Esme Lennox Quotes

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

She walks slowly. She wants to feel the prick, the push of every bit of gravel under her shoe. She wants to feel every scratch, every discomfort of this....her leaving walk.

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

It was always the meaningless tasks that endure: the washing, the cooing, the clearing, the cleaning. Never anything majestic or significant, just the tiny rituals that hold together the seams of human life.

Two women in a room. One seated, one standing

Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn't change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied "Good" and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.

The dress bunched up like loose skin round her neck. It wouldn't behave, wouldn't act as if it was really hers. Wearing it was like being in a three legged race with someone you didn't like.

Oh,’ she burst out. ‘I hate this—I hate it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Just—this. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m getting scared it might never come.

In an odd way, we no longer seemed like a family, just a collection of people living in different rooms.

I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON

April yields to March, then February, and meanwhile Iris reads of refusals to speak, of unironed clothes, of arguments with neighbours, of hysteria, of unwashed dishes and unswept floors, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way or seeking them elsewhere. Of husbands at the end of their tethers, of parents unable to understand the women their daughters have become, of fathers who insist, over and over again, that she used to be such a lovely little thing. Daughters who just don’t listen. Wives who one day pack a suitcase and leave the house, shutting the door behind them, and have to be tracked down and brought back.

couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else . . . What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? —EDITH WHARTON

ear, ‘did you know that two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people?

doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?

What do you think, Father said, and I said, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and she was, she was—

—doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?

And she holds the photograph. She holds it in her hands. She looks at it and she knows.

When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

and when I first saw him I thought I might dissolve, like sugar in water.

The whole thing made Esme want to burst into honesty, to say, let’s forget this charade, do you want to marry her or not?

She wouldn’t let them take Hugo. They had to prise him from her. It took her father and a man they’d got from somewhere. Her mother stood by the window until it was all over.

At the bottom of the steps, she turns to Iris, her face full of confusion. ‘They said it would be there. They promised they would put it in there for me.

You said.’ Esme shuts her eyes, screws them up tight, bowing her head. ‘You promised,’ she says, almost inaudibly and, with her hands, she is crushing the material of her dress.

and so I took hers. I did. And no one ever worked it out, so I suppose

The garden, Kitty, the boat, the minister, their grandmother, that handkerchief.

—and I took hers, it was as simple as that, but Father said I must never say, that—

Esme straightens up, weighing the pebble in her palm. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Were they burnt or strangled? Witches were strangled to death in parts of Scotland, weren’t they? Or buried alive.

Esme picks up woollen combinations and asks where they go in the baffling order of things. The shopgirl looks at their grandmother who shakes her head. ‘They are from the colonies,’ she says.

And Esme sees what might be. She shuts her mouth, closes her throat, folds her hands over each other and she does the thing she has perfected. Her speciality. To absent yourself, to make yourself vanish. Ladies and gentlemen, behold. It is most important to keep yourself very still. Even breathing can remind them that you are there, so only very short, very shallow breaths. Just enough to stay alive. And no more. Then you must think yourself long. This is the tricky bit. Think yourself stretched and thin, beaten to transparency. Concentrate. Really concentrate. You need to attain a state so that your being, the bit of you that makes you what you are, that makes you stand out, three-dimensional in a room, can flow out from the top of your head, until, ladies and gentlemen, until it comes to pass that—

She wouldn’t let go of the baby,’ her grandmother says suddenly. ‘Who?’ Iris pounces. ‘Esme?’ Her grandmother’s eyes are focused somewhere beyond the window. ‘They had to sedate her. She wouldn’t let go.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We bein in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass; we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Her grandmother keeps announcing that Esme will never find a husband if she doesn’t change her ways. Yesterday, when she said it at breakfast, Esme replied, good, and was sent to finish her meal in the kitchen.

and she picked up the glass from the table and she threw it to the floor, smash. I sat tight on the chair. She stamped her foot, like Rumpelstiltskin, and shouted, I will not go, I will not, you can’t make me, I hate him, I despise him.

She never liked school. The work she enjoyed, the lessons and the teachers. If only school could be just that. But the shoals of girls, forever combing and recombing their hair and snickering behind their hands. Insufferable, they were.

Tots nosaltres, pensa l'Esme, no som més que recipients a través dels quals passen les identitats: tenim faccions, gestos, costums manllevats i després els transmetem. Res no és pròpiament nostre. Quan venim al món som anagrames dels antecessors.

