A Kind of Vanishing (18 page)

The woman in the mirror spun around, sashayed back and forth, her movements fluid, her timing exact, as she echoed the rhythm of the guitar riff and with consummate understatement mimed the words. She exuded sex and vigour. Chris blushed, and tentatively touched her hot cheek with the back of her hand. She had never had to undergo the agony of seeing a parent lumbering hopelessly to sounds they were too old for. Her mother’s agoraphobia had spared her that. This was worse. This was a woman Chris was not meant to see. This woman was a stranger evoking feelings Chris was not meant to feel for her own Mum.

Chris’s mouth had gone dry, and feeling sick she had sneaked away. As she ran out of the flat into the street, gulping in the cold winter air to stop herself throwing up, she felt orphaned. Her Mum had abandoned her. As she could not belong with the bold, statuesque woman upstairs, with whom did she belong? Gary in his oil stained overalls was no last resort.

She clattered up the stairs to their flat on the second floor, her thoughts past and present stuck to the dingy walls and appeared half soaked on the staircase, like the washed fragments of
Pride and Prejudice
. She fumbled in her bag for the door key and at last found it swaddled in the tissues her Mum gave her every Monday. The half-empty packet was her Mum. Whenever Chris pulled a hanky out to blow her nose she was both reassured and annoyed.

She had to lean hard on the door to get it open. Her mother had jammed her brown velvet sausage dog against it. Sometimes the dog stuck, so like now, Chris had to squeeze through the gap. Alice’s stuffed emissary greeted her with an expression of lumpy resignation. Not for the first time Chris inwardly fumed at her mother’s insistence at using a draught excluder in the height of summer. She complained of being alone, but spent most of her time stopping people getting in.

Chris paused in the hallway. Since the David Bowie nightmare, she’d been entering with trepidation. She also savoured the illusion of being on her own. How different this flat would be if it were hers. She had never been alone in it.

The short corridor had no windows and depended on one of its five doors being open for light. They were always shut. Chris sniffed. The hall smelled of air freshener and washing and was pleasantly cool despite the heat outside. It was a relief now, but in the winter the hall was a place to avoid. There was no central heating. That was Stage Three of the modernisation of the Victorian estate. Stage Two had been security doors and a bench manacled to the estate office with a dedication plate to a dead councillor around which the information:
‘WP liKEs it up thE aRsE’
had been carved. Also included in Stage Two was a brick trough of dusty soil now populated with
browned-eared
shrubs and dotted with colour from drinks cans and food packaging. Stage One had been the Norwegian double glazed windows that could be cleaned on both sides without ladders or risk of death by falling. The third stage was on hold because the housing association had run out of money.

Chris tossed her bag on to her narrow single bed, registering with a stab of fury that it had been made. Now it was a pretend bed, with no creases or folds, a series of straight lines like a prison. Her mother always tucked the duvet in at the sides. How many times had she asked her not to?

‘Mum! No one tucks in a duvet!’

‘It’s neater, otherwise it’ll slip off the bed.’

‘How? Is the bed on a slope?’

‘Why do you have to contradict? You have to have the last word.’

‘No, you always have the last word.’

‘See what I mean?’

Now Chris snatched at the duvet and wrenched it out from the wall. Discarded and rejected clothes had been folded in reproachful piles on her desk, covering papers and pens.

Chris lay down, her arms outstretched.

After a bit she felt between the wall and the mattress and hauled up a square of crocheted wool and clamped it to her nose. Contentment crept through her like a paper slowly catching fire, licking and lapping: spreading heat. The room was hers again. Her mother had knitted the small pink blanket for her cot. She sniffed it, breathing right in. A kind of peace descended.

The walls were dark red with shiny black skirting. Chris had done the gloss four years ago when she was supposed to be doing her French homework. Nothing had been greater than her buzzing excitement as she left the shop with the tin of paint, a brush and the bottle of turpentine secreted in her bag. Chris had paid for everything with money from her Saturday job at the library. Her Mum had brushes and cleaning fluids, she was an expert on decorating and home improvement. But she would not have let Chris use her brushes, even if she cleaned them thoroughly afterwards. As it turned out, the borrowing of brushes might have been a small crime in comparison with the much larger one of painting her skirting boards black.

Streaks of cold tea had dribbled down the woodchip wallpaper, mingling with black paint. Even years later, Chris still found flakes of china tucked into the edges of the carpet. She liked this, preferring to think of her bedroom as a preserved crime scene. The next day she had bought her mother a new mug. It seemed her Mum, normally so fiercely tidy, always had to make a mess when she was cross.

