A Kind of Vanishing (25 page)

Still feigning interest in the cards in the post office window, Chris turned furtively to look at the cottage next door. It was a compact little house on two levels with sash windows, one up, one down, to the right of the front door. There was yet another hanging basket outside the door, but this one was full of dead stuff, pale withered fronds fringing the rim, the chain rusting. In contrast, the privet hedge was trimmed so neatly that individual leaves were not apparent. As this blended in with the one next door, Chris guessed the neighbours had lumped it in with theirs. The cottage was at the end of a terrace of four. Chris remembered from her notes that they had been workers’ houses, part of an estate owned in the nineteenth century by the Ramsay family, and now almost all of them sold off. All the doors were painted green. Chris had read that the Ramsays still owned a large house just outside the village, with about ten acres of the original land. She had also read that the friend Alice had been playing with that afternoon was called Eleanor Ramsay, and was the youngest daughter of the dead professor.

Chris panicked. She didn’t have a number. This might be the wrong house. It might be the one at the other end of the terrace, or it might be none of them. She had trusted her memory, reluctant to write too much down in case Alice caught her. She shut her eyes. The house in the picture had been to the right of the shop.

It was a hot summer’s day in 1968 and Chris was Alice hurrying home from her brilliant game of hide and seek, tired, contented and ready for tea. As she pushed open the warped, wooden gate and tried unsuccessfully to latch it back, she imagined skipping up to the front door, or up the side path to go in through the kitchen as she had read Alice usually did. She could call out: ‘I’m back!’ to her Mum and Dad. Chris had scribbled down that Alice’s Dad had died of a broken heart, which was a bit far-fetched. Chris didn’t know what having a father was like. She doubted Gary would die of a broken heart, or that he even had one. Her mother had said she didn’t know much about him, just as she had hardly known her own father. As if the fact that she had done without a Dad meant that Chris should do so too without complaining. Alice’s deprivations always had to be greater than her daughter’s. When Chris questioned her about the man who had got her pregnant, Alice would shrug her shoulders and explain it away: the sex with different men, drunk at parties, a bathroom floor, a bed piled with coats. What’s in a name? The main thing was she had been happy at the time. So Chris could be happy too. Besides she had been young, it was easy to make mistakes when you were too young to know better.

Everyone made mistakes.

Chris would stop her Mum, furious at Alice’s stupidity for letting facts escape, and not bothering to find out more about the man who she had known for about an hour at a party, but who Chris would not know for the rest of her life. At eighteen Chris already knew better. Now it occurred to her that perhaps the man on the bathroom floor was made up too. After all why had Alice disappeared when she was nine? What had she been doing all those years? Who was she hiding from? Chris was dizzy with questions. There was too much she was scared to know.

The scrap of grass in front of the house had dried yellow. Weeds had forced their way between the terracotta bricks on the path and around a cracked pot of woody lavender and thistles. The paint on the front door and on the soffits under the eaves was peeling and there were tiles missing from the roof. Alice could have kept it looking lovely if she had cared to. As Chris hesitated before lifting the doorknocker she was surprised that a house in Charbury was allowed to be so neglected; the locals must disapprove. She supposed Mrs Howland was excused.

Chris gave two tentative taps, she would go home if there was no reply. She was sure now there wouldn’t be. The house showed no sign of life. As she waited, flicking back her hair, and very nervous, switching her bag to her other shoulder, she hoped Mrs Howland was out.

From inside the house came a muffled ringing, Chris became nervous as the ringing grew louder and louder. The sound came from her bag. She rummaged furiously in every compartment before finding her mobile in the outside pocket.

‘Chris, is that you?’ Her mother always asked the same question, which Chris took as an admonition that she was not with her since it would obviously be her. Now she added a more sinister interpretation. Alice could not afford to have her daughter roam free doing what she pleased. She would probably have liked to have prevented her leaving the flat at all.

‘Of course it is,’ Chris snapped.

‘Where are you?’

There was a noise on the other side of the door, a scuffling, a sliding of bolts. The door creaked open. Chris was looking down, the phone clamped to her ear and first saw sensible shoes with light coloured soles, fixed with velcro straps, then a creased trouser leg hanging loosely around a thin bony ankle.