Will you listen to yourself, she said to him, and added, eejit, just loud enough for him to hear. When I looked back at him I saw that he was looking at her, I saw the way it was, that he might dissolve like sugar in water, and when I saw this I—

Aged sixteen, is what she sees first. Then: Insists on keeping her hair long. Iris reads the whole document from beginning to end, then goes back and reads it again. It ends with: Parents report finding her dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother’s clothes.

Esme began playing the game she often played with herself at times like this, looking over the room and working out how she might get round it without touching the floor. She could climb from the sofa to the low table and, from there, to the fender stool. Along that and then—

At the bottom of the steps, she turns to Iris, her face full of confusion. ‘They said it would be there. They promised they would put it in there for me.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ Iris says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. ‘I wanted it,’ she says. ‘I just wanted it. And they promised.

Please.’ Esme stood. She clasped her hands together to keep them still. ‘Miss Murray says I could get a scholarship and after that perhaps university and—’ ‘There would be no profit in it,’ her father said, as he settled himself back into his armchair. My daughters will not work for a living.

Iris wonders sometimes how she would explain Alex, if she needed to. How would she begin? Would she say, we grew up together? Would she say, but we’re not related by blood? Would she say that in her bag she carries a pebble he gave her more than twenty years ago? And that he doesn’t know this?

Mother and Father had said one night, just before my wedding, that her name would not be mentioned again and that they would thank me if I would act accordingly. And I did, act accordingly, that is, although I thought about her a great deal more than they realised. So I pulled out the letters and—

Esme turns. The wind steals her hair, flipping it above her head, streaking it over her face. There is the girl, sitting as Esme knew she would be, in the sand, legs crossed. She is watching her with that slightly anxious frown of hers. But no, Esme is wrong. She is not watching her, she is looking past her, towards the horizon. She is, Esme sees, thinking of the lover. This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family—her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents—from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme’s mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Esme looks up, sees the watch in Iris’s outstretched hand and shakes her head. She holds up the blue check material and Iris sees that it is a dress, a woollen dress, that it’s crumpled and two of the buttons are missing, torn out from the fabric. Esme is shaking it, as if something might be caught in its folds, then casts it aside.

mine was white organdie with an orange-blossom trim and I didn’t want the holly to tear it so she carried the wreath. She cared little for her dress. Scarlet velvet, she’d wanted. Crimson. But she got burgundy taffeta. And she said it didn’t fit properly, the seams weren’t straight and even I could see that but such things mattered so much to her that

That had done it. Esme had turned at that one. She had snatched up the protractor of Catriona McFarlane, high priestess of the tittering club, and pointed it at her like a divining rod. ‘You know what you are, Catriona McFarlane?’ Esme had said. ‘You are a sad creature. You are mean-spirited, soulless. You are going to die alone and lonely. Do you hear me?

a girl comes to crouch in front of me and I see that she is unlacing my shoes and taking them off and I say to her, I took it, I took it, and I’ve never told anyone. The girl looks up at me and she titters. You tell us every day, she says. I know she is lying so I say, it was my sister’s, you know. And she just turns to speak to someone over her shoulder and—

And she looked up at me and it was as if she was waking from sleep. She stretched. She actually stretched and she said, hello, Kit. And then she must have seen that I was on the verge of tears because her face fell and she said, what is it? And I said, you. You are ruining my chances. And, you know, she said, chances of what? And I realised that if I were to successfully—

And there is a soreness to her body, it aches, her head feels softened, muzzy. She has acquired a disturbingly acute sense of smell. The odour of print from a magazine someone is reading across a room can oppress her. She knows what will be on their plates at lunch just from sniffing the air. She can walk down the middle of the ward and can tell who has bathed this week and who has not.

Esme is thinking about the hard thing. The difficult one. She does this only rarely. But sometimes she gets the urge and today is one of those days when she seems to see Hugo. In the corner of her eye, a small shape crawling through the shadow in the lee of a door, the space beneath the bed. Or she can hear the pitch of his voice in a chair scraped across the floor. There’s no knowing how he might choose to be with her.

The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn’t think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez. ‘Ishbel,’ she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, ‘something will have to be done about the clothes.

Her dress was strange: she wouldn’t have the organdie, she wanted red, she said, crimson was the word she used. Velvet. I will have a crimson velvet, she said to Mrs Mac as she stood at the fire. You will not, Mother said from the sofa, you are the granddaughter of an advocate, not a saloon girl, and she was paying, you see, so Esme had to settle for a kind of burgundy taffeta. Wine, Mrs Mac called it, which I think made her feel

She sees the girl, Iris, sitting with her legs crossed at the table, and it strikes Esme as odd that she herself had been sitting there too, just a moment ago. She sees the chair that had been hers—that is still hers. It is angled away from the table and there is her plate, with the half-eaten potato. Amazing how easy it is to get up and walk away from a table, from a plate of food, how no one stops you, how it wouldn’t occur to anyone here that they could stop you.

