts of seeds that neither of the twins had heard of. It seemed that every time Miranda looked at Eliot he had some of that bread in his mouth — with Luc’s champagne marmalade, or mackerel, or honey, or butter. Miranda tried not to judge him, but it was hard. In revision sessions at school, Eliot leaned forward and answered the teacher’s questions around a wad of bread. The Sunday before their last set of exams, Miranda and Eliot tested each other on key dates and terms beneath a giant picnic umbrella in the garden. Miranda’s last module was for her history paper; Eliot’s was for politics. They answered so many of their practice questions correctly that it seemed like a jinx.
Sade sat at the other end of the garden, by the back door, in case she was called. For months she had been knitting something white that grew wider and longer. She didn’t seem to have a final form in mind for it. It lathered her lap like beaten egg white, full of sun, and she paused to brush leaves off it. As she worked she lowered her head and hummed, smiling as if the work was for someone she thought tenderly of.
“What will you do when it’s really summer?” Miranda asked Eliot.
When Sade glanced over, she picked up the thick smoothie that Sade had blended for her and pretended to drink. She let the fruit sit on her lips, then, when Sade looked away, she wiped it off. Her heart wasn’t in the subterfuge. The summer before last, Eliot had refused to go on holiday without Lily and spent much of August up on the roof wearing a black balaclava and writing poetry, which he then balled up and threw as far and as hard as he could, in various directions. Lily, contacted in Mumbai, had said that he was clearly exploring the role of the poet as incendiary. When she came home she’d advised that Eliot cut his hair, unless he preferred cheaply acquired androgyny.
“Will you go to South Africa straight away?” Miranda asked.
Eliot drank from her glass and suddenly half her smoothie was gone.
“Thanks,” she said.
“South Africa’s not until October,” Eliot told her. Perhaps he would spend summer on the roof again, then.
“What will you do when it’s summer?” he asked.