The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (12 page)

Esme looks up from her study of the marmalade-jar label. 'How marvellous,' she breathes.

Iris laughs, surprised. 'Well, I don't know about that. It doesn't seem very marvellous to me.'

'It doesn't?'

'No. Not always. I was a translator for a bit, for a big company in Glasgow, but I hated it. And then I travelled for a while, saw the world, you know, waitressing along the way. And then somehow I ended up doing my shop.'

Esme cuts her toast into small, geometric triangles. 'You're not married?' she says.

Iris shakes her head, her mouth full of crumbs. 'No.'

'You never married?'

'No.'

'And people don't mind?'

'What people?'

'Your family.'

Iris has to think about this. 'I don't know if my mother minds or not. I've never asked her.'

'Do you have lovers?'

Iris coughs and has to gulp at her tea.

Esme looks nonplussed. 'Is that an impolite question?' she asks.

'No ... well, it can be. I don't mind you asking but some people might.' Iris swallows her tea. 'I do, yes ... I have had ... I do ... yes.'

'And do you love them? These lovers?'

'Um.' Iris frowns and drops a crust on to the floor for the dog, who darts towards it, paws scrabbling on the lino. 'I ... I don't know.' Iris pours herself more tea and tries to think. 'Actually, I do know. I loved some of them and I didn't love others.' She looks at Esme across the table and tries to imagine her at her own age. She'd have been fine-looking, with those cheekbones and those eyes, but by then she'd have spent half her life in an institution.

'There is a man at the moment,' Iris hears herself saying and she is amazed at herself for doing so because no one except Alex knows about Luke and she likes to keep it that way, 'but ... it's complicated.'

'Oh,' Esme says, and stares at her, hard.

Iris averts her gaze. She stands, brushing the crumbs off her dressing-gown. She dumps the dirty plates on the draining-board. She sees by the clock on the oven door that it's only nine a.m. There are twelve, possibly thirteen hours to fill before she can decently expect Esme to go to bed again. How is Iris going to occupy her for an entire weekend? What on earth is she going to do with her?

'So,' Iris says, turning back, 'I don't know what you would like to do today. Is there anything...?'

Esme is looking at the bone-handled knife again, turning it over and over in her palm. Iris is hoping she might say something. She doesn't, of course.

'We could...' Iris tries to think '...go for a drive. If you like. Around the city. Or ... a walk. Maybe you'd like to see some of the places you...' She loses conviction. Then she brightens with an idea. 'We could go and see your sister. Visiting hours start at—'

'The sea,' Esme says, putting down the knife. 'I would like to go to the sea.'

Esme propels herself through the water, breasting the dip and swell, her breath escaping in ragged gasps. She is beyond the breaking point of the waves, out in that queer, foam-less no man's land. Around her legs, she feels the cold clutch of deep, powerful water.

She turns and looks back to land. The curve of Canty
Bay, the brown-yellow of the sand, her parents on a rug, her grandmother sitting bolt upright on a folding chair, Kitty standing beside them, looking along the beach, her hand shading her eyes. Her father, Esme sees, is making a gesture that means she should come further in. She pretends not to see.

A wave is coming, gathering its strength, drawing all the water around it towards itself. It moves at her, soundless, an impassive ridge in the ocean. Esme braces herself, then feels the delicious lift as the wave takes her, buoys her up, bears her towards the sky, then passes on, lowering her gently down. She watches, treading water, as it crashes and breaks, rushing in a frenzy of white towards the sand. Kitty is waving at someone and Esme sees that strands of her hair are escaping from her bathing cap.

They have taken a house in North Berwick for the summer. This is what people do, their grandmother told them. It is her job, she said, to see that Esme and Kitty are mixing with 'the right sort of folk'. They are taken to golfing lessons, which Esme detests beyond compare, to tea-dances at the Pavilion, to which Esme always ensures she brings a book, and every afternoon their grandmother gets them to dress in their best clothes and makes them walk up and down the sea front, saying how do you do to people. Especially families with sons. Esme refuses to go on these ridiculous walks. They make her feel like a horse at a show. Strangely, Kitty loves them. She spends hours getting ready, brushing her hair, patting cream into her face, threading ribbons into
her gloves. Why are you doing that, Esme had asked yesterday, as Kitty sat before the mirror, pinching and pinching the skin of her cheeks. And Kitty had got up from the stool and walked from the room without replying. Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied, good, and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.

