‘I THINK WE SHOULD ALL STICK together this evening,’ Tom says, as he walks Lily up to her room. ‘At least stay with me. That way I’ll know you’re safe. I’ll sleep on the floor, you can have the whole bed, I’ll hook apples for us in the morning.’
‘Thanks, but I’ll be OK,’ Lily says.
‘Just looking out for you.’
‘You will make someone a lovely husband one day,’ Lily says.
‘Don’t know about that.’
‘You’re sweet, kind, loyal, clever, funny . . .’ Lily says.
‘You’re forgetting extremely attractive,’ Tom says, waggling his eyebrows again. ‘And I do it with such apparent ease. Aging sexily isn’t for everyone, you know.’
‘Someone special will see that.’
‘You’ll find someone, too,’ Tom says to Lily. ‘Someone who stays, and I can actually meet.’
‘Maybe. For now, though, I’m jiggered. Just want to go to bed.’
‘Watch out, you’re Yorkshire’s showing,’ Tom says. ‘Your accent’s getting stronger, too, like a teabag left in to brew.’
Lily laughs. It’s true. ‘The past is always there, hidden.’
‘Like a picture behind an advent-calendar door.’
They’re both quiet for a moment. Lily thinks of everything that has opened up in her since being here, and wonders what’s still to come. Whatever Tom’s thinking, it’s making him look so sad. ‘Talking of doors,’ Lily says, as brightly as she can, ‘you should lock yours, too.’
Tom smiles again, seems to shiver off the past. ‘But I’m staying outside your door till you’ve locked it, OK?’
‘Goodnight, Mister Tom,’ she says, as she used to when they were little. His smile is so sweet, wide and shy that she leans over and kisses his cheek.
Walking into her bedroom, locking her door behind her, Lily listens to Tom walking away, whistling ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’. As she unlaces the maternity corset, she lets out a sigh that’s not just about being released.
Lily has ached to look at the card from her mum again all day, and placed it in the box Rachel gave her when she hid it in her room. But only in bed does she let herself read it. Liliana’s letter to Ronnie asks him to give the card to Lily on the last day of the game, ‘to prove it to her for good’.
The picture on the card is Endgame House at Christmas, etched by Aunt Veronica. The family are on the lawn, singing Christmas carols. Inside, in her mother’s writing, she reads:
Happy Christmas, my beautiful daughter. I love you. I may have given birth to you, but you give me life. You gift me joy every day and I can’t wait for more of our adventures. I’ll be here for you forever. Dare to be as fabulous as you really are. But most of all, just be you. Keep singing, and dark days will pass, and summer will always come.
Not the words of a woman about to kill herself.
The words also echo Liliana’s poem today. What was it? ‘Be fabulous. Do not slumber in mediocrity.’ Trust Aunt Lil to add the mediocrity. Sometimes, Lily thinks Sara has a point. If Liliana had accepted her, then would Sara be the person she is today? If she hadn’t expected Sara to be a Bowie, a mage or a star, or to wield words or a paintbrush, and had simply asked her to be herself, would Lily even suspect Sara of having the capacity to kill?
If Mum had lived, then Lily knows she’d be able to speak now. She wouldn’t be strung with cowardice; she wouldn’t have to lace up her corsets so no one could see her real shape. That’s what she has to give little Bean. The space to be her own shape.
She thinks about her mother singing Kooks and Christmas carols to get her to sleep, and, very quietly, so just Bean and the mice in the walls can hear, hums ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’.