It had been worth it. Now Chris knew every inch of her bedroom, the places where there were cracks and indentations and ominous bulges. She had painted like the bloke in the shop had advised, following the grain of the wood in rhythmic sweeps. Now though Chris regretted the black. But she kept this secret from Alice.

‘You’re late. Was the traffic bad, darling?’

‘Same as usual.’

‘The sun has left the quadrangle.’

‘Do you have to use that pretentious word. Yard. It’s a crappy old yard.’

‘So what?’ she retorted and too late berated herself; despite the launderette, they might have a nice evening. Chris repeated her usual resolution.

‘I will be nice. I will be kind. Just do as you’re told.’

Leaning against her Mum’s big old armchair, she glanced out of the window at the shaded yard. She wanted to see her Mum laughing with her own friends in some crowded restaurant or sipping a glass of wine in a pub garden decked out with lanterns like other people’s mothers did. Sometimes when Alice tapped her feet to a tune on the radio, Chris spied the girl in the stories, who skipped and pranced and wore her hair in bunches. More recently she was reminded of the woman in the mirror.

At two in the morning, listening to the flat flexing its limbs: the whimsical trilling of the fridge, groaning water pipes, and the other indefinable sounds of her home, Chris would whisper a wish to the darkness that one day her Mum would be able to go outside and feel the warm sun on her face. She would turn Alice into the carefree girl she was before her parents were killed. She would restore that happy child spinning a figure-
of-eight
on the ice rink watched by proud parents up in the stands. Then Chris would hear her Mum cough through the thin wall and despair that she would ever get better.

‘How was your day?’

‘I’ve made you
bœuf en daube.
With extra wine the way you like it.’

Chris loved her Mum’s cooking; it was their private language. Alice didn’t cook according to the seasons, but by mood or priority. She had defrosted the fridge, and was working through the contents and then gave her dishes fancy names enunciating the French with guttural enthusiasm. This was a joke they shared. Alice had spent three days over the dish. Chris was impressed that Alice was expert at cooking without going anywhere. She never picked up flavours and smells or ate other people’s food and swapped recipes and tips.

This flash of good feeling prompted Chris to bring on another high spot in her Mum’s day. She went to get the newspaper.

‘Hey Mum, you sit and read. Let me set the table and serve up. Then we can do the crossword.’

‘I’ll take you up on that.’ Alice started out of her chair to hug her daughter, but she had gone.

Chris opened the kitchen door and entered a world where only good things happened. The rich herby smell laced with garlic triggered another burst of love for Alice. As she lifted the lid from the pan and stirred the reddish-brown mixture, Chris called to the living room in a chirpy voice:

‘Mind you the news is weird. Some doctor bloke drove his car into a swimming pool and drowned himself at the weekend. Probably killed a patient and couldn’t admit it! There’s a great photo.’

There was no reply, but Chris was too preoccupied choosing especially tender pieces of meat for her mother to notice.

The kitchen was warm and bright. The surfaces were gleaming. It could have doubled as an operating theatre. No mistakes were made here. No crimes either. Her Mum rarely left traces of herself in a room, wiping down cupboards and polishing handles after cooking. She left no chance for mould to grow anywhere.

Alice had put out a tray with plates and cutlery so there wasn’t much for Chris to do. She was surprised her mother had let her serve the food. Alice liked recognition and presenting her culinary feats was part of the ceremony.

Chris handled the ladle Alice had put out with clinical care, lifting out meat and vegetables without splashing. She made sure to give her mother a bit more potato and lots of juice. She hummed to herself as she lowered the brimming plate on to the tray. She would come back for her own. She manoeuvred with care, concentrating on each step, keeping the gravy from slopping as she walked back through.

‘Mum, this looks delic…’

Chris staggered backwards as Alice shoved against her. The plate slithered across the tray. Chris tried to get her balance, but couldn’t stop gravy and bits of meat splashing to the floor. The room vibrated as Alice slammed the door behind her.

The settee was still warm where her Mum had been. Chris plonked the tray on the floor and sat motionless. At her feet the rug was a limp animal with gashes of gravy for open wounds. What had she done now?

After about ten minutes she went into the kitchen and filled the washing up bowl with soapy water. The gravy disappeared as she scrubbed. Then she took the tray with the rest of her mother’s supper back to the kitchen, tipped the food back in the pot and washed the plate. Her own plate had not been used. She put the lid back on the casserole dish and switched off the light. She had no appetite.

