‘Where do you get these ludicrous ideas, Eleanor?’ Isabel glared at Mark.
‘But what about all of his children?’ Forgetting her resolution to be neither seen nor heard, and that she wasn’t meant to have seen any news, Eleanor was overtaken by her fevered curiosity. Hiding behind the sofa when The World At One was on the radio, she had been particularly impressed by the information that the man who had been shot had ten children. ‘If their Dad dies, does that mean they’re not children any more?’
‘That’s not amusing, Eleanor.’
‘I only meant is he going to get better?’ Mark’s small daughter countered lamely. This was the best question she could have asked a doctor.
‘It’s astonishing what punishment the human brain can take. Actually there are large tracts of the brain that can pretty much be dispensed with. But he’s suffered damage to major blood vessels.’ Mark Ramsay smiled pleasantly, an expression Isabel knew he wore beside a sick bed. The look still made her want to have sex with him: ‘From the bulletins we’re hearing this afternoon, I’d say he’ll be brain damaged if he does survive, the right cerebral hemisphere is destroyed. The likelihood of any kind of recovery is remote. If he lives he’ll be a vegetable. But I doubt he’ll make it.’
Eleanor was reminded of the moment on her eighth birthday last year, when the tin mould was removed and she had held her breath in case her mother’s raspberry cat flopped into liquid as it usually did. It must set, or there would be no birthday. Eleanor had dug her fingernails into her palms willing it to work. With a brief wobble it had stayed upright. She had been so relieved, she had accidentally joined in singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and Gina had called her big-headed. She had the same dread of collapse now as her father warned:
‘The next twenty-four hours are critical, the bullet was a massive shock to his brain.’
Twenty-four hours was a day. It was the same length of time that Alice had been hiding. Eleanor arranged the cards in suit order. It would look unfeeling to actually play anything with them. In another day, Robert Kennedy might get well and Alice might come back nicer.
She began to build another tower.
That evening Eleanor formed a plan. She banged her head with some force on the wall by her bed six times before going to sleep. The next morning, Thursday 6th June, she woke promptly at six, in time to catch the newspapers at a quarter past. Her Mum had reacted swiftly to the crisis and insisted they order The Times as well as the Guardian to get what she called ‘a comprehensive picture’ of how Alice’s disappearance was being reported, so as to ensure things did not get out of control.
In the deathly quiet of the sleeping house, with only Crawford for company, Eleanor found Alice’s fixed smile on the hall mat, folded inside The Times. The head was slightly tipped to the side like a good girl. There were two small photographs on the inside pages, the one of Alice and, to Eleanor’s surprise, one of herself next to writing about the missing schoolgirl who had vanished leaving no trace. Eleanor was a confident reader and she scanned the text easily, pausing over ‘excavation’ and ‘interfered with’, which baffled her, but didn’t stop her making sense of the story. She hadn’t thought of Alice as a ‘schoolgirl’. School didn’t have much to do with Alice since they had met in the holidays and Alice behaved so old. Eleanor didn’t think of herself as a schoolgirl. Alice had been different, perhaps being a schoolgirl had been the difference.
The writing said Alice was pretty and innocent. Eleanor couldn’t see why she was innocent and wondered if it was to do with being good at ballet. Lizzie had said ‘poor little mite she wouldn’t hurt a fly’. Eleanor knew this wasn’t true. As she knelt on the doormat, the stiff brush pile stinging her knees, Eleanor wondered if the story said she too was innocent. She scoured the inky words with a stubby finger, but found no mention of herself as an innocent schoolgirl. But then after the incident with Judge Ramsay and the bambi, Eleanor she knew she was not.
Isabel Ramsay was vague about checking whether her children had done their homework. She might forget entirely until a letter came from a teacher. Then she would lurk around them making the work last twice as long with relentless questions and corrections. Despite this they preferred their mother’s scrutiny to their father’s. Mark Ramsay was impatient and irritable, reducing them to blank and panicky beings, whereas Isabel’s wafty presence did sometimes provide room to think and even learn. A hidden Ramsay fact was Isabel’s acute grasp of maths and music theory. She could spot a mixolydian or locrian scale after a few notes and whip through a simultaneous equation, slashing out numbers with dazzling speed and accuracy, her calculations a mouse’s tail down the page.
