by Jenna Blum
They are leaving. The girl is turning away. Iris, she is. The granddaughter, she is. She is picking up the bag by its straps, she is saying something to the night porter over her shoulder. Something rude, Esme thinks, something final, and Esme would like to cheer her for it because she has never liked the man. He turns off the common-room lights very early, too early, and sends them back to the wards, and Esme hates him for it and she would like to say something rude herself but she won't. Just in case. Because you never know.
And now they are walking back over the gravel towards the car, and this time Esme listens. She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this, her leaving walk.
—we never spoke of it again, of course. The son, the boy, that is, who died. Tragic, it was. We were told not to bring up the subject. Esme would persist in talking about him, though, would constantly say, do you remember this, do you remember that, Hugo this, Hugo that. And one day, at the lunch table, when she suddenly started reminiscing about the day he learnt to crawl, our grandmother brought the flat of her hand down on the table. Enough, she thundered. Father had to take Esme into his study. I have no idea what he said but when she came out she looked very pale of face, very agitated, her lips trembling and her arms folded. She never spoke of him again, even to me, because I said to her that night I didn't want to hear about him any more either. She was in the habit, you see, of talking about him when we were alone at night in bed. She seemed to take it the way she took everything: excessively hard. When really the one who was truly deserving of all our sympathy was Mother. I quite honestly don't know how Mother bore it, especially after all those other—
—and so I took hers. I did. And no one ever worked it out, so I suppose—
—and Esme started, then, to have these odd moments. Her 'turns', Mother called them. She's having one of her turns, she would say from across the room, just ignore her. You would come upon her and she might be at the piano or the tea-table or at the window, because she always liked to sit at the window, and she was like a clockwork toy one might give to a child, the mechanism all wound down. Perfectly still, motionless, in fact. Barely breathing. She would be staring into space and I say staring when in actual fact she didn't seem to be looking at anything at all. You might speak to her, call her name, and she wouldn't hear you. It could make you feel quite peculiar, to look at her when she was like that. It was unnatural, our grandmother said, like someone possessed. And I have to say that I found myself beginning to agree with them. She was old enough to know better, after all. Kitty, for heaven's sake, Mother would say, rouse her out of it, will you? You had to touch her, shake her sometimes, quite roughly, before she'd come back. Mother told me to find out what it was that caused it and I did ask but of course I could never say because—
—and Esme insisted the blazer wasn't hers. I'd gone out to meet her from the tram, that was it, because she'd said she hadn't felt well at breakfast that morning, a headache or something, I don't know, she did look very white and her hair was loose down her back, who knows what had happened to all the pins she kept in it to keep it out of her face at school? I don't think she liked school very much. And she said it wasn't hers. It belonged to someone else. Well. I turned over the collar and said, look, here's your name, it is yours—
—because what she said was, I think about him. And I couldn't think who she meant. Him, I said, who? And she looked at me as if I'd said I didn't know her. Hugo, she said, as if it was obvious, as if I was supposed to follow the ins and outs of her thoughts, and I don't mind telling you that it was a shock to hear that name again after so long. She said to me, sometimes I go back there, in my mind, to the library, to when you were all away and I was in there with ... and I had to stop her. Don't, I said, hush. Because I couldn't bear to hear it. I couldn't even bear to think of it. I had my hands over my ears. A horrible thing to dwell on. Three days she was there alone, they say, with—Anyway. It does no good to dwell on these things. I said that to her. And she turned her head to look out of the window and she said, but what if you can't help it? I didn't say anything. What could I have said? I was busy thinking, well, I can't tell Mother that so what am I going to say instead because lying is not in my nature at all, by the way, so—
—and Robert just shrugged. He had the little girl, Iris, on his shoulders at the time and she was laughing, trying to reach up for the chandelier, and I said, be careful, mind you don't bump her head. Part of me was, I admit, thinking of the chandelier. I'd just had it cleaned and it was such a bother getting a man in to take up the floorboards in the room above and lower it into a cloth. Ladders and brushes and youths in overalls clogging the hall for days. But he said, stop worrying, she's not made of glass. And I said, looking up at her because she is such a bonny thing, always has been, and she loves to visit me, always runs down the path, shouting, Grandma, Grandma. What an idea, I said, made of glass indeed, who'd have thought—
—and she picked up the glass from the table and she threw it to the floor, smash. I sat tight on the chair. She stamped her foot, like Rumpelstiltskin, and shouted, I will not go, I will not, you can't make me, I hate him, I despise him. I didn't dare look down at the shards of glass on the carpet. Mother was so poised. She turned to the maid who was standing at the wall and said, would you help Miss Esme to another tumbler, please, then turned back to my father and—
Iris puts Esme's bag down next to the bed in the boxroom. She cannot quite believe that this is happening. The foreshadow of a headache is pressing down on her temples and she would like to go into the living room and lie down on the floor.
