A Kind of Vanishing (27 page)

A
lice’s mother helped Chris on to the settee. She was now the stronger of the two as she snatched up cushions and tucked them in behind her, plumping them smartly, easing her backwards with the economic efficiency of a nurse. A warm dry hand stroked Chris’s forehead, tidying back her hair, brushing her cheek. Chris blinked as her eyes stung with sudden tears; it was just how her Mum would have been. She couldn’t think of that now. She gave in as her legs were gently lifted, so that she was lying full length on the settee, her feet propped on another cushion. If only she could stay here. The village was no longer a science-fiction nightmare; she wanted to live here and start again. But of course once she was better she would have to go. When she had gone Mrs Howland wouldn’t care because she would have Alice.

‘Have a few sips.’

As she took the cup and saucer Chris noticed there was no trace of the earlier shake and that Alice’s mother walked without catching her heels on the carpet.

‘What happened?’ Chris gave a groan.

Alice would have the right to stay as long as she liked. Her mother would be newly alive. Upstairs a fluffy hot water bottle would once again warm the immaculate bed. On an impulse Chris decided it could not happen. She wouldn’t tell Kathleen Howland about Alice and she wouldn’t tell Alice where she was. She too could start a new life, with a new name and story and see how Alice liked it. Mrs Howland would be her new mother.

Chris could be Alice. She could fill her space and stay with this kindly woman, who was after all her grandmother, lulled by the cluck-tock-cluck of the old clock on the mantelpiece. There was nothing to stop her. She needed a mother and this mother needed a daughter. This was the ‘grandma’ she had gone looking for outside Fuller’s Brewery.

Chris could not know that she was one of a long line of women, and some men, who, claiming reasons of research or detection, had come to Alice’s cottage wanting to occupy the vacant role of the nine-year-old child. If only for an hour. There had been many ‘orphans’ drawn like magnets to this mother going spare. With the callous vigour of the cheated and betrayed, Chris reasoned that if a life could be invented for her, populated with phantoms she had been taught to love like kindred spirits, she could take a loving mother and hot sugary tea and make up a new life for herself.

‘You fainted, that’s what happened. Down like a nine-pin. Lucky you didn’t hit your head.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s the heat. Abroad apparently they have thick walls and tiled floors. That’s better, you’re looking more yourself now.’

Chris sipped the tea and settled further into the cushions. Already she loved this woman with soft hands, adorned only with a gold band on the wedding finger, who talked with quiet confidence. When she had brought in the tea, she had sat on a footstool next to the settee, her hands gathered around her knees like a girl.

‘You came out with something a bit odd before you keeled over.’ Alice’s Mum took the empty teacup off Chris and set it on the coffee table. ‘About going to London.’

Chris could say she felt ill again, but this would mean more pretending. Despite the perfectly placed cushions and caring attendance, Mrs Howland was going through the motions. She was not Chris’s mother, nor did she want to be. No amount of fainting would change that. Chris would have to make her come to the flat and let her see Alice for herself.

In her bafflement at Alice’s terrible deceit, Chris had viewed Mrs Howland as no more than a catalyst, a prompter of events that would blast apart Alice’s world in the way Alice had shattered her own. Her trip to the eerily deserted village baking in hot sunshine and her arrival at a dark cottage had been for Chris part of a plot to make her Mum very sorry. She had been so intent on knocking down the tower of cards that her mother had painstakingly erected that she hadn’t taken on board the stark truth that there is no knowing how people will react.

‘It is a bit much. The heat.’ Chris didn’t know what to do next. ‘The bedroom…the dolls.’

‘You’re not the first. They think I don’t know how it looks, but it’s not possible to be normal. No parent should outlive their child. It’s normality turned on its head.’

‘I think I’ve found…’ Chris heaved herself into a sitting position. She would sort this thing out and put everything back in its place. She could do that, no problem.

‘Found what, dear?’

It was the second time she had asked the question.

‘It’s best you come with me and see for yourself.’

‘Now? To London?’

‘I’ll explain when we get there.’

Kathleen got up unsteadily.

‘I’d have to book a bed and breakfast. There was a good one in Hammersmith.’

