A Kind of Vanishing (33 page)

‘But Gina might have children.’

Eleanor shook her head. ‘She won’t. He knew that.’

‘Why, is she sterile?’ Chris thought of Gina, who only seemed to cheer up in front of a horse.

‘No.’

Eleanor dragged open the front of the doll’s house. It was coated in thick dust. A bird had got into the playroom, there were splashes of dried droppings along the roof of the house and down its front. She marched her fingers down the top passageway lined with minute oak panels and stopped at the top of the stairs. She could get no further. She had once tried and got her arm stuck. Gina had grazed it as she pulled it out. Eleanor’s face loomed into the bedroom where she and Gina had slept until she had to move because Gina grew older and too grumpy to share.

‘Warmer…’

‘Do you know where Alice is?’ Chris’s voice was harsh behind her.

Eleanor pushed her hand in as far as she could go and tapped the wood panelling on the landing. It made a hollow sound.

‘Hot!’

But then so did all the walls in the doll’s house. Eleanor shut the frontage sharply and got to her feet.

‘You know who killed her, don’t you.’

‘I think so.’

Eleanor was aware of a different kind of silence. There was no bird song, no scratching at the windows or creaking floorboards, only an uncanny quiet, final as death enveloping the dimly lit room. The sense of a presence other than themselves had quietly evaporated. Through the open window came the smell of wood smoke. Cedarwood. Eleanor’s favourite…once upon a time.

Eleanor was afraid. Her daughter had an expression on her face that Eleanor couldn’t fathom, that she had only ever seen once before on a human being. That time she had managed to get away. She wouldn’t get a second chance.

She had no more lives left.

‘So, who was it?’ She would make her Mum say the name.

‘It’s a long story. Some of it may not be true.’

‘Let me be the judge of that.’

‘It starts that Tuesday afternoon in the main street of the Tide Mills. I took you there. It’s where the Sainsbury’s…’

‘Yes, yes, go on.’ Chris leaned against the space hopper and shut her eyes, the way she had always done when her Mum told one of her stories. It made them more real.

I
t seemed to Alice that her voice was fading away. When she spoke, each number came out soft and flutey, and she imagined herself as a distant pigeon and not a girl at all. The heat was making her feel queasy and as she squinted in the direction in which Eleanor had rushed off, she seemed to float above the chalky path for it heaved and swelled at her feet.

‘One… two… three… four… five…’

Everything went black.

Enormous hands clamped over her eyes, and soft firm fingers pressed into her eye sockets making the darkness fleck with bright red arrows. As Alice tried to scream, one hand moved down her face to her mouth shutting it. This meant she could see again.

‘It’s okay, Alice. It’s me.’ Hot words whispered in her ear and the hands turned her to face him. Even with her eyes open, Alice still saw dancing darts, like sparklers. He had his back to the sun so she couldn’t see his face. But by now she was relaxed. She knew who he was.

Doctor Ramsay crouched down to Alice’s level, one knee on the stony path that had once been the Tide Mill’s busy main street, resting his elbow on his other knee. For a moment Alice imagined he was going to propose like the prince in Cinderella. She flinched as he stretched out and brushed a strand of hair from her cheek, whipped out his handkerchief, and went through the motions of dusting her down. She tried to stand stock still throughout; it annoyed her Mum when she wriggled during hair brushing.

‘Did I frighten you?’

‘Not really. Perhaps at first, until I saw it was you.’ She grinned. She was pleased to see him. He spidered around on his haunches so that the sun shone properly on his face. Now Alice could see fine drops of water on his forehead and she wanted to reach and wipe them away in return. The sun was beating down on their heads, no wonder he was sweating. But just as this idea was forming, Doctor Ramsay did it himself, mopping his hankie across his face as if in a hurry.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I wanted to catch you before you finished counting and dashed off. I suppose you’ve been roped into playing hide and seek again, have you?’ The doctor looked quickly back up the path towards the outhouses and the last remaining cottage. There was no movement from the remains of the Mill Owner’s house, the ruins were choked by ivy and nettles. Tall straggling blackberry bushes had obliterated the once flourishing pear orchard. Alice knew Eleanor wasn’t hiding there. She nearly told Doctor Ramsay this, but she was grateful for his help. She had guessed he understood how horrible it was playing games with Eleanor.

‘It’s my turn to look. I don’t know where to start, Eleanor has so many secret places. And really we’re not supposed to be here anyway.’

Instantly Alice knew she shouldn’t have pointed this out, she was assuming too much too soon. Doctor Ramsay might not really be her friend. Eleanor might have sent him as a spy to test whether Alice was a traitor. Eleanor had made it clear that treachery was a terrible crime.

‘You’re quite right, it is dangerous here. What if one of you fell and hurt yourself? Who would be there to help? People tend not to come here, the locals think it’s haunted.’ He guffawed, his head going back, so that Alice could see down his throat.

