The Best Contemporary Women's Fiction: Six Novels

by Jenna Blum

  'Their bed?' she says, wrinkling her nose. 'I hope you had the decency to change the sheets.' She sits up and folds her arms. 'You know, I can't stop thinking about that place.'

  'What place?'

  'Cauldstone. Can you imagine being in a place like that for most of your life? I can't even begin to see what it would do to you, to be taken away when you're still a—'

  Without warning, Luke seizes her and tips her sideways, crashing her into the mattress.

  'There's only one thing,' he says, 'that's going to shut you up.' He is disappearing under the duvet, working his way down her body when his voice reaches her: 'Who was your first?'

  She releases a strand of trapped hair from under her head, readjusts the pillow. 'Sorry,' she says. 'Confidential information.'

  He lurches out from under the duvet. 'Come on.' He is outraged. 'Fair's fair. I told you.'

  She shrugs, impassive.

  He seizes her round the ribs. 'You have to tell me. Was it someone I know?'

  'No.'

  'Were you obscenely young?'

  She shakes her head.

  'Ridiculously old?'

  'No.' Iris reaches out, touches the shade on the bedside light, then withdraws her hand again. She places it on the swell of Luke's biceps. She examines the skin there, the way the white of his shoulder meets the browner skin of his arm. She thinks, my brother. She thinks, Alex. The desire to tell flickers, resurges, then wanes. She cannot imagine what Luke would say, how he would respond.

  His hands are tight on her shoulders and he is still insisting, 'Tell me, you have to tell me.'

  Iris pulls away, letting her head fall back to the pillow. 'No, I don't,' she says.

  They were casting off from Bombay. The boat was vibrating and groaning beneath them and people were crowded along the quay, waving flags and banners in the air. Esme held her handkerchief between two fingers and watched it flap and flutter in the breeze.

  'Who are you waving at?' Kitty asked.

  'No one.'

  Esme turned towards her mother, standing next to her at the rail. She had one hand raised, holding her hat firm. Her skin had acquired a taut, stretched look, her eyes seeming to press back into their sockets. Her wrist, protruding from her lace cuff, was thin, the gold watch-strap round it loose. Something in Esme moved her to put her hand on her mother's wrist, to touch that bone, to slide a fingertip between the skin and the links in the watch-strap.

  Her mother shifted from one foot to the other, turned her head as if to see who was next to her, then turned it back. She reached forward with a jerked movement, as if on strings, gave Esme's fingers two quick pats, then removed them.

  Kitty watched her go. Esme didn't. Esme fixed her eyes on the quay, on the flags, on the great bales of cloth that were being loaded on to the ship. Kitty put her arm through Esme's and Esme was glad of it, the warmth of it, and she laid her head against her sister's shoulder.

  Two days later, the ship began to pitch, very slightly at first, and then to roll. Glasses slid along the tablecloths, soup slopped over the sides of bowls. Then the line of the horizon began to see-saw in the portholes and spray hurled itself at the glass. People hurried to their cabins, staggering and falling as the ship bucked beneath them.

  Esme studied the map that had been pinned to the wall in the games room, their course plotted in a line of red. They were, she saw, in the middle of the Arabian Sea. She said these words to herself as she made her way back along the corridor, clutching the handrail for balance: 'Arabian', and 'sea', and 'squall'. 'Squall' was a good word. It was halfway between 'squawk' and 'all'. Half-way between 'shawl' and 'squeamish'. Or 'squat' and 'call'.

  The crew were scurrying about the wet decks, shouting to each other. Everyone else had vanished. Esme was standing at the edge of the deserted ballroom when a steward, darting past, said, 'Don't you feel it?'

  Esme turned. 'Feel what?'

  'Ill. Seasick.'

  She thought about it; she took an inventory of her whole being, searching for signs of unease. But there was nothing. She felt shamefully, exuberantly healthy. 'No,' she said.

  'You're lucky,' he said, hurrying on his way. 'It's a gift.'

  Her parents' cabin door was locked and, pressing her ear to the wood, she heard sounds like coughing, someone weeping. In her own cabin, Kitty was crumpled on the bed and her face was deathly white.

