A Kind of Vanishing (31 page)

Isabel hadn’t come. When her Dad crept into the room, Eleanor had pretended to be asleep.

‘I brought you here when you were a baby. Isabel persuaded me to.’

‘What, right here on the beach?’

‘Yes, you and me and my mother. An odd little party. Then my Dad turned up. Isabel had said he was in London. Now I think she was telling the truth. She was as appalled as me. He carried you down to the shoreline to show you the sea.’

‘Did we come by train?’
Did you walk with me in your arms down the quiet road to the church?

‘Yes. Then we left. They didn’t stop me. It was you they wanted. To be touched by innocence.’

‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Chris went cold. Eleanor was crying. Not in her usual way with sobs and loud sniffs, but silently, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand like a kid. If Chris ran now, she’d have a head start.

But Eleanor would know where to find her. There would be no more hiding.

‘I saw him in London about ten years ago. He was following me. I dodged down an alleyway. He came into the alley, but I was behind a dustbin. He could easily have found me, but he’d never have thought I was hiding from him. So he went away. I didn’t come out of that stinking passage for an hour. After that I never went out.’

‘Did you think he was going to hand you over to the police? After all, he didn’t at the time.’

Eleanor sat up and dried her face with the flat of her hands. She looked tired and beleaguered, yet there was more life in her features than Chris had seen before. She could imagine Eleanor as a young girl rampaging through the countryside bareback on an imaginary horse. Except that she was frightened of horses.

In another life Chris could have been happy here too.

‘As each day went by, you and I were building up a new past.’

‘How could you be so stupid?’ Chris was angry with herself for still wanting to soothe her and stop her crying. ‘I’ve never been real. Even today you only wanted me here to listen to your stories and let you off the hook.’

‘That’s not true.’ But it was. Eleanor had never bothered to find out the second name of the boy in the bathroom, because he meant nothing to her. Yet he was Chris’s father. Now he too had vanished and with him the Renault garage where he had worked, demolished to make way for executive flats while Chris was still a baby. Eleanor had robbed Chris of her own story and substituted only fantasies and phantoms.

‘I have always been me with you.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I always loved you.’

‘You don’t know what love is. You’re off your head!’

‘Don’t be like this.’ Eleanor got up and came towards her.

Chris backed away and rushed back up the hill. At the top she looked back and saw the silver roof of Sainsbury’s twinkling in the wintery sunshine where the Tide Mills had once been. For a moment Chris thought it possible Eleanor had been real with her. Then she dismissed the idea. Tomorrow she would worm her way into the Ramsay family. Eleanor wasn’t the only one who could play spies.

Chris would do what Eleanor had avoided doing.

She would find Alice. 

C
hris had stumbled on to the scene of a murder. The body had been removed, but all around the room were signs of a fierce fight for life before it was snuffed out. There were broken toys, half a chair on its side, books flung across the room to land in sprawling heaps, some with torn covers and twisted spines. The contents of a board game were strewn across the floorboards. Then she pulled herself together – two glasses of wine had got the better of her – it was only the rough and tumble of a long abandoned playroom.

The doll’s house was in the centre of the room.

It loomed now, as it had dominated the stories her Mum told her long ago, quietly thrilling with concealed knowledge of past events and vanished inhabitants. Lingering in the doorway, the chatter of her mother’s ‘gas-fire-voices’ jogged Chris’s memory with broken sentences and stifled cries. She felt nauseous, and to recover herself fixed her attention on the two tall chimneys at each end of the roof of the house.

Images from her deserted life swapped in and out like lenses in an eyesight test. Chris saw in quick succession her bedroom window, the shadow of the light shade on the ceiling like a static sundial, the dips and folds of her mother’s duvet, and the hawkish lace-curtain birds that, like everything else, her mother had given names to. When Chris was small, the bedtime stories were punctual, each night at six-thirty, because Eleanor believed structure and routine were all. This had become an enchanted time they both had loved.

Whose memories were they?

Each new lens brought the doll’s house into sharper focus so that it became obvious to Chris that this was the room where she was meant to end up. Her diligent detective work of the last five weeks would end here tonight.

It was 31st December 1999, the last night of the twentieth century, and many months since Chris had discovered the truth about Eleanor and had met her real family, the Ramsays. She was living with Kathleen Howland, sleeping in the room that was once Alice’s but was now hers. Having passed her ‘A’ levels, she had begun a forensic science degree at Sussex University. Doctor Ramsay’s grand-daughter was at her calmest when staying late at the lab examining the different types of insects that feed on corpses. Eleanor was still in their flat, but she would have to move out because she was now a wealthy woman and the housing estate was for tenants on little or no incomes. Besides the flat was no longer home.