Already Kathleen was arranging the expedition with no trace of indecision. She thought nothing of getting on a train and being in a different city by nightfall. No one understood that for her nowhere was home, so it didn’t matter where she was. It was a relief to be kept busy. All these years the one thing she had learnt was to keep an open mind and trust that anything was possible. She would go wherever this young girl wanted to take her.

Kathleen’s practical willingness emphasised the flimsiness of Chris’s own intentions.

‘Hammersmith is miles away. You could stay with us.’

‘Who is
us
, dear?’ Alice’s mother was rifling through her purse, a bus pass between her lips as she flicked through the credit card section, zipping and snapping, opening and shutting compartments.

‘Me. And…my Mum.’

‘Your Mum?’ Kathleen looked up. ‘Have you asked her?’ She looked at Chris as an adult checks the story of a child, respectful yet doubting.

‘She won’t mind. She’ll be pleased.’ Chris nodded firmly. Everyone would be pleased.

On the train down, Chris had watched a little girl sobbing and being mopped up by her Mum and decided that nothing was certain. The child believed that her mother was protection against the world. Just as Chris had once assumed her own Mum was, until at three years old she had first seen her cry. She had not explained why she was crying, and would not stop. Chris got her tissues and patted her shoulders, repeating, ‘there, there’, but she had gone hollow inside and after that she had not felt safe.

The mother on the train was troubled and tired, and embarrassed that her daughter was wailing loudly in a quiet railway carriage. Earlier Chris had helped her load a suitcase on to the rack above their heads. The shared effort hadn’t opened up further interaction. Chris hated knowing that the child’s sense of safety was an illusion. Yesterday she had discovered that all certainty was illusionary.

Once thought, she could not unthink it.

‘I’ll be ready in two ticks, my bag is packed, just need to check I’ve got my pills, water, bits and bobs.’

Chris wandered to the window.

A blue Range Rover was parking outside the cottage. Its glass reflected the sun, so she couldn’t see the occupants. A door opened slowly, sending a lighthouse beam around the living room. Chris went up to the pane, interested now to see who would get out. So far the village had been devoid of life.

Two women emerged, one from each side of the car. Although they were dressed differently, and one had short hair, the other shoulder length, there was a similarity that contributed to an impression of choreographed symmetry. The woman nearer the cottage had her back turned as she bent back inside the car and then, standing up, she slung a handbag on to her shoulder. The other woman held a bulky plastic bag in her arms. The doors slammed shut at the same time, and the woman who had been driving strode around the bonnet, a hand trailing over it as if staying an animal. As she came into view something fell out of the carrier bag on to the road. Chris stepped closer to the glass. It was a video tape. The woman who had been driving fumbled for it, and finally picked it up. Both women paused and examined it briefly. Then the woman with the short hair and the handbag turned to face the cottage and this stopped being a play in which Chris had no part.

The woman was Alice.

Her companion lifted the latch on the gate. Chris bounded across the room to get to the door before they rang the bell. Already they were coming up the path. In the hall, she collided with Mrs Howland, nearly knocking her over.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I was going to tell you…’

‘Calm down, you’ll be ill again.’ Mrs Howland was in slow motion. Chris held on to the wall as the hallway reeled and dipped.

A shadow fell across the porthole of moulded glass in the door and the barometer needle trembled on Fair as the knocker thundered down.

Already Mrs Howland was far away as Chris pitched forward trying to stop her getting to the door. Too late. The front door opened with a deafening creak over which Chris was shouting. Later she wasn’t sure she had made any sound at all.

‘It’s Alice. I’ve found Alice!’

Sunlight flooded the hallway. In the glare, two figures on the doorstep loomed – shapes with no features. Chris was helpless as Kathleen stepped forward and all the while in the background, a voice was talking.

‘Mrs Howland, we’ve brought Dad’s camera tapes. Quite a collection, over two weeks’ worth, but what with…’

Kathleen Howland gave a cry, of pain or joy, Chris couldn’t tell, and grabbed Alice’s hands, grasping them, intertwining them, and jigging them up and down. She drew the other woman in too, pulling them to her.

‘It’s Eleanor Ramsay! And Gina too. How thoughtful of you both, with all that’s happened…oh, come in, come in! You can meet my new friend.’

