Esme leans forward to touch the dashboard. It is hot with the sun and vibrates slightly. The car goes over the humps in the driveway and she is thrown up then down in her seat.
She twists round suddenly. Cauldstone is being pulled away from her, as if reeled in on a string. The yellow walls look dirty and smudged from this distance and the windows reflect nothing but sky. Tiny figures toil back and forth in its shadow.
Esme turns back. She looks at the woman driving the car. She has hair cropped in at the neck, a silver ring on her thumb, a short skirt and red shoes that tie round her ankles. She is frowning and biting the inside of her cheek.
'You are Iris,' Esme says. She knows but she has to be sure. This person looks so oddly like Esme's mother, after all.
The woman glances at her and her expression is – what? Angry? No. Worried, maybe. Esme wonders what she is worried about. She thinks about asking her, but doesn't.
'Yes,' the woman says. 'That's right.'
Iris, Iris. Esme says the word to herself, forming the shapes inside her mouth. It's a gentle word, secret almost, she hardly needs to move her tongue at all. She thinks of blue-purple petals, the muscular ring of an eye.
The woman is speaking again. 'I'm Kitty's granddaughter. I came to see you the other-'
'Yes, yes, I know.'
Esme shuts her eyes, taps out three sets of three on her left hand, scans her mind for something to save her, but finds nothing. She opens her eyes again to light, to a lake, to the ducks and swans, right up close, so close that she feels if she leant out of the car she might be able to run her hand over their sleek wings, skim the surface of the cool lake water.
'Have you been out at all?' the woman is asking. 'I mean, since you went into-'
'No,' Esme says. She turns over the comb in her hand. You can see, from the back of it, the way the stones are glued into small holes in the tortoiseshell. She'd forgotten that.
'Never? In all that time?'
Esme turns it back, the right way up. 'There was no pass allocation for my ward,' she says. 'Where are we going?'
The woman shifts in her seat. Iris. Fiddles with a mirror suspended from the roof of the car. Her fingernails, Esme sees, are painted the emerald green of a beetle's wingcase.
'I'm taking you to a residential hostel. You won't be there for long. Just until they've found a place for you at a care home.'
'I'm leaving Cauldstone.'
'Yes.'
Esme knows this. She has known this for a while. But she didn't think it would happen. 'What is a residential hostel?'
'It's like… It's a place to sleep. To… to live. There'll be lots of other women there.'
'Is it like Cauldstone?'
'No, no. Not at all.'
Esme sits back, rearranges her bag on her lap, looks out of the window at a tree with leaves so red it is as if they are on fire. She has a quick shuffle through things in her head. The garden, Kitty, the boat, the minister, their grandmother, that handkerchief. Their grandmother, she decides, and the department store.
Their grandmother had said she would take them into town. The preparation for this expedition takes up most of the morning. Esme is ready after breakfast but it seems her grandmother has letters she must write, then she needs to consult with the maid about tea, then the threat of a headache casts a shadow over the whole outing, a tincture must be made and allowed to draw, then consumed, and the effect waited upon. Ishbel is 'resting', their grandmother has told them, and they must be 'quiet as mice'. Esme and Kitty have walked up and down the paths in the garden until they were so cold they could no longer feel their feet, they have tidied their room, they have brushed each other's hair, a hundred strokes each, as directed by their grandmother, they have done everything they could think of. Esme has suggested a clandestine visit to the upper floors – she has spied a staircase going up and she has heard the maid talking about an attic – but Kitty, after some thought, said no. So now Esme sits slumped at the piano, sounding out some minor scales with one hand. Kitty, in an armchair beside her, begs her to stop. 'Play something nice, Es. Play the one that goes daa-dum.'
Esme smiles, straightens her back, raises her hands and brings them down in the first, emphatic chord of Chopin's Scherzo in B flat minor. 'I don't think we're ever going,' she says, during a rest, timing it with a nod.
'Don't say that,' Kitty moans. 'We will. I heard Grandma say she couldn't bear the shame of people seeing us dressed like beggars.'
Esme snorts. 'The shame, indeed,' she mutters, as she brings her fingers down into the crashing chords. 'I'm not sure I'm going to like Edinburgh if it's considered shameful not to own a coat. Maybe we should run away to the Continent. Paris, perhaps, or-'
'We might never leave this house,' Kitty says, 'let alone get to-'
The door flies open. Their grandmother stands on the threshold, resplendent in a fur-trimmed coat, a capacious bag gripped in one hand. 'What,' she demands, 'is that dreadful racket?'
'It's Chopin, Grandma,' Esme says.
'It sounds like the Devil himself coming down the chimney. I won't have such a noise in my house, do you hear me? And your poor mother is trying to rest. Now, get yourselves ready, girls. We are leaving in five minutes.'
Their grandmother walks at a fair clip. Kitty and Esme have to break into a trot to keep up. All the way she mutters under her breath, about the various neighbours they pass, that the sky looks like rain, the pity that Ishbel couldn't come with them, the tragedy of losing a son, the paucity of the clothing Ishbel has provided for them.
At the tram stop, she turns to look them over. She gives a gasp and clutches her throat, as if Esme has come out naked. 'Where is your hat, child?'
Esme's hands fly to her head, feel the spring of her hair. 'I… I don't…' She glances at Kitty for help and notices with amazement that her sister is wearing a grey beret. Where did she get it from and how did she know to wear it?
Their grandmother lets out an immense sigh. She turns her eyes up to the sky and mutters to someone or something about trials and crosses to bear.
They are taken to Jenners of Princes Street. A man in a top hat holds the door for them and enquires, 'Which department, madam?' Mannequins waltz and twirl in the aisles and a shopgirl accompanies them across the floor. Esme tips her face back and sees balcony upon balcony, stacked on top of each other like the quoits on the ship. In the lift, Kitty feels for Esme's hand and squeezes it as the doors open.
The paraphernalia is astounding. They are girls who have spent their lives in nothing more than a cotton dress, and here are liberty bodices, vests, stockings, socks, skirts, underskirts, kilts, Fair Isle sweaters, blouses, hats, scarves, coats, gaberdines, all, seemingly, intended to be worn at once. Esme picks up woollen combinations and asks where they go in the baffling order of things. The shopgirl looks at their grandmother who shakes her head.
'They are from the colonies,' she says.
'Sign here.' The man behind the reinforced-glass screen of the hostel counter pushes a registration book towards her and gestures at a pen.
Iris picks it up but hesitates, nib poised above the book. 'Shouldn't it be her?' she says, through the screen.
'What?'
'I said, shouldn't it be her?' Iris points at Esme, who is sitting on a plastic chair by the door, a hand gripping each knee. 'She's the one who's staying – shouldn't it be her signature?'
The man yawns and shakes his newspaper. 'Same difference.'
Iris examines the scrawls in the book, and the pen, which is held to the wall by a chain. From out of the corner of her eye, she can see a teenaged girl, slumped on another chair. She is bent in concentration over something, her hair hiding her face. Iris looks more closely. With one hand, the girl holds a biro and on the other arm she is circling every mole, every mark, every bruise in blue ink. Iris looks away. She clears her throat. She is finding it hard to think straight. She knows she needs to ask something, get some kind of clarification, but has no idea where to begin. She has an overpowering urge to call Alex. She would just like to hear him speak, to say to him, I am here in this hostel and what should I do?