The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

  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—'

  Iris blinks. For a moment, she can't catch up with herself. She is sitting in Canty Bay. Luke is still talking at her down the phone. The dog is staring at a seagull on a rock. And her aged relative is stepping into the sea, fully clothed.

  'Esme!' Iris yells, struggling to her feet. 'Esme, no!' Then she says into the phone, 'Got to go,' and drops it. 'Esme!' she shouts again, setting off down the beach.

  She doesn't know if Esme can hear her. Iris hurtles across the sand towards her. Is she going to swim out? Is she going to—

  Iris arrives at the shoreline. Esme is stepping along the glassy, wet sand and tiny waves are breaking round her bare ankles. She holds her shoes in one hand and the hem of her skirt in the other.

  'It's very interesting,' Esme says, 'don't you think, how it's the ninth wave that is the biggest, the most powerful. I've never understood the mechanics of it. Or maybe it isn't mechanics. Perhaps it's something other.'

  Iris leans over, trying to catch her breath.

  'Are you all right?' Esme asks.

  The girl takes her to lunch in a café out on the far point of North Berwick. They sit outside on a planked platform and Iris mashes butter into Esme's baked potato for her. Esme is amused that she does this without asking, but she doesn't mind. Seagulls rip up the briny air with their cries.

  'I used to come to the pool here when I was little,' Iris says, as she holds out the fork for Esme.

  Again, Esme has to hide her smile. Then she sees that Iris is looking at the lines that criss-cross her arm and Esme takes the fork and turns her arm so that the lines, pursed white mouths, are facing the floor. She enters the zoetrope, briefly, catching a glimpse of Kitty on their swing in India, their mother lying on the bed in Lauder Road. But then she remembers she has to talk, to speak, and pulls herself out. 'Did you?' she says. 'I always wanted to, but we never did. My mother didn't approve of communal bathing.'

  Esme looks at the blank stretch of concrete, which has been poured over the pool, then at the other tables. People eating, in the sunshine, on a Saturday. Is it possible for life to be this simple?

  Iris is leaning over the table. 'What happened to you, in that place,' she is saying, 'in Cauldstone? What did they do to you?'

  Her tone is kind, inquisitive. Esme does not blame her for asking. But she can feel herself wincing. Cauldstone and this place, this platform with the sea below it, do not go. How can she say these things here? How can she try to think them? She cannot even see them in a sentence. She wouldn't know how to begin.

  Esme puts fo
od into her mouth and she finds that, once she starts, she cannot stop. She pushes forkful after forkful of soft, warm potato between her teeth until her cheeks are packed and her tongue cannot move.

  'We lived here for a while, after my father died,' Iris says.

  Esme has to swallow once, twice before she can speak, and it hurts her throat. How did he die?' she asks.

  'Oh, it was stupid. A stupid accident. He was in hospital for a routine operation and he was given a drug he was allergic to. He was young, only thirty-one.'

  Esme gets flashes of this scene. She thinks she has seen this, or something like it. When? She can't recall. But she remembers the convulsions, the thrashing body, the lolling tongue, and then the awful stillness. She has to concentrate on her plate to get rid of them.

  'That's very sad,' she says, and speaking the words is good because it distracts her mind into thinking about forming the syllables.

  'My parents were already separated by the time he died so I didn't see him much, but I still miss him. It would have been his birthday next week.'

  Iris pours water from a bottle into glasses for them and Esme is surprised to see tiny bubbles, thousands of them, rising to the surface, clinging to the sides. She picks up the glass and holds it close to her ear. There is the tiny crackling sound of the bubbles bursting. She puts it down when she sees Iris looking at her, alarm etched on her face.

  'Which day?' Esme asks, to fill the gap, to reassure her.

  'Sorry?' She still looks alarmed, but less so.

  'Which day was your father's birthday?'

  'The twenty-eighth.'

  Esme is reaching for the water glass again but something stops her. She seems to see these numbers. The swan-like stroke of the two lined up close to the double circles of the eight. Switched around they make eighty-two. With another zero, they could be two hundred and eighty, eight hundred and twenty, two hundred and eight, eight hundred and two. They multiply and replicate in her mind, filling it to its edges, strings and strings of twos and eights.

  She has to get up and walk to the barrier to get rid of them and when she gets there she sees, below the planked deck where everyone is sitting in the sunshine, a mass of spiked, black rocks.

  —realised that I have no idea when my parents' wedding anniversary is. I should have asked Mother. They didn't celebrate it, or not so as we knew. The wedding would have taken place in India, of course, Mother quite the colonial girl and Father just arrived. A wonderful reception party afterwards at the club. Everyone came. Everyone who was anyone. I have seen photos, Mother in a beautiful satin—

  —and I took hers, it was as simple as that, but Father said I must never say, that—

  —my husband bought it for me, or someone else did it for him, he paid for it anyway, and it must have been his idea. Very handsome, it was. A perfect circle of tiny, many-faced stones. It always caught the light in such a pretty way. Eternity rings are commonly given on the occasion of the birth of the first child, he said to me, and this was just as I was feeling very pleased and touched and, of course, that ruined the whole thing. That officious tone of his. He always liked to do things by the book. He kept a list in his desk of things like that. He would consult it. When to give paper and when to give gold, and so on and so forth and anyway—

