The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2 page)

'It's all right for you,' she says.

She yanks at the shutter over the door, so that it retracts
back into its roller with a shocked rattle. She steps over the puddle of beer on the threshold, pulling a pile of letters from the sprung trap of the letterbox. She shuffles through them as she crosses the shop. Bills, bills, bank statement, postcard, bills, and a brown envelope, sealed down in a V.

The typeface on the front makes her pause, half-way to the counter. It is small, cramped, each letter heavy with ink, the semi-circular heart of the
e
obliterated. Iris holds the envelope close to her face and sees that the shapes have been pressed into the grain of the manila paper. She is running her fingertips over them, feeling the indentations, realising that it has been done on a typewriter.

A draught of cold air snakes in, curling about her ankles. She lifts her head and looks around the shop. The blank, featureless heads of the hatstands stare down at her, a silk coat hung from the ceiling sways slightly in the breeze. She lifts the flap and the seal gives easily. She unfolds the single white sheet, glances down it. Her mind is still running on the beer, on how she's going to clean it up, how she must learn not to kick cans in the street, but she catches the words
case
and
meeting
and the name
Euphemia Lennox.
At the bottom, an illegible signature.

She is about to start again at the beginning when she remembers that she has some detergent in the tiny kitchen at the back of the shop. She crams the letter and the rest of the post into a drawer and disappears through a heavy velvet curtain.

She emerges on to the pavement with a mop and a bucket of soapy water. She starts with the outside of the door, sluicing water towards the street. She turns her face up to the sky. A van passes on the road, close enough so that her hair is lifted by the backdraught. Somewhere out of sight a child is crying. The dog stands in the doorway, watching the tiny figures of people walking along the bridge high above them. Sometimes this street feels so deep cut into the city it's as if Iris is leading a subterranean existence. She leans on the mop handle and surveys her doorstep. The name
Euphemia Lennox
resurfaces in her mind. She thinks, it's probably an order of some sort. She thinks, lucky I kept that bucket. She thinks, it looks like rain.

Iris sits opposite Alex in a bar in the New Town. She swings a silver shoe off the end of one toe and bites down on an olive. Alex toys with the bracelet on her wrist, rolling it between his fingers. Then he glances at his watch. 'She's never usually this late,' he murmurs. His eyes are hidden behind dark glasses that give Iris back a warped reflection of herself, of the room behind her.

She drops the olive stone, sucked clean, into a dish. She'd forgotten that Alex's wife, Fran, was joining them. 'Isn't she?' Iris reaches for another olive, presses it between her teeth.

Alex says nothing, shakes a cigarette out of its box, lifts it to his mouth. She licks her fingers, swirls her cocktail around her glass. 'You know what?' she says, as he searches
for a match. 'I got an invoice today and next to my name it had "the witch" scribbled on it. In pencil.'

'Really?'

'Yeah. "The witch". Can you believe that? I can't remember who it was now.'

He is silent, striking a match against its box, raising the flame to his mouth. He takes a long draw on his cigarette before saying, 'Obviously it was someone who knows you.'

Iris considers her brother for a moment as he sits before her, smoke curling from his mouth. Then she reaches out and drops an olive down the front of his shirt.

Fran hurries into the bar. She's late. She's been at the hairdresser's. She has her medium-brown hair streaked blonde every six weeks. It hurts. They yank sections of her hair through a tight cap, and daub it with stinging chemicals. She has a headache so bad that she feels as if she's still wearing the cap.

She scans the bar. She's put on her silk blouse, the one Alex likes. He once said it made her breasts look like peaches. And her narrow linen skirt. Her clothes rustle and her new hair hangs in a clean curtain around her face.

She sees them, half hidden by a column. They are bent together, close together, under the lights. They are drinking the same drink—something clear and red, clinking with ice – and their heads are almost touching. Iris is in a pair of trousers that sits low on her hips. She's still skinny, the jut
of her hipbones rising above the waistband. She's wearing a top that seems to have had its collar and cuffs scissored off.

'Hi!' Fran waves but they don't see her. They are holding hands. Or maybe not. Alex's hand rests on Iris's wrist.

