'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.
'Kitty had the house converted into flats,' Iris begins, because she feels she owes this woman some kind of explanation. 'This one and two others – bigger ones. I can't remember when. She lived in the ground-floor flat for years. The whole lot was sold to pay for her care. Except this one, which she signed over to me. I used to visit her when I was little and the house was still a whole house then. It was huge. A big garden. Beautiful.' Iris realises that she is gabbling and stops.
'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.