A Kind of Vanishing (28 page)

Eleanor didn’t care. The bag was too small and ladylike to hold anything useful.

They both knew that if Alice got the bag sorted, they could go back to Bermondsey and carry on as before.

But there was no such person as Alice.

‘So how was it then?’

‘When I rang you, you said you were with my mother. You have no idea what that did.’ Eleanor stole a furtive glance at Chris and emboldened by her stony silence continued:

‘I didn’t think of Mrs Howland. I assumed you were with Isabel Ramsay, I came to get you.’

‘So how come your name is Alice?’ Chris’s voice quavered.

‘People change their names. It’s normal.’ As soon as she heard the words, Eleanor saw her mistake. Unless she told the truth without excuses or expecting sympathy, Chris would go. Already it was probably too late.

‘Don’t patronise me!’ Chris was on her feet. ‘I know people change their names! What I want to know is why you did. You changed your whole life, don’t tell me that’s ‘normal’. You pretended to be a missing schoolgirl and lied to me, your own child. That’s if I am yours.’ She held up her hand. ‘There’s
nothing
you can say. I thought my grandparents died in a car accident. Me and Emma even went to that brewery where you said they were killed and put flowers there. I’ve always thought you were all the family I had.’

‘She wasn’t just a schoolgirl. Nobody knew what Alice was really like.’ Eleanor was talking to herself. ‘She could be so cruel.’

‘I don’t care about Alice.’ Chris stalked over to her mother, and coming up close like the boys in the playground, she jabbed her hard on the chest.

‘You were my Mum. Have you ever thought of that?’ She pushed her roughly. ‘You’ve taken my whole life away by pretending to be a girl you didn’t even like?’ Her speech was blurred with sobbing. ‘And you call that being a mother? You’re mental.’

Chris was breathing through her teeth, a gulping hissing.

‘Chrissie, I have nothing in my life other than you. You’re the point of it.’

‘I’m so grateful!’ Chris punctuated the exclamation with another push, rougher this time, even though she guessed her Mum was telling the truth. She saw her wince, then hide it. Her Mum would stand there taking it. Chris punched her hard on the shoulder, knocking her backwards.

‘Why?’ Her voice was low and grating.

‘What do you mean?’ Eleanor would not cry. She knew what Chris meant.

‘Why did you call yourself Alice?’

A small plane buzzed high overhead, and on the other side of the church a car engine purred into a rev as it drove up the lane; there was the bass boom of a snatch of ‘Baby One More Time’. The village was coming to life, but neither woman noticed.

‘I’ve done my best to make it up to Alice.’

‘Make up for what?’

Eleanor stepped away and with her back to Chris she gazed far into the distance at the point where the downs became the sky where she wished she could be:

‘For killing her.’ 

K
athleen was worn out. She had been astounded to find the Ramsay sisters on her doorstep. People said children were resilient and being young they didn’t feel things. Kathleen had always doubted this. Alice had been very sensitive.

Eleanor Ramsay had barely spoken and, with a shake of her head, had refused tea when her sister had just accepted, which made Gina change her mind. The girls had looked no more at ease with each other than they had when Kathleen had first met them that fateful summer. When Kathleen told them that a young lady who had said she was a reporter had turned out to be yet another sightseer, Gina had said she was appalled and wanted to call the police, while Eleanor had said nothing. Then just as Kathleen was reassuring Gina that she didn’t think the girl had meant any harm, Eleanor had announced she had to leave and fled the house before Gina could go with her. It was a long time since Kathleen had recalled the suspicion that the detective had confided to her in the garden where Steve couldn’t overhear. After the Ramsays had left it came back to her clearly.

She hadn’t cared for Detective Inspector Hall and for this reason made more effort with him. He was like a cat, drawn to her because he sensed her dislike. Most people took Steve to one side if they had something unpleasant to talk about, like the search of their cottage or of the Tide Mills and the day they dragged the river. They supposed Steve was the stronger one and could absorb bad news. But after a while Richard Hall realised this wasn’t the case, or maybe he preferred to talk to Kathleen.