Kathleen ushered the Ramsay sisters into the living room. There was no one there. The young woman whose name she had already forgotten had vanished. Kathleen wasn’t surprised. She was almost used to it. They got what they came for and went.

Nevertheless she was disappointed. This girl had seemed so different.

C
hris wasted valuable seconds fumbling with the back door key before realising it was already unlocked. A raised step tripped her up and she tumbled out into the garden sending a plastic box, like the one she used to take to school for her lunch, spinning over the path, white bread spilling. She dashed down the path between the cottage and the post office, and stopped at the corner of the cottage. The front door was shut, but the car was still outside. Chris bowed her head, then taking a deep breath, hands shielding her face, she ran out down the path and, leaving the gate swinging, she set off up the lane.

The pavement rushed beneath her, cracks passing faster and faster as she quickened her pace up the hill. Her lungs were bursting, sweat soaking her shirt, but still she kept going.

Since Chris had discovered the articles under her mother’s pillow, her landscape had been demolished. It was years since that morning when she had banged out of the flat without saying goodbye to the woman who was supposed to be her Mum and supposed to be called Alice. Hours and minutes had dragged, shot forward, wound back, and now in a benign country churchyard on a warm summer’s afternoon, they halted altogether.

Storming between the plots, tripping on the uneven ground, Chris was an agitated figure to anyone who might see her.

There was someone.

She caught a movement by the corner of the churchyard. In this horror-film village Chris hadn’t reckoned on meeting anyone. There was a woman, maybe not much older than herself, standing in the dappled shadow of a silver ash. She hadn’t seen Chris. She was looking at a grave and writing, supporting a notebook with one hand, her blonde hair falling forward. At first Chris assumed she was some mourner come to spend quiet time with her loved one. She must have made a sound because the woman looked up and saw her. She snapped shut her book, dropped her pen in the bag slung on her shoulder and marched swiftly over the grass back to the path. As she came towards Chris, a smile already prepared, Chris saw she was much older than her hair and clothes had made her think. Not actually old, but worn-out looking. Chris was also taken aback by her expression. Far from behaving as if Chris had interrupted a precious moment, she was embarrassed and the quick nod of greeting as she hurried by was apologetic.

After the woman had left the churchyard, Chris decided to find out which grave had so interested her.

She was not prepared for what she found. The grave was recent, a long low mound of soil flecked with bits of white chalk with nothing else to distinguish it, no flowers or messages of love. The thick clods of earth were rudimentary and raw while a makeshift wooden cross at its head undermined the permanency of the place and the significance of the grave itself. Chris imagined the body buried below, it probably still had eyes, and a lolling tongue turned colourless by death lying inert in its mouth. She read the name on the metal strip screwed to the wood.

Mark Henry Ramsay

20th November 1925 – 6th June 1999

The Dead Professor.

Chris knew nothing remarkable about this man except the bizarre way he had died. The mass of this ignorance, literally a body of uncharted facts, lured her closer. What had the woman been writing? Who was she? This man might have given her answers. He might have consoled her. They might have consoled each other. But she had arrived too late.

Mark Ramsay’s grave was but a marker for the magnificent marble headstone with forbidding lead lettering that stood next to it. The marble was pristine, unblemished by the years, which Chris calculated dated from when the first name was carved on it – Rosamund Ramsay – in 1934. The shiny stone contrasted with the state of the grave itself, a rampant weed bed entirely merging with the surrounding grass. The neglect was callous. Yet the leaden words said that Mrs Ramsay and her husband Judge Henry Ramsay, who had died in 1958 and was buried beside her, were ‘greatly missed by their children, Virginia and Mark’.

Chris was familiar with graveyards. Before they’d graduated to pubs, she and her friends would sit on a bench in the cemetery behind the school, passing round Red Bull and vodka in a plastic toothmug and spinning preferred realities. Pock-marked angels with spread wings cast gravity on teenage sagacity, as they made up torrid lives for the dead surrounding them from scant tombstone information. One woman had lost her husband in the First World War and all her sons in the Second. Another had ten children and died aged thirty-eight. There had been no words engraved for Pauline Davies who had died aged twenty-one in 1972, just the glazed image of a happy face, with a dreadful hair-do. They had let this pass as they searched for signs of her impending doom in Pauline’s too-red lips and bright brown eyes, looking for what made her different and would ensure their own immortality. There had been no clue except the awful hairstyle. The group would straggle on by, eager to put death behind them.

