A Kind of Vanishing (9 page)

‘Guess! I’m not going to make it easy.’ Alice hovered over her drawing of a stick girl with a bunch of flowers. She gripped the pencil like a dart. The figure took up one corner of the paper leaving an expanse of white space. Abruptly putting down her pencil, she sat back in the chair with folded arms. She was smiling with unblinking eyes. Later all Eleanor could think of was that when they had been out in the garden before the rain, Alice had refused to have a staring contest in case it was bad for her eyes. She hadn’t told the policeman this.

Four days after this conversation, as Eleanor leaned over to dip into the policeman’s paper bag, feeling his fingers through the paper, she heard Alice’s voice and saw her face staring up from the sweets.

‘Wings off the table!’

It was rude to slouch, she had hissed at Eleanor over lunch before their painting session, darting a look at Mark Ramsay, who had smiled back, which meant he liked her. Up until then Eleanor had been sure her Dad felt sorry for her for having to play with Alice. The shock of realising that along with everyone else, he too liked Alice had made her drop her fork on to the floor. As she reappeared above the line of the tablecloth, she caught the forbidding glare of Judge Henry reading her thoughts. That day Eleanor had realised that, contrary to family tradition, the Judge had no power at all. He could not stop anyone liking Alice.

‘Is it about Gina?’ Most things Alice talked about ended up with Gina. Eleanor considered it impossible that a secret about Gina would be interesting, but it might be useful.

‘No! Warm though.’ Alice picked up her pencil again and softly touched the rubber end with her tongue. Pink-red flesh whipped in and out. Alice always finished ice creams after Eleanor, taking small sippy licks to make them last. Her eyes would half close like Crawford’s when tucking into a lamb bone, content yet wary.

‘I give up.’ Eleanor purposefully gave the sun sharp fins: the heat was burning up the fields and evaporating the sea, and scorching the grass on the lawn. She picked light green and brown crayons, making the paper thick and slippery with colour. The rays of light fired like laser beams at the wings of her plane, as she soared into the distance beyond the horizon line, where the earth met the sky. Far away from Alice.

‘No. Guess! It’s really funny.’ Alice made the snuffly noise behind her cupped hands, glancing quickly at the closed dining room door. Eleanor looked too, hoping someone would come, even Gina would do. The house was quiet. Alice tucked her hands under her legs as if they might give her away, she wriggled with suppressed glee, making a show of forcing herself to look serious. Eleanor did not think any of Alice’s expressions were real. Alice was always being someone else. She wanted to tell the policeman with the crack in his chin that Alice had pretended all of it. This pretence was odd because Alice wouldn’t play spies or spacemen, saying they were not real.

‘If it’s about my Dad breaking the club house window with the cricket ball, I know, I was there.’ Relief made Eleanor exhilarated. It would be all right. ‘He doesn’t care, a cheque will sort it, I heard him telling my Mum.’

‘Cold again! We were all there, how could that be a secret?’

Later Eleanor remembered birds’ wings rushing by her ears and then complete stillness before she heard Alice’s voice down a long pipe:

‘It’s about your Mum!’ Alice pulled a face pretending the words had slipped out by accident and clapped her hands to scare them off. She leaned on her elbows, resting her witchy chin in her hands, watching Eleanor, with the Judge behind her left shoulder. The table creaked under her weight.

‘It’s stopped raining.’ Eleanor began shovelling up the crayons. Gina was upstairs with Lizzie, she could hear their voices and footsteps through the ceiling. Her father was working in his study and Lucian had gone fishing. Her Mum was in her bedroom lying down.

‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’ Alice snatched up her own drawing and screwed it up, tossing the paper ball back and forth in her hands.

‘I said I don’t care.’

The crayoned sun stung her cheeks, yet her body was crammed with ice, aching cold spreading into her legs. She couldn’t move.

‘I’m not letting you go until you answer the question.’ Alice rose up from the table. She threw off her cardigan and grasping a wooden ruler, sidled towards the door.

‘If it’s a secret, that’s the thing.’ Eleanor was briefly pleased with herself. Originally she had planned to draw a metal frame around the picture to make the edges of the aeroplane window. But now she had packed the grey away. She must not be scared. Outside a watery sun lifted the greenish light of the storm.

‘We can go out in the garden now. Or, if you want, you can go home.’