He led her out into the little garden, guiding her with a cupped hand on her elbow, which she had resented for its suggestion that she had lost so much she couldn’t walk unaided. Over time Kathleen came to see that this insistent protection was more complicated. While Isabel Ramsay intrigued and disturbed him, Kathleen Howland was Richard Hall’s ideal woman. In the first few days after Alice’s disappearance, she too was bathed in an innocence that over time, as she failed to fit people’s expectations of a grieving mother, eroded. At the time her maternal mimings with her arms flailing in an empty embrace, made sense to him.

Like Jackie Masters, he said he had understood about the sandwiches and the freshly ironed nightie on the freshly washed pillow.

As their feet sank into the soft soil around Steve’s vegetable plot, Richard Hall’s proximity, so close she could sniff waves of minty breath, revolted Kathleen. She remembered noticing that one of the canes for the runner beans had snapped under the weight of the plant and thinking she must tell Steve. Then in the same thought she had known not to bother. Steve had lost his love for the garden and let his plants and flowers run wild or die. He too had broken under the weight.

‘I don’t know how to say this.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t like the attitude of the youngest Ramsay girl.’ He seemed to suppose Kathleen shared his contempt for the Ramsay family and their privilege. Once upon a time this privilege would have earned them automatic respect from men like Richard Hall.

‘Eleanor Ramsay?’

‘Her story doesn’t add up. She isn’t one bit bothered by any of this. I gather she’s a handful at the best of times, but now she’s too clever by halves. The idea beggars belief, but we have to keep our minds open.’

‘What idea?’

‘I’m giving mileage to the theory that this Eleanor had a bit of a run in with Alice and things got out of hand.’

‘For pity’s sake, don’t waste your time bothering Eleanor Ramsay. What you’re really saying is my Alice is dead.’ She had been frightened by her words.

‘I’m just trying to keep you up to date with the investigation. I wanted you to be the first to know.’ He had bent down and fiddled with the runner beans, using a nearby cane to lend support to the broken one and tying them together with a bit of loose twine that he found lying on the grass. Richard Hall was free to do this; he still had both his daughters.

‘Eleanor’s upset.’ She had tried to be nice. He was only doing his job; they had to leave no stone unturned.

‘I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else. I know reporters hang around you. If you want me to get rid of that young woman…’

‘They’re only trying to help. ‘At the time she had believed Jackie Masters really was a friend. ‘They’re no different to you, Inspector.’ Then, for he had looked hurt by this, she had let him lead her back into the house and make her a cup of tea.

So after the Ramsay girls had left as suddenly as they had arrived, Kathleen had sat motionless in Steve’s armchair raking up old memories. The dopamine had drained away and she had to wait for the tablet to give her some movement again. Her ‘off’ times, when along with the dopamine, her serotonin levels plummeted, were her bleakest. She was overcome by an eerie stillness that froze her features and all hope. As far as Kathleen knew, Richard Hall had dropped his suspicions of Eleanor. The main suspect had become the tramp whose body was found tangled in the river weeds under the bridge near Southease by the police divers.

Seeing her today, Kathleen wondered if Eleanor had known more then she had told the police.

So later that evening when someone knocked on her door, Kathleen only struggled to her feet to answer because she guessed it must be Eleanor returning.

But it wasn’t.

This time she didn’t offer refreshment. Jackie knew where to find the tea things.

They sat on either side of the fire, Jackie in Kathleen’s chair and Kathleen in Steve’s. Jackie gripped her notebook like an insurance salesman.

She was businesslike:

‘After all this time, I think we both know she’s not coming back.’

‘Eleanor?’ Kathleen’s mind was still on the Ramsay sisters.

‘Alice.’

‘Oh.’ Kathleen’s body began to tremble and she held her right hand tightly in her left. Jackie noted this down. She was like an artist doing a quick sketch, darting looks at her subject before scribbling busily.

‘It’s certain that Alice is dead. I wanted you to be the first to know.’

Why did they always say this? What difference did it make if she were the second person to know?

Kathleen was floating; her feet were sliding out from under her, pulling her down towards the floor. She needed an emergency tablet, but couldn’t move.

Doctor Ramsay had advised her to take care of herself.

Her face had stiffened to a mask, and her skin colour drained to a pasty grey as, in her head, Kathleen called out to Eleanor. She knew why Eleanor had gone. She must go after her. But her feet were lead and with Jackie here, she could not go anywhere.

