And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows. She thinks about those numbers again, the twos and the eights, which together make eighty-two and also twenty-eight. And she thinks about what happened to her once on the twenty-eighth day of a month in late summer. Or, rather, she doesn't think about it. She never needs to. It is running in her mind, always and for ever. She has it, all of the time, she hears it. She is it.
She knows who this man is. She knows who he was. She sees it all now. She glances round the room that used to hold their summer clothes all winter long in cedar chests – lightly folded dresses of cotton and muslin that they hardly ever, in the Edinburgh climate, wore. On bright days in August, they might have shaken them out, aired them, buttoned them on. She doesn't remember how often this happened. But instead of the tall chest with many shallow drawers that her mother found so useful for her print blouses and light shawls there is a television. It casts a guttering, bluish pall over the room.
She looks again at the photograph of the man. He is holding a child on his shoulders. They are outside. Tree branches reach down into the frame from above. He is half tilting his face up to say something to the child. She has her fingers gripped in his hair; his are curled round her ankles, holding her fast, as if he is afraid she might float up into the clouds if he were to let go.
Esme examines the man's face and she sees, in its planes and angles, the set of the head, everything she ever wanted to know. She sees this, she understands this: he was mine. She seems to hold out her arms for this knowledge and she takes it. She puts it on, like an old overcoat. He was mine.
She turns to the girl standing next to her and this girl is so like Esme's mother, so very like, that it could be her – but her in strange, layered clothes and with her hair cropped and cut in an asymmetric slant across the forehead, so unlike how her mother's would ever have been, it makes her almost laugh to think it. And she sees that the girl is hers, too. What a thought. What a thing. She wants to take the girl's hand, to touch that flesh which is her flesh. She wants to hold on to her, fast, in case she might float off and up into the clouds, like a kite or a balloon. But she doesn't. Instead she takes two steps to a chair and sits down, the photograph on her knee.
There is a moment, under sedation, before full unconsciousness swallows you, when your real surroundings leave an impression on that floating, imagistic delirium that holds you under. For a short period you inhabit two worlds, float between them. Esme wonders for a moment if the doctors know this.
So, anyway, they hoisted her up from the floor of the corridor and she was inert, an outsized rag doll. Already, thousands of ants were boiling up out of the ceiling above her, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see a grey dog running along the wall of the corridor, muzzle to the ground.
Two men were carrying her between them, she could be fairly sure of this. An arm and a leg each, her head lolling back on her neck, all the blood rushing cold there, what was left of her hair almost touching the ground. She knew where she was going. She'd been at Cauldstone long enough. The grey dog seemed to be following her, coming with her, but the next moment it had slunk across the corridor and leapt from a window. Could it be open, that window? Was it possible? Probably not. But she did seem to feel a breeze skimming across her skin, a warm breeze, flowing from somewhere, and she saw a person stepping out of a door. But this couldn't be real either because this person was her sister and she appeared upside-down, walking on the ceiling. And she was wearing Esme's jacket. Or a jacket that had been Esme's. One in fine red wool that her sister had always admired. She had her back to Esme and she was walking away. Esme watched with longing. Her sister. Imagine that. Here. She thought of trying to speak, trying to call her name, but the lips don't obey, the tongue won't work and, anyway, she couldn't be real. She never came. She would fly out of the window in a moment, like the grey dog, like all the ants, who were growing wings and crowding into her face with small, hooking feet.
– seemed to fit. That is all. It seemed too good to be true. I did want a baby so much, so very much. It was as if an angel had descended from heaven and said, this could be yours. So I went to Father because nothing could be done without him, of course. I asked to speak to him in his study and he sat behind his desk, staring down at his blotting pad as I spoke. And I finished speaking and he did not reply. I waited, standing there in my good clothes because for some reason I had thought it fit to dress properly to make this request, as if that would help my case. I saw no other way, no other possible end to my torment, you see. I think I said this to him and my voice trembled. And he looked up sharply because he hated nothing more than women crying. He said so often enough. And he sighed. As you see fit, my dear, he said, and he gestured me out of the room. It was astonishing to me, that moment, as I stepped into the hall and I saw that it could happen, that it could be. But I should say quite clearly that I never meant to-
– so remarkably easy. I said to people, I am going away for a few months, south. Yes, I'm going for the air. The doctors say the warmth is best in my condition. Yes, a baby. Yes, it's marvellous. No, Duncan is not coming with me. The office, you know. All so remarkably easy. The only problem with lying is that you have to remember what you've told whom. And this was easy because I told everyone the same thing. It was perfect. Gloriously, unutterably perfect. No one would be any the wiser. I said to Duncan: I'm having a baby, I'm going away. I didn't even look at him to see his reaction. I sometimes think that Mother worked it out. But I can't be sure. Perhaps Father said something although he maintained it was all for the best if she never knew. If she did realise, she never-
– Jamie would come back to Edinburgh once in a while with his French wife and then a small Englishwoman and then, this was in much later years, a silly girl half his age. He held the baby once. He arrived unannounced and I was in the parlour with Robert on a rug on the floor. He was just crawling, I remember. And in he came, alone for once, and Duncan was out and there was the baby on the rug, between us, and he said, aha, the son and heir, and I could not speak. He bent and swept up the baby and held him high above his head and I could not speak and he said, a bonny lad, very bonny, and the baby looked at him. He looked at him very hard, the way babies do, then his lower lip went straight and square and he opened his mouth and howled. He howled and howled. He wriggled and fought and I had to take him back. I had to take him upstairs, away, away, and I was glad. I held him to me, as I climbed the stairs, and I whispered in his ear: I whispered the truth. The first time I'd ever said it. The only time. I said-
– times when it wasn't so easy. Who was it who couldn't keep a secret and had to whisper it to the river? I don't recall. There were days when it was very hard. If there had been just one other person with whom I could talk it over, could vent myself, it would have been better. I did go back, once, I felt it only right. And they took me down to this terrible place like a dungeon and instructed me to peep through this small hole in a door with iron locks. And in this camera obscura I saw a creature. A being. All wrapped up like a mummy but with a face that was bare and split and bleeding. It was creeping, creeping, its shoulder pressed into the softened wall, mumbling to itself. And I said, no, that's not her, and they said, yes, it is. I looked again and I saw that perhaps it was and I-
– and so I said to the doctor, yes, adoption, that will be perfect. I will take it myself. And he said, admirable, Mrs Lockhart. And he said, we will keep Euphemia with us for a while afterwards, to see how she fares, and after that perhaps… And I said yes. As simple as that. But I never meant for her to-