Another wave comes, and another. Esme sees that her grandmother has got out her knitting, that her father is reading a newspaper. Kitty is talking to some people. A mother and her two sons, by the look of it. Esme frowns. She cannot understand what has happened to her sister. The sons are lumpish, large-handed, and hang back from Kitty's eager enquiries. She cannot imagine what Kitty is finding to say to them. She is just about to shout for her to come in to swim when something changes. The deep cold water beneath her is shifting, dragging at her legs. She is being sucked backwards very fast, the water around her rushing towards open sea. Esme makes an attempt to swim against it, back to the shore, but it's as if chains are tied to her limbs. There is a roaring sound like the moment before a storm. She turns.

Behind her is a green wall of water. The top of it is cresting, tipping over. She opens her mouth to scream but something heavy crashes on to her head. Esme is yanked under, dragged down. She can see nothing but a greenish blur and her mouth and lungs are filled with bitter water.
She flails this way and that but has no idea which direction is the surface, where she must fight towards. Something bangs her on the head, something unyielding and hard, making her teeth clash together, and she realises that she has hit the bottom, that she has been turned upside-down, like St Catherine in her wheel, but the sense of orientation lasts only for a second because she is flung forwards, downwards, dragged inside the muscle of the wave. Then she feels sand and stones grating against her stomach. She pushes hard with her hands and – miraculously – her head breaks the surface.

The light is white and jarring. She can hear the mourning cries of the gulls and her mother saying something about a gammon steak. Esme gulps at the air. She looks down and sees that she is kneeling in the shallows. Her bathing cap is gone and her hair sticks to her back in a wet rope. Tiny wavelets run past her to lap at the shore. There is a sharp pain in her forehead. Esme touches her fingers to it and when she looks at them, they are flecked with blood.

She stumbles to her feet. Angular pebbles press up into her soles. She almost trips but manages to stay upright. She lifts her head and looks towards the beach. Will they be angry? Will they say they told her to keep further in?

Her family are on the rug, passing round sandwiches and cuts of cold meat. Her grandmother's knitting needles work against each other, winding in the thread of wool. Her father has a handkerchief on his head. And there, sitting on the rug, is herself. There is Kitty, in her striped bathing-suit, her cap pulled down low, and there she is. Esme. Sitting next to Kitty, her sister, in her matching suit, accepting a cold chicken leg from her mother.

Esme stares. The scene seems to tremble and break apart. She has the sensation of being pulled strongly towards it, as if drawn by a magnet, as if she is still in the clutch of the wave, but she knows she is standing still, in the shallows of the sea. She presses her hand to her eyes and looks again.

She, or the person who resembles her, has her legs crossed. Her bathing-suit has the same snag on the shoulder, and Esme knows the way the rough wool of the blanket feels against bare skin, the way the spiked fingers of the marram grass behind them pokes through your clothes. She can, she realises, feel it at that very moment. But how can that be if she is standing in the sea?

She glances down, as though to reassure herself that she is still there, to check whether she has been exchanged in some way for someone else. A wave is passing, tiny and inconsequential, licking at her shins. And when she looks up again, the vision is gone.

If she is in the sea, what was she doing on the rug? Did she drown in the wave and, if she did, who was that person?

I'm here, she wants to shout, this is me.

And in her real-time life, she is there again. She is standing in Canty Bay. The sky is above her, the sand below her, and stretched out in front of her is the sea. The scene is very simple. It presents the fact of itself, ineluctable, unequivocal.

The sea is calm today, eerily so. Small green waves flop and turn at its edge, and further out the skin of it heaves and stretches as if, far below, something is stirring.