'You'll be OK in here,' she says, more to reassure herself than anyone else. 'It's a bit small. But it's only for a few nights. On Monday we'll get something else sorted. I'll ring the social worker and—' She stops because she realises Esme is speaking.
'– maid's room,' Esme is saying.
Iris is annoyed by this. 'Well, it's all there is,' she says crossly. Yes, the flat is small but she likes it and she is tempted to remind this person that her choices are limited to this servant's boxroom and the hostel from hell.
'It used to be green.'
Iris is shoving a chair back against the wall, pulling the duvet straight. 'What did?'
'The room.'
Iris stops fiddling with the duvet. She straightens up and looks at Esme, who is standing at the door, rubbing her palm over the handle.
'You lived here?' Iris says, aghast. 'In this house?'
'Yes,' Esme nods, touching the wall now, 'I did.'
'I ... I had no idea.' Iris finds that she is inexplicably annoyed. 'Why didn't you say?'
'When?'
'When...' Iris gropes for what she is talking about, what she means. What does she mean? '...well,' she snaps, 'when we arrived.'
'You didn't ask.'
Iris takes a deep breath. She can't quite fathom how all this has come about: how it came to be that she has a forgotten, possibly deranged geriatric sleeping in her spare room. What is she going to do with her? How is she going to pass the time until Monday morning when she can get on to Cauldstone or Social Services or whoever and get something done? What if something terrible happens?
'This was the attic,' Esme is saying.
'Yes. That's right.' And Iris suddenly detests the inflection of her own voice. Its patronising emphasis as it concedes to the woman that, yes, this was once the attic of the house she grew up in, the house from which she was taken away. Iris drags frantically through her recollections of anything her grandmother might have said about that time. How is it possible that she never mentioned a sister?
'So, you lived here when you came back from India?' Iris says, at random.
'Well, it wasn't really coming back. Not for me and Kitty. We were born there.'
'Oh. Right.'
'But for my parents it was. Coming back, I mean.' Esme looks around the room again, touches the door frame.
'Yes, it was. My mother liked to garden.'
Iris tugs at a strand of hair over her eyes. She cannot fathom the strangeness of all this. She has acquired a relative. A relative who knows her home better than she does. 'Which was your room?' she asks.
Esme turns. She points. 'The floor below. The one overlooking the street. It was mine and Kitty's. We shared.'
Iris dials her brother's number. 'Alex, it's me.' She carries the telephone into the kitchen and kicks the door shut. 'Listen, she's here.'
'Who's where?' he says, and his voice sounds very near. 'And why are you whispering?'
'Esme Lennox.'
'Who?'
Iris sighs, exasperated. 'Do you ever listen to a word I say? Esme—'
'You mean the madwoman?' Alex raps out.
'Yes. She's here. In my flat.'
'How come?'
'Because...' Iris has to think about this. It's a good question. Why is she here? 'Because I couldn't leave her in the crack den.'
'What are you talking about?'
'The hostel.'
'What hostel?'
'Never mind. Look,' Iris presses her fingertips to her forehead and does a few circuits of the kitchen table, 'what am I going to do?'
There is a pause. In the background of Alex's office, she can hear the bleep of telephones, someone shouting something about an email. 'Iris, I don't get it,' Alex says. 'What is she doing in your flat?'
'I had to do something with her! There's nowhere else for her to go. What was I supposed to do?'
'But it's ridiculous. She's not your responsibility. Get on to the council or something.'
'Al, I—'
'Is she dangerous?'
Iris is about to say no when she realises that she has no idea. She tries not to think about the words she saw upside-down in Lasdun's file. Bi-polar. Electro-convulsive. She looks about her. The knife rack on the wall, the gas-rings, the matches on the work surface. She turns her back, faces the blank wall. 'I ... I don't think so.'
'You don't think so? Didn't you ask?'
'Well, no, I ... I wasn't thinking straight.'
'Jesus Christ, Iris, you're harbouring a lunatic you know nothing about.'
Iris sighs. 'She's not a lunatic'
'How long was she in that place?'
She sighs again. 'I don't know,' she mutters. 'Sixty years, something like that.'
'Iris, you don't get banged up for sixty years for nothing.' She hears someone in the office calling his name. 'Look,' he says, 'I have to go. I'll call you later, OK?'
'OK.' She hangs up and places both hands on the counter. She hears the creak of a floorboard, a light step, a throat being cleared. She lifts her head and glances again at the row of knives.
Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we're not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn't know this?
She could say that she first saw him when he was six and she was five. That she has barely known life without him. That he came into her sights one day and has never left them since. That she can recall the first time she ever heard his name.
She was in the bath. Her mother was there, sitting on the floor in the bathroom, and they were talking about a girl in Iris's class at school, and in the middle of the conversation, which Iris had been enjoying, her mother suddenly asked if Iris remembered a man called George. He took them out the other week and he showed Iris how to fly a kite. Did she remember? Iris did, but didn't say so. And her mother then said that George would be moving into their flat next week and that she hoped Iris would like that, would like him. Her mother began to pour water over her shoulders, over her arms.