  'Kit,' Esme said, bending over her, and she was suddenly seized with the fear that her sister was ill, that her sister might die. She gripped her arm. 'Kit, it's me. Can you hear me?'

  Kitty opened her eyes, gazed at Esme for a moment, then turned her face to the wall. 'I can't stand the sight of the sea,' she muttered.

  Esme brought her water, read to her, rinsed out the bowl beside the bed. She hung a petticoat over the porthole so that Kitty wouldn't have to see the wild, swinging angles of the sea. And when Kitty slept, Esme ventured out. The planked decks were deserted, the lounges and dining rooms empty. She learnt to lean into the angle of the pitch when the ship shifted beneath her like a horse taking a fence. She played quoits, hurling the rope circles one by one on to a pole. She liked to watch the foaming path left behind the ship, her elbows hooked over the railings, to watch the grey, crested waves that they had passed over. A steward might appear and drape a blanket round her shoulders.

  In the second week, more people appeared. Esme met a missionary couple returning to a place called Wells-next-the-Sea.

  'It's next to the sea,' the lady said, and Esme smiled and thought she must remember that, to tell Kitty later. She saw them both glance at the black band round her arm, then look away. They told her about the huge beach that stretched out below the town and how Norfolk was full of houses made of pebbles. They had never been to Scotland, they said, but they had heard it was very beautiful. They bought her some lemonade and sat with her on deck-chairs while she drank it.

  'My baby brother,' Esme found herself saying, as she swirled the ice in the bottom of the glass, died of typhoid.'

  The lady put her hand to her throat, then rested it on Esme's arm. She said she was very sorry. Esme didn't mention that her ayah had also died, or that they had buried Hugo in the churchyard in the village and that this bothered her, that he was being left behind in India while they all went to Scotland, or that her mother hadn't spoken to her or looked at her since.

  'I didn't die,' Esme said, because this still puzzled her, still kept her awake in her narrow bunk. 'Even though I was there.'

  The man cleared his throat. He gazed out to the lumped, greenish line of what he'd told Esme was the coast of Africa. 'You will have been spared,' he said, 'for a purpose. A special purpose.'

  Esme looked up from her empty glass and studied his face in wonder. A purpose. She had a special purpose ahead of her. His dog-collar was startling white against the brown of his neck, his mouth set in a serious downturn. He said he would pray for her.

  Esme's first sight of the place her parents called Home was the flatlands of Tilbury, emerging from a shadowy, dank October dawn. She and Kitty had been waiting up on deck, straining their eyes into the mist. They had been expecting the mountains, lochs and glens they had seen in the encyclopedia when they had looked up Scotland, and found this low, fogged marshland a disappointment.

  The cold was astonishing. It seemed to flay the skin from their faces, to chill the flesh right down to the bone. When their father told them that it would get colder still, they simply did not believe him. On the train to Scotland – because it turned out that this was not Scotland, after all, just the edge of England – she and Kitty bumped against each other in the lavatory as they struggled to put on all the clothes they had, one on top of the other. Their mother held a handkerchief to her face all the way. Esme was wearing five dresses and two cardigans when they pulled into Edinburgh.

  There must have been a car or a tram, Esme thinks, from Waverley, but this she doesn't remember. She recalls flashes of high, dark buildings, of veils of rain, of gas-lamps r
eflected on wet cobbles, but this may have been later. They were met at the door of a large stone house by a woman in an apron.

  'Ocht,' she said to them, 'ocht,' and then something about coming away in. She touched their faces, Esme's and Kitty's, and their hair, talking on about bairns and bonny and lassies.

  Esme thought for a moment that this was the grandmother but she saw that her mother gave this woman only the very tips of her fingers to shake.

  The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn't think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez.

  'Ishbel,' she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, 'something will have to be done about the clothes.'

  That night, Esme and Kitty curled round each other in a big bed, their teeth chattering. Esme could have sworn that even her hair was feeling the cold. They lay for a while, waiting for the heat of the stone hot-water bottle to seep through their socks, listening to the sound of the house, to each other's breathing, to the clip-clop of a horse outside in the street.