In a minute, Esme thinks, she will turn and look towards the land. But she hesitates because she is not sure what she will see. Will it be her family on the tartan travelling rug? Or will it be the girl, Iris, sitting on the sand, watching her? Will it be herself? And which self? It's hard to know.

Esme turns. The wind steals her hair, flipping it above her head, streaking it over her face. There is the girl, sitting as Esme knew she would be, in the sand, legs crossed. She is watching her with that slightly anxious frown of hers. But no, Esme is wrong. She is not watching her, she is looking past her, towards the horizon. She is, Esme sees, thinking of the lover.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel.

From all her family – her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents – from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme's mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Esme turns back to the sea, to the keening of the gulls, to the rearing monster-head of the Bass Rock, which are
the only unchanged things. She scuffs her feet in the sand, creating miniature valleys and mountain ranges. She would like, more than anything, to swim. People say you never forget. She would like to test this theory. She would like to immerse herself in the cold, immutable waters of the Firth of Forth. She would like to feel the ceaseless drag of the currents flexing beneath her. But she fears it may frighten the girl. Esme is frightening – this much she has learnt. Maybe she shall have to settle for removing her shoes.

Iris is watching Esme at the seashore when her mobile rings. '
LUKE
' is flashing on the screen.

'Hi.'

'Iris?' he says. 'Is that you?'

'Yeah. How are you doing? Are you OK.? You sound a bit odd.'

'I ... I am a bit odd.'

She frowns. 'Sorry?'

'I think...' Luke sighs, and behind him she hears traffic, a horn blaring, and she realises that he has had to leave the flat to make this call. 'Look, I'm going to tell Gina. I'm going to tell her today.'

'Luke,' Iris sits forward on the rug, convulsed with panic, 'don't. Please don't.'

'I have to. I think I have to.'

'You don't. You don't have to. Luke, do not do it. At least, not today. Will you promise me?'

There is a silence on the line. Iris has to stop herself shouting, don't, don't do this.

'But I ... I thought you'd...' His voice is tight, level. 'I thought you wanted us to be together.'

Iris starts to drag her fingertips through her hair. 'It's not that I don't want it,' she begins, wondering where she is going with this. For Luke to leave his wife would be a disaster. It is the very last thing she wants. 'It's just that...' she tries to think what to say '...I don't want you to leave her on my account.' Iris grinds to a halt. She is making frantic furrows in the sand in front of her. She listens to the silence at the other end of the phone. She can't even hear him breathing, just the roar and suck of traffic. 'Luke? Are you still there?'

He coughs. 'Uh-huh.'

'Look, this isn't a conversation we should have over the phone. I think we should talk about it properly, before you—'

'I've been trying to talk about it properly with you for days now.'

'I know, I—'

'Can I come over?'

'Um. No.'

She hears him sigh again. 'Iris, please. I can come right now and—'

'I'm not there. I'm at the sea with my great-aunt.'

'Your—' Luke stops. 'You mean the woman from Cauldstone?' he says, in a different tone.

'Yes.'

'Iris, what are you doing with her?' he barks out in his new, authoritative voice, and it makes her want to laugh. She can, for a moment, imagine what he's like in court. 'And what do you mean you're at the sea? Is anyone else with you?'

'Luke, relax, will you? It's fine.'

He takes a deep breath and she can tell that he is curbing his temper. 'Iris, this is serious. Is she there now? Why is she with you? I thought she was going into a home.'

Iris doesn't answer. There is silence on the line, punctuated by the drone of a motorbike in the distance. She glances around Canty Bay. The dog is some distance off, nosing a bank of seaweed. Esme is bending over, inspecting something in the sand.

'It's idiotic to have taken her on yourself,' Luke is saying. 'Idiotic. Iris, are you listening to me? You have this urge to give in to every wilful impulse that crosses your mind. It's no way to live your life. You have no concept of how stupid this is. Were you a trained professional, then perhaps, and I mean perhaps, you could see your way to—'