Jackie Masters drew a perfectly straight line in her notebook and tapped the page peremptorily with her silver pen:

‘I’ve been doing some digging. I know who killed Alice.’

At the same moment, Kathleen realised that so did she. 

T
he Judge’s tombstone dwarfed his son’s makeshift cross. The bench was now in shade, but it had not cooled down, the eiderdown air was still and heavy. Eleanor was in the dock, knees together, humble, before the stark lettering.

‘How did you kill her?’ For the moment her anger had gone, leaving a silt of bewilderment. It didn’t even matter who her mother was. These doubts were the luxuries of a lost life. Her mother’s confession had extinguished any glimmer of hope.

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You must remember.’

‘I hid. There was counting. Alice cheated.’

‘She cheated?’ Her Mum was mad, she ought to be kind to her. ‘If you can’t remember anything, how do you know you killed her? Why would you?’

‘She said terrible things.’

‘So you killed her?’ Chris would tame the word.
Kill time, kill off the germs, stop it, you’re killing me, kill two birds.
She could keep meaning at bay and save her Mum. Last week Chris wouldn’t have thought her Mum could murder anyone. But now…

‘She was an innocent schoolgirl. Always in a good mood, always willing and always top of everything. I worked it out. If Alice was so good, I must be bad because I was the opposite of her. She sneered at me and said everything I cared about was rubbish. She said my Dad didn’t love me.’

‘She said those things?’ 

‘Maybe I made it all up.’

As she talked Eleanor’s mouth relaxed, her lips were fuller and wider, the lines around them smoothed away; she was no longer Alice. Chris supposed her confession had relieved her of a burden. She forced herself to listen:

After the night of the smashed mirror when her Mum went off in the ambulance, Eleanor had invented a new story. Her real parents were a poor couple living in Friston Forest who had left her on a blanket in the car park when she was a baby. They wanted her to have a better life than they could give her. They took pleasure in seeing her grow up from a distance. They kept watch as she went to the sweet shop to buy bubble gum or played secretly at the Tide Mills. This meant Eleanor was never alone because the kind couple – the woman a spit image of Mrs Jackson – were always there, they would even take her back if things got too much.

After Alice had gone, her parents really were the strangers who had found her on the rug deep in the forest. They became silent and separate and stern except at night when she heard their voices talking long after their bedtime. Then as everyone finally went to sleep there would be the banging and knocking as Alice sneaked back from hiding. But only Eleanor saw her.

One night Eleanor had crept to the window to find Alice on the other side of the pane. She was on the sill trying to shelter from the fine rain, tapping with scratchy nails to be let in. Alice was like the lady in the bit from
Wuthering Heights
that Gina had once read to her and Lucian to stop them pestering her. It was pitch black outside, but Alice was lit up like the Christmas tree angel with a light bulb stuffed up her skirts.

Alice had menaced Eleanor with secrets that made Eleanor’s eyes prick with tiny needles. She had tried to make Eleanor cry.

That bruise on your mother’s neck is a love-bite. Like a vampire.

Your Dad said I was the daughter he wished you had been.

Still in the dream, Eleanor had been disappointed to see Alice carried in through the front door of the doll’s house in Mr Howland’s hairy arms. She hoped she had gone for good. Eleanor was in the doll’s house. The front was open so that the windows were suspended in mid-air like the fireplace at the Tide Mills. Mr Howland had cuddled Alice like a doll. She had been bath-time-cosy in a rabbit dressing gown and fluffy slippers. Alice was completely dry, which Eleanor thought was strange because it was pouring outside. Eleanor felt a cold draught as Alice sneaked up on to the green sofa beside her. While the grownups were in the kitchen making cocoa, she explained in a fast whisper how she was sorry for cheating. She had learnt her lesson. From now on they could play whatever game Eleanor suggested and she would pretend it was real. Eleanor told her it was too late. Alice had used up her last life.

‘I can’t hear you?’

Alice’s voice had been like a radio, with the volume getting quieter. Yet she was still sitting beside her making Eleanor as cold as ice.

She had nearly gone. Finally, like the Cheshire cat, there was just her mouth, smiling like a good girl.

‘The Mill Owner. You were right about him. I didn’t believe you.’ The Alice-mouth had no voice. Eleanor had to lip read.