  —and we were taken to a studio in the New Town and they tried to get our hair looking the same, which, of course, was a thankless task because hers was wild, long, with curls all over: it could never have looked like mine. Mine would brush down nicely and sit well, close to my head. We had to pose for a long time, perfectly still. It was usual, I think, in portraits of siblings, for the elder to sit and the younger to stand behind. But because she was so much taller than me she was placed in the chair and I had to stand behind her with one hand resting on her shoulder and I always regretted that because I had spent all morning starching the pleats on the front of my dress and, of course, they weren't seen, being—

  —that satin wedding dress made it back to Scotland with us. Mother let us try it on once. Esme went first because I wanted to do it, I wanted to try it on so badly that, when Mother asked which of us would go first, I could not speak. And when Esme stood before the mirror, she threw back her head and laughed and laughed. It was so short on her! She had such long legs, like a giraffe, and it did look very comical. But I couldn't laugh as well because I saw the set of Mother's face, saw that she did not like Esme laughing at her dress. I looked perfect in it. Mother said so. She and I were the same height. You can wear it on your wedding day, darling, Mother said. And Esme was standing behind us, I could see her in the mirror, and she said, not me, then? She was just being cheeky because, of course, there was no conceivable way she could have worn it and Mother snapped because Esme was in the habit of riling her—

  —and when I heard the screaming I wound up my skipping-rope and I came running. She was all in a heap on the lawn, Mother and Father standing helplessly, staring down at her. Well, I was more used to it than they were. I put my arms round her and I said, what is it, tell me, what is it. What was it? I forget. There was always something, always some reason, however strange, with her, but you couldn't have guessed what it would be. You never knew, with her, what was going to happen from one minute to the next. I think that's why—

  —and when the portrait came back, Mother gave word for Esme to be confined to her room all day. Esme looked so cross in it, her face glowering and furious. Mother had every right to be angry, of course. Well, with the price of the sitting and everything you could hardly blame her. And I was put out as well. I had spent an entire morning preparing my clothes, combing down my hair with water and rose oil so that it looked just so. And all for nothing. Mother said that no parent in their right mind would display a portrait like that. Esme was not at all contrite. The chair was so uncomfortable, she said, there were two springs digging into my leg. She was funny like that, always so ridiculously oversensitive. She was like that princess in the story about the pea and all the mattresses. Is there a pea, I would say to her when she thrashed about in the bed at night, trying to get comfortable, and she would say, whole pods of them—

  —that ring Duncan gave me, I used to wear it. I wore it on my wedding finger, as is the custom with eternity rings. But I can't see it. It's not there. I stretch out my hands in front of me, both of them, just to be sure. It's not there, I say to the girl, because there is always a girl. Never far away, watching you. I beg your pardon, she says, and I know it's not that she didn't hear me – I have a good speaking voice, very clear, I have often been told – it's that she's not listening. She is fiddling with some chart on the wall. My ring, I say loudly, to let her know that I mean business, they can be so flighty, these girls. Oh, she says and she still doesn't turn away from that chart, I wouldn't worry about that now, and this angers me so much I turn in my seat and I say—

  —whole pods of them, as she wriggled about, trying to get comfortable, and it would make me laugh, and as soon as she saw me laughing, she would do it again and again. She always had that way, to make you laugh. Until, that is—

  Esme stares at the spiked rocks. She stares and stares until they begin to lose their third dimension, until they begin to look unfamiliar, insubstantial. Like the way words said over and over become just a slurry of sound. She thinks of this. She says the word 'word' over and over in her head until she hears only 'dwur-dwur-dwur'. She is aware of those numbers, that two and the eight, trying to find a place to slip back in. They have been lurking at the edges where she pushed them and they are mounting an assault, a break-in. She won't have it. She will not. She slams all the doors, she throws the bolts, she turns the locks. She fastens her eyes on the rocks, the spiked crenellations of the rocks beneath the platform, and she scans her mind to find something else because the rocks and the word 'word' won't work for ever, she knows that. And suddenly she is rewarded because from nowhere she finds she is thinking about the blazer. She checks herself quickly. Can she think about this? And she de
cides yes.

  The blazer, the blazer. She can recall the exact felted feel of it, the itchiness of its collar, the horrid embroidered crest on the pocket. She never liked school. The work she enjoyed, the lessons and the teachers. If only school could be just that. But the shoals of girls, forever combing and recombing their hair and snickering behind their hands. Insufferable, they were.

  Esme turns away from the rocks. She is safe now. She keeps one hand on the wooden barrier, though. Just in case. She sees the rows of houses fitted together in a line along the beach road. She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers – that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn't occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

  She smiles at this thought. In some corner of her mind, school is still ticking over. The giggling, the snickering, the laughter that happened behind her and would stop if she turned. She didn't care, she absolutely didn't. She wasn't interested in those girls and their grouse weekends, their coming-out balls, their notes from the prefects at the boys' school. She could lose herself in listening to the teachers, in knowing that her marks were good, better than anyone else's, almost. But there were days when she found the girls wearisome. Tell us about India, Esme, they would chant, pronouncing it 'In-di-ah', for reasons Esme never understood. And this only because she had once mistaken their questions as sincere and described for them the yellow mimosa dust, the iridescent wings of the dragonflies, the curved horns of the black-faced cattle. It had been several minutes before she realised that they were all stifling laughter in their jumper sleeves.

  The laughter. Erupting behind her during lessons, following her like a dress train as she walked down a corridor. Esme could never really tell why, what it was about her that afforded them such hilarity. Does your hair curl naturally, they would ask, and then start giggling. Does your mother wear a sari? Do you eat curry at home? Who makes your clothes? When you leave school are you going to be an old maid like your sister?