The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (6 page)

Alex is still going on about Euphemia Lennox. 'You're telling me that no one's ever heard of her?' he is saying. 'Not you, not your mum, not anyone?'

Iris sighs. 'Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Mum says that Dad was definitely under the impression that Grandma was an only one, and that Grandma used to refer to it frequently. The fact that she had no siblings.'

Alex takes an enormous bite of his own sandwich and speaks through it. 'Then who's to say these people haven't made a mistake?'

Iris turns the glove over in her hand. It has three mother-of-pearl buttons at the narrow wrist. 'They haven't. I saw her, Alex, she...' She stops herself, glancing towards Fran. Then she leans forward briefly, so that her forehead makes contact with the cool glass of the counter. 'There are papers,' she says, straightening up again. 'Legal papers. Incontrovertible evidence. She's who they say she is. Grandma has a sister, alive and well and in a madhouse.'

'It's so...' Fran takes a long time to search for the word she wants; she has to close her eyes with the effort of it. '...bizarre,' she comes up with eventually, pulling each and every vowel out of it. 'For that to happen in a family.
It's very ... very...' She closes her eyes again, frowning, searching.

'Bizarre?' Iris supplies. It is a word for which she has a particular dislike.

'Yes.' Fran and Iris look at each other for a moment. Fran blinks. 'I don't mean that your family's bizarre, Iris, I just—'

'You don't know my family'

Fran laughs. 'Well, I know Alex.' She reaches out to touch his sleeve but he is standing just a little too far away so that her hand falls into the space between them.

Iris says nothing. She wants to say: what would you know? She wants to say: I came all the way to bloody Connecticut for your wedding and not one of your family thought to address a single word to me, how's that for bizarre? She wants to say: I gave you possibly the most beautiful nineteen-sixties Scandinavian coatdress I have ever seen as a wedding present and I have never once seen you wear it.

Alex lets out a cough. Iris turns to look at him. There is a minute, imperceptible flex in his facial muscles, a twitching raise of an eyebrow, a slight downturn of the mouth.

'The question is,' Iris says, looking away again, 'what I'm going to do about it. Whether I—'

'Now, hang on,' Alex says, putting down his bottle of water, and Iris bristles at the imperative tone. 'This has nothing to do with you.'

'Alex, it does, it's—'

'It doesn't. She's, what, some distant relation of yours and—'

'My great-aunt,' Iris says. 'Not that distant.'

'Whatever. This is a mess made by someone else, by your grandmother, if anyone. It's nothing to do with you. You mustn't have anything more to do with it. Do you hear me? Iris? Promise me you won't.'

Iris's grandmother is sitting in a leather chair, her feet propped on a stool, a cardigan around her shoulders. Outside the window, an elderly man shuffles up and down the terrace, hands held behind his back.

Iris stands in the doorway. She doesn't come here very often. As a child, she was taken to visit her grandmother once a week. She had liked the gloomy old house, the overgrown garden. She used to run up and down the tangled, mossy paths, in and out of the gazebo. And her grandmother had liked having her there, in a pretty dress, to show her friends. 'My Iris,' she used to call her, 'my flower.' But, as a teenager, her grandmother lost enthusiasm for her. 'You look disgusting,' she said once, when Iris appeared in a skirt she had made herself, 'no decent man will have you if you make an exhibition of yourself like that.'

'She's just had her dinner,' the care assistant says, 'haven't you, Kathleen?'

Her grandmother looks up at the sound of her name but, seeing no one who means anything to her, looks down again at her lap.

'Hello,' Iris says. 'It's me, Iris.'

'Iris,' her grandmother repeats.

'Yes.'

'My son has a little girl called Iris.'

'That's right,' Iris says, 'that's—'

'Of course it's right,' her grandmother snaps. 'Do you think I'm a fool?'

Iris pulls up a stool and sits down, her bag on her lap. 'No. I don't. I just meant that that's me. I'm your son's daughter.'

Her grandmother looks at her, long and hard, her face unsure, almost frightened. 'Don't be ridiculous,' she says, and shuts her eyes.

