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couldn’t get through three consecutive nights without wetting his bed; he couldn’t learn his tables; he couldn’t remember the words of ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’; he couldn’t eat a meal without spilling it; he couldn’t feed the bantams withoutthrowing the grain up into the air. He was beyond hope. It would be better if, one morning in his saturated bed, he did not wake up. He would be buried in a little grave, nice and neat with a stone angel kneeling above him making sure he stayed where he was. Estelle would mourn. She would take flowers. She would go and stare at the angel. Then she would recover. She would no longer say thoughts out loud or sit in a trance, stroking her sewing machine. She would abandon her walks to the river. She would come back from wherever it was she’d been.
    Mary decided to kill him that night, Christmas night, 1955.
    She kept herself awake by hitting her ear, still bruised from Sonny’s slapping.
    Her head ached. She wanted everything to be over. She thought, I know now why Grandma Livia went up in her glider; she was tired of every single thing except the sky.
    When she heard Sonny’s snoring start, she went barefoot down the stairs and into the cold kitchen. She opened the door of the larder and took down the insect spray kept there for the summer flies. It was called Flit. She liked the word. She thought, this is how you kill: you have a weapon and a word you say. You use both. Flit. ‘Flit.’
    She came back up the stairs. She didn’t feel afraid, only tired, so that her legs were heavy.
    She knelt by the door to Timmy’s little room and opened it only wide enough to put her arm in and point the Flit gun at the bed. As a precaution against her own death she’d brought a handkerchief and she held this over her nose and mouth.
    She began to pump. The nozzle of the gun bubbled and fizzed. There was no sound from inside the room. A Flit death was a peaceful one. You breathed the sweet-smelling poison and you slept. And in the morning you didn’t wake.
    Sonny had woken at midnight with a drink headache and a thirst. On his way to the bathroom, he’d found Mary crouching by Timmy’s door.
    ‘What are you doing?’ he said.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Mary.
    But Sonny could smell the Flit. He pushed Mary aside and went into Timmy’s room and saw his son sleeping peacefully under a cloud of poison.
    He shouted for Estelle and she came running, in her stained nightdress, and gathered Timmy up and put him by the window of her room and made him breathe the freezing air of Christmas night. She didn’t look at Mary, nor at Sonny. She closed her door.
    Sonny went to work with his hands. He took down Mary’s pyjamas and hit her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.
    When she didn’t cry out or make any sound, he punched her ear, the same ear he had slapped after Miss Vista’s show. The force of this blow knocked Mary to the floor. Sonny pulled her up by the arms and hit her head again and then again and again until he had no more strength to haul her to her feet.
    He left her lying and walked away. He stood in the cold bathroom, drinking a quart of water.
    Mary remembered no morning or returning day. She lay in a pit. She knew she was deep down in the earth, where no one could find her.
    Sounds came and then passed, came and passed. One of the sounds that came was the voice of Miss Vista. ‘Light, children!’ it whispered. ‘Light, light!’

CHAPTER FOUR
1957
Mary:
    My grandfather – Livia’s husband – was called Thomas Cord. We knew him as Grandpa Cord. He was sallow and small and fond of history. He was addicted to Wincarnis. When he talked, he closed his eyes, as if seeing and speaking at the same time were too difficult for him. He loved four things in the world. One of these was his remembered Livia. Another was the face and voice of an actress called Mary Martin.
    He wrote sayings out in green ink on little cards and pinned them up over door lintels. Some of these were in