'Maybe,' her mother said, 'you'd like to call him Uncle George.'
Iris watched the streams of bathwater fork into tiny rivulets as it coursed over her skin. She squeezed her flannel between both hands until it was a hard, damp ball inside her palms.
'But he's not my uncle,' she said, as she sank the flannel into the hot water again.
'That's true.' Her mother sat back on her heels and reached for Iris's towel. Iris always had a red towel and her mother had a purple one. Iris was wondering what colour George would have when her mother cleared her throat.
'George is bringing his little boy with him. Alexander. He's almost the same age as you. Won't that be nice? I thought you could help me clear out the spare room for him. Make it look welcoming. What do you think?'
Iris was watching from under the kitchen table when George and his son arrived. She had pulled the cloth down low and she sat cross-legged, waiting. In the folds of her skirt she had hidden three ginger snaps. In case George was late. Because she was not coming out for a long time. She told her mother this and her mother said, 'All right, sweetheart,' and carried on peeling carrots.
When the doorbell rang, Iris crammed two ginger snaps into her mouth. One in each cheek. Which left only one for emergencies but she didn't care. She heard her mother open the door, say hello with a funny emphasis, hel-lo, and then say, it's lovely to see you again, Alexander, come in, come in. Iris allowed herself one small chew. So she'd met him before?
Iris shunted herself down on to her stomach. From here, she could peer under the hem of the tablecloth, which gave her a clear view of the kitchen lino, the sofa, the door into the hall. And in that door appeared a man. He had sandy, wavy hair, a green jacket with patches on the elbows, and he was carrying a bunch of flowers. Nerines. Iris knew a lot about flowers. Her father had taught her.
She was thinking about this, about her walks round the garden with her father, when she saw the boy. Iris recognised him instantly. She had seen him before. She had seen lots of him before. On the walls of the Italian churches her mother had taken her to last summer, which were painted with pictures of angels. Angels, everywhere you looked. With wings and harps and flowing pieces of cloth. Alexander had the same wide blue gaze, the curling yellow hair, the delicate fingers. It had been in one of those churches that her mother had told her about her father. She said, Iris, your father died. She said, he loved you. She said, it was no one's fault. They had been sitting in the back pew of a church that had strange windows. They weren't glass but made of some gold-coloured stone that had, her mother told her, been cut very fine, so fine as to let the light through. 'Alabaster' was the word. They read it in the book her mother had in her bag. And after her mother had told her, she held Iris's hand, very tight, and Iris looked at these windows, the way the sunlight behind them made them glow like embers, and she looked at the angels on the walls, the wings stretched out, their faces turned upwards. Towards heaven, her mother said.
So Iris lay on her stomach, swallowing hard at the molten ginger in her throat, staring at the angel boy who had sat himself down on her sofa, as if he were just an ordinary mortal like the rest of them. Her mother and George disappeared into the corridor and then Iris heard them coming in and out of the front door, carrying bags and boxes and laughing to each other.
Iris pulled the tablecloth a fraction higher. She needed to get a proper look at this boy. He sat motionless, one sandal resting on the other. In his lap was a small knapsack and his hands were clenched round it. Iris tried to remember what her mother had said about him. That he was shy. That his mother had gone off and he hadn't seen her since. That he might be sad because of this. That he'd had chickenpox recently.
She watched as he looked at a drawing Iris had don
e of a sunset that her mother had taped to the wall. He looked away again quickly. He turned his head towards the window, then he turned it back.
On the crest of an impulse, Iris scrambled to her feet and burst out from under the tablecloth. The angel on the sofa started, terror flashing across his features, and Iris was shocked to see his angel-blue eyes swimming with tears. She frowned. She stood on one leg, then the other. She advanced towards him across the carpet. He was blinking to get rid of the tears and Iris wondered what to say to him. What do you say to an angel?
She ate the last ginger snap contemplatively, standing before him. When she'd finished, she put her thumb into her mouth, twirling a plait round one of her fingers. She examined his knapsack, his sandals, his shorts, his golden hair. Then she popped her thumb free of her mouth. 'Do you want to see some tadpoles?' she said.
When Iris is eleven and Alex twelve, George and her mother part ways. He has met someone else. He goes, and takes Alex with him. Iris's mother, Sadie, sometimes cries in her room when she thinks Iris isn't listening. Iris takes her cups of tea – she isn't sure what else to do – and Sadie jumps up from the bed, wiping her face hurriedly and saying how her hayfever is bad this year. Iris doesn't point out that hayfever doesn't usually affect people in January.
Iris doesn't cry but she sometimes stands in the room that had been Alex's with her fists balled and her eyes closed. It still smells of him. If she keeps them closed for a long time she can almost pretend that it hasn't happened, that he hasn't gone.