'You know,' Iris puts her hands on her hips, 'I'm not sure she is.'
Alex is instantly wary. 'But she has been in a nuthouse for… How long was it again?'
'Doesn't necessarily mean she's mad.'
'Er, I think it probably does.'
'Why?'
Hang on, hang on.' Alex holds up his hands, as if calming an animal. 'What are we talking about here?'
'We're talking,' she is suddenly impassioned, 'about a sixteen-year-old girl locked up for nothing more than trying on some clothes, we're talking about a woman imprisoned for her whole life and now she's been given a reprieve and… and it's up to me to try to… I don't know.'
Alex stares at her for a moment, arms folded. 'Oh, God,' he says.
'What? What do you mean, "Oh, God"?'
'You getting on one of your things about this, aren't you?'
'One of my things?'
'One of your high horses.'
'I don't know what you mean,' Iris cries. 'I think it's out of order to-'
'She's not one of your rare vintage finds, you know.' He scratches invisible inverted commas in the air with his fingers.
For a moment, she is speechless. Then she snatches up the bowl of eggs. 'I don't know what you mean by that,' she snaps, 'but you can go to hell.'
'Look,' Alex says, more gently, 'just tell me-' He breaks off with a sigh. 'Just tell me you're not going to do anything stupid.'
'Like what?'
'Like… I mean, you are going to put her away, aren't you, find somewhere for her? Aren't you?'
She slams a frying-pan down on to the hob and slops oil into it.
'Iris?' Alex says, behind her. 'Tell me you're going to find somewhere to put her.'
She turns, pan in hand. You know, if you think about it, this flat really belongs to her.'
Alex buries his head in his hands. 'Oh, Christ,' he says.
Through the wall, Esme hears their voices. Or, rather, she hears the buzz, like bees in a jam-jar. The girl's voice is undulating, scaling peaks, then sliding down again, the boy's a near monotone. They might be arguing. The girl, Iris, makes it sound as if it's an argument but if it is it's very onesided.
Her brother, she'd said. When Esme first saw him there, standing in the doorway, she wondered for a moment if he might be the lover. But then she looked back at Iris and saw that he wasn't. Not a proper brother, though, not a real one. A kind of half-attached one.
Esme bends her legs so that her knees break the surface of the bathwater, like islands in a lagoon. She has run the bath so hot that her skin is pinked, livid. Stay in as long as you like, Iris said to her, so she is. Steam has swarmed up the walls, the mirror, the inside of the window, the sides of the bottles on the shelf. Esme has no memory of this room. What would it have been in her day? The other rooms she can transpose, pull a photographic plate down over them, see them as they were: her room as the maid's bedroom, the sitting room as a place under the eaves where summer clothes were stored in cedarwood chests. Iris's bedroom used to be filled along one wall with glass jars for preserves. But for this room, she has no recall. The whole space she remembers as terribly dim and low-ceilinged when in fact the rooms are high enough, and airy. Just goes to show how fallible memory is.
She takes the soap from its dish and rubs it between her hands, like Aladdin with his lamp. A delicious sweet scent rises from it and she brings it up to her face and inhales. She wonders what the pair next door would say if she told them that this was her first unsupervised bath for over sixty years. She eyes the razor on the bath edge and smiles. The girl has left it there so casually. Esme has forgotten what it is like to be among unsuspicious people. She picks it up and touches the tip of her finger to its cool edge, and as she does so, it suddenly comes to her what used to be in this room.
Baby things. A wooden cot, with ribs like an animal skeleton. A high-chair with a string of coloured beads tied to the tray. And boxes full of tiny nightgowns, bonnets, booties, the sharp stink of mothballs.
Who would have been the last baby in this house? For whom were those jackets knitted, those gowns stitched? Who strung the beads on the high-chair? Her grandmother for her father, she would guess, but she cannot imagine it. The thought makes her want to giggle. Then she takes a breath, holds it and sinks under the water, letting her hair float around her like weeds.
