The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox Read Online Free PDF Page B

wolfish smile again, 'are you willing to take her?'
    Iris frowns. 'Take her where?'
    'Take her,' he repeats. 'House her.'
    'You mean...' she is appalled '...with me?'
    He gestures vaguely. 'Anywhere you see fit to—'
    'I can't,' she says. 'I can't. I've never met her. I don't know her. I can't.'
    He nods again, wearily. 'I see.'
    On the other side of the table, the social worker is shuffling her piles of paper together. Peter Lasdun brushes something off the cover of his file.
    'Well, I thank you for your time, Miss Lockhart.' Lasdun ducks down behind the desk, reaching for something on the floor. Iris sees, as he resurfaces, that it is another file, with another name. 'If we need your input on any matters in the future, we will be in touch. Someone will show you out.' He gestures towards the reception desk.
    Iris sits forward in her chair. 'Is that it? End of story?'
    Lasdun spreads his hands. 'There is nothing further to discuss. It is my job, as representative of the hospital, to put this question to you, and you have duly answered.'
    Iris stands, fiddling with the zip on her bag. She turns and takes two steps towards the door. Then she stops. 'Can I see her?'
    The social worker frowns. Lasdun looks at her blankly. 'Who?'
    His mind is already on the next file, Iris sees, the next reluctant set of relatives. 'Euphemia.'
    He pinches the skin between his eyes, twists his wrist to glance at his watch. He and the social worker look at each other for a moment. Then the social worker shrugs.
    'I suppose,' Lasdun says, with a sigh. 'I'll get someone to take you down.'
    ***
    Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There's no knowing how he might choose to be with her.
    There are women playing snap at the table across the room, and in the flack-flick of the cards is the noise of the ceiling fan that hung in the nursery. Oiled, stained wood it was. Utterly ineffective, of course. Just stirred the heavy air like a spoon in hot tea. It had been above her, churning the heat in the room. And she had been twirling a paper bird above his cot.
    'Look, Hugo.' She made it fly down towards him then up, coming to rest on the bars. But he didn't put out his hand to try to seize it. Esme jiggled it again, near his face. 'Hugo. Can you see the bird?'
    Hugo's eyes followed it but then he gave a sob, turning away, pushing his thumb into his mouth.
    'He's sleepy,' said Jamila, from across the room where she was hanging nappies out to dry, 'and he has a slight fever. It may be his teeth. Why don't you go out into the garden for a while?'
    Esme ran past the pond where the hammock swung empty, past the fleece of orange flowers round the banyan tree. She ran over the croquet lawn, dodging the hoops, down
the path, through the bushes. She vaulted the fence and then she stopped. She shut her eyes, held her breath, and listened.
    There it was. The weeping, the slow weeping, of rubber trees leaking their fluid. It sounded like the crackle of leaves a mile away, like the creeping of minute creatures. She had sworn to Kitty that she could hear it, but Kitty had raised her eyebrows. Esme tilted her head this way and that, still with her eyes shut tight, and listened to the sound of trees crying.
    She opened her eyes. She looked at the sunlight splintering and re-forming on the ground. She looked at the spiral gashes in the trunks around her. She ran back, over the fence, over the croquet lawn, round the pond, filled with the glee of her parents being away, of having the run of the house.
    In the parlour, Esme wound the gramophone, stroked the velvet curtains, rearranged the chain of ivory elephants on the windowsill. She opened her