Chris had always gleaned reassurance from the brevity of the words on the headstones. People were born, they were related to other people and then they died. The facts of life.

Now she sat down on a bench beside the Ramsay plot and from a comparatively safe distance stared at the graves, willing them to yield their secrets. She felt a tickling on her cheek and reaching up to scratch it, her fingers came away wet; she was crying, maybe that was why the lady with the notebook had been weird with her.

The sun was dropping down behind the downs, and Judge Ramsay’s headstone cast a long shadow across his scrubby plot. Between the inches that separated Mark Ramsay from his parents there were over forty years. The child who had ‘greatly missed’ his father was now dead himself, with his own children to miss him. Or not. Where were the years? Were they in the rustling leaves of the ash, the chunks of soil, the lichen-covered stone? Were they around her now, the hundreds of minutes experienced, the birthdays, the family holidays or Sunday lunches? Moments like this, when sitting still she could hear the engines and gears of all the lived lives? The woman who wasn’t Alice had said there was no Heaven and Chris had thought this idea reasonable. But what happened to all the seconds that amounted to a life?

‘That’s your grandfather.’

The whispering voice made Chris start. Then with a rush of delight and relief she put out her hands. Her Mum was here. The next instant white heat urged her to smash Alice to pieces.

‘What do you want?’

‘I came to find you.’ Her reply was addressed to the freshly dug grave. She was holding a twig in one hand and flicked it over the fingers of her other hand, leaves fluttering and tearing.

‘Well, you found me. So piss off!’ Chris was tugged with vicious insecurity at the sight of her Mum, baffled and vulnerable, looking with such desolation at the flimsy cross. There was no one to step out of a crowd and save Chris from kicking, stamping and smashing her mother’s face into silence with a chunk of flint.

‘Haven’t you seen a grave before?’

‘Not this one.’

‘Couldn’t even be arsed to get a proper headstone. Like that ugly bastard of a mausoleum.’ She waved impotent arms at Judge Ramsay’s tombstone. ‘Is that false too? Going to take it away as soon as I’ve gone, are you?’

‘Apparently it’s being carved, this is temporary. And the ground has to settle.’ Eleanor had not meant to point out Chris’s ignorance and reveal her knowledge of the Ramsays’ affairs. ‘Oh, Chris.’ She turned to her, not bothering to dash away the tears that trickled down her cheeks. ‘He’s your grandfather!’

‘Whatever. Until the next lie.’

‘I know you’re cross.’ Eleanor could see that Chris sniffed insincerity in her clumsy choice of words. Sometimes the truth didn’t speak for itself.

‘I don’t think you do.’ Now Chris too addressed Mark Ramsay’s grave.

‘I never meant to hurt you. Quite the reverse.’

‘‘Quite the reverse’ oh, lah de dah. She’s got new words to go with the new name. Who do you think you are to lecture me!’ Chris gulped for air and added with self-conscious triumph: ‘In fact who do you think you are? Does anyone know? Or was it just me you lied to?’

‘Chris, please…’ Eleanor couldn’t sound as upset as she felt. She had grown too adept at being someone else.

‘It’s only stupid-git-features here, who thought her Mum was Alice Kennedy, the Agoraphobic of Bermondsey…doh! So who are you today? Elea-nor-Ram-say!’ She put on an upper class intonation, as she spat out the syllables.

Eleanor shrank back, unable to disguise her fear of her own daughter. Chris realised with a jolt that she couldn’t remember when she had last seen her Mum out of doors. Eleanor was dazzled by the sunlight. Chris pictured her Mum behind the partial screen of the lace curtains or with her kindly features softened by the light of the gas fire. She was still holding the strange handbag that had confused Chris earlier. She was an indecisive figure, the dainty handbag incongruous because Eleanor wasn’t collected enough or tidy enough for its understated elegance.

Eleanor’s legs were unsteady and her attempts to hide this were pathetic. Of course, her Mum was frightened to be outside. It must be torture to her to be so exposed.

No, that was another story. Yet anger briefly ebbed as Chris saw her Mum did genuinely seem to be upset. She would part her hair, numbering the different coloured flecks – brown, gold, blonde, no silver at all.