Without any explanation, Mark Ramsay had left his youngest child the White House, which Isabel was to hold in trust for her, as well as a share of his estate. He had left Chris the doll’s house; a pecuniary legacy, again with no explanation, to the grand-daughter he had only once held in his arms. Chris was glad he was dead and she didn’t have to deal with him along with the other Ramsays. She wasn’t grateful for his gift. She was suspicious. There must be strings attached that would one day become clear. This was confirmed by the lack of surprise expressed by any of the family, who had been horrified when Eleanor had offered to make the White House over to all of them or pass it to her mother. No one wanted either house. Chris thought her mother might as well have been offering to share blood money with them and, intrigued, stepped up her visits. Eleanor thought Chris was becoming reconciled to her new family after all. This in turn encouraged Eleanor to soften towards them too.

Eleanor spent little time in the flat. After years of being cooped up like a prisoner she could not bear to stay indoors longer than was necessary. She had to be out and she had to keep moving. She left early each morning to tramp miles through London, never returning until the evening. She would cross and re-cross the Thames, pausing on Hammersmith Bridge by a plaque in memory of a man drowned one Christmas in the freezing waters below while rescuing another man. She would climb the steps of Hungerford Bridge and wait in the gloom for a smile without a face that she now saw only in her dreams. Often she veered impulsively down side streets, hurrying as if chased, down alleyways, into subways, cutting corners off palatial Victorian squares to emerge on to busy rushing streets. She strode along the Euston Road, and faltered on Eversholt Street at the point where one day a woman would be killed trying to stop thieves stealing her handbag. She stayed at the kerbside through several traffic light changes on a corner of Wood Lane, where a woman cyclist had been crushed by an articulated lorry. She trudged through the oozing green river mud that slimed the shoreline at the Bell Steps in Hammersmith, where on Lady Diana Spencer’s wedding day a young mother had been murdered and her killer not found. Eleanor stepped on pavements trodden yesterday by people who were dead today or would die tomorrow in a distracted bid to join up the dots and become whole.

Each night she traced the day’s route in her
London A to Z
with a red biro. Soon she had covered most of the pages with the crouching creature shapes of her journeys, each one a fine thread leading through a dark forest. She would open the book at random and retrace the ink line of a day’s route. As her pen flitted along each high road, detoured around each crescent, or moved with precision down a broad tree-lined avenue, she recalled her walking thoughts: the weather, the passers by. Eleanor’s life was recorded in the London street atlas. It was her secret diary written in a code that was impossible for others to crack. Until one evening, forced into the Underground by a flash storm, Eleanor would accidentally leave it on a westbound District Line train, where it would be found by someone with a mind like her own.

On Fridays, Eleanor would came back early to catch Jane before she left the estate office. Jane made bearable the teeming, screaming traffic along Newington Butts and the urine-scented lift in Wood Green shopping centre. A good genie, there to make the most modest of wishes come true. Jane hadn’t cared if Alice was Eleanor. She liked her whoever she was.

During the day, Eleanor imbued her private London with her unarticulated hopes of their new friendship. After Alice vanished, Eleanor had found it impossible to keep up her existing friendships and, burdened with secrets, made few new ones. When she had absented herself from her old life, she cut off all contact with the people she knew. Now she was terrified she had forgotten how to have a friend of any kind.

As her pen completed the shape of each day and ended back at the Old Kent Road, Eleanor would dare imagine that their cups of coffee in the estate office, and more recently glasses of wine after work in her flat, were inching her back to sanity. She knew Chris had been right. She must be mad.

At weekends Eleanor returned to Isabel at the White House. The two women watched television, cooked elaborate meals and shopped in Brighton. In between, they played
end-to
-end games of Scrabble and Racing Demon.

After the trip to the Tide Mills, Chris was willing to go to the White House but, to Eleanor’s disappointment, would insist on returning to Kathleen’s cottage at night. To everyone’s astonishment, Chris embarked on riding lessons with Gina. She agreed to learn to drive with Gina’s husband, who her new grandmother called ‘Jon-the-Footrest’ without humour or apology. Chris planned to save for a car and take Kathleen out for day trips. Kathleen no longer searched for Alice. She stopped watching the tapes. Chris knew there was something Kathleen hadn’t told her.

It was only that morning, when Kathleen had brought her a cup of tea and stayed sitting on the side of her bed while she drank it, that Chris had found out what.

Until tonight, despite her secret intention to find out the truth about Alice, Chris had never explored the White House. She had become immersed in university work and when she visited she preferred to stay in the warm kitchen with her Aunt Gina, with whom she had formed a bond that puzzled them both. This was the first proper opportunity Chris had had to examine the room that had been her mother’s childhood sanctuary. Besides, she had tired of the Millennium Eve party her grandmother had impulsively decided to hold and craved some quiet.

She was diminished by the implacable walls of the model house topped with its brutish chimneys. She blanched, with the same sinking feeling as once when she had to wait for the Queen, being driven down Museum Street in a glass-topped car with a crest on the front, preceded by a fanfare of outriders blowing whistles. Chris had stood on the kerb, spare-parted by such significance. The doll’s house was as grand, proud and sure as royalty. And like the Queen, Chris knew its face intimately although she had never seen it before.

She moved in a circle away from the house, edging towards the salt-streaked windows, the back of her neck crawling like sifting sand. As an old woman, when it was too late to change anything, she would think back to this last night of 1999, the detail still sharp, and identify it as the last point when she might have turned back and left everything alone. Then she would remind herself that it was already too late.

