The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (21 page)

You're getting married, Alex, she had shouted, tomorrow. Remember? And he had said, I don't care, I don't want to marry her. Then don't, Iris replied. I have to, he said, it's all arranged. It can be unarranged, she said, if you want. But he had shouted then: why did you go to Russia, why did you go, how could you leave like that? I had to, she shouted back, I had to go, you didn't have to come to New York, you don't have to stay here, you don't have to marry Fran. I do, he said, I do.

Iris uncurls herself, straightens her legs, places her feet on the floor. She says nothing.

'So, what are you going to do about this Lucas person, then?' Alex asks, fiddling with the remote control.

Iris allows there to be a slight pause before she says: 'Luke.'

'Luke, Lucas,' he waves a hand, 'whatever. What are you going to do?'

'About what?'

Alex sighs. 'Don't be obtuse. Just try it. For once. See how it feels.'

'Nothing,' she says, looking fixedly at the television. She doesn't want to talk about this any more than she wants to talk about the night before Alex's wedding, but she is relieved that at least they seem to be back in the present. 'I don't know what you mean. I'm not going to do anything.'

'What – you're just going to continue as this guy's mistress? Jesus, Iris,' Alex flings the remote to the arm of the sofa, 'do you never feel you're selling yourself short?'

She snaps upright, stung. 'I'm not selling myself in any way at all. And I'm not his mistress. What a hideous word. If you think—'

'Iris, I'm not having a go at you. I just wonder if...' He trails off.

'What? You wonder what?'

'I don't know.' Alex shrugs. 'I mean, is he ... I don't know.' He fiddles with a loose thread in a cushion. 'Is he who you want?'

Iris sighs. She flings herself backwards so that she is lying flat against the cushions. She squeezes her eyes shut, pressing her fingers to them, and when she opens them the room leaps with violent colour. He says he's going to leave her.' She addresses the lampshade above her.

'Really?' He is looking at her, she can tell, but she doesn't
meet his eye. 'Hmm,' he mumbles, and picks up the remote again. 'I bet he won't. But what would you do if he did?'

From her reclined position, Iris sees Esme enter the room and drift towards them. She has the ability to make herself almost invisible. Iris doesn't know how she does it. She watches her and sees that Esme doesn't look their way, doesn't acknowledge their presence in the room, as if they are invisible to her.

'What?' Iris says, watching Esme. 'Oh, I'd hate it. I'd be horrified. You know that.'

Esme has been distracted from her invisibility thing by something. She stops in her tracks, then approaches a desk Iris keeps pushed up against the wall. Is it the desk she's interested in? No. It's the pinboard above it, where Iris has stuck a patchwork of postcards and photographs. She sees Esme leaning in to look at them. Iris glances back to the television, to the reports of high winds and rain.

Then she turns. Esme has said something, in a peculiar, high voice.

'What was that?' Iris says.

Esme gestures at something on the pinboard. 'There's me,' she says.

'You?'

'Mmm.' She points at the pinboard. 'A picture of me.'

Iris scrambles from the sofa. She is more than keen to leave it and the conversation with Alex. She crosses the room and comes to stand next to Esme. 'Are you sure?' she says. She is sceptical. It's not possible that she has had a
photo of Esme on her wall for all these years and not realised it.

Esme is indicating a brown photograph with curling edges that Iris had found among her grandmother's papers. She'd liked it and kept it, pinning it up with the other pictures. Two girls and a woman stand beside a big white car. The woman is wearing a white dress and a hat pulled down over her eyes. A fox hangs about her shoulders, tail snapped in mouth. The elder girl is standing with her head touching the woman's arm. She has a ribbon in her hair, ankle socks, her feet splayed, and her hand rests in that of the younger girl, whose gaze is fixed on something just beyond the lens. Her outline is slightly blurred – she must have moved as the shutter fell. To Iris, it gives her a ghostly appearance, as if she might not have been there at all. Her dress matches that of the other girl but her hair ribbon has come loose and one end hangs down to touch her shoulder. In her free hand is a small, angular object that could be a baby's rattle or a kind of catapult.

'It was in our driveway in India,' Esme is saying. 'We were off on a picnic. Kitty got sunstroke.'