  Esme waited a moment, then uttered a single word into the dark: 'Ocht.'

  Kitty exploded into giggles and Esme felt Kitty's head brush against her shoulder as she clutched her arm.

  'Ocht,' Esme said, again and again, between spasms of laughter, 'ocht ocht ocht.'

  The door opened and their father appeared. 'Be quiet,' he said, 'the pair of you. Your mother is trying to rest.'

  —gathered the holly that afternoon in the Hermitage, with a kitchen knife. I wouldn't do it, I was scared of the spines tearing at my skin (I'd been soaking my hands in warm water and lemon for weeks, of course, everybody did). But she pulled it from me and said, don't be a goose, I'll do it. You'll tear your dress, I said, and Mother will be angry, but she didn't care. Esme never cared. And she did, tear it, I mean, and Mother was vexed with us both when we got back. You are responsible even if Esme isn't, she said to me, you are responsible because Esme isn't, and we'd have to take it with us on our next visit to Mrs MacPherson. Mrs Mac, she liked to be called, made the dress I wore that evening. It was the most beautiful frock imaginable. We had three fittings, for it had to be right, Mother said. White organdie with an orange-blossom trim, I was terrified the holly would rip at it so Esme carried it as we walked there, taking care on the ice because our shoes were thin. Her dress was strange: she wouldn't have the organdie, she wanted red, she said, crimson was the word she used. Velvet. I will have a crimson velvet, she said to Mrs Mac as she stood at the fire. You will not, Mother said from the sofa, you are the granddaughter of an advocate, not a saloon girl, and she was paying, you see, so Esme had to settle for a kind of burgundy taffeta. Wine, Mrs Mac called it, which I think made her feel—

  —wine is kept in the cut-glass decanters on the table behind the sofa. A wedding present from an uncle. I liked them at first but they are a devil, excuse my French, to dust. One must use a small brush, an old, softened toothbrush or similar, to get into all the fissures. I would ideally like to be rid of them, give them to a younger family member, say, as a wedding gift, a fine present they would make, but he likes them there. He takes a glass at dinner, only one, two on a Saturday night, and I must fill it only half full because it needs to breathe, he said, and I said, I've never heard such nonsense in all my life, wine can't breathe, you dunderhead, this last part said under my breath, of course, because it doesn't do to—

  —and Mother said she must cut her hair, all of it, to the chin. But Esme wouldn't have it. Mother got out the pudding bowl from the kitchen cupboard and what did Esme do but take it from her and hurl it, smash, to the floor. It's my hair, she shouted, and I'll do as I please. Well. Mother couldn't speak, she was that angry. You will wait until your father gets home, Mother said, and her voice was still as ice, just get out of my sight, go off to school. The bowl in pieces all over the stone flags. Mother tried to—

  —I wasn't to go to school. It wasn't done, a girl my age. I was to stay and help with the house, to go on calls with Mother. It wouldn't be long, she said, before I was married myself. And then I'd have a house of my own. With looks like yours, she said. So she took me about their acquaintances and she and I went to tea and to golf parties and church socials and suchlike and Mother would invite young men to the house. There was a time when I wanted to take a secretarial course. I thought I would have been good at the typing and I could have answered the telephone, I had a nice voice, I thought anyway, but Father maintained that the right thing was—

  —when I left I thought of the bed, our bed, empty, every night. Don't get me wrong, I was happy to be married. More than happy. And I had a beautiful house. But sometimes I wanted to go back, to lie in the bed we'd shared, I wanted to be there on her side, where she'd always lain, and look up at the ceiling but of course—

  —what was it she found so funny about Mrs Mac? I forget. There was something and Esme used always to try to bring it into conversation while we were there. I used to have a pain from trying not to laugh! It made Mother cross. You are to behave, Esme, do you hear, she used to warn, as we arrived at Mrs Mac's gate. Mrs Mac's mouth was always full of pins and you had to stand on a low stool to be fitted. I loved it. Esme hated it, of course. The standing still was harder for her. It's never as nice as you imagine it's going to be, she said, when she got her wine dress. I remember that. She was sitting on the bed with the box before her and she held it up by the waist. The seams aren't straight, she said, and I looked and they weren't but I said, of course they are, they're fine, and you should have seen the look she gave me—