‘So is it true? You must know.’

‘What do I know?’

‘Your Mum tried to kill herself by eating cheese with her medicine!’ Alice made a shrill noise and still she paced in front of the closed dining room door, smacking the ruler across her palm in time to her words: ‘Is it true?’

Slap. Slap. Slap.

‘What do you mean?’ Eleanor made the question part of a hearty guffaw. She went on packing up the crayons, drawing out the activity. Light colours at the left, getting darker to the right. Black at the end. Where was the black? She shoved the paper around, and lifted the heavy baize cloth. She must find it, or someone would tread on it and blame her.

‘Is it true that your mother would be dead now except Doctor Ramsay saved her life by pumping out the inside of her stomach?’

‘No!’ Eleanor slammed shut the lid on the crayons and tried to get up, but sank down. She couldn’t leave. ‘That’s stupid. You can’t die from cheese. We had some for lunch.’

‘Well, that’s what my Mum said and she’s not stupid.’ Alice bit back tears.

‘She was wrong.’ Eleanor didn’t see what Alice had to cry about.

‘That’s rude. How could she be wrong?’

‘She is. That’s all.’

‘The whole village knows. She said that’s why your mother stays in bed. It’s called dee-presh-shon.’ Alice was speaking faster, and it seemed to Eleanor that Alice’s mother – the source of this secret – was in the room too, in step behind her daughter, nodding all the while to show how right she was. ‘She tried killing herself by holding her breath until she was dead. That didn’t work so she ate cheese and then drank her medicine.’

‘She’s not always in bed.’ Eleanor’s hands were limp and dutiful in her lap.

‘She’s in bed now!’ The ruler cleaved the air with a swipe. ‘How do you know she’s not dead right this minute?’

Eleanor saw the black crayon. It lay inches from Alice’s feet. She addressed it in a whisper:

‘She’s tidying her bedroom. She’ll be down soon.’

These were the ‘open sesame’ words. At the possibility of the approach of Mrs Ramsay, Alice laid down the ruler and said she had to leave; she was already late. She was supposed to be staying for tea under Uncle Jack’s tree. Eleanor was not keen to remind Alice of this and willingly watched her go. Alone with the Judge, Eleanor rose unsteadily to her feet and picking up the black crayon she slotted it into the gap in the box.

After Alice had gone Eleanor had run up to her Mum’s room. Isabel hated to be disturbed, especially when she had a headache. Eleanor stopped outside the door and, with her ear pressed to the wood, listened.

There was no sound.

Downstairs Lizzie had started dinner, singing lustily to a tinny Tom Jones on her transistor. These were noises in her home that Eleanor loved, but now she required silence. Gina must have gone to muck out her horse and Lucian was still out. There was no sound from her father’s study further down the corridor. She inched the doorknob round. With a loud clunk she fell forwards into the room. She had forgotten it was impossible to go into her parents’ bedroom quietly, the door was warped and could only be banged shut or shouldered open with a clatter. Her mother complained every time they came down, but nothing that was broken or faulty at the White House was mended unless it brought things to a halt.

‘For God’s sake. Who’s that?’ The voice groaned from beneath the bedding. The mound moved slightly.

‘Only me.’

‘Who’s “Only Me”?’

‘Elly.’ Eleanor just stopped herself from saying ‘your daughter’. The Cheese Secret had made her mother a stranger. ‘Just came to see if you were ali…if, if, you wanted anything…’

‘Can’t you all leave me alone, must you all constantly barge in?’ Her mother always said this even if she had been left alone for hours. ‘First Gina, then…’

‘What did Gina want?’

‘Oh, Eleanor! What do you want?’

‘Do you need a cup of tea or a drink? It’s nearly after the Yard Arm.’ Their special joke, but her mother groaned and, extracting her hand from under the blanket, flapped feebly at the door.

‘It’s the afternoon, Elly. Push off!’

Eleanor wandered disconsolately up to the playroom, thumping a rhythm on the banister as she climbed. She swung open the front of the doll’s house. It made a snapping sound and stuck half way. Alice said the hinges were rusted and the door was wonky. The dusty furniture had been tossed back into the rooms any old how. She had not touched it since she met Alice. Now she picked up each piece and returned it to the right room. She straightened the tiny bedspread and laid the sitting room rug beside the bed. She hated stepping on the freezing floor in the mornings during winter holidays. She dragged the bed over to the window so the sun would shine on the pillows first thing. Her mother said sunshine made her happy and, when she didn’t have headaches, she loved sunbathing best of all.

