A Kind of Vanishing (5 page)

After Alice vanished, Eleanor dreaded parties. She wished that, like Crawford, she could escape out the back door until everything was over.

A
lice was there. No matter what Eleanor did. Alice was there, smiling.

As soon as Eleanor clicked off the bedroom light Alice arrived and would not go. Eleanor tried everything to make her disappear. She jammed her knuckles into her eye sockets to shut out Alice’s smile, but as her eyes began to ache and sting, Alice’s disembodied head still hung in the spangled darkness like a Chinese lantern, her face swollen and peculiar. Now Alice had new powers. She made shadows glide around the room. Her skin was translucent white, the eyes a grey see-through jelly. The hair was solid like the bust of Beethoven on Lucian’s piano. Eleanor tried opening her eyes and staring hard to make Alice vanish again. This almost succeeded, but then Alice returned bit by bit, in the carved pattern over the wardrobe mirror. First two eyes, then the nose and finally the curly bit in the corner became a ghastly grin. Other times Alice floated like an escaped balloon outside the window where the moon should have been. Her bloated, gloating face lit up the room with a bluish light like Mark Ramsay’s surgery at the hospital where Eleanor believed she had once slept, although it may have been a dream.

Then things got worse. Alice came in the day too. She was there when Eleanor’s father shut the curtains in the evening, hovering in the fabric. Earlier, Eleanor had found her lying under the sofa, her face cupped in chubby hands. She was using all Eleanor’s secret places. Alice was spying without taking turns, which was not fair. She was hiding really well, for only Eleanor had found her.

After Alice didn’t come back from hide and seek, Eleanor’s parents kept the newspapers away from her. If Eleanor pattered into the sitting room when the news was on, they leapt up to switch off the television. Yet they didn’t work as a team. They disagreed about what to shield Eleanor from. They wanted to see the news themselves, so were unreasonably infuriated with her for causing them to miss it. Finally Mark took to ordering Eleanor out of the room. In the midst of this, both Mark and Isabel underestimated the resourcefulness of their youngest child. Simply by remaining single minded and alert Eleanor learnt to pick an erratic course through the fog that descended on the Ramsays after Alice went, to find out what she needed.

Alice’s disappearance forced the Ramsays to stay on in Sussex while the police interviewed Eleanor. The press got wind of this and so Isabel had barred her from going into Charbury and even from being at the front of the house where she could be seen from the window. She could go in the back garden because it was screened by a high wall, reinforced by holly bushes and trees planted by the Judge, a private man and, as the executions mounted, a paranoid one. Now his paranoia would have been justified, for journalists outnumbered inhabitants in the lane beyond his wall. Vans and cars were parked nose to tail along the verges leading from the station right to the church, ploughing up the village green.

Lean-eyed men lounged against the counter in the village stores and queued outside the telephone box beside the Ram Inn. They perched on the church wall to scribble frantically in notebooks, or prowled around the narrow streets, lifting dustbin lids, parting branches and peering through windows and questioning everyone like pretend police. From her lookout post high above them all, Eleanor, spying out of the playroom window with a notebook of her own, was rewarded by the sight of a line of constables in white shirtsleeves, poking long poles into hedges and ditches, the way her father checked the oil in his car.

With Alice gone, Eleanor had no one to play with and there was no more talk of suitable local children. Lucian and Gina could go out but must not speak to anyone, even people they knew, like Iris Carter, the new lady at the stores who looked like Lulu. This ban effectively stopped them buying sweets. Gina might go to the stables if accompanied by her father, which made her furious. Lucian went to the river, returning in the evenings smudgy and cross with no fish. The rules made no sense to Eleanor; she knew they would never find Alice by stopping her leaving the house. Yet she kept to the regime with a devotion that went unnoticed. Their self-imposed curfew put the Ramsays in a sour mood.

Isabel stopped having headaches and was possessed with the organisational energy associated with parties. She learnt the names of the police, fended off reporters, deciding who to give interviews to and how best to present her family, as she always had. Mark and Isabel’s friends would have been astonished to hear that it was Mark who crumpled. Although he was of no interest to the police because he was a doctor, Mark was irritable, shouting at objects, and swearing when the telephone rang.