Fran makes her way through the tables, clutching her bag to her side. When she reaches them, they are exploding into laughter and Alex is shaking his shirt, as if something is caught in it.

'What's so funny?' Fran says, standing between them, smiling. 'What's the joke?'

'Nothing,' Alex says, still laughing.

'Oh, go on,' she cries, 'please.'

'It's nothing. Tell you later. Do you want a drink?'

Across the city, Esme stands at a window. To her left, a flight of stairs stretches up; to her right, the stairs sink down. Her breath masses on the cool glass. Needles of rain are hitting the other side and dusk is starting to colour in the gaps between the trees. She is watching the road, the two lines of traffic unwinding in contrary motion, the lake behind, ducks drawing lines on the slate surface.

Down on the ground, cars have been leaving and arriving all day. People climb in, through one of the back doors, the engine is fired and the cars leave, gobbling gravel as they swing round the bend. Bye, the people at the door call, waving their hands in the air, byebyebye.

'Hey!' The shout comes from above her.

Esme turns. A man is standing at the top of the stairs. Does she know him? He looks familiar but she's not sure.

'What are you doing?' the man cries, surprisingly exasperated for someone Esme thinks she's never met. She doesn't know how to answer, so doesn't.

'Don't dawdle at the window like that. Come on.'

Esme takes one last look at the driveway and sees a woman who used to have the bed next to her, standing beside a brown car. An old man is stowing a suitcase in the boot. The woman is weeping and peeling off her gloves. The man doesn't look at her. Esme turns and starts climbing the stairs.

Iris climbs into the window display of her shop. She eases the velvet suit off the mannequin, shaking it out, pairing up the seams of the trousers, placing it on a hanger. Then she goes to the counter and unwraps, from layers and layers of muslin protectors, a folded dress in scarlet. She takes it up carefully by the shoulders, gives it a shake and it opens before her like a flower.

She walks towards the light of the window with it spread over her hands. It's the kind of piece she gets only rarely. Once in a lifetime, almost.
Haute couture,
pure silk, a famous design house. When a woman had called and said she had been clearing out her mother's cupboards and had found some 'pretty frocks' in a trunk, Iris hadn't expected much. But she'd gone along anyway. The woman had opened the
trunk and, among the usual crushed hats and faded skirts, Iris had seen a flash of red, a bias-cut hem, a tapered cuff.

Iris eases it over the mannequin's shoulders, then works round it, tugging at the hem, straightening an armhole, adding a pin or two at the back. The dog watches from his basket with amber eyes.

When she's finished, she goes out on to the pavement and studies her efforts. The dog follows her to the doorway and stands there, panting lightly, wondering if a walk is in the offing. The dress is flawless, tailored perfection. Half a century old and there isn't a mark on it—perhaps it was never worn. When Iris asked the woman where her mother might have got it, she had shrugged and said, she went on a lot of cruises.

'What do you think?' Iris asks the dog, taking a step back, and he yawns, showing the arched pink rafters of his mouth.

Inside, she turns the mannequin forty-five degrees so it looks as if the figure in the red dress is about to step out of the window and on to the street. She searches in the room at the back of the shop for a boxy, sharp-cornered handbag and lays it at the mannequin's feet. She goes outside to have another look. Something isn't quite right. Is it the angle of the mannequin? The snakeskin shoes?

Iris sighs and turns her back on the window. She is edgy about this dress and she isn't sure why. It's too perfect, too good. She isn't used to dealing with things that are so untouched. Really, she knows, she would like to keep it.
But she stamps on the thought immediately. She cannot keep it. She hasn't even allowed herself to try it on because if she did she'd want never to take it off. You cannot afford to keep it, she tells herself severely. Whoever buys it will love it. At that price, they'd have to. It will go to a good home.

For want of something to do, she pulls out her mobile and dials Alex's. She casts another, baleful, look at the window as she hears the ringtone click off and she inhales, ready to speak. But Fran's voice is on the line: 'Hi, Alex's phone.' Iris pulls her mobile away from her ear and shuts it with a snap.

In the middle of the afternoon, a man comes in. He spends a long time wiping his shoes on the mat, darting glances around the room. Iris smiles at him, then bends her head back over her book. She doesn't like to be too pushy. But she watches from under her fringe. The man strikes out across the empty middle of the shop and, arriving at a rack of négligés and camisoles, rears away like a frightened horse.

