Chapter 40
Esme
They told her on a Sunday in November, in the kitchen of the house at Hallam Heath, with the blind half down and a pot of tea going cold on the table. Callum sat in the corner by the dresser with his hands on his knees and wasn't asked to say a single word.
He'd thought it would be loud. He had braced himself for it all week, the way a man braces for a collapse. He'd imagined the scene in a great many versions, a slammed door, a scream, a girl running out into the rain, and rehearsed in the bath, in the dark, a small set of useless sentences. But when it came it was none of them. It was quiet. It was the quietest thing he had ever seen.
Verity told it. She told it standing, with her back to the window and her hands clasped in front of her at the waist, like a woman reading out a plea. Gareth sat at the table, his big gentle stooped body folded into a kitchen chair, his tired kind face gray as putty, holding his daughter's hand. Esme sat between them. She wore a school jumper and jeans with a hole in the knee, and her dark hair was tied back with an elastic, and in the white winter light she looked small and thin and completely composed.
She listened to all of it.
She didn't interrupt. Her eyes never left her mother's face. At a hospital in Whitby she nodded very slightly. At your aunt Isa was twenty-one her fingers moved once on the table, a small tight twitch like a bird's foot. At the end, when Verity said, in a voice she had plainly rehearsed to the point of flatness, and so you see, darling, I am not the one who, I did not, I didn't carry you, her voice broke, and she stopped.
The kitchen clock ticked.
Esme looked at her hands.
"I know," she said.
It fell into the room like a plate.
"I know," she said again, quite gently. She lifted her head. The gray eyes, Isabel's eyes, wide-set and direct, went from her mother to her father and back with a calm that was almost cruel. "I've known since the summer. I think I've known since I was ten, only I didn't have the words for it."
"Esme," whispered Verity.
"It's all right, Mummy."
"How? Who—"
"Nobody told me. I worked it out." She said it with the faintly pained patience of the very young explaining to the very old. "She looked at me, you know. Aunt Isa. When she came. She'd look at me when she thought I wasn't watching. Like I was something she'd lost and found." A swallow. "And I do things she does. The tap. The way I say there's a thing. I thought it was a game. And then one day at the lake I looked at our hands on the rug, hers and mine, and they were the same. The same thumb." She held up her own. "It's a funny shape. It bends back."
She turned it. In the gray light of the window the first joint of the thumb curved back, slowly, in a long supple arc, like a young tree in a wind.
Callum looked at his own hands.
"I asked her," said Esme. "In August. I said, Aunt Isa, are you my mum? And she cried. She cried so much I thought she'd be sick. She said she couldn't tell me. Not yet. She said there was something she had to do first, and then she'd tell me everything, in the right order." Her mouth quivered. "And then she died."
Verity made a sound.
She crossed the kitchen in three steps. She went down on her knees on the lino beside the chair, in her good black trousers, put both arms round her daughter's waist and her face in the school jumper, and said something in a thick wet broken voice that no one but Esme could hear. Gareth put his hand on his wife's hair. The child sat rigid for a long moment with her arms at her sides. Then, slowly, with an air of unwilling surrender, she put both hands in her mother's dark hair and held on.
"You're my mum," said Esme fiercely, into the top of her head. "You're my mum. You sat up with me when I had the croup. She didn't. She never did a single night." She was weeping now, openly, with her whole face. "I don't want another one. I'm not going to have two."
"You don't have to."
"I'm not."
"You don't have to, darling."
"But I'm allowed to be sad about her." Her voice shook. "Aren't I? I'm allowed to be sad she's dead. I'm allowed to miss her. Even though."
"Yes," said Verity. She was crying too. "Yes. Oh, yes. You're allowed anything."
Callum got up quietly and went out into the garden.
It was a small walled garden, bare and wet, with a single apple tree and a swing. He stood under the tree with his hands in his pockets and his breath going up in the cold, and looked at the sky, which was low and white and full of rooks. His eyes were stinging. He didn't mind. After a while he heard the back door and the light quick step on the path, and turned, and she was there in her jumper, arms wrapped round herself, her eyes swollen.
"Uncle Callum."
"Esme."
"Are you all right?"
"I think I'm supposed to ask you that."
"I'm all right." She stood beside him under the dripping tree. "I'm better than I was. It's good to say it out loud." She sniffed. "Mummy's making toast. Daddy's gone upstairs. I think he's gone to cry in the bathroom."
"He's a kind man."
"He's very good at it." A tiny, watery smile. "Can I ask you something?"
"Anything."
"What was she like?" Her eyes were on the apple tree. "Not what Mummy says. Not what Granny says. I mean really. When she wasn't being careful."
He thought about it.
He thought about it for a good while, with the rooks wheeling overhead and the cold coming up through the soles of his shoes. He thought of a woman tying her left shoe twice. A woman humming eight bars of Verdi in the shower and never finishing. A woman who put a button in a jar for every place she had been somebody, who was afraid of mirrors in lifts, who wept when an old man said boat. A woman who had lied in front of a board at nineteen and spent the rest of her life trying to unsay it. She had been a good many things. She had been funny, and cowardly, and brave, and impossible, and in the end more honest than anyone he knew. He didn't know how to put it into a sentence a girl of fourteen could carry.
"She was careless," he said.
"Careless?"
"In the best way." He smiled. "She left a mess. She dropped things. She'd start a story and wander off into another. She never remembered where she'd put her keys. And she used to say the whole secret of a person was in the mistakes." He looked down at her. "I can show you. I've got a jar."
"A jar?"
"Of buttons. One for every place she'd been herself." He took a breath. "You could have it, if you like. When you're a bit older. I think she'd want you to."
"Not all of them."
"All of them."
"Not the first one," said Esme with sudden firmness. "That belongs to Nora."
He stared at her.
"Mummy told me about her. On the phone, last week. About the other lady. The one who looks like Aunt Isa." The gray eyes were bright and shy and curious. "Is it true? That she can do anybody's voice?"
"Yes."
"Can she do mine?"
"I expect so."
"Would she?" Esme's face flushed. "I know it's silly. But I'd like to hear it. How I sound, from outside." A pause. "I'd like to hear what Aunt Isa heard."
He put his arm round her shoulders. It was an awkward, unpracticed gesture, and she leaned into it at once, like a plant toward a window, and for some time the two of them stood under the dripping apple tree in the cold, in the white light, saying nothing, their breath mingling in the air.
"I'll ask her," said Callum.
"Thank you."
"Esme."
"Yes?"
"There's one more thing. About the tap."
"What about it?"
"It's not Isabel's." He spoke slowly. "It's not Nora's either. Or it was, and it wasn't. It started somewhere, with a grandmother and a bread board, and it went through a great many hands, and it came to you." He squeezed her shoulder. "It's yours now. It's the only thing in the world that nobody can say belongs to someone else."
She looked at him.
Then, with an expression of extraordinary seriousness, she put out her free hand and laid it flat on the rough bark of the apple tree. And her forefinger lifted. And came down.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
She laughed.
It came up out of her all at once, high and clear and astonished, a girl's laugh with a crack in it. It rang round the little wet garden and went up through the bare branches into the white sky, where the rooks rose and wheeled and settled. And Callum, standing beside her with his arm round her shoulders, heard it go, and didn't hear an echo, and didn't listen for one, and for the first time in a year was glad there was none.