‘I can’t talk now.’

‘What do you mean? Just tell me where you are.’

She was guided inside. She had no sense of walking. Objects floated past her, as a hand lightly caressed her shoulder. A dark wooden hat stand laden with garments – a red anorak, a man’s trilby, a walking stick, a plastic mac, a canvas shopping bag. She was Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, a barometer pointing to
Rain
floated by, followed by a print of a dewy-eyed boy in a straw hat, hands in the pocket of baggy trousers. A gas meter screwed to a thick board above a doorway looked like a school metal work exercise. Chris hissed into the mouthpiece:

‘I’m with your mother!’

She snapped shut the telephone and turned it off. She was confronted by a tan sofa facing an upright chair with wooden arms. On a hearse-like television with spindly legs a framed photograph of Alice Howland smiled right at her. Chris recognised the smile only too well.

‘Sit down. Can I get you tea, a glass of water? Here, let me take your jacket, you must be sweltering.’

Chris allowed herself to be led to the sofa, which received her with a sigh.

‘A cup of tea would be nice.’ She remembered her manners. ‘…but please don’t go to any trouble. Can I help?’

‘You’ve taken the trouble to come all this way, it’s the least I can do.’

As the woman walked out of the room Chris noticed she didn’t pick her feet up properly, which would have annoyed Alice, who constantly nagged Chris about her posture. The backs of Mrs Howland’s heels dragged on the carpet and for a moment, in the doorway, she acted like she had forgotten something. Chris expected her to turn round and she put on a bright face in readiness, but then Mrs Howland continued with a more confident step and soon Chris heard the roar of a boiling kettle and the clinking of tea things.

The room was dim, its small windows were covered by net curtains. Despite the scrubby front garden the room was tidy and a smell of polish lingered in the air, so it must have been cleaned recently. Chris noticed that the carpet was worn around the sofa and the chair and in a path out of the door. She hoped it was the same carpet that Alice would have played on, and then recalled something about her mother playing on floorboards and complaining it hurt her knees. Perhaps they had thought putting carpet down would entice her back.

There were no books, newspapers, or even a clump of knitting in the room. No evidence of how Mrs Howland spent her time. A silver tankard had been placed on one side of a tiled mantelpiece and above, ranged along the wall too high and too far to the left, were three bronze plates embossed with ships in full sail. On the other side was a remote control for the television, the size of a brick. The room could have belonged to anyone.

But pride of place was given to the photograph. Chris shifted along the sofa and examined it. It was taken slightly from the side, with a fake backdrop of the sea and the sky behind it, still effective in black and white. A flick of fringe nearly reached one thin eyebrow, otherwise her hair was in two plaits held by elastic an inch from the ends. The plaits just reached her shoulders. She wore a cardigan and under this the brilliant white collar of her shirt was marginally too big for her, leaving a shadow at the back of her neck and increasing the appearance of frailty. She had never grown into it.

Yes she had.

Chris rushed over to help as Kathleen Howland came back carrying a tray. She was moving more easily than before, and without effort placed the tray on the sideboard. As she handed Chris a cup and saucer her hand shook, making the crockery rattle dangerously. Chris took it off her before the tea was spilt, and mumbled a mixture of thanks and helpless protest, as Mrs Howland lifted out a folding table from behind the armchair and set it up beside the settee.

As the two women sipped tea and nibbled on homemade fairy cakes topped with lemon icing, they looked at each other properly for the first time.

‘So, what can I tell you?’

‘I had to come. Once I knew. I had no choice.’ Chris blurted out the words.

‘Did you?’ Mrs Howland dabbed at her mouth with her serviette. Chris had forgotten about hers and picked it up, at once putting it down again without unfolding it.

‘I used to think it must be interesting doing what you do, meeting people, writing down what they say. Hearing their stories. Every day is different. But you all say it’s a job like any other. You could stay at home, but you wouldn’t get paid. So here you are!’

‘Oh, no I didn’t mean...’

‘Don’t worry, I understand.’ But she didn’t.

Chris shook her head impatiently as Mrs Howland offered her another cake.

