A Kind of Vanishing (15 page)

She screamed and was distantly aware of stepping backwards heavily on to Eleanor’s foot and not saying sorry.

Eleanor peered around from behind Alice’s mother and, forgetting her carefully rehearsed manners, swore out loud.

There was food everywhere. Serviettes were shredded and stuck all over the table and the floor, where squelchy stuff lay in soggy mounds. Orange squash had soaked into the tablecloth and dripped slowly on to the lino making a brightly coloured puddle that Eleanor found pleasing. Inching further into the room Eleanor nearly toppled on to the bin. It lay on its side, surrounded by squares of cheese stabbed with sticks pointing this way and that. There were globules of jam everywhere, on the chairs, slithering down the sideboard, even hanging from the ceiling. In the middle sat Alice smattered with red jelly, smeared with chocolate, with her hair decorated with scraps of Victoria sponge.

She leapt up, flinging her hands above her head and standing right on the tips of her toes, she yelled at the top of her voice:

‘Surprise!’

That evening, alone in her room, gazing down the empty lane in the direction of the White House where Doctor Ramsay would be eating supper in his dining room, Alice was determined to be friendly when Eleanor saw her the next day. After her behaviour at the tea table she was frightened by the girl she was turning into. She gave herself one last chance to change back.

As she had helped her bewildered Mum clear up the chaos in the kitchen after Eleanor had been sent home, Alice promised Kathleen Howland faithfully that she would do whatever the Ramsays said and that no, she would never play up strangely again. Her mother couldn’t bring herself to use the word ‘naughty’ about her daughter, usually so well behaved. But ‘strangely’ was to Alice far worse, because it proved her fears were true. Her Mum was so horrified that she couldn’t even be cross. This time Alice knew for certain that her Mum had not told her Dad. It only made things worse.

But he would soon find out. Everyone would. Already people were beginning to see what Alice was really like. As she watched Mrs Carter from the post office come out of her flat above the shop and trot off down the lane in her slingback stilettos towards the station, Alice knew that from now on she must make a real effort to be nice and good or it would be too late.

They didn’t meet up until after lunch on the Tuesday because Mrs Howland took Alice into Lewes to get new shoes. When they did, Alice quickly told Eleanor that it was entirely up to her where they went to play because she honestly truly didn’t mind what they did. When Eleanor promptly suggested that they go and play hide and seek down at the haunted Tide Mills, Alice, determined to be good, had no choice but to agree.

I
sabel was annoyed with Mark. He had taken the lilo because he knew she wanted to lie on it. He had done it to get at her. He hated sunbathing.

There he was, sprawled across the silver plastic, his long legs still muscular and shapely; glistening with sun tan cream and droplets of water. He could have been fifty, not seventy-four. Her friends teased her that it must be like being married to Paul Newman, but better looking. Lucky Isabel, they said.

She hadn’t told anyone that she had started to suspect Mark was avoiding her. She believed that communicating this fear would propel it into being. Besides, sometimes she was convinced she was imagining it. Then a brief moment of comfort would be obliterated by her self-knowledge. She was too observant, much too watchful to be mistaken. In the last few months Mark never looked at her when they were talking, his eyes were restless and distant. Indeed right now she could see that Mark was busily paddling the water with his hands to prevent the lilo drifting in her direction. These things were paltry if described on their own, but added together they made Isabel uneasy. The one thing that had always made life tolerable was that they were a team.

She knew it was inconceivable her husband was having an affair, after all he had ignored countless opportunities over the last forty-six years; all those women queuing up in all those waiting rooms over the decades.

The lilo was extremely important to Isabel. It represented a vital comfort that recently, as her body succumbed to its late sixties, eluded her. She would have had it all to herself if Mark had driven into Lewes this morning as he usually did on a Saturday morning. His denying Isabel this crumb of joy infuriated her; not only did he shun her companionship, but he stole her tiny pleasures. To add insult to injury, Isabel’s luxury sun lounger, made to order in Florence, had so far failed to arrive. All she had was the lilo and now she didn’t even have that.

The lilo was the size of a double mattress and fantastically sturdy, so it didn’t fold up like an envelope or tip up unexpectedly if she twitched a toe or turned her head. She could float on it in the pool without getting wet as Mark was doing now. When Gina had brought it over, folded up tight in a deceptively small and childishly colourful zippy bag, Mark had scoffed, consigning it instantly to that place he was too lofty to inhabit: the world of soap operas, chunky holiday fiction, gossip and anything Isabel enjoyed. Mark had declared that Jon had wanted it to use in the pool when he and Gina visited, but as usual had to disguise his materialistic desires as fulsome liberality. It was like Mark to assume that others coveted what he claimed to despise. Then, like a wound he must worry, he would grumble that seeing how extravagantly rich his son-in-law was it was peculiar that he hadn’t built Gina a swimming pool. Mark insisted Jon was mean, preferring to use theirs for free. Typically Mark hadn’t blamed his eldest daughter for the frivolous present, assuming the idea was her poor husband’s, who Mark gleefully found a rich source of jokes. This meant that if for no other reason, Isabel was grateful to her son-
in-law
for inadvertently diverting her ever more gloomy and restless husband.