Doctor Ramsay thought ghosts were stupid. This changed everything. Alice’s Mum insisted that their old cottage was haunted and had kept on at her Dad to ask the Post Office to find them another place to live. He had stayed up one night in the living room with all the lights off to prove to her it wasn’t. No ghost had appeared, but she had said ghosts didn’t show themselves to everyone. Now Alice laughed loudly too. Of course ghosts were stupid.

Only stupid people believed in ghosts.

‘This is Eleanor’s best place.’ Now he would know she was a traitor. She flushed, already she had broken the morning’s resolution to be ’specially nice to Eleanor.

‘It would be. It’s full of insects, dead animals, hazardous places to climb and fall out of and secret hidey-holes. But what do you think, or didn’t you get a say?’

‘I think it’s a bit scary. My Mum says you get all sorts these days.’

‘Your Mum is right. You do indeed. Come on, I’ll take you away from here.’

These were the words that Alice had been dreaming of hearing Doctor Ramsay say. She had relived their encounter in the lane two days before, picturing his long brown arm resting along the sill of the car door with his fingers only inches from her nose while his other hand tapped on the steering wheel. The fantasy always ended with his suggestion that she come for a ride in his gleaming new car. The narrative had developed at quite a pace over a short time, from being a simple offer to drive Alice the short distance to her parents’ cottage to a more ambitious journey. Doctor Ramsay would whisk her to London: they would visit the Zoo and then go on to Madame Tussaud’s, where they had waxworks of the Royal Family and the Beatles. After a short while she would be his wife and make him happier than Mrs Ramsay did, who she had heard her Mum describe as a trial.

Her friend Jean at the Newhaven school had said the waxworks were like actual people. She had told Alice that she had asked a policeman in the entrance what time it closed and he hadn’t answered because he was made of wax. Alice had known that she would never be fooled as to whether a man was real or not.

Or maybe Doctor Ramsay would show her the big house he had in London. Alice had never known anyone with two houses. Her Mum had said the Ramsays were very important in London and had parties full of famous people that got reported in the papers. Eleanor was dismissive when Alice quizzed her. She preferred to talk about crane flies, cats and marbles. So Alice had been none the wiser. Doctor Ramsay would take her on a tour of all the sights. There was nothing she wanted more than to run away with him and leave Eleanor behind. Alice had to face facts; he would only take her home. She dared not hope for more.

For the first time since playing with Eleanor, Alice didn’t want to go home. The little cottage next to the post office was no longer a safe haven. Cracks and doubts had appeared on its perfect surface. Now the thought of her Mum and Dad and the way they lived made Alice uncomfortable.

‘I’m supposed to be with Eleanor. I’m not expected back until tea time.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He stuck out his lower lip and shrugged his shoulders. It was all up to Alice. Only she could take away his disappointment.

Alice was dumbfounded. She had never been in charge of a grownup before. The experience was terrifying and exhilarating. What should she do? She must not let this chance slip away. It was like Eleanor’s complicated rules. Alice had three lives and after saying ‘no’ to Doctor Ramsay a second time, she would have one life left. Perhaps she might not get a third go. He might not ask her again. His rules might be stricter than Eleanor’s and include fewer lives. She would never go with him to London, they would never see the glasshouses in Kew Gardens or the River Thames at the bottom of his road. Doctor Ramsay was going to leave her alone on this boiling hot path in the middle of nowhere searching for his daughter forever. Or worse he would dump her outside her boring house and never see her again. Alice made a snap decision:

‘Maybe it wouldn’t matter if we did go. Eleanor usually goes off by herself when she does hiding anyway. She has a lot of dens, and forgets we’re playing.’ She didn’t want to sound cross with Eleanor so quickly added: ‘I don’t mind. She has a lot to do.’ Alice didn’t pause to consider that Eleanor had never actually abandoned her during a game of hide and seek.

‘I’m afraid that’s the nature of the beast.’ Doctor Ramsay had cheered up. ‘Okay, let’s not give her another thought. She’ll make her own way home when she’s ready. Let’s give her a dose of her own medicine and hide too. I bet we can hide even better.’ Doctor Ramsay had become like Lucian, boyish and excitable. Alice watched in amazement…

‘I know a secret place that Eleanor has never seen. It’s ages until tea, shall I show you?’

‘But Eleanor knows all the secret holes.’

‘Not this one, she doesn’t. I promise you.’ Doctor Ramsay put out his hand to her. ‘Cross my heart?’

Without hesitation, and by now brimming over with joy, Alice grasped it. She couldn’t believe how things had turned out. She had made the doctor better.

‘Now, the quickest way is down here, but it’s very steep with lots of loose bits of chalk, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ll be very quiet in case Madam is spying. Stay close to me.’