Mother said that no parent in their right mind would display a portrait like that. Esme was not at all contrite. The chair was so uncomfortable, she said, there were two springs digging into my leg. She was funny like that, always so ridiculously oversensitive. She was like that princess in the story about the pea and all the mattresses. Is there a pea, I would say to her when she thrashed about in the bed at night, trying to get comfortable, and she would say, whole pods of them

They turned into Lauder Road. The lamps had been lit, as they were at this time every day, and the lighter was passing on the other side of the street, his pole over his shoulder. Esme’s sight seemed to close in at the sides and she thought she might faint. ‘Oh,’ she burst out. ‘I hate this—I hate it.’ ‘What?’ ‘Just—this. I feel as though I’m waiting for something and I’m getting scared it might never come.’ Kitty stopped and stared at her, perplexed. ‘What are you talking about?

what I call a button. That was it. She loved that more than anything and would put on the voice and pick up something, always something very ordinary, and say, now this is what I call a spoon, this is what I call a curtain, because Mrs Mac would look up at you as you stood there on the special stool and say, now, in here I’ll put what I call a button. It used to make Mother so cross because we would both laugh and laugh. Don’t mock those less fortunate than yourselves, she would say, with her mouth pursed.

The girl is turning away. Iris, she is. The granddaughter, she is. She is picking up the bag by its straps, she is saying something to the night porter over her shoulder. Something rude, Esme thinks, something final, and Esme would like to cheer her for it because she has never liked the man. He turns off the common-room lights very early, too early, and sends them back to the wards, and Esme hates him for it and she would like to say something rude herself but she won’t. Just in case. Because you never know.

She said to me, sometimes I go back there, in my mind, to the library, to when you were all away and I was in there with . . . and I had to stop her. Don’t, I said, hush. Because I couldn’t bear to hear it. I couldn’t even bear to think of it. I had my hands over my ears. A horrible thing to dwell on. Three days she was there alone, they say, with—Anyway. It does no good to dwell on these things. I said that to her. And she turned her head to look out of the window and she said, but what if you can’t help it?

It’s idiotic to have taken her on yourself,’ Luke is saying. ‘Idiotic. Iris, are you listening to me? You have this urge to give in to every wilful impulse that crosses your mind. It’s no way to live your life. You have no concept of how stupid this is. Were you a trained professional, then perhaps, and I mean perhaps, you could see your way to—’ Iris blinks. For a moment, she can’t catch up with herself. She is sitting in Canty Bay. Luke is still talking at her down the phone. The dog is staring at a seagull on a rock. And her aged relative is stepping into the sea, fully clothed.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family—her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents—from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme’s mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

This girl is remarkable to her. She is a marvel. From all her family — her and Kitty and Hugo and all the other babies and her parents — from all of them, there is only this girl. She is the only one left. They have all narrowed down to this black-haired girl sitting on the sand, who has no idea that her hands and her eyes and the tilt of her head and the fall of her hair belong to Esme's mother. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

I used to come to the pool here when I was little,’ Iris says, as she holds out the fork for Esme. Again, Esme has to hide her smile. Then she sees that Iris is looking at the lines that criss-cross her arm and Esme takes the fork and turns her arm so that the lines, pursed white mouths, are facing the floor. She enters the zoetrope, briefly, catching a glimpse of Kitty on their swing in India, their mother lying on the bed in Lauder Road. But then she remembers she has to talk, to speak, and pulls herself out. ‘Did you?’ she says. ‘I always wanted to, but we never did. My mother didn’t approve of communal bathing.

Esme turns back to the sea, to the keening of the gulls, to the rearing monster-head of the Bass Rock, which are the only unchanged things. She scuffs her feet in the sand, creating miniature valleys and mountain ranges. She would like, more than anything, to swim. People say you never forget. She would like to test this theory. She would like to immerse herself in the cold, immutable waters of the Firth of Forth. She would like to feel the ceaseless drag of the currents flexing beneath her. But she fears it may frighten the girl. Esme is frightening—this much she has learnt. Maybe she shall have to settle for removing her shoes.