Mark remained unimpressed by the fortune Jon had built over the decade through the manufacture of plastic commercial products, mostly grey, although there was a health and safety line that was a jolly yellow. He called him Jon-the-Footrest – usually to his face like a title honourably bestowed – because of the chunky adjustable platforms Jon manufactured for under office desks. It cut no ice with Mark when Jon laboured the point that his success was only due to Mark’s wonderful daughter Gina supporting him through thick and thin. Isabel would hear these tipsy speeches, generally made after Sunday lunch, with a sinking heart because they sealed Jon’s death warrant. Later Mark would unleash a torrent of cruel wit that luckily Jon appeared to receive as complimentary. Once they had left, Mark would expostulate that it was the last straw for Jon to implicate Gina in his devotion to making mountains of money through flogging roadside grit bins and
sand-weighted
safety cones. Apart from these, the highly successful Ginaware range included wrist rests, inserts for commodes, baby changing platforms and bucket/wringer combination packs for public spaces. It financed the horse – indeed a whole stable of horses – that Gina’s parents had refused to buy her when she was a girl. Isabel would concede that it didn’t make her a proud mother to be confronted by Gina’s name on a sanitary napkin receptacle (she had picked up the terminology) while hovering over a loo seat in a motorway service station, or negotiating a splatter of spilt salsa sauce guarded by a garish multilingual caution sign near the frozen fish in Sainsbury’s. But you had to earn a living somehow and Isabel could think of far worse things a man could do.

Mark was wrong. The lilo had been Gina’s idea. She had genuinely expected her father to like it when a lilo was so clearly a more suitable present for Isabel. Yet as Isabel eyed Mark circling on the water, casually regal on his litter of silver plastic, she reflected that after all Gina had been right. He did like his present. Not that Mark would be the one to tell her.

Isabel would watch their children bringing Mark gifts the way Crawford had long ago deposited decapitated rodents on their pillows with doe-eyed expectancy. Mark’s grownup children were anxious for a smile, even a nod, as he fastidiously unwrapped them. He always took a long time, careful not to tear the paper, folding it up neatly before turning to the object itself. But as he examined the offering, with a contemplative frown, all they ever got was a gruff thanks drowned out by her own vacuous cries of delight. How much more miserable would they have been if they had seen Mark after they had gone, communing with the Judge, brooding into his whiskey at the dining room table, as he teased out incontrovertible evidence of his children’s betrayal in the guise of a Liberty tie or a tan coloured Filofax of the softest Italian leather. The years had turned Mark into a well-dressed King Lear, who read only dissent in his children’s pathetic acts of love. Isabel had become adept at spinning a new take on events to render the day-
to-day
experience that makes up family history palatable. She would hurriedly weave a plausible explanation, even inventing nice things the children had said about Mark to comfort their disgruntled father or vice versa. In her late middle age she had constantly to wield this skill:

‘He was absolutely thrilled with the tie, wears it all the time.’

‘Gina wanted to get you something special. Isn’t that reason enough?’

Yet Isabel had absorbed Mark’s dismal outlook. Perhaps he was right she decided, as Mark gracefully eddied in the middle of the pool, their time was up and their children were waiting in the wings to step into their shoes.

Love had nothing to do with it.

‘Mark, I’m getting a drink, do you want one?’ He was pretending to be asleep to stop her claiming the lilo. To keep her out. To such pettiness had their lives been distilled.

‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

‘Not for me.’
Fuck you!

‘I’m fine.’ With a flick, the lilo glided away.

‘When I come back, I want to lie on that,’ she warned.

He raised his head in mock surprise at her tone.

‘As you like. I have to go anyway.’

Mark must be going to Lewes after all. Despite her dismay Isabel refused to protest because it would be just the response he wanted. He knew perfectly well that Gina and Jon were arriving for lunch any minute, expecting him to be there. Indeed he had arranged it with Gina himself. Recently he had been acting perversely, leaving the house just before supper was served, going to bed early, setting off to the National Hospital in London where he still did consultancy, but instead driving into Brighton or Lewes. Or so he said when she’d told him she had rung the hospital and he wasn’t there. He didn’t care if he was caught out. Last Monday he had said he was working in his study, but when she had stuck her head round the door to tell him she was going out, he hadn’t been there. His car was still on the drive, but there was no sign of him. That afternoon Isabel had suddenly been reminded of herself as a young woman looking for Eleanor who had constantly concealed herself behind curtains, inside cupboards and under beds when she was wanted for anything. And on bad days Isabel’s memory would burrow even deeper to another search, one that most of the time she succeeded in forgetting about.