‘But this is the way Eleanor went.’ Too late Alice remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know. ‘I think.’

‘Be very quiet. We don’t want her to hear us,’ he whispered. ‘And I mean, if she appears, I’m only taking you home. She can’t be cross.’

Mark Ramsay and Alice descended sideways down the steep winding track between the thick bushes of gorse and blackberry. They passed only a few feet from where Eleanor was crouching, deep in the undergrowth. As she heard their footsteps she shut her eyes and held her breath. But as they went by, she dared to lift a branch to see where Alice was going. What she saw made no sense.

She slumped back against a bush, settling into its armchair comfort, shifting until the springy branches finally stopped poking into her back. She didn’t know what to do now.

One, two, one, two.

She told herself the steps had surely been one person walking, and this is what she would later tell the policeman. She also said she had kept her eyes tight shut so she hadn’t actually seen Alice. If Detective Inspector Hall had realised that Eleanor was lying to him about hiding in a hedge by the lane, he might have guessed she was making up other things too. As it was, although he didn’t trust the scruffy little girl who was more like a boy, he had nothing concrete to go on.

Eleanor’s ears were pounding and to stop the sound she scrubbed at her hair and shifted about. After a few moments it dawned on her that there was no point in hiding. Alice wasn’t looking for her any more. That much had been clear. She came to her senses; there was no time to waste.

Thrusting aside brambles, she slithered along the floor of the leafy tunnel on her stomach until she reached the path. She stood for a moment, unsure whether to go down or up. Either way she risked being seen. Did it matter?

Then movement to her left caught her eye. There was a white shape like a giant flower on one of the bushes some yards back up the path to the Tide Mills. As she got nearer she saw it was a giant butterfly fluttering hopelessly in dying throes, too weak to disentangle itself from the blackberry thorns. Eleanor stumbled towards it, tripping on chips of chalk and nearly falling; her feet had pins and needles from sitting for so long.

The butterfly was a white handkerchief. She pulled it off and put it to her nose. The familiar sharp tang turned her stomach. There was embroidery on one corner, and Eleanor knew without looking what the letters were. The handkerchief might have been a coded instruction because it galvanised her into action. She knew what she had to do. In Eleanor’s mind she was doing it to save her mother’s life. In reality Isabel, at that moment curled in a light doze on her bed, was in no danger.

Eleanor plunged back into the dense bushes on her hands and knees, pushing deep through the small tunnels in the undergrowth. To prevent herself from hurtling down the steep slope, she held tight to the stronger branches and skidded downwards. Eleanor was reckless as thorns ripped at her skin. Soon bright beads of blood dotted the scratches. After a few minutes of shoving along, with her face close to the dry baked earth, she came out into blinding sunlight. She was yards from a sheer drop of about six feet down to the beach. Efficiently she scootered backwards on her bottom, then rolled on to her stomach and inched over the edge feet first, feeling for toeholds. There was one, but as she trusted her weight to it and searched for the next one, it gave way in a spray of chalk. She shot down and crash-landed on to the shingle, bruising her knee and jarring her ankles.

She heaved herself into a sitting position, relishing the pain as part of the massive task of slaying the monster. Her palms were stinging. She fought the urge to cry without being able to articulate what had made her miserable. It was what had always made her miserable. At the time, she thought she was alone with her pain, but over thirty years later she would see, without words being exchanged, that Gina had also suffered. What might have unified the sisters, drove a wedge between them. They stopped inviting friends to stay if the friends had not already stopped wanting to come. Eleanor had always thought Gina was okay; she had her horses.

She wiped her forehead with the handkerchief and frantically cast around as she tried to recapture the heady feeling of one of her imaginative games. But she could not. This game was real.

The beach was enclosed by a chalky outcrop at one end and a pile of rocks at the other, that few people ever climbed. When the policeman asked her to recall details of that day, Eleanor had assured him the beach was empty. A rusting boat, slouching dark and sulky against the sky, interrupted a stretch of pebbles that dropped in terraces to a thin slip of wet sand at the shoreline. She told him that it was a cloudless day full of colours – yellow, blue and red – and didn’t mention seeing anyone. But by then she had said they had been playing hide and seek in the lane, so it would have made no sense to mention the beach. Eleanor would say she’d gone to the Tide Mills after Alice had been missing for about an hour. She told the police she had decided to look everywhere since Alice wasn’t in the usual places.

This meant of course that Eleanor couldn’t tell the policeman that the beach was the last place she had seen Alice alive, nor could she tell him that Alice had not been alone.

Doctor Ramsay took Alice along the sand where it was wet but the ground was firm. The seawater frothed up close to their feet. She wanted to suggest they go higher up where the sand was dry and there was no chance of getting wet. But he knew what he was doing. Glancing back she noticed that the sea was already where they had been walking, and the lapping water had washed away their footprints.