The girl is talking to the night porter and he is saying no. His mouth a round shape, his head swinging, back and forth. He is saying no. He is saying, not authorised. And the girl is gesturing. She looks tense, her shoulders hunched, her brow creased. And Esme sees what might be. She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more. Then you must think yourself long. This is the tricky bit. Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head, until, ladies and gentlemen, until it comes to pass that-
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?'