Two weeks ago, as she had stood by Mark’s immaculately tidy desk, careful not to touch anything because he laid tiny traps and would know if even a stapler had been moved, Isabel had found herself wondering if Mark was hiding from her. Despite the empty room, she had fancied she could hear breathing and had swept aside the curtain to see if he was standing stock-still behind it.

Isabel had once dreaded that Mark would end up like his father, but she had never really believed it possible. As a young man, Mark had been so different from the grouchy old codger who got pleasure issuing death sentences; she had been confident Mark would always be cheerful and charming. But once they were married things had changed and now Mark was every inch that grouchy old codger. Isabel smiled bitterly at this description as she crossed the garden to get her drink. She had managed the Judge. She would go on managing Mark.

The lawn had been mowed the day before. It was cut close like a carpet and was pleasingly springy under her bare feet. That was one thing: the garden looked the best it ever had.

Flowers were mere pixels in Isabel’s grand design. The Mondrian bed, the heady lavender borders, her small patch of wild meadow, and the sculpted busts she had made in her pottery class and mounted on red brick plinths in surprise places all created an enchanted space. She had resisted topiary, to the dismay of Toby, the new young gardener, who had done a course. Hedges were only boundaries, delineating each area and leading the visitor on to the next. A tall beech hedge framed the Rose Garden on one side and on the other, as well as the lawn with Uncle Jack’s tree. The swimming pool had been her achievement. She had reclaimed the meadow behind the house, where Gina had planned to graze the horse she never got. Mark hadn’t wanted the pool:

‘In this bloody climate, you’ll have six days’ use each year. It’s a crazy expense.’

‘Six days is better than nothing. It’ll be more than that anyway.’

‘The kids have grown up, what’s the point?’

‘They still like swimming. I like swimming. And we might have grandchildren.’

Of course he had relented and as with the lilo Mark now used the pool more than anyone. Ten white plastic loungers that Jon had foisted on them were crowded around the edge. A semi-circular set of blue and white tiled steps led into the shallow end. To one side of the pool stood a brick-built barbecue used only when Jon came, sleeves rolled up and tongs rattling at the ready. Mark didn’t ‘do’ barbecues. Large tubs brimming with bright flowers were placed along a gravel path bordered with railway sleepers that wound around the side of the garage to meet the old path along the side of the house, skirted the lawn and led eventually up to the back door.

A trellis, thickly woven with honeysuckle, was meant to screen the garages and Judge’s workshop from the pool, but the honeysuckle hadn’t yet taken off so Isabel tried to ignore the grimy stucco beyond. Mark had balked at building a brick wall between the pool and the garage and the cost had been too high for Isabel to argue. They had already spent a fortune on CCTV cameras posted high enough to cover the house and the garden. These were filled with real tapes, which Mark indexed and stored downstairs in the basement in a room next to his father’s trial transcripts. It had been Isabel’s idea, after a burglary ten years ago. Mark had quickly become enthusiastic, constantly checking to confirm the cameras were working and upgrading them regularly. Isabel had come to hate them. Sensors caught the slightest movement and directed the lenses accordingly. They eyed her as she dead-headed roses, cut flowers for the dining room or smoothed sun tan cream in upward strokes along her legs and across her stomach. If she homed in, she could hear the whirr as the camera swivelled, like the Judge’s eyes, following her wherever she went. Now Mark could spy on her even when he was in London. The growing library of tapes formed a staccato black and white film diary of the house. Hours and hours of brickwork, portico and lintel interrupted by strobe-puppets jerking through the garden, in and out the doors like characters in a Swiss clock. The only person who watched these interminable silent comedies was Kathleen Howland, the woman in the cottage next door to the village stores, who was still searching for her daughter after some thirty years and who many said had gone mad.

Afterwards, Isabel remembered that Saturday in June 1999 as a terrific convergence of events both cataclysmic and minor. She fixed on the small things like sun loungers and the lilo as lifebuoys in a tumultuous sea.

In a percussive flurry, the telephone bell pealed through the house, the doorknocker banged twice, and far above the attic hatch crashed open, as once again its bent catch gave way. Isabel had just found the cordless handset under a pile of medical journals in the downstairs lavatory and was heading to answer the door when she heard an engine revving right outside the kitchen window, louder and louder. She rushed back to the kitchen, forgetting about the front door and the telephone. Tyres squealed, and as she reached the kitchen door she felt the windows shake as there came a tremendous sound like an avalanche from the direction of the garden, involving glass and wood and metal and climaxing with a splash like a gigantic belly flop. Then there was an eerie stillness.

Isabel answered the phone.

‘Mum?’

‘Gina? Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. What’s going on? I was calling to say we are nearly there but you took so long that now we are here. What the Hell’s going on?’ It annoyed Mark that Gina and Jon would ring to announce their arrival only seconds in advance, which offered no practical advantage and was always disruptive. He said it was because Jon liked to show off his technology.