The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

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Overview

From the New York Times best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait comes a gothic, intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth.

“I found this actually unputdownable . . . Reminiscent of classic writers like Rebecca West and Daphne du Maurier.”—Ali Smith, author of Autumn

In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage-clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital—where she has been locked away for more than sixty-one years. 

Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face. 

Esme has been labeled harmless—sane enough to coexist with the rest of the world. But she's still basically a stranger, a family member never mentioned by the family, and one who is sure to bring life-altering secrets with her when she leaves the ward. If Iris takes her in, what dangerous truths might she inherit? 

 “Think Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Charlotte Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea . . . It’s a breathtaking, heart-breaking creation.”—The Washington Post Book World


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780547350677
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 06/02/2008
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 11,655
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include The Marriage Portrait, Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine, and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

Read an Excerpt

Let us begin with two girls at a dance.

 

They are at the edge of the room. One sits on a chair, opening and shutting a dance-card with gloved fingers. The other stands beside her, watching the dance unfold: the circling couples, the clasped hands, the drumming shoes, the whirling skirts, the bounce of the floor. It is the last hour of the year and the windows behind them are blank with night. The seated girl is dressed in something pale, Esme forgets what, the other in a dark red frock that doesn’t suit her. She has lost her gloves. It begins here.

 

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it begins earlier, before the party, before they dressed in their new finery, before the candles were lit, before the sand was sprinkled on the boards, before the year whose end they are celebrating began. Who knows?

Either way it ends at a grille covering a window with each square exactly two thumbnails wide.

 

If Esme cares to gaze into the distance – that is to say, at what lies beyond the metal grille – she finds that, after a while, something happens to the focusing mechanism of her eyes. The squares of the grille will blur and, if she concentrates long enough, vanish. There is always a moment before her body reasserts itself, readjusting her eyes to the proper reality of the world, when it is just her and the trees, the road, the beyond. Nothing in between.

 

The squares at the bottom are worn free of paint and you can see the different layers of colour inside each other, like rings in a tree. Esme is taller than most so can reach the part where the paint is new and thick as tar.

 

Behind her, a woman makes tea for her dead husband. Is he dead? Or just run off? Esme doesn’t recall. Another woman is searching for water to pour on flowers that perished long ago in a seaside town not far from here. It is always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooking, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life. The girl obsessed with cigarettes has had two warnings already and everyone is thinking she is about to get a third. And Esme is thinking, where does it begin – is it there, is it here, at the dance, in India, before?

 

She speaks to no one, these days. She wants to concentrate, she doesn’t like to muddy things with the distraction of speech. There is a zoetrope inside her head and she doesn’t like to be caught out when it stops.

 

Whir, whir. Stop.

 

In India, then. The garden. Herself aged about four, standing on the back step.

 

Above her, mimosa trees are shaking their heads at her, powdering the lawn with yellow dust. If she walked across it, she’d leave a trail behind. She wants something. She wants something but she doesn’t know what. It’s like an itch she can’t reach to scratch. A drink? Her ayah? A sliver of mango? She rubs at an insect bite on her arm and pokes at the yellow dust with her bare toe. In the distance somewhere she can hear her sister’s skipping-rope hitting the ground and the short shuffle of feet in between. Slap shunt slap shunt slap shunt.

 

She turns her head, listening for other noises. The brrrcloop-brrr of a bird in the mimosa branches, a hoe in the garden soil – scritch, scritch – and, somewhere, her mother’s voice. She can’t make out the words but she knows it’s her mother talking.

 

Esme jumps off the step, so that both feet land together, and runs round the side of the bungalow. Beside the lily pond, her mother is bending over the garden table, pouring tea into a cup, her father beside her in a hammock. The edges of their white clothes shimmer in the heat. Esme narrows her eyes until her parents blur into two hazy shapes, her mother a triangle and her father a line.

 

She counts as she walks over the lawn, giving a short hop every tenth step.

 

‘Oh.’ Her mother looks up. ‘Aren’t you having your nap?’

 

‘I woke up.’ Esme balances on one leg, like the birds that come to the pond at night.

 

‘Where’s your ayah? Where’s Jamila?’

 

‘I don’t know. May I have some tea?’

 

Her mother hesitates, unfolding a napkin across her knee.

 

‘Darling, I rather think—’

 

‘Give her some, if she wants it.’ Her father says this without opening his eyes.

 

Her mother pours tea into a saucer and holds it out. Esme ducks under her outstretched hand and clambers on to her lap. She feels the scratch of lace, the heat of a body underneath white cotton. ‘You were a triangle and Father was a line.’

 

Her mother shifts in the seat. ‘I beg your pardon?’

 

‘I said, you were a triangle—’

 

‘Mmm.’ Her mother’s hands grip Esme’s arms. ‘It’s really too hot for cuddles today.’ Esme is set down on the grass again. ‘Why not go and find Kitty? See what she’s up to.’

 

‘She’s skipping.’

 

‘Couldn’t you join in?’