Iris puts down her book. 'Can I help you with anything?' she says.

The man reaches for the counter and seems to hold on to it. 'I'm looking for something for my wife,' he says. His face is anxious and Iris sees that he loves his wife, that he wants to please her. Her friend told me she likes this shop.'

Iris shows him a cashmere cardigan in the colour of heather, she shows him a pair of Chinese slippers embroidered with orange fish, a suede purse with a gold clasp, a
belt of crackling alligator skin, an Abyssinian scarf woven in silver, a corsage of wax flowers, a jacket with an ostrich-feather collar, a ring with a beetle set in resin.

'Do you want to get that?' the man says, lifting his head.

'What?' Iris asks, hearing at the same time the ring of the phone under the counter. She ducks down and snatches it up. 'Hello?'

Silence.

'Hello?' she says, louder, pressing her hand over her other ear.

'Good afternoon,' a cultured male voice says. 'Is this a convenient time to talk?'

Iris is instantly suspicious. 'Maybe.'

'I'm calling about –' the voice is obliterated by a blast of static on the line, reappearing again a few seconds later '– and meet with us.'

'Sorry, I missed that.'

'I'm calling about Euphemia Lennox.' The man sounds slightly aggrieved now.

Iris frowns. The name rings a distant bell. 'I'm sorry,' she says, 'I don't know who that is.'

'Euphemia Lennox,' he repeats.

Iris shakes her head, baffled. 'I'm afraid I don't—'

'Lennox,' the man repeats, 'Euphemia Lennox. You don't know her?'

'No.'

'Then I must have the wrong number. My apologies.'

'Wait a sec,' Iris says but the line cuts out.

She stares at the phone for a moment, then replaces the receiver.

'Wrong number,' she says to the man. His hand, she sees, is hovering between the Chinese slippers and a beaded clutchbag with a tortoiseshell fastening. He lays it on the bag.

'This,' he says.

Iris wraps it for him in gold tissue paper.

'Do you think she'll like it?' he asks, as she hands him the parcel.

Iris wonders what his wife is like, what kind of a person she might be, how strange it must be to be married, to be tightly bound, clipped like that to another. 'I think she will,' she replies. 'But if she doesn't, she can bring it back and choose something else.'

After she has shut the shop for the night, Iris drives north, leaving the Old Town behind, through the valley that once held a loch, traversing the cross streets of the New Town and on, towards the docks. She parks the car haphazardly in a residents-only bay and presses the buzzer on the outer door of a large legal firm. She's never been here before. The building seems deserted, an alarm light blinking above the door, all windows dark. But she knows Luke is in there. She leans her head towards the intercom, expecting to hear the relay of his voice. There's nothing. She presses it again and waits. Then she hears the door unlocking from the other side and it swings out towards her.

'Ms Lockhart,' he says. 'I take it you have an appointment?'

Iris looks him up and down. He is in a shirt, the tie loose at the neck, the sleeves rolled back. 'Do I need one?'

'No.' He reaches out, seizes her wrist, then her arm, then her shoulder, and pulls her over the threshold towards him. He kisses her neck, pulling the door shut with one hand, while the other is working its way inside her coat, up and under the hem of her blouse, round her waist, over her breast, up the dents in her spine. He half carries, half drags her up the stairs and she stumbles in her heels. Luke catches her elbow and they burst in through a glass door.

'So,' Iris says, as she rips apart his tie and flings it aside, 'does this place have security cameras?'

He shakes his head as he kisses her. He is struggling with the zip of her skirt, swearing with effort. Iris covers his hands with her own and the zip gives, the skirt slides down and she kicks it off her feet, high into the air, making Luke laugh.

Iris and Luke came across each other two months ago at a wedding. Iris hates weddings. She hates them with a passion. All that parading about in ridiculous clothes, the ritualised publicising of a private relationship, the endless speeches given by men on behalf of women. But she quite enjoyed this one. One of her best friends was marrying a man Iris liked, for a change; the bride had a beautiful outfit, for a change; there had been no seating plans, no speeches and no being herded about for horrible photographs.