On the morning after Alice disappeared, Eleanor was making her way along the passage from her bedroom to the stairs, hoping to overhear something useful about Alice, when she came upon her Dad on the landing. He was staring at Crawford, who, unaware of his rapt audience, was very slowly crawling along the carpet, his nose up close to the skirting board, his tummy touching the floor. He began sniffing the wood, pausing now and then to give a scratch at it with his paw. He was following a mouse trail. Eleanor wished that Alice would return just to see this. Alice hated mice. Then Mark Ramsay, unaware that he in turn was being watched, gave Crawford a hefty push with his boot making the animal yelp and shrink back in a snarl of fur. At the same time Mark caught sight of his daughter at the corner of the passage.

‘Scram!’ He growled at Crawford who, pausing briefly to spit at him, lolloped awkwardly away down the stairs, obviously in pain. Eleanor was perplexed. How she had treated Crawford during the Mrs Jackson campaign was her terrible secret. Perhaps it had not been so bad. Yet if she had kicked Crawford with pointless cruelty just for being a cat, her Dad would have been livid. She didn’t think it fair.

Mark and Eleanor eyed each other, as if a long held enmity was now being laid bare before Eleanor obediently trudged on up the stairs to the playroom.

In the days that followed Eleanor slunk about feeling like an unwanted guest, pausing outside rooms, loitering on the landings, always retreating to the playroom. At meals she chewed dainty mouthfuls ten times, persisting though no one praised her as they had Alice. The Alice-Head hovered, invisible to the others, demanding Eleanor saw through its eyes. Eleanor became ruthlessly tidy and forced to ignore fanciful possibilities, her life shrank to a tedium. Alice had made Eleanor a fugitive in her own home.

Later that Wednesday Eleanor had succeeded in sneaking into the sitting room, and was building a tower with playing cards in the corner while her parents fluttered restlessly about the room. Her mother held a book, but wasn’t reading it, while Mark had given up on the newspaper, saying that since the Kennedy shooting it was full of old news, and was pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace. Eleanor, who had been keeping quiet in the hope they would fail to notice her, was startled into attention when he blurted out to Isabel how absurd it was that one child got so much attention when there had been an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. Isabel said it was an awful thing to happen twice, and that if the Senator died there would be no hope for America. She mumbled something about Alice going missing being the last straw and looked so upset that Eleanor did not like to ask how the Senator could die twice. She reconsidered her hide and seek rule of having three lives. Maybe two would do.

‘The world is falling apart and they are wasting their time on this.’ Mark drew the curtain to cut out the view of the gates, where a straggle of journalists had been camped since the previous evening when news of Alice’s disappearance became public.

‘What’s the matter, worried because Kennedy’s your twin so you’ll lose half your self? I thought you weren’t superstitious.’ Isabel sneered.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Eleanor meant to keep quiet to avoid annoyance, but she couldn’t resist speaking. Until now she had only known about her Dad’s younger sister, she didn’t know he had a twin brother, let alone one that had been shot. No wonder he was so cross.

‘What twin? Is he your brother, this Senator?’

‘Now look what you’ve done.’ Mark rounded on his wife.

‘She doesn’t understand.’ Isabel always took the time to explain things when it was to make a point to Mark and she turned to Eleanor now with exaggerated patience: ‘Robert Kennedy, this man who has been shot, is exactly the same age as Mark. It’s always given him a power complex. Except today it’s given him a headache!’ She laughed and rubbed her face. No one was meant to find anything funny since Alice had gone.

Eleanor was grateful for being noticed so she nodded sagely.

‘It’s a damned sight more important than a girl going AWOL.’ Addressing the gap in the curtain, Mark added: ‘She’s missing. Until they find her, what more is there to say? I’m being practical. We hardly even knew her so why don’t they leave us alone?’

‘You know why.’ To Eleanor’s alarm, her Mum had started crying and she spluttered in horrible jerking sobs. ‘What if one of your children disappeared off the face of the earth?’ Isabel shifted around so she could see Mark, who was now standing behind her, and kicked over the Bagatelle board that Eleanor had left propped against the sofa. It fell with a crash spilling ball bearings all over the floorboards. Isabel carried on:

‘Her parents don’t have any other children. It’s over for them if Alice isn’t found. I feel for her poor mother.’ She fished up her cardigan sleeve for a tissue and blew her nose loudly at Mark Ramsay’s implacable back, the material tightening around his bottom as he shuffled change in his trouser pockets.

