A Kind of Vanishing (21 page)

For some weeks Kathleen worried that Steve had upset Jackie because she didn’t come round. Kathleen kept lifting the receiver of their new telephone to check if it was working, or if the other people on the party line were making a call; this would explain why Jackie hadn’t rung. In the end she dialled the number Jackie had given her. She had said to ring if something occurred to her or of course if she just wanted a chat. After Kathleen explained who she was and that she only wanted to say ‘Hello’ and that no, there was nothing new to say, the man on the other end went away. He came back to say Jackie was out. Kathleen hated to be a nuisance and as she was rather scared of the telephone, she didn’t call again. However, even without Jackie there, Kathleen continued to talk to her. She told her how she was each day, she chatted to her as she cooked, cleaned and tidied. At first Steve would come in to see who she was talking to.

Just thinking out loud.

Kathleen couldn’t have said when this invisible listener stopped being Jackie and became Alice. Perhaps when Alice reached the age of her missing friend. Perhaps she had always been Alice. Certainly for as long as Kathleen could remember she had been talking to the wise and competent woman she had glimpsed on the evening of the green stick fracture. There was now a reason for getting up in the morning. Kathleen had someone who wanted to know how she spent her day and she must have something to tell her.

Steve never approved of her searching for Alice. He was a man who called a spade a spade. Once a thing is done it’s done. He wouldn’t talk about Alice and eventually stopped going into her bedroom. He had never had a daughter. This meant they had truly lost the greatest thing they shared. Once she had overheard him telling the landlady in a bed and breakfast in Wales that no he didn’t have children, he hadn’t wanted them. After that they didn’t go on holiday.

One night Kathleen had woken up alone in the bed. She got up, not turning on the light, finding her dressing gown and slippers with the dexterity of a person used to sneaking around in the dark. Steve was talking.

Someone was with him.

She had to steady herself as she reached the top of the stairs. Like Alice, Kathleen knew to avoid the creaky step, but feeling ill with hope she hardly dared admit to, she had had to cling to the banister to prevent herself pitching headfirst. Halfway down she stopped to listen to the murmuring from the living room.

Steve was speaking to Alice. How she had cherished that voice he used – caressing and wondering – describing a miracle to Alice. The voice that had made her love Steve even more after Alice was born. Kathleen would gaze contentedly as her young husband led Alice along the edge of the beach at Newhaven or bent down with her to look for tiny creatures in the pools of shallow water at the foot of the cliffs. At barely two years old Alice could imitate his words.
Caterpillar. Grasshopper. Spider.

It was years since she had heard that voice.

Kathleen nearly screamed.
Alice is back!

She had been right all along when she asserted Alice was alive and not buried in some hastily dug grave like everyone privately thought. Steve was a father again.

Daddy.

She had run down the rest of the stairs, and then as she touched the doorknob something made her stop in her tracks. Steve wasn’t saying anything.

There was no one else talking. Then she heard it.

The silence was broken by a low moaning like the wind. She knew the sound. Steve was crying but Alice wasn’t comforting him. She would have tried to make him better the way she had when she was just three and Steve’s father had died suddenly of a heart attack. He had been briefly enchanted out of grief as his little princess reached up with a tea towel, and pushed through his criss-crossed fingers to dab at his face. Kathleen had prided herself on not being jealous of the way he looked at Alice. She had assured her sister that she didn’t mind that Steve never saw anyone else if Alice was there. She loved the Steve that doted on his daughter.

‘Daddy. Please don’t cry.’

So why wasn’t she handing him a towel now?

Then she heard him:

‘Alice. Where are you? My little Alice…’

Kathleen had rushed back upstairs. She lay rigidly, wide-awake for the rest of the night. Steve didn’t return to bed and he left for the sorting office without coming to wake her with a cup of tea. When he had clicked shut the front door, quietly so as not to disturb her, it struck Kathleen that he hadn’t brought her a cup of tea in bed for a long time.