The
Evening Standard
was on the settee. She looked at the picture of a car hanging from a crane over a swimming pool of some posh country mansion. When she had scanned the paper earlier before getting off the tube, Chris had found the picture funny despite the story. It was a surreal sight. She considered whether her mother was going mad. She would not know how to check, for she was used to her odd ways. Alice would touch five things on entering a room and talk to her draught excluder dog as if he was real. The estate didn’t allow proper pets. On good days Chris even loved Alice more for these eccentricities. The doctor said her Mum was marvellous, coping so well in the circumstances. What would he have said about her tonight? Her Mum had ruined the evening for no reason.

She read the story properly. It put off doing anything about Alice.

Chris didn’t know anyone with Parkinson’s Disease but swiftly concluded it was obviously suicide and that the son was kidding himself. Children knew less about their parents than anyone. Although she could be sure that Gary would never kill himself using a car.

Chris admitted that the professor was okay looking for an old man, with no grey hair and a dimple in his chin. She remembered her Mum saying newspapers always had pictures of dead people smiling to show they had been nice when they were alive and to make readers care that they were dead. Apparently the professor had everything, good looks, a successful career, children and a wife described as a ‘glamorous sixties socialite’. Chris reflected that, even dead, Mark Ramsay looked happier than she was at that moment. Wealth might not bring happiness, but it provided better places to kill yourself or be miserable in.

Whatever his son said, Chris guessed something must have upset the old professor. Parents were unpredictable. Not that she knew about fathers. Her father would be unlikely to ruin a perfectly good car in order to kill himself. She remembered the man in the subway and closing her eyes, she felt the warmth of his tense body against hers. Her body’s memory was better than her own. Chris could not remember what the man had looked like. Only then did she realise that she had not seen his face.

She left the paper on the glass coffee table. Her Mum might still read it. She would be better tomorrow. 

I
sabel climbed out of bed as soon as Gina had left the room. Her whole body was stiff after the business in the pool and when she stood up her temple throbbed. It was a relief to be alone as long as she knew it wouldn’t last. She had read somewhere that people felt closer to death after both their parents had died, when the buffers shielding them from mortality were removed. Her own parents had died when she was too young to remember them so she had never had that feeling. She felt it now. With Mark’s death Isabel had been shunted forward in the queue, suddenly old, a widow, a dowager.

Her turn next.

Isabel’s arms ached as she drew back the curtains and leaned out of the open window into the warm dusk. A pale square of light from the kitchen was like a sheet spread over the grass in the growing gloom. The ghostly outlines of the table and empty chairs under the willow tree were both emblems of the past and finger-posts to a bleak future. The thick bushes and the trees that were now grown as tall as the house rustled in the late evening breeze. She stared hard, but no amount of looking changed anything. Mark was not there now.

There were voices, distant enough for her to feel held in a private silence. Did other people have these thoughts, inconsequential, yet integral to one’s self? In a drunken conversation after making love before they were married she and Mark had once confided their most trivial experiences to each other. They discovered for instance that they touched the end of a biscuit with their tongues after biting, to stop crumbs dropping. Tiny expediencies they had seldom acknowledged since, yet she had believed those shared assumptions were always there. Now it was all over.

The intruders had gone for the day. All afternoon there had been a policeman posted at the gate. He was back there after thirty years. His presence should form a direct link to a lost time, as a blanket of snow can level changes to a landscape, and precipitate the recall of forgotten events. But Isabel felt only disintegration and heavy limbs. A hand clasped her waist. She opened her eyes and preparing her face, gave in to its pressure, turning round ready to speak; she must sound patient and try not to snap at him.

There was no one there except the half-drunk glass of water on Mark’s bedside table and his reading specs.

Now only the children were left in the house. She could hear them through the window, talking in hushed conspiracy downstairs, presumably the kitchen. They would have formed a committee around the table, drinking cocoa made by Lucian who had the sensible answer for everything. Lovely, dependable Lucian: boiling the milk to precisely the right temperature, lining up the cups like soldiers, dispensing the exact measurement of powder. He would leave enough milk for the morning in case the milkman failed to deliver. It had never happened yet. Lucian the Pharmacist spent his life working through a computerised list of instructions and descriptions. Isabel had always languidly assumed his work was limited to doling out pills and potions into receptacles; pouring powder into delicate sachets from larger packets, dripping from small bottles on to spoons, slipping syringes into plastic bags, coaxing blobs on to petri-dishes, and tweezering on to microscope slides. All day long, he transferred something to somewhere else, when he had wanted terribly to be a doctor. Isabel knew her son had grown up into a disappointed man. She despised him for his blinkered ambition, so inappropriate for a boy who might have been artistic and created works that changed the world. Isabel sometimes found the sight of her son, so imperturbably stoical in the face of his substituted life, quite unbearable.