It was the largest doll’s house Chris had ever seen, over four feet high and as deep. A mass of boxes jumbled to the brim with toys, wooden bricks, a plastic truncheon, cricket bats, tennis rackets, tennis balls, footballs, straggling dressing-up clothes nudged at the house walls. A bicycle wheel with a flat tyre had been propped against a sagging space hopper with a rip in the side; broken spokes had caught under the eaves of the house, lifting up part of the roof. Circles of plastic from an old Spirograph set littered the floor. A child’s black patent leather court shoe poked toes first from beneath a crate filled with scratched and dented cars, bits of Lego and racing green Meccano. Shelves piled with books and games climbed the alcoves by the fireplace. A tired one-eyed bear with moth-eaten fur had retreated to the top shelf with an Action Man, khaki legs doubled up to his chin, collapsed on the bear’s lap. They were crumpled refugees from a happier land. The broken and tawdry state of the toys and books, sprinkled with a shading of dust and scattered with dead leaves (how did they get there Chris wondered), signalled not a room abandoned by children since grown up, but the debris of a childhood dumped without notice.

Chris felt uneasy. She was sure no one had seen her leave the party, but she was equally convinced she wasn’t alone. She scanned the room, her head pounding with rising panic. There was nowhere to hide. No curtains on the windows. No furniture to creep under. It was the alcohol.

She backed into the windowsill. Daunted by the stillness, she was fearful of making a sound, and from the spurious safety of the wide seat she studied the replica of the White House. The ‘real’ house was her family home, although she wouldn’t admit kinship. Peace after the noise downstairs was like the intense presence of someone holding their breath and keeping very still. Chris wished she hadn’t come upstairs. The doll’s house glared back at her, its sharp lintels and gaping windows arched and callous.

The Ramsays never stopped talking, declaiming their opinions on food and cars, in brash tones, glugging wine into glasses, breaking into songs from musicals –
Oliver!
,
The Sound of Music
– with Lucian conducting and Eleanor singing the loudest. They kept conversation going with a myriad of petty subjects; their words leapt and jumped like fish in a net, slippery and shiny, a mass of possibility. It seemed to Chris, armed with the perspicacity of the young adult, that not much moved on: each time she went there they said and did much the same things. At meals she was put next to her mother, yet despite their lavish attentions she remained an outsider. Chris thought it peculiar that neither Mark Ramsay’s death, nor the fact that her mother hadn’t been back there for years, was ever discussed. Mark Ramsay’s inquest had returned a verdict of ‘death by misadventure’, because, coupled with the fact that he had no history of depression, the master cylinder in his Rover had failed and this would have disabled the brakes. Chris dared not say what she thought about it to Eleanor because until today Kathleen wouldn’t discuss it.

Now she knew why.

Chris was fascinated by her Uncle Lucian, who would spring out of his seat and dash away to open wine, shine glasses with a cloth, and clatter around in the cutlery drawer for a bottle opener. Her Aunt Gina was trapped in a loveless marriage, so Chris felt a bit sorry for her. Lucian should be good looking, but he wasn’t, his nose was too large and his chin too prominent, yet he compelled the eye. Jon-the-Footrest, in pink socks and garish bow tie to make him more exciting, actually was attractive, his features even and clear; but Chris found his looks instantly forgettable.

In the Ramsay world Chris was a determined foreigner who had unwillingly picked up the basic language but refused to learn the idioms and colloquialisms to enable her to understand it. She made only feeble bids to decipher signals. She didn’t want to belong. She realised that they must think she fitted in when she observed how the Ramsays were with true outsiders. They closed ranks and despite snapping each other’s heads off and betraying no signs of affection to one another, they did look after each other. It was with solicitous care that Lucian gave Gina a glass of wine or Eleanor followed Isabel into the dining room bearing an enormous dish of mashed potato, a tea towel slung on her shoulder in a way that declared: we do it this way and nothing will stop us.

That night a breeze from the garden had flickered the flames in the giant candle holder at the centre of the table, the low light making the group seem to converge and conferring on them an impression of camp fire camaraderie that found echo in the boisterous chatter. Chris looked askance as they lapsed into votive silence while Isabel plunged her ladle into a steaming cauldron of Boeuf en Daube. Each Ramsay sniffed the air appreciatively as she released the rich smell of herbs and garlic laced with red wine that whirled Chris back to the flat in the Old Kent Road.

Home
.

She was sickened. So it was an old family recipe. The rush of love was saturated with betrayal. Her appetite was deadened as she studied her mother brimming with wit and chat that must be further signs of mental illness. Chris had seen only too clearly that Eleanor was more at home here than she had been with her, and hardened her heart. Bit by bit the Ramsays had hauled Eleanor back in. With a stab of jealousy Chris imagined the juices, whose subtle flavours they were all going mad about, slicking the dining room walls and dribbling down the face of the dead Judge and oozing between triangles of shattered china and a smashed existence.