No one in the family could do needlework.
Last Christmas, six months before Eleanor would meet Alice, she had been sent home with the template for a brown and beige felt bambi, to be completed in the holidays. Eleanor not only hated stitching, she despised the whole idea of sewing. She wanted to do woodwork, but girls were not allowed. While the boys made useful, interesting objects like chairs and boxes, the girls had a choice of gonks or bambis. Eleanor had sulkily agreed to the less silly of the two options, privately planning to do neither. But when at the end of the holidays, the folded pieces of felt were discovered still in their paper bag, Eleanor had been exiled to the austere dining room in the White House where she was given three hours to produce a fully fledged bambi. The Ramsays were going back to London that evening after the rush hour. In a burst of maternal authority, Isabel laid out cotton, thimble, scissors, buttons for eyes, and old stockings for stuffing. Eleanor had to cut out felt in the shape of the cardboard template, then sew up the two halves, leaving a hole to stuff the stockings through. She accidentally attached the back legs to each other with uncharacteristically neat blanket stitch and then, in a fury of unpicking, undid all she had achieved. Needlework was really stupid she growled, as at last she managed to guide the sodden end of cotton through a needle with the biggest eye her mother could find. Then she pricked her finger. She stifled a scream of rage. It was then Eleanor had realised she wasn’t alone.
She was being watched. The oil portrait of Judge Henry Ramsay eyed her grimly, his judicial wig giving him the advantage. The gilt framed painting hung over the gigantic marble fireplace and at night was lit by a tarnished gold down-light. The Judge sat in a high backed chair, with his arms folded. He held a thick blue book, his bony hands obscuring the title. Mark Ramsay had told his children this was Aeschylus’ Oresteia, his father’s favourite, while Isabel said it was the telephone directory. On the first day when Eleanor had been made to give Alice a tour, she had taken the time to explain that the Judge’s book was about justice and that the man who wrote it had changed drama by using the chorus in a different way, although in response to Alice’s persistent questioning, Eleanor was hazy about the details and couldn’t say how or why because it was Lucian who listed facts. Alice had come alive at the mention of a chorus and informed Eleanor that she had been placed at the front of the chorus for her school production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat so she understood exactly how important one was. Eleanor had nothing to add to this, and had instead pointed out to Alice how the Judge’s eyes swivelled so that wherever a person was in the room he was always staring right at them. To her satisfaction Alice had not liked this.
Judge Henry saw everything.
The Judge had watched her struggling with her embryonic bambi. She wanted him stopped.
Eleanor had climbed off her chair and lugged it over to the fireplace. She retrieved the bambi from the grate where it had landed, and mounted the chair, the needle in her left hand, the bambi dangling from the knotted thread. Standing on tiptoe, she could just reach the Judge’s face. She pushed the needle firmly into one eyeball then the other. She eased it around to widen the holes. Then she abandoned method and began stabbing the pupils, piercing the canvas over and over.
He was still staring; now his eyes had a blank quality that was much worse. Perhaps the Judge was as mad
as her Mum said. With wild criss-cross stitches, Eleanor had then hurriedly assembled the bambi, shoving in the silk stocking stuffing and scampering from the room.
The bambi and the Judge knew Eleanor was not an innocent schoolgirl.
Eleanor was briefly ashamed of the buzz of excitement she felt at seeing her own face in the newspaper. She had got this feeling when she was The Narrator for the Nativity play, aged only six and a half. She had been the youngest child to do narrating in the school’s history so was made a fuss of. The headmistress told her father, who had arrived when it was all over, that Eleanor ‘had embraced the responsibility with unbridled enthusiasm’. With her hand pressing on Eleanor’s head, she had told Doctor Ramsay that Eleanor had vocalised with confidence and clarity.
‘What a shame Mrs Ramsay couldn’t get here either. Eleanor said that you were very busy, but she insisted to me that her Mummy was coming.’
‘My wife gets headaches.’
‘Oh, Doctor Ramsay!’
