A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Eleanor’s grandfather had made the doll’s house, an obsessively faithful replica of the family mansion called the White House, over thirty years before for Mark Ramsay and his younger sister, Virginia. It was an uncharacteristic act of paternal attention from the adamantine high court Judge, who enthusiastically donned the black napkin until prevented by the demise of capital punishment itself. The loss of so final a tool of retribution had made Judge Henry permanently peevish. In 1957, the enactment of the Homicide Act effectively curtailed his power to propel a man or woman to meet their maker and drove him into brooding retirement. He clung to his memories and to the almost permanent seclusion of his workroom, a shed in the orchard, which like his study was acrid with the smoke of the ‘Regency Segars’ he received every month in a brown paper parcel from Fribourg and Treyer in the Haymarket.

  When Judge Ramsay died on 13th July 1958, exactly three years after Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in Britain, a month before his seventieth birthday and too soon to know about the birth of Eleanor, no one had the courage to clear out his den. Isabel had turned up at the door of the shed, clanking with cleaning materials, intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of her hated father-in-law and transforming it into an artist’s studio with which to tempt Lucian with its chalky light. She had quailed at the sight of the immaculately laid out bench, the labelled shelves stacked with tools, and books on architecture and model building. Towers of wooden cigar boxes were filled with tiny objects: drawing pins, nails, screws and pen nibs. Isabel’s nerves were finally shattered as her cheek brushed against the Judge’s black wool jacket hanging lifeless from the door, and as she jumped back the metal bucket clipped the doorjamb with a fearsome clatter. Defeated, she had abandoned the shed to become an inadvertent shrine. Over the years people claimed to have caught glimpses of the Judge through the grimy windows, a giant concentrating crow perched on his high stool, shrouded in his jacket.

  Deep among the plum and apple trees where the Judge couldn’t hear the incessant squall of children, and – before she died when her eldest child, Mark, was nine – the high pitched call of Rosamund his wife, he would work into the night. At last with reluctance, he had presented the doll’s house to two catarrhly bemused children whom he had expected to be semaphorically appreciative of his gift. His son’s reaction particularly enraged him. Mark walked around the butcher’s block on which the house was placed, his hands behind his back, the nonchalant pose actually a desperate demonstration that he recognised its significance. At last Mark had gleefully pointed out the clue. There was always a clue. The Judge didn’t approve of unfettered generosity so every present he gave them was a test. In each of the two playroom windows in the big house there were six bars giving the long wide room the oppressive air of a prison cell. But in the doll’s house playroom windows there was none.

  Mark Ramsay never forgot the look of contemplative fury his father gave him for revealing his mistake. The Judge had not imagined the playroom with bars on the windows because he had avoided the room once his parents had made the gardener install them, thus making them pointless for the rest of his childhood as he was the only surviving child. Now his own son had unmasked his father’s apparent labour of love as a labour of atonement. Although only ten years old, Mark Ramsay knew utterly that an irrevocable severance had taken place. From that moment, until his own death, he was the Judge’s greatest champion. His defence reached evangelical fervour in the face of Isabel’s scorn.

  Mark and Virginia could only play with the house under the Judge’s supervision; they did so with the highly tuned attention of bomb disposal experts. Soon they dreaded the sight of it standing on its grisly plinth in the playroom like a body on a slab.

  Judge Ramsay had constructed each storey separately to slot into the frame of the house like a shelf into a fridge. He spent days reproducing the fretted stonework that hung like a web between octagonal pillars to recreate the geometric shadow on the wall of the actual house. The Ionic pillars supporting the pediment of the front porch were particularly hard to get right, and took him months. The front and back were effectively large doors, and he saw that his first idea of using hardboard was impractical, for it would quickly deteriorate with constant opening. In the end he chose pine, with fascias of oak where dark paint wouldn’t do. He became skilful on a lathe despite a discouraging start, which included severing an Ionic column in half along with the top of the middle finger of his left hand. One obituary incorrectly attributed this injury to a letter bomb sent by a relative of a man who had been hanged. Thus did myth become truth.

