Nobody knew what to say to Luc. His children were closest to knowing, but Miranda was mad and when she saw him those first few weeks after Lily’s death, she wasn’t sure who he was. Eliot noticed Luc more, as an eye does when something is removed from a picture and the image is reduced to its flaw, the line where the whole is disrupted.
I find Luc interesting. He really has no idea what to do now, and because he is not mine I don’t care about him. I do, however, take great delight in the power of a push, a false burst of light at the bottom of a cliff, just one little encouragement to the end. Sometimes it seems too easy to toy with him. Other times… I don’t know. But he is always so close by that it doesn’t matter so much.
•
My father is very brief. All in the most likeable manner possible — he gets this look of discomfort whenever someone tries to discuss something with him at length. He looks as if he would very much like to spare you the effort. He used to go through horrors with Miri on the subject of her day at school, his replies cautious and neutral in case he appeared to be disapproving of something that was a good thing. Miri would chatter and chatter about our teacher having been unfair or the disappearance of her pencils. “Ah,” Dad would say, and, “Right.” And, “Really?”
If I was going on a trip or something it was a simple matter of handing him a letter or an itinerary and saying, “Dad, it’s £300,” or whatever it was. He’d scan the paper and say, “Fine,” or he’d say, “Here’s the thing; can’t afford that this term. Are you now resentful?”
Are you now resentful is always a genuine question from him. We never, ever said yes. It was my dad’s idea to open Lily’s house as a bedand-breakfast. Lily’s grandma, our GrandAnna, had raised Lily herself, and when she died she left Lily the house in Dover. I heard my Dad on the phone to someone about it: “Seven bedrooms, four bathrooms and God’s own 1940s kitchen…”
Lily wanted to put the Dover house up to let and use the money to pay the rent on our flat in London, which, Dad said, made no sense at all. But: “Why on earth would I want to live in Dover again? I spent my childhood in a state of inertia.”
Dad spent about six months working on Lily. The facts, figures and written proposals he’d prepared for the bank left her completely unmoved; she always tried to ignore things she didn’t understand rather than be intimidated by them. But apparently it was the bed linen that changed her mind. Cool blue silk and cotton patchwork. When Dad laid the stitched pillowcase and duvet out for her on the sofa, the colours reminded her of something she’d never seen. She said to us, “Imagine everyone in the house — even people we don’t know — all wrapped up safe in blue, like fishes. What fun…”
Miri and I were ten; Dad spent some time with a big map, planning a scenic route, and then he drove the moving van himself. Miri and I fidgeted at first, then settled when we saw cliffs bruising the skyline and smelt birds and wet salt on the air.
Our new house had two big brown grids of windows with a row of brick in between each grid. No windows for the attic. From the outside the windows didn’t look as if they could be opened, they didn’t look as if they were there to let air or light in, they were funny square eyes, friendly, tired. The roof was a solid triangle with a fat rectangular chimney behind it. Lily bounced out of the van first and I scrambled out of the other side and crooked my arm so as to escort her to the door. The house is raised from the road and laid along the top of a brick staircase, surrounded by thick hedge with pink flowers fighting through it. “Careful on the steps,” Lily said. The steps leading up to the house bulge with fist-sized lumps of grey-white flint, each piece a knife to cut your knee open should you slip. Opposite our house there is a churchyard, a low mound of green divided into two. The graves beneath it are unmarked. Lily took my arm and held Miri’s hand and when we got up to the front door she rubbed the crescent moon — shaped door knocker and laughed a little bit and said, “Hello, hello again.”
The first thing Lily showed us inside was the dusty marble fireplace. It was so big that Miri could crawl into the place where the wood was supposed to sit. She tried to make crackling, fire-like noises (when we were ten I always knew the meaning of the sounds she made, even when they were unsuccessful)
but ended up choking on a puff of dust that bolted down the chimney. Next Lily showed us the little ration-book larder behind the kitchen; the shelves were wonky and the room had a floor so crazily checked that none of us could walk in a straight line in there. I remember how brilliant I thought it all was; there was nothing for it but to jump in the air and yell and kick and make kung-fu noises.
Miri and I conferred and decided that we liked the tallness of the house, the way the walls shoot up and up with the certainty of stone, “Like we’re in a castle,” Miri put it. We liked the steep, winding staircase with the gnarled banister. We especially liked the ramshackle lift and the way you could see its working through a hole worn into the bottom in the back left corner. We liked that the passageways on each floor were wide enough for the two of us to stand beside each other with our arms and legs spread, touching but not touching. I climbed one of the apple trees and surveyed the garden, the patches of wild flowers that crumpled in the shade, the Andersen shelter half-hidden by red camellia shrubs. I was well pleased. “Wicked house,” I said. “Magic,” said Miri, from somewhere below.
We thought it would be hard to make friends because of the way people came out and stared at us in the moving van as it passed through the streets. But Miri is good at making friends, and I am good at tagging along on expeditions and acting as if the whole thing was my idea in the first place. Miri was very pleased with Martin Jones’s curly hair; the boy’s head was like a sheep’s. He became our first friend in the area and he brought most of the rest.
Actually, when we were sixteen Miri gave me the task of telling Martin that he didn’t stand a chance with her. Miri called me into her room, fixed me with a look of dread and whispered, “He asked me out and now I just can’t look at him anymore.” I refused point-blank to be her messenger or to have anything to do with any of it, but she said, “Then I’ll write him a letter.” I cringed and said, “Don’t do that.”
Martin and a couple of others came around to smoke and watch what promised to be “strange and unusual porn.” Women with horses, women with lizards, women with women plus horses and lizards. I pretended to be leaner than I was and at one point mentioned aloud one of the “actor’s” resemblance to Miri’s boyfriend. The others groaned.
“What the fuck—”
“Er, no—”
“Too gay, Silver.”
Martin didn’t say anything himself, but I knew that he was gutted and I didn’t let him pay for his share of the weed; he put a note down and when he wasn’t looking I screwed it up and threw it into his coat pocket with a sense of relief so huge it was disabling. I wrote something in my diary about it a few days later, about our teenage years being a realm of the emotionally baroque. I wasn’t even lean when I wrote that.
So Martin was the first friend, but the other kids he brought liked the house too.
For a few months after we moved in it was just Lily, Miri, Dad and me in the house, no guests. Decorating happened, the kitchen got updated; Lily went away to Mexico and came back with a pair of shrivelled corn-husk dolls that she put on a shelf in her studio when Miri and I rejected them. During that time there was no better place in the neighbourhood for hide-and-seek, or for Robin Hood versus Sheriff of Nottingham swordstick fighting in the back garden. There was no better place to play Hitler Resistance Force, a game I made up so I could be Churchill. My first kiss was in the Andersen shelter, more a percussion of heads, faces, mouths than anything else. We were thirteen. Emma’s the sort of girl who likes boys who have unpredictable moods and write poetry and imagine things, so I played up to that. We were in the shelter because she was supposed to be a Nazi double agent giving me secret information. For some reason whilst kissing her my main preoccupation was not hurting her or bruising her. I tried not to hold her too hard. Her hair and skin were so soft.