  —terribly cold, I am. Terribly. I have to say I am not entirely sure where I am. But I don't want anyone to know this so I shall sit tight and perhaps someone will—

  —what I call a button. That was it. She loved that more than anything and would put on the voice and pick up something, always something very ordinary, and say, now this is what I call a spoon, this is what I call a curtain, because Mrs Mac would look up at you as you stood there on the special stool and say, now, in here I'll put what I call a button. It used to make Mother so cross because we would both laugh and laugh. Don't mock those less fortunate than yourselves, she would say, with her mouth pursed. But Esme loved the way Mrs Mac said it and I always knew that she was waiting for it, every time we went there, and it used to make me very—

  —someone in the room. There is someone in the room. A woman in a white blouse. She is pulling the curtains shut. Who are you, I say, and she turns. I'm your nurse, she says, now go to sleep. I look at the window. What I call a window, I say, and I laugh and—

  When Iris arrives at Cauldstone, the social worker or Key Worker or whatever she is, is waiting for her in the lobby. An orderly leads them down a corridor. They enter a room and Esme is standing at a counter, a curled fist resting on its surface. She turns sharply and looks Iris up and down. 'They are fetching my box,' she says.

  No hello, Iris thinks, no how are you, no thanks for coming to get me. Nothing. Was there, she wonders, a flicker of recognition? Does Esme know who she is? She has no idea. 'Your box?' Iris asks.

  'Admissions box,' the orderly chips in. 'All the stuff she had with her when she came in. However long ago that was. How long has it been, Euphemia?'

  'Sixty-one years, five months, four days,' Esme incants, in a clear, staccato voice.

  The orderly chuckles like someone whose pet has just performed a favourite trick. 'She keeps a record every day, don't you, Euphemia?' She shakes her head, then drops her voice to a whisper. 'Between you and me,' she mutters to Iris, 'they'll be lucky if they find it. God knows what's in there. She hasn't shut up about it all morning. I'm surprised she remembers anything at all, the amount of—'

  The orderly breaks off. A man in an overall has appeared, carrying a dented tin box.

  'Wonders will never cease.' The order
ly laughs and nudges Iris.

  Iris stands and goes over to Esme's side. Esme is fumbling with the lock. Iris reaches out and pushes back the catch and Esme lifts the lid. There is a musty smell, like old books, and Esme puts her hand down into the box. Iris watches as she pulls out a brown lace-up shoe, the leather split and curled, an indeterminate article of clothing in faded blue check, a handkerchief with the initial E in uneven chainstitch, a tortoiseshell comb, a watch.

  Esme picks up every item, holds it for a second, then discards it. She works quickly, intently, ignoring both Iris and the orderly. Iris has to bend to pick up the watch when it falls to the floor and she sees that its hands are frozen at ten past twelve. She is wondering whether it was midday or midnight, when she sees Esme peer into the depths of the box, then glance again at the discarded things.

  'What is it?' Iris asks.

  Esme falls on the heap and starts searching through it, flinging things aside.

  'What are you looking for?' Iris asks. She offers her the watch. 'Is it this?'

  Esme looks up, sees the watch in Iris's outstretched hand and shakes her head. She holds up the blue check material and Iris sees that it is a dress, a woollen dress, that it's crumpled and two of the buttons are missing, torn out from the fabric. Esme is shaking it, as if something might be caught in its folds, then casts it aside.

  'It's not here,' she says. She looks, first at Iris, then at the orderly, then at the social worker, then at the man who brought the box. 'It's not here,' she repeats.

  'What?' Iris says. 'What isn't there?'

  'There must be another box,' Esme appeals to the man. 'Will you look for me?'

  'There's just the one,' the man says. 'No more.'

  'There must be. Are you sure? Will you check?'

  The man shakes his head. 'Just the one,' he repeats.

  Iris sees that Esme is near tears. She stretches out and touches her arm. 'What is it you're missing?' she asks.