'I can't believe that's you,' Iris says, staring at an image she knows by heart but suddenly cannot recognise. 'I can't believe you're there. Right there. You've been here in front of me all these years and I never knew about you. I've had this photo up by my desk for so long and I've never thought about who the younger girl was. It's stupid. Incredibly stupid of me. I mean, you're wearing matching clothes.' Iris frowns.
'I should have noticed that. I should have wondered about it. It's so obvious that you're sisters.'

'Do you think?' Esme says, turning to her.

'Well, you don't look alike. But I can't believe I never saw it. I can't believe I never asked her who you were. I only found it after she'd become so bad we had to move her out of here.'

Esme is still looking at her. 'How ill is she?' she asks.

Iris bites at a snag in her nail and pulls a face. 'It's hard to quantify. Physically, they say she's in good shape. But mentally it's all a bit of a mystery. Some things she remembers quite clearly and others are just gone. Generally, she's stalled at about thirty years ago. She never recognises me. She's got no idea who I am. In her mind, her granddaughter Iris is a little girl in a pretty frock.'

'But she remembers things from before? From before thirty years ago?'

'Yes and no. She has good days and bad days. It depends when you catch her and what you say.' Iris wonders whether or not to bring this up, but before she has even thought it through, she finds herself saying, 'I asked her about you, you know. I went to see her specially. At first she said nothing, and then she said ... she said a very strange thing.'

Esme looks at her for so long that Iris wonders if she heard her.

'Kitty,' Iris clarifies. 'I went to see Kitty about you.'

'Yes.' Esme inclines her head. 'I understand.'

'Would you like to know what she said? Or not? I don't have to tell you, I mean, it's up to—'

'I would like to know.'

'She said, "Esme wouldn't let go of the baby."'

Esme turns away, instantly, as if on a pivot. Her hand passes through the air above Iris's desk, past the papers, the envelopes, the pens, the unanswered mail. It comes to a stop near the pinboard. 'This is your mother?' Esme asks, pointing at a snapshot of Iris, the dog and her mother on a beach.

It takes Iris a moment to respond. She is still thinking about the baby, whose baby it might have been, she is still hurtling along a detective track and it takes her a few seconds to slam on the brakes. 'Yes,' she says, attempting to focus on the photo. So you're playing the avoidance game, she wants to say. She touches the next photo along, giving Esme a quick glance. 'That's my cousin, my cousin's baby. There's Alex and my mum again, on top of the Empire State Building. Those are friends of mine. We were on holiday in Thailand. That's my goddaughter. She's dressed as an angel for a nativity play. That's me and Alex when we were children—that was taken in the garden here. This one was at my friend's wedding a couple of months ago.'

Esme looks at each one carefully, attentively, as if she will be examined on them later. 'What a lot of people you have in your life,' she murmurs. 'And your father?' she says, straightening up, fixing Iris with that gimlet gaze of hers.

'My father?'

'Do you have a photograph of him?'

'Yes.' Iris points. 'That's him there.'

Esme bends to look. She eases out the drawing-pin and holds the photograph close to her face.

'It was taken just before he died,' Iris says.

—and so I hid from Mother and Duncan and I took a taxi cab. I told them I was going into town but really I went in the opposite direction. As we drove there I kept thinking about how it would be and I pictured a pretty sort of room and her in a nightgown, sitting in a chair with a rug over her knees, looking out over a garden, perhaps. And I pictured her face lighting up when she saw me and how I might help a little, in small ways, straightening the rug for her, perhaps reading a line or two from a book, if she felt up to it. I pictured her taking my hand and squeezing it in gratitude. I was amazed when the driver told me we had arrived. It was so close! Not ten minutes from where we lived. And all that time I had imagined her far away, out of the city. It couldn't have been more than a mile or so, two at most. As I walked up the drive I looked around for other patients but there were none. A nurse met me at the door and she showed me, not to where she was, but to an office where a doctor was fiddling with a fountain pen and he said, it's a pleasure to meet you, Miss—and I said, Mrs. Mrs Lockhart. And he apologised and nodded and he wanted to know. He wanted to know. He
said, I have been trying to make contact with your parents. He said—