—gathered the holly that afternoon in the Hermitage, with a kitchen knife. I wouldn’t do it, I was scared of the spines tearing at my skin (I’d been soaking my hands in warm water and lemon for weeks, of course, everybody did). But she pulled it from me and said, don’t be a goose, I’ll do it. You’ll tear your dress, I said, and Mother will be angry, but she didn’t care. Esme never cared. And she did, tear it, I mean, and Mother was vexed with us both when we got back. You are responsible even if Esme isn’t, she said to me, you are responsible because Esme isn’t, and we’d have to take it with us on our next visit to Mrs MacPherson.

Like the way words said over and over become just a slurry of sound. She thinks of this. She says the word ‘word’ over and over in her head until she hears only ‘dwur-dwur-dwur’. She is aware of those numbers, that two and the eight, trying to find a place to slip back in. They have been lurking at the edges where she pushed them and they are mounting an assault, a break-in. She won’t have it. She will not. She slams all the doors, she throws the bolts, she turns the locks. She fastens her eyes on the rocks, the spiked crenellations of the rocks beneath the platform, and she scans her mind to find something else because the rocks and the word ‘word’ won’t work for ever, she knows that. And suddenly she is rewarded because from nowhere she finds she is thinking about the blazer. She checks herself quickly. Can she think about this? And she decides yes.

We lived here for a while, after my father died,’ Iris says. Esme has to swallow once, twice before she can speak, and it hurts her throat. ‘How did he die?’ she asks. ‘Oh, it was stupid. A stupid accident. He was in hospital for a routine operation and he was given a drug he was allergic to. He was young, only thirty-one.’ Esme gets flashes of this scene. She thinks she has seen this, or something like it. When? She can’t recall. But she remembers the convulsions, the thrashing body, the lolling tongue, and then the awful stillness. She has to concentrate on her plate to get rid of them. ‘That’s very sad,’ she says, and speaking the words is good because it distracts her mind into thinking about forming the syllables. ‘My parents were already separated by the time he died so I didn’t see him much, but I still miss him. It would have been his birthday next week.

She was a good pianist but too undisciplined, our grandmother said. But Mother sent her back for the gloves and to fix her stocking, which had slipped down her leg, showing the skin between her hem and the stocking top, which, of course, wouldn’t do. I went with her when I saw the thunderclouds in her face. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, she hissed to me, as we walked, and she was walking faster than usual so I had almost to run to keep up. These rules, these ridiculous rules, how is anyone supposed to remember them all? It’s only a pair of gloves, I said, I did remind you as we were leaving the house. But she was furious, always chafing at the bit, she was. And we couldn’t find the gloves, of course. Or we could find only one. I forget. I know we looked everywhere. I can’t think of everything, I said to her, as we searched, because she was forever losing one or the other and it was always up to me to remember them for myself and for her and I had begun—

Esme reaches out and laces both her hands round one of Iris’s. ‘You have come to take me away,’ she says, in an urgent voice. ‘That is why you are here.’ Iris studies her face. Esme looks nothing like her grandmother. Can it really be possible that she and this woman are related? ‘Esme, I didn’t even know you existed until yesterday. I’d never even heard your name before. I would like to help you, I really would—’ ‘Is that why you are here? Tell me yes or no.’ ‘I will help you all I can—’ ‘Yes or no,’ Esme repeats. Iris swallows hard. ‘No,’ she says, ‘I can’t. I . . . I haven’t had the chance to—’ But Esme is withdrawing her hands, turning her head away from her. And something about her changes, and Iris has to hold her breath because she has seen something passing over the woman’s face, like a shadow cast on water. Iris stares, long after the impression has gone, long after Esme has got up and crossed the room and disappeared through one of the doors. Iris cannot believe it. In Esme’s face, for a moment, she saw her father’s.

—we never spoke of it again, of course. The son, the boy, that is, who died. Tragic, it was. We were told not to bring up the subject. Esme would persist in talking about him, though, would constantly say, do you remember this, do you remember that, Hugo this, Hugo that. And one day, at the lunch table, when she suddenly started reminiscing about the day he learnt to crawl, our grandmother brought the flat of her hand down on the table. Enough, she thundered. Father had to take Esme into his study. I have no idea what he said but when she came out she looked very pale of face, very agitated, her lips trembling and her arms folded. She never spoke of him again, even to me, because I said to her that night I didn’t want to hear about him any more either. She was in the habit, you see, of talking about him when we were alone at night in bed. She seemed to take it the way she took everything: excessively hard. When really the one who was truly deserving of all our sympathy was Mother. I quite honestly don’t know how Mother bore it, especially after all those other—