Eleanor was anxious to stop her mother crying – her Dad hated crying – so she asked why ‘it was over for them’? He scowled at Eleanor as she scuttled around the room retrieving ball bearings.

‘You are only a mother if you have a child.’ Isabel massaged her tears into her face with a forefinger because, as she had once told Eleanor, tears were good for the complexion. ‘If Mrs Howland hasn’t got Alice, she has no one to mother. At her age it’s probably too late.’

‘Stop talking bilge!’ Mark closed the curtains entirely. They were in the dark until he snapped on a light. ‘She’s only about thirty! She has at least five child-bearing years yet.’

Eleanor dropped a ball bearing. It hit the side of her tower of cards bringing the whole lot down. She hovered over the cards making comic gestures of powerlessness to mitigate the mess and disown the pettiness of her game. Mark Ramsay rounded on his wife:

‘Whatever happens she’s still a fucking mother!’

Alice had said swearing was rude. Her teacher had told her it was a lazy use of language.

‘It’s irrelevant whether your children are dead or alive! Since when did you care about Alice Bloody Howland? You hardly bother with our lot. It’s me who ferries them about and is driven bonkers by the inane chatter of them and their friends!’

‘Oh and a few car rides makes you the perfect father, does it? If you think she’s dead, why did you insist last night she was probably just hiding or had wandered off? Make your mind up!’ Isabel caught Eleanor gaping at her and slumped back in her chair, adding too wearily to convince, ‘Daddy doesn’t mean it’, before subsiding into silence.

Eleanor spoke fast to ward off more tears:

‘Is the man going to be okay?’

‘What?’ Mark Ramsay stared at his daughter.

‘The Senator Man. Is he going to get better?’

‘No.’ Doctor Ramsay pronounced a death sentence. Eleanor shuffled the pack of cards. She had boundless confidence in her father’s powers, medical or otherwise.

‘You don’t know that.’ Isabel pulled a face at him. She assumed it must be bad for her children to hear unpleasant news even about people they had never heard of.

‘I do.’ Mark was firm.

‘They said on the radio earlier that Senator Kennedy saved his son from drowning days before he was shot. He managed to grab him as he was being swept away and get him to shore. He was a good man.’

‘What would you expect him to do, let him drown?’ Mark was impatient.

Isabel pursed her lips and turned away from her husband.

‘Does that mean if he dies then his son will die now too?’ Eleanor couldn’t conceive of the consequences of a person’s actions remaining intact after they had died. If after saving him, his Dad died, wouldn’t the son die too? Surely all trace of a dead person having lived vanished when they died.

Like footprints in the sand washed away by the tide.

Eleanor dared not admit, even to herself, that she wished very much that this was the case.

‘Where do you get these ludicrous ideas, Eleanor?’ Isabel glared at Mark.

‘But what about all of his children?’ Forgetting her resolution to be neither seen nor heard, and that she wasn’t meant to have seen any news, Eleanor was overtaken by her fevered curiosity. Hiding behind the sofa when
The World At One
was on the radio, she had been particularly impressed by the information that the man who had been shot had ten children. ‘If their Dad dies, does that mean they’re not children any more?’

‘That’s not amusing, Eleanor.’

‘I only meant is he going to get better?’ Mark’s small daughter countered lamely. This was the best question she could have asked a doctor.

‘It’s astonishing what punishment the human brain can take. Actually there are large tracts of the brain that can pretty much be dispensed with. But he’s suffered damage to major blood vessels.’ Mark Ramsay smiled pleasantly, an expression Isabel knew he wore beside a sick bed. The look still made her want to have sex with him: ‘From the bulletins we’re hearing this afternoon, I’d say he’ll be brain damaged if he does survive, the right cerebral hemisphere is destroyed. The likelihood of any kind of recovery is remote. If he lives he’ll be a vegetable. But I doubt he’ll make it.’

Eleanor was reminded of the moment on her eighth birthday last year, when the tin mould was removed and she had held her breath in case her mother’s raspberry cat flopped into liquid as it usually did. It must set, or there would be no birthday. Eleanor had dug her fingernails into her palms willing it to work. With a brief wobble it had stayed upright. She had been so relieved, she had accidentally joined in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and Gina had called her big-headed. She had the same dread of collapse now as her father warned: