The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (20 page)

'But what?' Alex prompts, and Iris wants to shush him but also wants to hear the answer.

'We didn't speak...' Esme says, and her voice is level, she sounds like an actress going over her lines '...on that occasion. I was in a different room. Behind a door. She didn't come in.'

Alex looks over at Iris and Iris looks mutely back. He reaches for his wine glass, then seems to change his mind. He rests his hand on the table, then scratches his head. 'See?' he mutters. 'I always told you she was a bitch.'

'Alex,' Iris says, 'please.' She stands, lifting the plates from the table.

Esme sits at a table in the dayroom, feet curled round the chair legs. She mustn't cry, she mustn't cry. Never cry in public here. They'll threaten you with treatment or give you injections that make you sleep and wake up confused, disjointed.

She clenches her hands together to hold back the tears and looks down at the piece of paper in front of her.
Dear Kitty,
she has written. Behind her, Agnes and Elizabeth are sniping at each other.

Well, at least I had a child. Some women never—'

'At least I didn't murder my child through neglect.
Imagine letting your own flesh and blood wander under a cart.'

To shut out their voices, Esme picks up her pencil.
Please come,
she puts.
Visitors are allowed on Wednesdays. Please,
she writes again,
please please.
She leans her forehead on her hand. Why does she never come? Esme doesn't believe that the nurses post her letters. Why else would she not come? What other explanation can there be? You are not well, the nurses tell her. You are not well, the doctor says. And Esme thinks she may be starting to believe this. There is a tremulousness to her suddenly. She can cry at nothing, at Maudie pinching her arm, at Dorothy stealing her afternoon biscuit. There are moments when she looks through the windows at the drop to the ground and thinks about the relief of the fall, the coolness of the air. And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

She stands, to try to clear her head, to try to put some space between her and the rest of them, and walks to the window. Outside, it is a still day. Oddly still. Not a single leaf moves on a tree and the flowers in the beds all stand up straight, motionless. And she sees that on the lawn the patients from Ward Four are having their exercise. Esme touches her brow to the pane, watching them. They are
in gowns, pale gowns, and they are drifting about like clouds. It's hard to tell if they are men or women as the gowns are loose and their hair is cut short. Some of them stand still, gazing ahead. One sobs into cupped hands. Another keeps giving a sharp, hoarse cry, which peters out in a mumble.

She turns away and looks round the dayroom. At least they wear their own clothes, at least they brush their hair every morning. She is not ill. She knows she is not ill. She wants to run, she wants to burst through the doors out into the corridor, to sprint along it and never come back. She wants to scream, let me out, how dare you keep me here. She wants to break something, the window, that framed picture of cattle in the snow, anything. And although she wants all this, and more, Esme makes herself sit at the table again. She makes herself walk across the room, bend her legs and sit in a chair. Like a normal person. The effort of it leaves a tremble in her limbs. She breathes deeply, presses her hands to the tabletop in case anyone is looking. She has to get out of here, she has to make them let her go. She pretends to be reading through what she has written.

And later, during her long-awaited appointment with the doctor, she tells him she is feeling better. Those are the words she has decided she must use. She must let them know that she, too, thinks she has been ill; she must acknowledge that they were right, after all. There had been something wrong with her but now she is mended. She
tells herself this all the time, so that she can almost start to believe it, almost quell those shouts that say, there is nothing wrong with me, there was never anything wrong with me.

'Better in what way?' Dr Naysmith asks, his pen poised, polished in the sunlight streaming on to his desk. Esme would like nothing more than to reach into its heat, to lay her head on his papers, to feel the burn of it on her face.

'Just better,' she says, her mind racing. 'I ... I never cry, these days. I'm sleeping well. I'm looking forward to things.' What else, what else? 'My appetite is good. I'm ... I'm keen to get back to my studies.'

She sees a frown appear on Dr Naysmith's face.

'Or ... or...' she falls over herself '...or perhaps I should just like to ... to help my mother for a while. Around the house.'

'Do you think about men, ever?'

Esme swallows. 'No.'

'And do you still experience these moments of confused hysteria?' he says.

'What do you mean?'

Dr Naysmith peers at something in his notes. 'You insisted clothes that belonged to you weren't yours, a school blazer in particular,' he reads, in a monotone, 'you claimed to see yourself sitting on a rug with your family when you were, in fact, at some distance from them.'

Esme looks at the doctor's lips. They stop moving and
close over his teeth. She looks down at the file before him. The room seems to have very little air in it: she is having to breathe down to the bottom of her lungs and she is still not getting enough. The bones of her head feel tight, constricted, and the tremor has seized her limbs again. It is as if this doctor has peeled back her skin and peered inside her. How can he possibly know about that when the only person she told was—

'How did you know that?' She hears her voice waver, rise at the end of the sentence and she tells herself, watch it, be careful, be very careful. How did you hear about those things?'

'That is not the question. The question, is it not, is whether you still experience these hallucinations?'

She digs her nails into the flesh of her thighs; she blinks to clear her head. 'No, Doctor,' she says.

Dr Naysmith writes furiously in his notes and there must be something in what she says because, at the end of the appointment, he leans back in his chair, fingertips resting together in a cage. 'Very good, young lady,' he intones. 'How should you like to go home soon?'

Esme has to suppress a sob. 'Very much.' She manages to speak these words in a thoughtful voice, to sound not too eager, too hysterical. 'I would like that very much.'

She runs down the corridor towards the window, which is illuminated with soft spring light. Before she comes to the ward door, she cuts her pace to a level, ordinary walk. Ordinary, ordinary, is the word she incants to herself over
and over again as she enters the ward, as she walks to her bed and sits herself down on it, like a good girl.

—a terrible thing to want—

—sewed the sequins on the evening bag for her. She couldn't do it. In truth, she didn't try very hard. After only two she had stabbed herself in the finger and tangled her thread and dropped the box of sequins. She flung the whole thing aside in a rage, saying, how does anyone stand the tedium of it? I took it up because it had to be done and I sat by the fire while she wandered from the window to the table to the piano to the window again, still ranting about tedium and boredom and how was she to stand it. I said, you're dripping blood on the carpet, so she put her finger in her mouth and sucked it. It took me all evening to sew the sequins and I said she could tell Mother that she'd done it but Mother took one look at it and—

—dropped the flowers on the way up the aisle. I don't know why. I wasn't nervous; I felt peculiarly clear-headed and I was cold in my thin dress, Mother's dress. But everyone gasped when I did this and the girl who was bridesmaid darted round me and picked them up and I heard someone muttering that it was bad luck and I wanted to say, I don't believe in that, I am not superstitious, I am getting married, I am getting married and—

—a terrible thing to want a—

—remember very clearly the first time I saw her. The
ayah,
I forget her name, came in and put her hand on my neck and said, you have a little sister. We walked hand in hand round the courtyard and into the bedroom and Mother was lying on her side and Father said, ssh, she's sleeping, and he lifted me so I could see into the crib. The baby was awake and involved in some tussle with her coverlet, and her skin had a pale, waterlogged look to it, as if she belonged to some other element. She had eyes dark as coffee beans and she was watching something just past our heads. What do you think, Father said, and I said, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and she was, she was—

—a nightgown in rosy silk and I imagined him saying, you are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. And when he came out of the bathroom and I lay there on the bed, ready in my gown of rose-petal silk, I wasn't nervous. I just wanted it over, so' that we could begin, so that my new life could start and I could leave all that behind me. In the train, I had practised writing my new name, Mrs Duncan Lockhart, Mrs K.E. Lockhart, Mrs DA. Lockhart. I showed him, just for a bit of fun. And he said that he didn't particularly like my name. Kitty, he said, was a name for a pet, a cat perhaps, didn't I think that Kathleen was a more sensible option now that I was—

—a terrible thing, a terrible—

—and so I lay there and it seemed like a dreadfully long time. I couldn't hear anything, no water running, no moving about. Nothing. I had an urge to go up to the bathroom door and press my ear to it, just to be sure he was still in
there, and a dreadful thought crossed my mind: what if he had escaped through the window and into the night? But then the door opened and yellow light spread into the bedroom, before he turned it off, and I saw his pyjamaed figure moving through the room, felt the bed sag as he sat down. He cleared his throat. You must be very tired, he said. His back to me. I said, no, not really. I tried to add, darling, but it didn't quite come out. And then a really dreadful thing happened. I found I was thinking about Jamie, about the way his smile lifted his face, the way his hair grew in a peak on his forehead and I turned my head away and I think he saw, because he was lying down by this time. I turned it back and I wanted to say, I wasn't turning away from you, but I couldn't because he leant over and he kissed me on the cheek. He had one hand on my arm and he kissed me on the cheek and he hovered there for a moment and I thought, now, it will happen now, and I was holding my breath and then he said, good night. And I couldn't understand what—

—and I stood there in Mother's room with the letters in my hand and I saw my name on the front and I saw the writing and I saw that they had never been opened so I put my finger under the flap of one and the glue gave easily and I unfolded the sheet and all I saw was, please, please, come soon, and when I saw this I—

—realise I am speaking aloud. Terrible thing, I am saying, to want a child and not be able to have one. A nurse is standing by the table, peering at something on the wall,
and she gives me a funny look. She is young. What does she know? What do you know, I say, and—

Iris stands on the threshold of her living room. Alex is slumped in one corner of the sofa, arm outstretched, aiming the remote control. The television startles into life and a man is frowning at them from a studio, pointing at the concentric circles of a storm approaching another part of the country.

She comes to sit next to him, curling her legs underneath her, resting her temple against his shoulder and they look together at the weather map.

Alex scratches his arm, shifts in his seat. 'So I told Fran I'd probably stay'

'Stay?'

'The night.'

'Oh.' Iris is surprised, but struggles to pretend that she isn't. 'OK. If you like.'

'No.' He shakes his head. 'If you like.'

'What?'

'I'll stay the night if you want me to.'

She straightens up. 'Alex, what are you on about? You know you're more than welcome to stay but—'

He interrupts in the calm, reasoned voice that never fails to enrage her. 'Can you not tell when someone is trying to do you a favour? I thought I'd stay the night in case you were worried. You know. About being alone with Esme.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' she scoffs. 'She is perfectly—'

Alex catches her face between both hands and pulls it close to his. She is so taken aback that for a moment she cannot move. Then she starts to writhe crossly in his grip. He doesn't let go. 'Iris, listen to me,' he says, at their new, close range, 'I am offering to stay to help you out. I don't know if you know this but you're supposed to say "yes" and "thank you" in these situations. Would you like me to stay the night?' He forces her head into a nodding movement. 'Good. That's settled, then. Say "Thank you, Alex," please.'

'Thank you, Alex, please.'

'You're very welcome.' He is still holding her face between his palms. They regard each other for a moment. Alex clears his throat. 'I mean on the sofa,' he says quickly.

'What?'

'I'd sleep on the sofa.'

Iris pulls away. She smooths her hair. 'Of course,' she says.

She turns her attention back to the television screen. It is showing images of a half-collapsed building, a river flooding its banks, a flattened car, thrashing trees.

'Do you remember,' Alex says suddenly, 'when it was that we last slept under the same roof?'

She shakes her head, still looking at the storm pictures.

'Eleven years ago. The night before my wedding.'

Iris doesn't move. She focuses on the frayed edge of his sleeve, the spot of what looks like ink there, the way the lock and weft of the fabric is beginning to unravel.

'Except you were on the sofa that night. Not me.'

Iris remembers the low buzz of a defective light in the corridor outside his tiny apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side, long hours of jet-lagged wakefulness, an iron bar that seemed to run the length of the sofa just beneath the upholstery. She remembers the boom and wail of the city rising up to the open window. And she remembers Alex appearing next to her in the middle of the night. No, she had said, no. Absolutely not. And she had struggled away. Why, he had said, what's the matter? She hadn't seen him for almost nine months—the longest they had ever been apart. Iris had been in Moscow, as part of her degree course, struggling to teach sullen Russian youths the subtleties of the English pluperfect.