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haven’t been sleeping too well. You can help yourself to a soda if you’d care to.’
    â€˜Okay, sure,’ she said, as sweetly as she could, in case he changed his mind. She suddenly felt pleased that she was nine, and rather grown-up. She betted he wouldn’t have asked Laura to help herself to a soda, and join him in the library, right slapbang in the middle of the night, for goodness’ sake.
    The two of them went downstairs together, and this time the stairs creaked and it didn’t matter. Elizabeth went to the Frigidaire, crammed with platefuls of Mrs Patrick’s leftovers, and found a frosty-chilled bottle of Coca-Cola. She returned to the library to find that her father had drawn his big leather chair up close to the fireplace, and that he had poured himself a large cut-crystal glass of whiskey, and set it in the brown-tiled grate.
    â€˜Sit down,’ he said; and so she dragged up his old piano-stool, the one with the frayed tapestry seat and all the music inside it, strange musty-yellow music that nobody would ever play, like ‘Climbing Up The Golden Stairs’ and ‘Break The News To Mother’.
    Elizabeth swigged Coca-Cola from the bottle and watched the fire embers dying away. She wondered if father were going to talk, or whether he would sit here in silence, drinking whiskey and staring at nothing at all.
    â€˜I guess you miss Peggy pretty sorely,’ he said, at last.
    Elizabeth nodded.
    Her father said, ‘The Reverend Earwaker keeps telling me that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, as if that’s supposed to make me feel better. I don’t know. I wouldn’t have minded
what
the Lord had taken away from me – my arms, my legs, my eyes . . . But not little Peggy, not my little Clothes-Peg. He didn’t have to take her away.’
    â€˜I expect she’s happy,’ ventured Elizabeth.
    Her father glanced across at her and gave her half a smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I expect she is.’
    â€˜Laura and I say prayers to her, every night, and talk to her, too.’
    â€˜Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad of that.’
    Elizabeth said, ‘You’re not sorry you had her, are you?’
    There was a lengthy silence. One of the last logs lurched in the hearth, sending a whirl of sparks up the chimney. ‘That’s a very mature question,’ said her father. ‘I’m not too sure that I know what the answer is.’
    â€˜Sometimes I think that mommy’s a bit sorry she had any of us.’
    â€˜Your mommy? Your mommy’s not sorry she had you, any of you! Nothing of the kind!’
    â€˜But if she hadn’t had us, she could have been a movie actress, couldn’t she?’
    Her father had pressed his hand over his mouth for a while, as if he were making quite sure that no words came out until he was sure what he was going to say. Then he explained, ‘Your mommy is one of these people who always needs to think that their life could have been different.’
    â€˜But it could have been, couldn’t it? She was on Broadway.’
    â€˜Yes,’ her father agreed, ‘she was on Broadway.’
    â€˜And she could have been a famous movie star?’
    She could tell by her father’s expression that he was tempted to say no. She was almost tempted to say it for him. He couldn’t look at her:
wouldn’t
look at her, in the way that he wouldn’t look at mommy whenever mommy started talking about El Morocco and Monty Woolley and
Fifty Thousand Frenchmen
. Elizabeth suddenly realized that she had known for quite a long time that mommy had never been gifted with whatever it takes to be a famous movie star, the style, the idiosyncrasy, the voice, the kind of face that cameras fell in love with.
    But mommy’s lost movie career was one of the articles offaith of Buchanan family life, and they both understood that it was heresy to question it.
    Father looked down