Eleanor had lied when she told Alice they had eaten cheese for lunch. They had beans and fish fingers. Alice must have realised this because she had eaten lunch with them.

Eleanor had shunted the green sofa against the sitting room wall. In the big house the sofa was in front of the fireplace and was the best place to be in winter apart from by the kitchen stove. Her mother always lay on it when she was out of bed. Eleanor would sprawl on the thick rug in front of the fire and lean back against the sofa as she watched figures dance and leap in the flames. Sometimes her Mum would run spider fingers on the back of Eleanor’s neck, tracing messages that made her shrug and duck. Isabel liked to torment. She would nudge Crawford with her foot until he spat at her and blow on the back of Eleanor’s head until her skin tingled, while singing made-up songs that made them all laugh uneasily.

Isabel Ramsay had been on the rug the night her family returned from the Lewes fireworks last November. Eleanor had been overjoyed to see her downstairs.

Isabel lay sprawled on her side, an arm across the carpet, and the other bent underneath her in a way that Eleanor thought must give her pins and needles. She didn’t get up when they burst in whooping and shouting, pink cheeks stinging from the icy winds. Lucian and Eleanor were jumping like the mad firework that had zipped and dipped and made them giggle for ages after. Gina had been appalled. Her siblings were embarrassing. It was rare for Lucian to side with Eleanor and this had added to her joy.

When she saw her Mum, Eleanor mouthed to the others shut up and did giant hopping steps towards her.

One side of Isabel’s face was flushed purple from the fire, which although only glowing, was still boiling hot. Her jumper had pulled up at the back revealing a strip of white flesh and the black strap of her bra. As Eleanor got closer she discovered her Mum wasn’t asleep. An eye was open and watched something horrible in the fire without blinking, like one of Crawford’s birds. She was about to speak to her when there was a roar like a tornado whirling in from the garden. The living room door crashed against the wall shattering the convex mirror behind. A shower of splinters glittered and flashed in the firelight.

Eleanor could think only of how her father never let anyone near the mirror, which was his dead mother’s. He acted like even looking in it wore it out. She had gazed down at the broken glass. It would be impossible to put it back together. Then she was spun off her feet as a great creature blundered past her shouting something about room to breathe. She grabbed at the mantelpiece to keep her balance. It was then she saw the puddle on the floor in front of her Mum’s face. A thin thread of sick hung from her lips, from which all the colour had gone.

Her Dad was suddenly there, kneeling down on the floor beside her Mum, but Eleanor knew it was too late. She was dead. Later she would merge the memory of her mother sprawled on the floor with the grainy black and white image of the dying Senator. As her Dad bellowed at the children to get out, Eleanor had wanted to assure him none of them had broken the mirror or done anything to their mother. But before she could form the words an arm went around her, warm hands guiding her away as a soft whispering in her ear said things she couldn’t hear properly but that made her feel better.

They had ended up in Gina’s bedroom and sat close together on her bed. Gina clasped them both to her in a huddle, and stroked their hair, telling Eleanor not to cry. Until then Eleanor had not realised she was crying, but her cheeks were wet so she let Gina blow her nose with Lucian’s handkerchief. She stole a glance at Lucian and saw that he was trembling like Crawford when he used to visit Mrs Jackson. They could hear their Dad calling out their Mum’s name so that Eleanor decided she had hidden and he was looking for her. He kept repeating: ‘Darling Izzie, it’ll be okay now. It’ll be okay.’

After what seemed like hours the room filled with blue light going on and off, and they shuffled like a sack race across to the window, and gasped. A huge white van had crashed into their father’s brand new Rover. Then they saw it was just parked as close to the door as possible and not actually touching his car. Eleanor had saved up enough for a Red Cross ambulance with a detachable stretcher and doors that opened at the back and at the sides. She had been going to buy it at the weekend. This occurred to her as she stood between her brother and sister, and with a gossamer touch Gina stroked away Eleanor’s fringe. Now there would be no weekend.

‘An ambulance,’ she breathed, then flinched, waiting for Gina to reprimand her.