‘I’m more thick skinned than they think. Also dear, let’s be honest, I need the publicity.’ She spoke in a quieter voice, almost a whisper: ‘I don’t want people forgetting. There’s a chance someone will read what any of you write, and, I don’t know, listen to their conscience and come clean.’

Chris scalded the roof of her mouth as she gulped her tea. Mrs Howland had been expecting her. She had assumed Chris was a journalist doing a piece on Alice. She didn’t know she was an eighteen-year-old who had come without her mother’s permission. Any minute now the real journalist would turn up and she would be exposed. The gushing scene that featured herself as the rescuer, the restorer, evaporated. Her own hand began to shake and she hastily put down the cup in case Mrs Howland thought she was making fun of her.

‘So, you’ll want to see her room? We kept it the same.’

‘I ought to be goi…’

The words trailed off because Chris had no intention of leaving. She would see the room, then tell Mrs Howland the truth and they could be out of the house before the real journalist arrived. She traipsed behind Mrs Howland up a steep dark stairway. Her shame at her duplicity increased as she saw Alice, running up and down these stairs, waiting on the landing outside her parents’ bedroom door in her new Brownies outfit or to wake them up on Christmas morning. Chris had adopted the stories Alice had told her and made them her own memories. Her mother had done what good liars do: she had kept as much to the truth as possible. So she had said her Dad was a postman and Chris knew the weight of his huge postman’s cap as the peak slipped over her eyes. Her arms ached, and her stomach swooped as they swung her high into the air between them with a
one-two-whoaaghgh!

Chris had no better idea than Kathleen Howland what had happened to Alice after she failed to return home that afternoon. But she did know where to find her.

Alice’s mother didn’t open the bedroom door immediately and from the way she hesitated Chris thought for a wild second that there was someone in the room. She steeled herself in readiness. Then Mrs Howland let the door swing slowly open and stood aside.

Chris recoiled. ‘You go first.’

‘No dear, it’s better if you do. It’s not a big room.’

Chris practically stormed in to show Mrs Howland she wasn’t afraid.

The room was indeed small. There was just enough space for a child’s dressing table with a chair, a built-in cupboard and the bed. A beam of sunshine, thick with motes of dust, slanted across the faded candlewick bedspread and a white fluffy rug beside the bed. On the other side of the alcove to the cupboard was a set of shelves on which books – Enid Blyton,
Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland
and another called
Ballet Shoes
– were stacked neatly. On the shelf above were three Sindy dolls, propped up against the wall in symmetry. They looked brand new, but had been in her Mum’s stories so couldn’t be. Chris nearly made a sound as she spied the neat parade of shoes: brown sandals with crepe soles, silk ballet pumps, small Wellington boots, yellow woollen slippers with ladybird buttons. Two top shelves were empty. Alice had not stayed long enough to fill them.

There were no pictures on the walls, the dressing table was bare save for an ebony hairbrush and matching hand mirror that were unlikely possessions for an eight-year-old. Chris was disappointed: the room yielded no secrets. The things in it looked new, so obviously bought recently and never used. She realised that what she had most dreaded and most wanted were clues, a trail of signs that would link her to the Alice she had grown up with. Yet if Chris had believed in ghosts, or indeed had believed Alice was dead, she would have been convinced the house was haunted, for Alice’s presence filled the room.

‘What’s in the cupboard?’ She adopted the blunt curiosity of a reporter. One more minute and she would tell Mrs Howland the truth.

‘I’ll show you.’ She was used to showing people around her house, anticipating their questions, managing their responses. She tried twice to raise herself off the soft bed where she had been sitting, then with the air of a confident owner, sure of the verdict of the potential buyer, she opened the cupboard doors. Lavender talc clouded into the room and made Chris sneeze four times in quick succession.

‘Bless you.’ Mrs Howland had a kindly voice. So far Chris could see no resemblance between this calm, sensible woman and the neurotic obsessive described in the articles. ‘Sorry about that. The powder keeps the must at bay. Funnily enough I got that tip from dear Doctor Ramsay. Doctors have to deal with a lot of unpleasant odours, of course.’