After that Kathleen understood that they were lost to each other. They had taken bits of Alice away into separate places to examine and treasure. If Alice had come home she would have found it occupied by two people who didn’t know each other.

So when Steve died Kathleen was no more alone than she had been before. She also had the comfort of knowing that for Steve at least, the gnawing pain was over.

Thirty-one years and four days later Kathleen still kept the kitchen door unlocked with the beacon burning brightly, although she no longer tried to work out what had happened to Alice. She had gone over so many possibilities for years and had exhausted them. Was she abducted? Did she run away? Did she bang her head and lose her memory and wander off into the house of another family who took her in and brought her up as their own? Had Alice been imprisoned in someone’s basement and over time become attached to her kidnappers like Patty Hearst? Kathleen didn’t dwell long on the option of murder. She had read that statistically it was the most likely. She now knew that most abducted children are killed within hours of their kidnap, for few people want to be caught holding a child captive. She knew that whatever the police said, after a fortnight they are looking for a body. They keep that to themselves. She had also read that the more time that passes the less chance there is that the child will be found alive. Over time the clues grow fewer and the trail gets colder.

Nowadays she noticed there were big rewards from newspapers and celebrities appeal for missing children to come home, assuring them they are not in trouble. Their favourite music is played on the radio and later, if there is a funeral, it is piped over loud speakers to silent crowds. Hollow-eyed parents, like herself and Steve, stare into the camera begging their child to come home, pleading with their child to come back, or with an anonymous abductor to release them. Kathleen would snatch hungrily at the snippets of these shattered lives to add something to her own jig-sawed world.

Now that Doctor Ramsay had drowned, life would change again.

Kathleen had never told anyone how important the doctor was to her. (To Kathleen he would always be Doctor Ramsay.) It would have confirmed opinions that she was not stable. Doctor Ramsay had been kind to her after Alice went. He had told her to keep hope alive and said something about hope being a flame of life. She should have written it down. He continued to make an effort with her, going out of his way to speak to her if they met in the village. Kathleen guessed that some people only talked to her because they saw that he did. He had never treated her as if she was mad. Years ago he had become an expert on her illness, although neither of them discussed this coincidence. Of course he wasn’t her doctor, he was far too important, but he always asked how she was and really seemed to want to know. Kathleen took any comment Doctor Ramsay made about health seriously. The Ramsays had sent flowers when Steve died. She knew they were really from Doctor Ramsay.

Doctor Ramsay had volunteered to join the line of men in the second search at the Tide Mills. Half the village had taken part in the first one, but for this one they wanted only men. When she heard this, Kathleen had passed out. She had guessed it was because they expected to find her body. She had urged the Chief Inspector not to bother. Alice never went there, Kathleen had told her it was too dangerous. Then Steve had pulled her up off the floor and together with the detective helped her on to the settee:

‘Let them get on with their job.’

‘I was only putting them right.’

‘They don’t need putting right.’

‘She never went there.’

‘Yes, she did.’ Steve was steely and brutal.

‘What do you mean?’

‘She went there last Saturday with that Eleanor Ramsay.’

‘But she was last seen on Tuesday afternoon in the lane near the Ramsays’ house.’ Kathleen robotically spoke in a newspaper phrase.

‘So, it means she knew about the place.’ He had kept close to her, perhaps already concerned that the police should guess how disturbed she was. Maybe he thought they would try less hard to find Alice if they thought her mother was unbalanced. Or was it that he worried that seeing this, the police might blame Kathleen, as Steve already blamed her, for their daughter’s vanishing?

‘She went the day after you first took her to meet those Ramsays.’

‘Alice would have told me.’

‘She told me.’

‘She what? Did you tell her off?’ Kathleen had hoped that Steve was nice to her. Her anguish for every harsh word either of them had ever said to Alice, however mild, was still unbearable now, decades later.

His face had gone strange, twisted, tight. He wasn’t Steve.

‘I was never cross with her.’

‘On the last day, she promised me to behave.’ She could only repeat: ‘They played hide and seek by the White House. Chief Inspector Hall told us that Eleanor said…’

‘Like I said, let them get on with it.’

