Frankie Styne & the Silver Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

art.’
    Another of her commands was to always search for Silver Linings. It was worth it because with a flick of the wrist a dull garment, something like a school mac, could be transformed. It was a kind of magic, perpetually waiting behind the everyday, the intractable, the boring. Finding a Silver Lining made Grammy laugh like a fishwife. She did it as often as possible.
    â€˜Damned if I can see one in this place,’ Liz’s mother would say.
    The search for Silver Linings, the avoidance of ties that bound, hiding and forgetting: these were Grammy’s most repeated, most strenuous commands. But there were many more. Some began with always, others with never, but only the one: ‘Try to forget me,’ with try to. In her later years Grammy issued her commands from bed, sitting straight up, her face immobile and her hands resting on the turned-down sheet:
    â€˜Never sit with your legs crossed.’
    â€˜Always look people in the face when you’re speaking to them. Especially if you’re telling a lie.’
    â€˜That child,’ Liz’s mother said, ‘will do nothing we ask, but she’s putty in your mother’s hands.’
    Long before all this, the first thing Liz remembered anyone saying about Grammy was that she was a widow. At that time she hadn’t known what it meant, but guessed it must somehow refer to the ways in which Grammy wasn’t like other people of her age. She genuinely enjoyed playing hide-and-seek; she left bits of her dinner she didn’t care for on her plate without even pushing them to the edge; she loved to watch television, the same things as Liz herself: vampires and rayguns, shootouts, aliens— rubbish. She was someone who slipped through the net that held other grown-up people fast. She had her independence, then, and couldn’t be told what to do.
    Against a tide of disapproval, Grammy dyed her wisps of hair jet black and this made the scalp glow even whiter beneath. As they both grew older—and it was important, too, that they both counted years—Liz helped her with this, standing behind the upright chair to paste on the foul-smelling dye, her eyes torn between the task at hand and the television screen. So although people naturally would say that it was the divorce, or pubs, which had made Liz turn out how she did, they would be mostly wrong. It was Grammy, who in her own way had predicted it all.
    â€˜Of course,’ Liz’s father often said, ‘I don’t expect anything back. She struggled to bring me up—’
    â€˜Probably had a right old time while she did it—’
    â€˜â€”But she might leave that money to help her own grandchild. Or something like cancer research.’
    â€˜Something like us. A sum like that.’
    â€˜I never asked them to bring me here,’ Grammy told Liz when she had moved into the Swan. (It was an Edwardian structure and stood miraculously preserved in the middle of a modern housing estate. The inside had been done up in modern style. Just like the one before, it was going through bad times. Nightclubs, Liz’s father said, were to blame . . .) ‘It was a fait accompli,’ Grammy continued. ‘Always avoid, dear, the ties that bind. Indeed, you really ought to avoid me now.’ But when Grammy said that, she smiled. Ought was like try to; it didn’t seem to be quite so absolute a command as the others. There was room for failure.
    Grammy was awkward. Sometimes she answered the telephone and put people off. She was temperamental, she was ungrateful and selfish. Grammy was senile: her brains, Liz’s mother explained, were slowly thickening and scrambling, like eggs. Liz’s mother had a way with expressions like that—said them in a tone of voice somewhere between distaste and wonder so that they seemed to mean exactly what the words said. In the end, that voice suggested, Grammy’s brains would stick to the bottom of