Eleanor had known, by the way her Dad fiddled with his watch, that he sniffed a criticism. Good doctors should be able to stop headaches. Her mother had been well enough to go out for a meal that night. As The Narrator, Eleanor sat next to her and was allowed to choose her own pudding.
In the photograph, Alice was in school uniform. Her hair was bunched in pigtails with bows neatly tied. The crisp newspaper without tears and creases made Eleanor forget that Alice couldn’t have posed for her picture after going missing. Alice gave a big smile for the camera, showing off clean white teeth that Eleanor knew she brushed every morning and every night. Up down, up down, not too hard so they are pearly white. Her own face was above the words ‘The tomboy who courted danger and excitement’.
Alice had said Eleanor looked like a boy in the photo they had found in a packet at the back of a drawer in the games cupboard, and left out on the sideboard in the dining room. This was the clumsy snapshot that Mark Ramsay snatched up when the police asked for one of his daughter. Lucian had only taken it to finish the film. Few pictures of Eleanor were taken on purpose. She was a liability, likely to squirm and be smeared with dirt as well as pink and sweaty from getting over-excited. She had cut the crooked fringe herself with unwieldy kitchen scissors, and tufts peeped out of the sides of her beloved denim sailor cap, pushed jauntily back. People examining her over their breakfasts assumed the sun-dazzled scowl was evidence of ill temper and waywardness, and formed the toast-crunching opinion that she was not the kind of girl they would let loose on their own children.
Eleanor’s boisterous presence was in stark opposition to Alice’s angelic absence. Eleanor was placed in a different species category to Alice.
The previous night, after the police had been, Eleanor had overheard her mother telling her father off. Isabel Ramsay had an acute sensitivity to the importance of public perception. She was adept at constructing a potent and plausible story with little scenery and scant characterisation. As she berated her husband for his careless choice of picture, Isabel knew exactly the damage he had done to her family.
Alice had flipped through the photographs and made a gurgling sound at one of Gina leaning against a stable door with Prince, her horse. Eleanor clutched her stomach for the giggles they would share, for it appeared that Gina had a horse’s head growing out of her neck. Instead, Alice had said Gina was beautiful in a strangled voice. When she saw the snap of Eleanor she had sniffled into church-steepled hands, saying her cap was too big and she looked like a boy.
So, Alice wasn’t laughing now.
Eleanor remained on the chequered tiles in the hallway, hidden by the coat stand, her skin tinted red by the dawning sun coming through the stained glass fanlight. Blurred back to front sentences like a crudely coded message were imprinted on her bare arms from the newsprint where she had leaned on the paper, but she was too engrossed to notice. She turned back to the front page and read the thick black words about Senator Kennedy. ‘Kennedy Clings To Life After Brain Operation.’ She didn’t know what a Senator was, but now discovered that apart from having ten children he had another on the way.
He might die without ever seeing his baby.
She peered closely at the picture of the man lying on the floor with his hands resting on his chest. He looked asleep in the sun like her Dad except he had on a suit and tie and wore polished black shoes. His jacket was twisted and crumpled. His eyes were like the Judge’s and stared at something frightening on the ceiling. Eleanor ran a finger along the words: ‘They rested his head on a plastic boater hat, with a band that said: “Kennedy Will Win”. The blood from his wound ran down over the hat, and mixed with the pool on the floor.’ He had been shot at twenty minutes past midnight, Los Angeles time. She blinked and rubbed her nose with a grubby fist. There was another picture of Robert Kennedy making a speech minutes before he got shot. He looked happy with his wife Ethel beside him. Eleanor thought he must be a nice dad to have and wished she was one of ten children with one on the way instead of three with no one else expected. Then Eleanor knew with a certainty beyond her years and outside the bounds of rationality that if Robert Kennedy were to live it would be all right. Alice would come out of her hiding place, all of her not just her head and her hands and her smile, and this time they would play properly. They would even be friends.
It was just as she thought this and was turning the pages of the paper so as to leave it neatly that Eleanor saw the small headline. She froze.