‘He doesn’t exist. I made him up. He’s dead in the churchyard. He died of Apo-plex-ey on a train from Seaford.’ Eleanor had yelled, but the ears had faded away long ago.

In the morning, Alice was still missing and Eleanor’s Dad was furious when she told him Alice had come back in the night. She showed him the marks on the bedroom window frame as proof. But he accused her of making them herself. Eleanor had not confessed that when she had tonsillitis last year, she had tried to carve her name in the wood with her penknife. But he had known. She wanted him to understand that the point was Alice had come back. She had thought he would be pleased.

Long days crawled by, stretching into weeks and soon years were laid down like paving slabs with no secret animals or messages scratched in the stone. Alice never returned and after a while she wasn’t mentioned in the Ramsay household.

Aged sixteen, Eleanor was expelled from her expensive central London school for stealing a teacher’s purse. Her last year of education was at a crammer in Kensington where to everyone’s incredulity she got three ‘A’ levels. She was befriended by one of the teachers, a man with corkscrew hair whose boyfriend was an oboist in the Covent Garden Orchestra. She bunked off lessons to go to rehearsals of operas and ballets, lounging in the stalls of the empty auditorium, knees propped up on the seat in front, munching sweets and desultorily revising
The Duchess of Malfi
with an usher’s torch in the boring bits.

When she was not much older than Chris was now, Eleanor had sex with a boy called Gary on the bathroom floor of a squat in Shepherd’s Bush. He was head mechanic at the local Renault garage and she had fancied him because he looked like Paul Weller. Eleanor told him she was engaged when he asked to see her again. She never told him she was pregnant.

By the time she had the baby – a girl she called Chris after the oboist who she had loved more than anyone – Eleanor was getting flashbacks. Her memories were like dreams and at first she could dismiss them. But they began to make too much sense. Eleanor had seen Alice near the halt at the Tide Mills and was outraged that she wasn’t looking for her. She would get her.

She told Chris that as the unbidden pictures came more often, she hadn’t been able to go on seeing her family. She had found a room in Holloway. At twenty-one, Eleanor had inherited a trust fund set up by Judge Henry for his heirs and this small allowance was paid straight into her account. This income coincided with giving birth to Chris. So as the truth of what happened on that June day was pieced together out of the fragments of a sunsoaked past, Eleanor changed her name to Alice Kennedy after the Senator with the dimple in his chin who had been shot the day after Alice vanished, and with her small baby, she too disappeared.

‘I took away her life. If I became Alice, she would not be dead.’

‘You didn’t actually think you were her, did you?’ Chris had thought her Mum was intelligent, despite her illness. ‘An eight-year-old might just believe it, if they were a bit bonkers, but you were a grownup. Mrs Howland was searching for her, you hadn’t brought her back at all. What did your parents say?’

‘I was Alice. They weren’t my parents. Until today I hadn’t seen my mother since you were a baby.’ Eleanor appeared just to register this, she went on with less energy: ‘I had to be punished.’

‘So we should all be grateful.’ Chris snorted.

Eleanor had found the flat in Bermondsey and, keeping her address a secret, cut herself off from everyone she knew. This wasn’t difficult; after Alice vanished, she only had one friend – the oboist – and she assumed he wouldn’t miss her.

‘You have never known Eleanor Ramsay. You knew Alice Kennedy. You made Alice real.’

‘But how real did it make me?’

‘You’re my daughter. I love you more than anyone. That’s all that matters.’

‘You think?’

‘You said that an eight-year-old would have thought it possible to become someone else. I was eight when I became Alice. Everyone wanted me to be Alice. No one wanted Eleanor. Mrs Howland was stunned after Alice went. Not eating, not talking, and then she got this obsession about seeing me. She livened up. No one could talk her out of it. So I had to go there a week after Alice went.’