Esme cuts her toast into small, geometric triangles. ‘You’re not married?’ she says. Iris shakes her head, her mouth full of crumbs. ‘No.’ ‘You never married?’ ‘No.’ ‘And people don’t mind?’ ‘What people?’ ‘Your family.’ Iris has to think about this. ‘I don’t know if my mother minds or not. I’ve never asked her.’ ‘Do you have lovers?’ Iris coughs and has to gulp at her tea. Esme looks nonplussed. ‘Is that an impolite question?’ she asks. ‘No . . . well, it can be. I don’t mind you asking but some people might.’ Iris swallows her tea. ‘I do, yes . . . I have had . . . I do . . . yes.’ ‘And do you love them? These lovers?’ ‘Um.’ Iris frowns and drops a crust on to the floor for the dog, who darts towards it, paws scrabbling on the lino. ‘I . . . I don’t know.’ Iris pours herself more tea and tries to think. ‘Actually, I do know. I loved some of them and I didn’t love others.’ She looks at Esme across the table and tries to imagine her at her own age. She’d have been fine-looking, with those cheekbones and those eyes, but by then she’d have spent half her life in an institution.

She is thinking, as she walks, about that argument with her father, on an evening just before bed when the fire was dying down, and Kitty, her mother and the grandmother were busy with what they called their handwork and her mother had just asked her where was the tapestry square she’d given her. And Esme couldn’t reply that she had hidden it, stuffed it down behind the chair cushions in her room. ‘Put the book away, Esme,’ her mother had said. ‘You have read enough for tonight.’ But she couldn’t because the people on the page and the room they were in were holding her fast but then her father was there in front of her and he snatched the book away, shut it without saving her page, and suddenly there was only the room she was in. Do as your mother asks,’ he said, ‘for God’s sake.’ She’d sat up and the fury was within her, and instead of saying, please give me my book, she said, I want to stay on at school. She hadn’t meant to. She knew it wasn’t the time to bring this up, that it would get nowhere, but it felt sore within her, this desire, and she couldn’t help herself. The words came out from where they’d been hidden. Her hands felt strange and useless without the book and the need to stay at school had risen up and come out of her mouth without her knowing.

Dr Naysmith peers at something in his notes. ‘You insisted clothes that belonged to you weren’t yours, a school blazer in particular,’ he reads, in a monotone, ‘you claimed to see yourself sitting on a rug with your family when you were, in fact, at some distance from them.’ Esme looks at the doctor’s lips. They stop moving and close over his teeth. She looks down at the file before him. The room seems to have very little air in it: she is having to breathe down to the bottom of her lungs and she is still not getting enough. The bones of her head feel tight, constricted, and the tremor has seized her limbs again. It is as if this doctor has peeled back her skin and peered inside her. How can he possibly know about that when the only person she told was— ‘How did you know that?’ She hears her voice waver, rise at the end of the sentence and she tells herself, watch it, be careful, be very careful. ‘How did you hear about those things?’ ‘That is not the question. The question, is it not, is whether you still experience these hallucinations?’ She digs her nails into the flesh of her thighs; she blinks to clear her head. ‘No, Doctor,’ she says. Dr Naysmith writes furiously in his notes and there must be something in what she says because, at the end of the appointment, he leans back in his chair, fingertips resting together in a cage. ‘Very good, young lady,’ he intones. ‘How should you like to go home soon?

In the second week, more people appeared. Esme met a missionary couple returning to a place called Wells-next-the-Sea. ‘It’s next to the sea,’ the lady said, and Esme smiled and thought she must remember that, to tell Kitty later. She saw them both glance at the black band round her arm, then look away. They told her about the huge beach that stretched out below the town and how Norfolk was full of houses made of pebbles. They had never been to Scotland, they said, but they had heard it was very beautiful. They bought her some lemonade and sat with her on deck-chairs while she drank it. ‘My baby brother,’ Esme found herself saying, as she swirled the ice in the bottom of the glass, ‘died of typhoid.’ The lady put her hand to her throat, then rested it on Esme’s arm. She said she was very sorry. Esme didn’t mention that her ayah had also died, or that they had buried Hugo in the churchyard in the village and that this bothered her, that he was being left behind in India while they all went to Scotland, or that her mother hadn’t spoken to her or looked at her since. ‘I didn’t die,’ Esme said, because this still puzzled her, still kept her awake in her narrow bunk. ‘Even though I was there.’ The man cleared his throat. He gazed out to the lumped, greenish line of what he’d told Esme was the coast of Africa. ‘You will have been spared,’ he said, ‘for a purpose. A special purpose.’ Esme looked up from her empty glass and studied his face in wonder. A purpose. She had a special purpose ahead of her. His dog-collar was startling white against the brown of his neck, his mouth set in a serious downturn. He said he would pray for her.