She was livid with Mark for leaving the police entirely to her, literally leaving them. She had told them she had been lying in the sun reading, and even described how the heat was somewhat mitigated by a refreshing cool wind and how her blue and white umbrella positioned to the left of her lounger shaded her face and book while allowing the rest of her to tan. Police liked detail.

‘Oh, and it was factor fifteen, in an orange squeezy thingy. No idea what’s happened to it. I’m sure I had it outside. Mark was lying on my lilo which my daughter, this one here, my eldest, gave to me last year.’

She turned to Gina for confirmation. They needed corroboration. Statements backed with hard evidence:

‘It was last year, wasn’t it? Or the year before?’

‘It doesn’t matter, Mum. They don’t care about the lilo.’ Gina had glowered at her toes. She blamed it all on Isabel, of course. Even today it was not Mark’s fault.

‘We went to the Caribbean the year before, so yes, it was last July.’ Gina’s commitment to accuracy got the better of her.

Gina had gone to the hospital with Mark’s body, hovering possessively close as they zipped him up in a shiny black body bag and loaded him on to the gurney before wheeling him round the side of the house to the drive. Absurdly the wheels rattling over on the gravel reminded Isabel of a supermarket trolley and she had stifled a shout of laughter. She had expected Gina to be squeamish – as a girl she had been unable to contemplate her dead hamster – but she had been devout in her attention to her drowned father. She had even tried to make Isabel come in the ambulance too.

‘I’m not ill. There’s nothing the doctors can do for either of us, me or your father.’ She had already disowned him.

‘You’ve had a shock, they could sedate you.’

‘A large gin could do that.’ Isabel was shapeless in Jon’s gigantic pullover and Gina’s jodhpurs, which hung loosely on her thin legs. None of them had thought of going upstairs for her clothes, but had grabbed what they could find in Jon’s car. Her hair had dried in clumps but now there was no Mark to care. Or so she had said to Jon when he offered to find her a brush. She could see the dismay in her son-in-law’s chlorinated eyes, and knew that he saw Isabel’s abandonment of her appearance as a sign of madness. Perhaps it was. It was a long time since she had lived in the real world.

Finally Isabel had upset Gina over the sun lounger. Her eldest child had never been good at relaxing.

‘What are you doing?’ Isabel had found Gina in the hall filling out a label on the side of the cardboard box containing the luxury lounger.

‘I’m sorting this out. It’s not like anyone will want it.’ Gina gave the cardboard a thump.

‘I want it. I’ve been waiting absolutely ages for it. It’s come from Italy.’

‘Isn’t there enough to deal with? Police, forms, questions; a frightful mess?’ Gina continued to write, then she looked up and spat out: ‘There’s going to be a post mortem.’

‘What’s going on?’ For a brief moment, it was Mark. Isabel had never properly noticed how much Lucian resembled him. Had the quality of likeness changed now there was only Lucian?

‘Nothing.’ Gina had screwed up the address label and stood close beside the box.

‘We have to be a team on this one.’ Lucian was brisk.

‘On what one? No we fucking don’t.’ Isabel had snapped. ‘We just have to get through without ballsing up.’ Her children instantly became a team.

‘I’ll get scissors.’ Gina had moved towards the kitchen, but Lucian produced a blade from the key ring in his pocket and slid it precisely along the rim of the box.

‘Where do you want this? It’s um, rather busy at the pool.’ He grinned quickly and for a second she had back her young son.

‘Oh, stick it out the back. I can lie on the lawn at least.’

Gina had elbowed Lucian out of the way and set to unpacking the bed and studying the cleaning instructions.

In the hours after his death Isabel had been intent that Mark’s death should not stop her living as he had during life. But he was stopping her. Isabel’s lifestyle was being raked over and awarded marks. She wasn’t doing very well. She had told the police:

‘I went inside for some orange juice and when I came out my husband had gone.’ Gina had been beside her on the swinging Jack and Jill seat with frilly blue and white canopy a little way from the pool. The police had wanted to interview Isabel in the house, but she had said she couldn’t bear to be indoors on such a sunny day. Gina was holding her arm in a show of emotional support although it was Gina who needed it, so Isabel held her hand. The double seat swung if they moved only slightly so this arrangement kept them stable if nothing else.