The day before the Ramsays were to go home to London, Mark Ramsay came to tell Eleanor that Alice’s parents wanted her to come to tea. He had stomped into the playroom more like a doctor than her Dad and stood over her. She was shielded from him by the open frontage of the doll’s house. They avoided looking at each other. One huge foot was planted against the drawing room window, trampling on the fuzzy felt lawn. It snapped off the window sill, and when he lifted his foot the green material stuck to the sole of his shoe and ripped away. Before Alice vanished Eleanor would have protested, even pushing him, directing his attention to her sign:
Keep off the Grass.
She had rubbed the felt in a pile of grass cuttings behind the garage so it smelled real. But as her Dad had not spoken properly to her for days, she decided not to make things worse by pointing out the rule about the grass. Alice would have said it was because Eleanor was bad. She said bad things happened to bad people.

Who are you to tell him off? He’s a doctor; he knows best.

I don’t know, who am I?

Doctor Ramsay took Eleanor to the Howlands’ cottage for tea. Neither of them said a word on the very short journey from the White House to the tidy cottage by the village stores. Eleanor had sat in enforced primness in the back, Jeremy Fisher-feet dangling over the leather seat. Although she was alone, Eleanor sat where she always sat when the family went anywhere, in the middle. Gina and Lucian had the window places, Gina because she got car sick, and Lucian because he was going to be a doctor. Usually if she went anywhere without the rest of them, Eleanor would clamber gleefully over to one of the windows, wind the glass down and stick her face into the wind. That day she kept quite still like a good girl and waited to arrive with clean hands and an unclear conscience. She could see her Dad’s eyes in the driving mirror. They flicked back and forth like a cat as he reversed the car round at the front of the White House then roared out of the gates. Then they whizzed up the hill to where Alice lived.

Everyone became bothered about Eleanor before she left for the tea. Her mother had brushed her hair so hard she made her eyes sting and she sneezed five times, which made her brush harder. She had to put on the disgusting fairy dress they had made her wear to a recent wedding. It scratched under the arms. Gina had been instructed to lend her black, patent leather shoes with poppers. Gina could no longer fit into them, but normally she never let anyone else wear her shoes even when she couldn’t wear them herself. She had done so only on the whispered condition that Eleanor kept them clean. This was the first time Gina had properly spoken to her since her furious return from the stables.

‘How can I get them dirty? Is their house muddy?’ Eleanor had forgotten to whisper back, so her mother heard and snapped:

‘Eleanor! This is not a joke.’

Eleanor had not been joking. She had given up making jokes.

Instead she shouted things inside her head so they could not guess where it came from. All the while she sat neatly with her mouth tight shut. She would not look over at the kitchen clock, where instead of the hands telling the time there was Alice’s white face smiling virtuously.

The Howlands were waiting on the doorstep as the car drew up. She had expected them to be cross like everyone else and glumly assumed she was going to be told off about Alice. They were like two matching vases placed on each side of the front door with hands clasped together and to her surprise they acted pleased to see her. Suddenly Eleanor knew they were the couple who had left her in Friston Forest. These people were her proper parents and seeing that she was unhappy, they had claimed her back. She felt a rush of joy that was like the start of crying and the start of Christmas all at once.

She grabbed the fruit cake Lizzie had baked – that she was to say was her present – from the front seat, and trotted up the path holding it out in front of her like one of the three kings bearing a gift. This image was so vivid to Eleanor she had to resist dragging each foot the way the boys who played the kings in the play did. It was giving in to an impulse such as this that always got her into trouble.

Instead of answering her when she said ‘Hello Mr Howland’, as she had been told to, Alice’s Dad, who Eleanor rather liked, did a strange clucking thing with his throat, and pulled a funny face with his mouth halfway up his face. She laughed – he was good at faces – but glancing back saw her own father’s face darkly forbidding and stopped as if he had slapped her.

Her father was staring at Mr and Mrs Howland, who he obviously thought were frightening creatures. For a minute Eleanor expected him to scream with terror because cords stood out on his neck like they did to people about to be murdered in scary films. She prepared her fingers to block her ears.

Later, she decided she had made this bit up.

‘Come in, Eleanor, tea’s all ready.’ Mrs Howland bent towards her and putting out a hand, stroked the top of her head with short sharp pats the way boring guests did with Crawford. ‘And you too, Doctor Ramsay. Stay. The more the merrier!’

The two men stood with the gate between them looking back at the little girl in the immaculate party dress as she skipped obediently into the house holding hands with the nice woman. They watched Mrs Howland as she snatched up the role of mother and hostess with eager fervency.