Tilly Left When We Took Out the Stairs

Tilly was part of our household for two years. Our daughter set places for her, blamed her fairly — only for things a small invisible girl could plausibly do — and reported her opinions, which were mostly about weather and shoes. One oddity: Tilly, our daughter said, lived 'where the house goes down,' and she'd point at the blank wall at the end of the ground-floor hallway. There is nothing there. There is especially no down; the house has no basement on any plan we'd seen.

When we finally renovated, the builders opened that hallway wall to run pipework and stopped work within the hour. Behind the plaster: a staircase. Bricked at the bottom, boarded at the top, descending into a void that predated our house — the foundations of whatever stood here before, unrecorded, unfilled. The building historian our architect called in dated the lower brick to eighty-odd years before our street existed and used the phrase 'they built over rather than through,' which I have chosen not to examine.

Our daughter, seven by then, was at school during the discovery and we said nothing. She came home, dropped her bag, looked down the hallway at the hole where the wall had been, and said — flatly, factually, with a child's brutal absence of ceremony: 'Tilly's door is open. She can go now.'

Tilly did not come to dinner that night. Or ever again. When we asked after her a week later, our daughter said, in the tone reserved for adults being slow, 'She only stayed because it was shut.'

The void was surveyed, filled, certified, forgotten by everyone whose name is on the paperwork. Our daughter is ten and claims no memory of Tilly at all — but she still says goodnight to the end of the hallway. When I asked her why, last month, she said, 'Habit.' Then, at the top of the stairs, quietly: 'And manners.'