Iris looks about her. Her grandmother's room is thickly carpeted, choked with antique furniture, and has a view over the garden. A fountain twists in the distance and it is possible to make out the roofs of the Old Town, a crane wheeling in the sky above the city. Beside the bed are two books and Iris is just tilting her head to see what they are when her grandmother opens her eyes. 'I'm waiting for someone to do up my cardigan,' she says.

'I'll do it,' Iris says.

'I'm cold.'

Iris stands up, leans over and reaches for the buttons.

'What are you doing?' her grandmother squawks, shrinking into the chair, batting at Iris's hands. 'What are you doing?'

'I was helping you with your cardigan.'

'Why?'

'You were cold.'

'Was I?'

'Yes.'

'That's because my cardigan isn't buttoned. I need it done up.'

Iris sits back and takes a deep breath. 'Grandma,' she says, 'I came today because I wanted to ask you about Esme.'

Her grandmother turns towards her, but seems to become distracted by a handkerchief poking out of her cuff.

'Do you remember Esme?' Iris persists. 'Your sister?'

Her grandmother plucks at the handkerchief and it unwinds from her sleeve, falling into her lap, and Iris half expects there to be a string of them, all knotted together.

'Did I have lunch?' her grandmother asks.

'Yes. You've had dinner too.'

'What did I have?'

'Beef,' Iris invents.

This makes her grandmother furious. 'Beef? Why are you talking about beef?' She swings round wildly to peer out of the door. 'Who are you? I don't know you.'

Iris suppresses a sigh and looks out at the fountain. 'I'm your granddaughter. My father was—'

'She wouldn't let go of the baby,' her grandmother says suddenly.

'Who?' Iris pounces. 'Esme?'

Her grandmother's eyes are focused somewhere beyond the window. 'They had to sedate her. She wouldn't let go.'

Iris tries to stay calm. 'Which baby? Do you mean your baby?'

'
The
baby' her grandmother says crossly. She gestures desperately at something, at meaning. 'The baby. You know.'

'When was this?'

Her grandmother frowns and Iris tries not to panic. She knows she doesn't have long.

'Were you there,' Iris tries a different tack, 'when the thing with the baby happened?'

'I was waiting in a room. It wasn't my fault. They told me afterwards.'

'Who?' Iris asks. 'Who told you?'

'The people.'

'People?'

'The woman.' Her grandmother makes an indecipherable shape round her head. Two of them.'

'Two of what?'

Her grandmother looks vague. Iris can sense her sinking back into the quicksand.

'Who told you about Esme and the baby?' Iris speaks quickly, hoping to fit it all in before her grandmother loses herself again. 'Whose baby was it? Was it her baby? Is that why she was—'

'Have I had my dinner?' her grandmother says.

Someone at the front desk tells her where to go and Iris takes a turning into an ill-lit corridor with lights stretching
out in a row. There is a sign above a door, Records, and through the distorted aquarium glass, she sees a big room, lined with shelves.

Inside, a man sits on a high stool with a file in front of him. Iris rests her hand on the counter. She experiences a spasm of doubt about this mission. Maybe Alex is right. Maybe she should just leave this alone. But the man behind the counter is looking at her expectantly.

'I was wondering...' she begins. 'I'm looking for records of admission. Peter Lasdun said I could come.'

The man readjusts his glasses and grimaces, as if hit by a sudden pain. 'Those records are confidential,' he says.

Iris fumbles in her bag. 'I've got a letter from him in here somewhere, proving I'm a relative.' She delves deeper, pushing aside her purse, some lipstick, keys, receipts. Where is the letter he faxed over to the shop this morning? Her fingers brush against a folded piece of paper and she pulls it out, triumphant. 'Here,' she says, pushing it towards the man. 'This is it.'

The man spends a long time perusing it and then Iris. 'When are you looking for?' he says eventually. 'What date?'

'The thing is,' Iris says, 'they aren't exactly sure. Nineteen thirties or forties.'

He gets down from his stool with a long sigh.