‘So was that your husband’s gin and tonic by the side of the pool?’ The young man knew it wasn’t. Isabel was glad she had made him sit on a stool at their feet.

‘It was lunchtime, my daughter was due any minute.’ At this she had felt Gina stiffen as if unwilling to be implicated and Isabel became momentarily flustered.

‘Did I say orange? No the gin was mine.’ Silly old bag, he was thinking. Out of the corner of her eye, Isabel caught Gina biting her cheek, doing that dreadful face, pulling her mouth across like rubber. She already had lines around her mouth and now it might make her look unreliable. Isabel only just stopped herself from slapping Gina’s hand. The seat swayed, making the policeman teeter backwards to avoid being kicked.

‘Mark drinks whiskey,’ she added for good measure. Mark was not getting off scot-free.

‘So Mark had been drinking?’ The young man was sure of himself. He had soon dropped ‘Professor Ramsay’, no doubt the result of communication training. Use first names to make them feel at ease. Isabel remembered the detective talking to Eleanor when Alice Howland went missing. He had been deferentially polite, and never gave away what he was thinking. Perhaps he had been cleverer than she had given him credit for. He had never found Alice so he wasn’t that clever. She wondered if he was dead too, policemen died young, they worked such terrible hours.

She had roused herself:

‘No, my husband said it was too early.’ She hadn’t meant to say that and quickly offered: ‘He was driving into Lewes. He never drinks if he’s driving.’

Drank. She wasn’t in denial. She knew Mark had gone and was not kidding herself, saying ‘we’ because she couldn’t bear ‘I’, but it was too soon for past tense and besides she needed Mark to be in this with her. Later she caught a young constable – a boy – looking at her. She knew the expression, and felt a frisson of triumph that she could still inspire that look in the opposite sex.

‘Was he in a funny mood recently? Low, distracted, uncommunicative?’

‘Oh yes, always!’

‘Mum’s joking.’ Gina squeezed her arm. ‘You’re in shock, Mum. Is this okay? They can stop for now.’

Isabel thought of Eleanor over thirty years ago, refusing to take Richard Thingummy’s questions seriously. Perhaps she was entering her second childhood.

‘Mark was the same as ever. There was nothing different about him.’ But there had been. Suddenly she knew what it had been like; Mark had behaved as if he was being hunted.

‘Is there anything special about today? The 6th of June, is that significant?’

‘Not remotely.’ She held his gaze. What could she say? There was no sense in mentioning Robert Kennedy, then they really would think she was mad.

‘You had no idea he was going to do this?’

‘Are we assuming he knew he was going to do it?’ she had replied archly.

The interview by the side of the pool was punctuated by a bubbling sound that might have been relaxing had it been a water feature. It was the car shifting in the water. Actually it was a water feature. She had snorted with sudden laughter, startling the police and making Gina squirm, which in turn rocked the swing seat and unsettled the policeman.

‘You think your husband accidentally drove his car into the swimming pool?’ The man would have been openly sarcastic if death and status hadn’t been involved.

‘Of course.’ She thrust out a long jodhpured leg. The policeman flinched. ‘He was on the lilo when I left the garden. He had to hurry, to get to Lewes and be back in time for lunch.’

‘Strange time to choose to go out, with guests due any minute, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘They weren’t guests, they were family. We don’t stand on ceremony.’

‘How long were you in the house, Mrs Ramsay?’

Gina was watching her.

‘How long does it take to make a gin and tonic?’

The policeman had raised his eyebrows in a ‘you tell me’ way, probably relieved his own mother didn’t drink gin in the day.

‘Minutes, I suppose, I don’t know, maybe five, maybe ten? I took my time, I had no…’

She stopped mid-sentence. She could read his mind:
‘Strange woman, not shed a tear, drinks at all hours, lies about it, keeps laughing at odd moments. The minute she’s out the way, husband slams his car into the pool and drowns and she doesn’t bat an eyelid.’
Isabel was crying inside but that didn’t count. She wanted to go back to lying in the sun with Mark doing graceful circles on the lilo. She wasn’t ready for this phase of her life.

Now she trailed across to their bed and, finding Jon’s jumper folded on Mark’s side, hauled it over her head and rolling up the sleeves, prepared to go downstairs. She didn’t want to be on her own any more. There would be enough time for that.