That was when Kathleen had learnt that Alice had been closer to Steve than she was to her. For the first time since Alice was born, Kathleen had minded about the strong unspoken love they shared. Only in life is the heart a bottomless pit. Alice’s love was now finite and Kathleen wanted more than half her share of it.

With the doctor dead, Kathleen assumed she would get no more tapes. So she had lost another chance of finding Alice. He had delivered them to her every Saturday on his way to Lewes when he would also collect last week’s batch. She had the tapes ready by the door in a plastic bag. He never came in and they always went through the same routine:

‘Here’s another week’s worth. You keeping well?’

‘Can’t complain. I’ve put these back in date order and rewound them. How are you?’

‘Tired and I do complain, but no one listens!’

‘You must treat yourself properly.’ Kathleen didn’t like to delay him, he was still a busy man. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you next week then.’ She never liked to presume.

‘Same time same place!’

Doctor Ramsay never asked if she had found anything on the tapes. He was too sensitive. He trusted her to tell him. Whatever she said he would believe her.

She knew this for a fact.

The tapes recorded all the comings and goings at the White House. Initially Kathleen had ignored anything that was outside the remit of her search. She was poised, intent, because this might be the week when Alice would materialise: a sneaking image skipping past the pool, dodging out of sight of the windows, cutting across the garden on her way back home.

But Kathleen had observed that the Ramsays had a lot of visitors. She could not help becoming familiar with the man who came to see Isabel for several months on Wednesday afternoons when Kathleen knew the doctor was in London. But she didn’t notice the day he stopped appearing on the film. Kathleen tried to forget most of what she saw because she respected the Ramsays’ privacy; she was looking for Alice, everything else that went on was irrelevant. Yet despite herself, Kathleen got to know all the routines of the house. The video counter recorded the times of arrival of those who delivered: groceries, chemicals for the pool, furniture and of course the post. In the early tapes Kathleen would see the figure of Steve going up and returning down the drive, the film making him look like a character in the Woodentops. Then Kathleen would have to wind back and look more closely. This was a Steve she had never known, after he left the house in the mornings. In the past she hadn’t needed to know this other Steve for she had her own one. But as she watched the blurred black and white figure jerk across the screen over and over again, she felt miserable in a new way to the constant ache of Alice. This out-of-focus monochrome image was all she had. When Steve died the figure changed. First there was a relief postman, an elderly man, who would pause on the path to smell the lavender and here and there to dead head a flower, and then the permanent replacement – a woman young enough to be Kathleen’s daughter, who didn’t look in the least like Alice.

Kathleen had begun by taking notes, partly to help her concentration, but as her Parkinson’s got worse, her writing became harder to read, and it was harder to write. So she gave up and kept no notes on her thoughts about the woman who she saw lingering behind the Judge’s shed every Friday morning when Doctor Ramsay was out and which, Kathleen also knew, was the gardener’s day off. She didn’t mention her for a long time because the woman always had her back to the camera and, besides, the film quality was very poor. Kathleen didn’t want to risk her relationship with Doctor Ramsay by bothering him with stupid fancies until she was absolutely sure.

Last Saturday Doctor Ramsay hadn’t appeared. Kathleen waited in, confident that he would come. He was so reliable. She hadn’t liked to ring, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. The tapes were a big favour. Perhaps after what she had told him he had decided to stop letting her see them. Perhaps he had decided to use the same tape, erasing the previous week’s worth. Kathleen had tried not to panic. She relied on the tapes.

Kathleen had not believed Iris when she told her, and she had wanted to get out of the shop. She wished she had not gone there, perhaps if she had stayed at home, she could have prevented his death. But she had gone for precisely that reason, worried as the time went on and Doctor Ramsay did not come. If there was anything to know, she had known that Iris would know it. As she struggled back and pushed open the front door, which these days she used all the time, she had caught her foot on the bag of videos still by the hat stand in the hall. Now Kathleen would have to find a way of returning them that wasn’t rude.