She lay under the restraints. She watched a fly crawl with inching progress up the sickly green wall. She counted the number of noises she could hear: the drone of a car outside, the chatter of starlings, the wind tugging at a sash window, the mumble-mumble of the woman in the corner, the squeal of wheels from the corridor, the rustle of bedclothes, the sighs and grunts of the other women. She accepted spoonfuls of glutinous, tepid porridge from a nurse, swallowed them, even though her stomach rebelled, seemed to close at every mouthful.
In the middle of the morning, two women got into an argument.
'It's mine.'
'It never is.'
'It's mine. Give us it.'
'Get off it, it's mine.'
Esme raised her head to see them, pulling and yanking at something. Then the taller one, with greying hair scraped back into a messy bun, reached out and smacked the other's cheek. She immediately yelped, let go of whatever it was they were fighting over, then reared up, like an animal on its hind legs, and hurled herself at the other woman. Over they went, on to the floor, a strange eight-limbed creature, tussling and screaming, overturning a table, a basket of clothes. Nurses appeared from nowhere, shouting, calling to each other, blowing whistles.
'Stop that!' the ward sister shouted. 'Stop it at once.'
The nurses dragged them apart. The grey-haired woman went limp, sat down meekly on the bed. The other still fought, screaming, yelling, clawing at the ward sister's face. Her gown rode up and Esme saw her buttocks, pale and round as mushrooms, the folds of her stomach. The ward sister caught her wrist, twisted it until the woman cried out.
'I'll put you in straits,' the nurse threatened. 'I will. You know I will.'
Esme saw the woman think about this and, for a moment, it seemed as though she would be calm. But then she bucked like a horse, kicking out, catching the ward sister on the knee, screaming a string of obscenities. The sister gave a short puff of breath and then, at some signal, the nurses bundled the woman off, down the ward, through a door and Esme listened as the noise grew fainter and fainter.
'Ward Four,' she heard someone whisper. 'She'll be taken to Ward Four.' And Esme turned her head to see who was speaking, but everyone was sitting on the beds, bolt upright, heads bowed.
When they unbuckled the belts, Esme kept very still. She sat on the bed, her hands tucked beneath her. She thought of animals that can be motionless for hours, crouched, waiting. She thought of the party game where you have to pretend to be a dead lion.
An orderly came round and dumped cloths and tubs of yellow, bitter-smelling polish on each bed. Esme slid off hers and stood, unsure, as the other women bent down to their knees as if about to pray, then began rubbing the polish into the floor, working backwards towards the door. Her legs felt stiff and immovable after the belts. She was just reaching for the cloth and polish on her bed when she saw one of the nurses point at her. 'Look at Madam,' she sniggered.
'Euphemia!' Sister Stewart yelled. 'Get down on your knees.'
Esme jumped at the shout. For a moment, she wondered why everyone was staring at her. Then she realised the sister meant her. 'Actually,' she began, 'I'm called-'
'Get down on your knees and get to work!' Sister Stewart bawled. 'You're no better than anybody else, you know.'
Esme knelt, shaking, wrapped the cloth round her fist and began rubbing at the floor.
Later, the other women came to speak to her. There was Maudie, who married Donald and then Archibald when she was still married to Hector, even though the one she really loved was Frankie, who was killed in Flanders. In her good moments, she would regale everyone with stories of her wedding ceremonies; in her bad ones, Maudie skipped up and down the ward with a petticoat tied under her chin, until Sister Stewart pulled it off and told Maudie to sit down and be a good girl or else. In the next beds were Elizabeth, who had seen her child crushed by a cart, and Dorothy, who was occasionally moved to strip off all her clothes. At the far end was an old woman the nurses called Agnes but who always corrected them by saying, 'Mrs Dalgleish, if you please.' She, Maudie told Esme, wasn't able to have children and sometimes she and Elizabeth got into arguments.