‘“Alice” Grave To Remain. The grave of Mrs Alice Hargreaves who was the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is safe.’ The story was about a council saying it would ‘level all graves and remove headstones’ to make space for more bodies. Eleanor wondered where it planned to find these bodies. People had complained and stopped them. It hadn’t occurred to Eleanor that Alice had a grave. Up until now it had been a game that ended happily with Alice no longer here to bother her. Eleanor conflated the smiling face on page two with the item about the grave and went cold.
How could a grave ever be safe?
She heard a sound, a tiny creak from one of the many rooms above her head and hastily arranged the newspaper on the mat to look like it had fallen there. This minute action was the start of a policy of disguise and concealment that would seal fates and change lives. No one heard Eleanor scamper back to bed on small, soundless feet.
Eleanor lay facing the open window, gradually warmed up by the morning sun slanting on her pillow, and in a bid to banish thoughts, she whispered a story to herself about her real father, the handsome Senator with the crack in his chin. ‘He was shot eight times at close range and lay injured by the freezers in the kitchen. He moved a little; once he licked his lips slowly,’ she hissed hoarsely, demonstrating a photographic memory unrecognised by her teachers or family. ‘The kitchen was “boiling with people” but “Senator Kennedy and three other wounded lay terribly quiet in the midst of the uproar”.’ She propped herself up on one elbow. ‘They think he spoke, he asked everyone to move back to give him air!’
As Eleanor knelt beside him she stroked the Senator’s hand, he smiled up at her and squeezing her fingers he muttered:
‘I’m so proud of you, Alice.’
‘It’s Eleanor!’
After that Eleanor formed the routine of checking the newspapers each morning. Then every night after everyone was asleep and it had become too late to make anything better, she would tiptoe down to the kitchen, and as her eyes grew used to the dark, she would skitter across the stone flags, to pull the newspaper out from the pile under the sink and stuff it up her pyjama jacket. She was astute in her assumption that the rackety habits of the Ramsay household carried on despite everything. Used to her home as a harbinger of secrets, Eleanor had learnt to keep her own while negotiating the repercussions of others. Her pyjamas crackled as she marched stiffly up to the playroom at the top of the house. Scissor blades flashed in the shimmery light from a rubber waterproof torch balanced between the chimneys of the doll’s house as she
snip-snipped around the article, leaving neat windows in the paper.
She would lay her growing collection of images out in a row on the floorboards. Robert Kennedy sitting on a carpeted staircase in smart shoes that must squeak when he walked. He looked tired. Eleanor’s favourite was a close-up of his face with the dent in his chin that she had invested with magical significance. Finally, smoothed flat, the three she had found of the Senator sprawled between freezer cabinets in the Los Angeles hotel kitchen, a still shape glimpsed between shoving bodies lit by a frenzy of flash bulbs. In the last, his shirt had been undone exposing a hairy chest. Her Dad’s chest was hairless. As an afterthought, Eleanor had cut out the story about Alice with both their pictures in it. She had left the one about the grave.
After scrutinising her private gallery, she would slip everything into the space between the floor and the skirting board behind the doll’s house. When they returned to London, Eleanor intended to take them all out and put them in her Box of Secrets. But when the time came she forgot and later, as often happened with her secrets, she forgot what they were or where they were hidden.
Four
Eleanor had been introduced to Alice one sunny Friday morning on the last day of May that year. The Ramsays had arrived from London late the night before intending to spend the first week of June at their house in Sussex. For all of them the day they got there was always the best, rich with hope and anticipation. The hope dissipated even as Lizzie opened all the doors and windows to chase out the damp. By the next morning everyone had gone their separate ways: Gina to the riding stables; Lucian to the river; Mark retreated to his study with the door locked and Isabel was planning the food with Lizzie in the kitchen. Eleanor had been called downstairs just as she started sorting out the doll’s house. On the way down to Charbury, squeezed between her older brother and sister, she had planned to rearrange the furniture to give the inhabitants a new lease of life. She would draw new pictures for the rooms and paint the front door bright red. With this in mind, she had packed her box of enamel paints. The doll’s house was a loyal friend awaiting her. She told herself she had no need of other friends ever again.
A Kind of Vanishing Page 5