 

‘No.’ Esme reaches out and touches the frosted icing on a bun. ‘She’s too—’

 

‘Esme,’ her mother lifts her wrist clear of the table, ‘a lady waits to be offered.’

 

‘I just wanted to see what it felt like.’

 

‘Well, please don’t.’ Her mother leans back in the chair and shuts her eyes.

 

Esme watches her for a moment. Is she asleep? A blue vein pulses in her neck and her eyes move under the lids. Tiny globes of water, no bigger than pinheads, are pushing out from the skin above her lip. Where her shoe straps end and skin begins, her mother’s feet bloom red marks. Her stomach is distended, pushed out with another baby. Esme has felt it, wriggling like a caught fish. Jamila says she thinks this one is lucky, that this one will live.

 

Esme looks up at the sky, at the flies circling the lily flowers on the pond, at the way her father’s clothes protrude from the underside of the hammock in diamonds of loose cloth. In the distance, she can still hear Kitty’s skipping-rope, the scritch, scritch of the hoe – or is it a different one? Then she hears the drone of an insect. She turns her head to see it but it’s gone, behind her, to the left of her. She turns again but it’s closer, the buzz louder, and she feels the catch of its feet in her hair.

 

Esme springs up, shaking and shaking her head but the buzzing is louder still and suddenly she feels the crawling flutter of wings on her ear. She shrieks, flailing at her head with her hands but the buzzing is deafening now, blocking out all other sounds, and she feels the insect edging inside the narrow passage of her ear – and what will happen, will it eat through her eardrum and into her brain and will she be deaf like the girl in Kitty’s book? Or will she die? Or will it live in her head and she will have this noise inside her for ever?

 

She lets out another piercing shriek, still shaking her hair, staggering about the lawn, and the shriek turns to sobs and just as the buzzing starts to lift and the insect backs out of her ear, she hears her father saying, ‘What is the matter with the child?’ and her mother calling across the lawn for Jamila.

 

Could this be her earliest memory? It might be. A beginning of sorts – the only one she remembers.

 

Or it might be the time Jamila painted a lacework of henna across her palm. She saw her lifeline, her heartline interrupted by a new pattern. Or Kitty falling into the pond and having to be fished out and taken into the house in a towel. Playing jacks with the cook’s children outside the garden’s perimeter. Watching the earth around the muscular trunk of the banyan tree boiling with ants. It could just as easily have been these.

 

Perhaps it was this. A lunch when she was strapped to a chair, the binding tight across her middle. Because, as her mother announced to the room, Esme must learn to behave. Which, Esme knew, meant not getting out of her chair until the meal was finished. She loved the space under the table, you see, they couldn’t keep her from it, the illicit privacy under the cloth. There is something peculiarly touching about people’s feet. Their shoes, worn down in odd places, the idiosyncrasies in lace-tying, blisters, calluses, who crossed their ankles, who crossed their knees, whose stockings had holes, who wore mismatched socks, who sat with a hand in whose lap – she knew it all. She would slip from her chair, lithe as a cat, and they couldn’t reach to hook her out.

 

The binding is a scarf that belongs to her mother. It has a pattern Esme likes: repeating swirls in purple, red and blue. Paisley, her mother says it is called, which Esme knows is a place in Scotland.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2006 Maggie O’Farrell

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

 

Reading Group Guide

Questions for Discussion
1. Some of the earliest scenes Esme shares with the reader are those from her childhood in India. What do they reveal about Esme, her family, and their place in time and society?
2. Alex and Luke are both married men in love with Iris. Do you think Iris really loves either one of them? Why or why not?
3. O'Farrell's novel is steeped in secrets. As the story of Esme and Kitty unfolds simultaneously with the story of Iris and Alex, O'Farrell offers clues about the true nature of these relationships. How do these two stories relate to each other? How does it affect your feelings about the characters?
4. Why do you think Esme was sent to Cauldstone, and never released to go home? Do you think she is mentally unbalanced? Give examples from the book to support your opinion.
5. Esme is both taken aback and fascinated by many things that Iris shows and tells her. What does Esme find so remarkable about Iris? How are Iris and Esme similar? How are they different?
6. As Iris discovers more about Cauldstone, she discovers some of the more outrageous reasons that women were sent to "mad houses" like it. According to the novel's descriptions of that time period, what do you think drove this trend? Do you think changes have occurred in our view and treatment of women who don't "behave"? Why or why not?
7. O'Farrell creates distinct voices for the three main characters and shifts between their points of view to tell the story. Why do you think the author made this choice? What do the characteristics of these different voices reveal about Iris, Esme, and Kitty? How does this technique affect your reading experience?
8. How will the revelation of Esme and Kitty's secret change Iris's life? Do you think it will alter her relationships with Luke and Alex?
9. What do you make of the ending? What do you imagine will happen to these characters after the last page is turned? Has the author satisfied your interest in these characters?

Further Reading: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys; Good Behaviour by Molly Keane; Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

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