—and on the sixth night of my marriage, when he got into bed, I reached out for him through the dark. I took his hand in mine and I held it firm. Duncan, I said, and I was surprised at how authoritative I sounded, is everything all right? I had rehearsed this during the day, during the many days, I had decided what I would say. Is it me? I said. Is it something I'm doing or not doing? Tell me what to do. You must tell me. He extracted his fingers from mine. He patted my hand. My dear, he said, you must be tired. On the nineteenth night, he suddenly rolled on to me in the dark. I was just drifting off to sleep. It gave me a shock and I couldn't breathe but I lay still and I felt him grip my shoulder with one hand, like a man testing a tennis ball, and I felt his feet paddling at mine and I felt his other hand pulling up the hem of my nightgown and then he made a kind of frantic, tugging motion somewhere lower down and he shifted the hand on my shoulder to my breast and all I could think was, my God, and then he stopped. He stopped dead. He scrambled off me, back to his side of the bed. Oh, he said, and his voice was full of horror, oh, I thought ... and I said, what, you thought what? But he never—

—doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?

***

Sister Stewart appears at Esme's bedside early one morning. 'Get yourself up and get your things together.'

Esme rips back the bedsheets. 'I'm going home,' she says. 'I'm going home. Aren't I?'

Sister Stewart pushes her face up close. 'I'm not saying yes and I'm not saying no. Now, come on. Be quick about it.'

Esme pulls her dress over her head and bundles her possessions into its pockets. 'I'm going home,' she calls to Maudie, as she trips down the ward behind Sister Stewart.

'Good for you, hen,' Maudie replies. 'Come back and see us.'

Sister Stewart walks down two flights of stairs, along a long corridor, past a row of windows, and Esme sees snatches of sky, of trees, of people walking along the road. She's coming out. There is the world waiting for her. It is all she can do to stop herself pushing past Sister Stewart and breaking into a run. She wonders who will have come to collect her. Kitty? Or just her parents? Surely Kitty will have come, after all this time. She'll be waiting in the foyer with the black and white tiles, sitting on a chair perhaps, her bag balanced on her lap, as it always is, her gloves on just so, and as Esme comes down the stairs she will turn her head, she will turn her head and smile.

Esme is about to take the flight of stairs leading to the ground floor and Kitty when she realises Sister Stewart is holding open a door for her. Esme steps through. Then Sister Stewart is speaking to another nurse, saying here's
Euphemia for you, and the nurse is saying, come on, this way, here's your bed.

Esme stares at the bed. It is steel, with a coarse cotton cover and has a blanket folded at its end. It is in an empty room with one window, so high up she can see nothing but grey cloud through it. She turns. 'But I'm going home,' she says.

'No, you're not,' the nurse replies, and reaches out to take her bundle of clothes.

Esme pulls it away. She can feel that she is about to cry. She is about to cry and she does not think she can stop herself this time. She stamps her foot. 'I am! Dr Naysmith said—'

'You're to stay here until the baby comes.'

Esme sees that Sister Stewart is leaning against the wall, watching her, a peculiar smile on her face. 'What baby?' Esme asks.

Her face is so close to the bed-end that she can see marks on the metal. Scratches or chips in the enamel. She is twisted, contorted, her head pushed back into the mattress, her back arched, and she curls her hands over the marks and watches her fingers turn white. The pain comes up from the core of her and seems to engulf her, storming over her head. Such pain is unimaginable. It will not stop. It has her in a constant, never-weakening grip and she does not think she is going to live. Her time is now. Her time is soon. It is not possible to be in so much pain and not die.

She tightens her fingers round the marks and she hears someone screaming and screaming, and only then does it occur to her that they are teethmarks. Someone in this ward, in this very bed, has been driven to gnaw the bedpost. She hears herself shout, teeth, teeth.

'What's she saying?' one of the nurses asks, but she cannot hear the answer. There are two nurses with her, an older one and a younger one. The younger one is nice. She holds her to the bed, like the older one, but not so firmly and, near the beginning of this, she dabbed a cloth over her face when the older nurse wasn't looking.

They are pressing down on her shoulders, on her shins, saying, lie still now. But she cannot. The pain twists her, it lifts her from the bed, buckles her. The nurses thrust her back to the mattress, again and again. Push, they shout at her, push. Don't push. Push now. Stop pushing. Come on, child.