The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

by Maggie O'Farrell

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.

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’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?’ Esme lowered herself on to a garden wall, flinging her satchel to the ground, and looked up at the yellow flare of the gas-light. ‘I’m not sure.’

Life can have odd confluences. Esme will not say serendipity: she loathes the word. But sometimes she thinks there must be something at work, some impulse, some collision of forces, some kinks in chronology.