You’ll never be old to me.

‘I will go if you want me to. I could wait for you at the station.’

‘Where did you get that?’ Chris spoke evenly.

‘What?’

‘You heard.’ Nasty now.

‘My mother…Isabel Ramsay gave it to me, just now. Your grandmother.’ A futile placation. The bag incriminated her. She couldn’t tell her daughter she had accepted it only because she had seen that Isabel hadn’t known what to do with her. She couldn’t explain that it had touched her that her mother had tried so hard to make a maternal gesture. Neither of them had been able to talk properly because they never had.

She had not told Isabel she had only come to fetch her daughter, after which she was going to leave again. Her mother had been so happy to see her, so that when she hadn’t found Chris at the White House, Eleanor had lost volition and had submitted to Isabel’s uncharacteristic stream of hyperbolic chatter that had culminated in the handbag. Isabel had snatched it off a pile of jumble in the utility room and thrust it into her hands. None of this could she explain to Chris.

Chris knew Eleanor tossed in the word ‘grandmother’ as stale bread to a duck and had noted her mother’s snap decision to stand her ground as Chris advanced towards her. She didn’t even flinch as Chris tore the bag off her, wrenched it open, ripping the gold clasp from the flap, and tipped it upside-down. The contents spilled on to the grass. Chris’s arm described an arc as she prepared to smash the bag down on her mother’s head, but at the last moment she hurled it over the top of the gravestones. It smashed through the branches, and in a shower of leaves landed in the wheat field behind the churchyard wall.

Her mother didn’t react and Chris was afraid of the blatant misery in her face. There was no satisfaction in defeating the defeated.

Who was this well-spoken stranger?

‘So are you just going to stand there?’ Chris demanded.

Eleanor scuffed a toe in the ground, kicking up dust.

‘I hate the bloody thing anyway.’ Eleanor did not sound convincing. After so long doing a good imitation of Alice, she had forgotten how to do herself.

‘Yet, you were happy to be given handouts by Mummy, and forget about me. Go there a lot do you, while I’m at school, or doing the shopping or the washing.’

‘It was for you.’

‘You got a stupid cast-off from your mother for me?’

‘No, I mean all of it. The going into hiding and changing my name. It was all for you.’ Eleanor regretted the trite words – too Alice. Except there was no Alice.

Chris sat up unnaturally straight on the bench, the muscles in her temples and jaw twitching. Eleanor desperately wanted to comfort her. She was moved by her child’s valiant effort to be unaffected. Chris had been thrown into the situation by her own mother.

Eleanor was stunned by what she had done. It had been a minute-by-minute thing with extraordinary consequences. With a dull and crushing recognition like a glimpse of death, Eleanor saw she had lost the right to Chris’s love the day she went to the Tide Mills with Alice. The soon-to-be-nine-
year-old
was too young to know she was stepping into Hell.

‘Let me get this right. I’m on a train going to Alice Howland’s mother to tell her that her missing girl was very much alive and living near the Elephant and Castle, and you’re sneaking out and running back to your real mother when she’s meant to be dead in a car crash!’ She finished with a strangled shout: ‘You were never Alice! You’re a liar. You fucking bitch!’ Chris had only ever spoken to Alice this way in her head. How good it would be to go back to the time when the only problem she’d had was how to tell her Mum that she’d had sex with a supply teacher and not had a period for five weeks. How innocent she had been to think that the arrival of her period signalled the end to her worries.

‘That’s not right,’ her mother protested.

Chris snapped her head round and Eleanor froze.

Chris looked down at the clutter of objects scattered in the rough grass. She loved them for the picture of Alice they eloquently portrayed. A nail file, a packet of tissues, a used foil of aspirins half hidden by a blue plastic packet with ‘Handy Shopper’ printed in slanting writing. Her diary had landed half open, its spine broken by the fall. Chris had given it to her for Christmas. She must have grabbed all this stuff before leaving, as usual thinking of every eventuality. Chris hadn’t thought of buying her a handbag, because she never went out.

They both knew Alice wanted the bag. They both saw Alice leaning over, pulling it up, and methodically replacing her things. Tidying up. She would want to check if the clasp could be saved and give the leather a buff with a tissue.