The volumes are enormous and weighty. Iris has to stand up to read them. A thick epidermis of dust has grown over the spine and the top edges of the pages. She opens one at random and the pages, yellowed and brittle, fall open at
May 1941. A woman called Amy is admitted by a Dr Wallis. Amy is a war widow and has suspected puerperal fever. She is brought in by her brother. He says she won't stop cleaning the house. There is no mention of the baby and Iris wonders what happened to it. Did it live? Did the brother look after it? Did the brother's wife? Did the brother have a wife? Did Amy get out again?

Iris flicks over a few more pages. A woman who was convinced that the wireless was somehow killing them all. A girl who kept wandering away from the house at night. A Lady somebody who kept attacking a particular servant. A Cockenzie fishwife who showed signs of libidinous and uncontrolled behaviour. A youngest daughter who eloped to Ireland with a legal clerk. Iris is just reading about a Jane who had had the temerity to take long, solitary walks and refuse offers of marriage, when she is overtaken by a violent sneeze once, twice, three, four times.

She sniffs and searches her pockets for a tissue. The records room seems oddly silent after her sneezes. She glances around. It is empty apart from the man behind the desk and another man peering closely at something on a blue-lit microfiche screen. It seems strange that all these women were once here, in this building, that they spent days and weeks and months under this vast roof. As Iris turns out her pockets, it occurs to her that perhaps some of them are still here, like Esme. Is Jane of the long walks somewhere within these walls? Or the eloping youngest daughter?

No tissue, of course. She looks back at the pile of admissions records. She really should get back to the shop. It could take her hours to find Esme in all this. Weeks. Peter Lasdun said on the phone that they were 'unable to identify the exact date of her admission'. Maybe Iris should ring him again. They must be able to find out. The sensible idea would be to get the date and then come back.

But Iris turns again to Jane and her long walks. She flips back through time. 1941, 1940, 1939, 1938. The Second World War begins and is swallowed, becoming just an idea, a threat in people's minds. The men are still in their homes, Hitler is a name in the papers, bombs, blitzes and concentration camps have never been heard of, winter becomes autumn, then summer, then spring. April yields to March, then February, and meanwhile Iris reads of refusals to speak, of unironed clothes, of arguments with neighbours, of hysteria, of unwashed dishes and unswept floors, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way or seeking them elsewhere. Of husbands at the end of their tethers, of parents unable to understand the women their daughters have become, of fathers who insist, over and over again, that she used to be such a lovely little thing. Daughters who just don't listen. Wives who one day pack a suitcase and leave the house, shutting the door behind them, and have to be tracked down and brought back.

And when Iris turns a page and finds the name Euphemia Lennox she almost keeps turning because it must be hours
now since she started this and she's so dumbstruck by it all that she has to check herself, to remind herself that this is why she is here. She smooths the ancient paper of Esme's admission form with the pads of her fingers.

Aged sixteen,
is what she sees first. Then:
Insists on keeping her hair long.
Iris reads the whole document from beginning to end, then goes back and reads it again. It ends with:
Parents report finding her dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother's clothes.

Iris goes back to the shop. The dog is overjoyed to see her, as if she's been away a week, not just a few hours. She switches on the computer. She checks her email, opens one from her mother. Iris,
I've racked my brains again and again about your grandmother and I don't recall her ever mentioning a sister,
Sadie has written,
Are you sure they've got it right?
Iris replies,
Yes, I've told you, it's her.
And she asks how the weather is today in Brisbane. She replies to other emails, deletes some, ignores others, notes down the dates of certain jumble sales and auctions. She opens her accounts file.

But as she inputs the words
invoice
and
downpayment
and
outstanding
her concentration keeps slipping out from under her, because in some corner of her mind is the image of a room. It is late afternoon in this room and a girl is unpinning her hair. She is wearing a dress too large for her but the dress is beautiful, a creation in silk that she has looked at and longed for and now it is finally on her, around her. It clings to her legs and flows around her feet like water. She is humming, a tune about you and the
night and the music, and as she hums, she moves about the room. Her body sways like a branch in the wind and her stockinged feet pass over the carpet very lightly. Her head is so full of the tune and the cool swish of silk that she doesn't hear the people coming up the stairs, she doesn't hear anything. She has no idea that in a minute or two the door will fly open and they will be standing there in the doorway, looking at her. She hears the music and she feels the dress. That is all. Her hands move about her like small birds.