  The Judge was most proud of the priest hole that ran from the minute study on the second floor to emerge behind a wood panel on the landing. It was operated by pushing a knob in the centre of a Tudor rose to the right of the mantelpiece exactly like its real counterpart. It comprised a tiny chamber behind the study wall with a narrow airless passage leading away from the study along to the landing. It had been particularly complex to construct, but after several weeks the Judge had achieved it. He didn’t tell Mark and Virginia. This well-kept secret was his big test. He hadn’t known of the existence of the priest hole until finding the plans. He would reward whoever discovered his clue.

  If one of them did, they never confessed.

  Until his son exposed his error of the windows without bars, the Judge had considered the plasterwork his one failure. Time was lost as he wrestled with tiny renditions of the intricate mouldings for the ceilings on the ground floor. Eventually he relented and commissioned a craftsman. He told no one that the work was not his own, but was given away by an obsessive commitment to administrative order. He had filed the invoice and Eleanor found it after his death. This was proof to her that Henry Ramsay wasn’t the great man Mark insisted he was. The Judge had lied. Isabel’s dislike of the Judge dated from before she met him, in jealous response to Mark’s uncritical devotion to ‘Henry’, which seemed far stronger than for herself. She rationalised her emotions into principle and on their visits to Charbury she would rashly engage the Judge in fierce arguments about capital punishment until Mark ushered her away. However, Mark assured Isabel she had misjudged the Judge. Mark explained to his family that the invoice had been the Judge’s clue.

  Judge Ramsay left the White House and its replica to his son on his death. The Judge had used the White House as a country retreat for weekends and holidays. It was after the sudden death of his wife that he began work on the doll’s house. He told himself he was granting Rosamund her dying wish that he take good care of the children, but he knew he was building the house for his own reasons. Had she known of this promise, his daughter would not have considered it fulfilled.

  Virginia Ramsay was astonished that her brother had forgotten the stolid meals round the dining table, the compulsory evening recitals of poems, the tiptoed silence that enabled the Judge to work in his study and his fury if one of them mentioned their dead mother. Once she was old enough to leave home, Virginia shunned all opportunities to return to the White House and only came back when she was old and could be sure that everything would be different.

  Mark exorcised his father by whipping up a hectic family life involving dizzying sessions of charades, Scrabble, Monopoly, and Racing Demon, and long striding walks along the coast towards Brighton or up into the South Downs. He hated it when Isabel had a headache and the children had to be quiet, sneaking around like prisoners, careful not to slam doors, for then his childhood returned as if it had never gone away.

  Mark Ramsay did not impose his father’s numbing laws of ‘playing with the house’ on his own children. Perhaps he unconsciously hoped it would disintegrate through hours of hectic attention. It did not. The outside grew as weathered as the original, paint peeled and the plasterwork under the eaves chipped and powdered, as each child made it their own.

  At first Eleanor could only touch the house under Gina’s stern direction, occasionally being ordered to move a doll or a chair. She was never allowed to do any of
the dolls’ voices, because Gina said she got them wrong. Now Gina, like her Aunt Ginny before her, thought the doll’s house stupid, and spent most of her time at the stables, or sticking horse posters up around her room and reading books in which horses featured heavily. Eleanor was frightened of horses, a secret only Gina knew, but had so far not made use of. So only a few months before meeting Alice, Eleanor became sole custodian of the doll’s house. She had taken possession with a flourish, installing her Matchbox cars in the bedrooms and initially interring the dolls in a shoebox, although she did later exhume them and give them minor parts.

  The furniture had been copied from furniture still in the big house. The long green velvet sofa and rickety rocking chair were identical to ones in the living room. Only the table and chairs in the kitchen were from a shop, the originals lost or broken, even the tiny plates and cups were exact versions of the crockery piled in teetering towers in the church-like wooden unit in the kitchen.

  Out of her Box of Secrets came postage stamp pictures of Crawford and pencilled family faces split by joyful laughter. Singing and chatting to herself, Eleanor hung them from threads of cotton in all the rooms.

  Minute bedspreads had been fashioned out of squares of material. Her Mum had stitched them one winter afternoon earlier that year. The house was freezing and they had huddled together in the kitchen, close to the Rayburn like conspirators. As a surprise, Isabel had embroidered Eleanor’s initials in the middle of one square: ‘E.I.R’ – Eleanor Isabel Ramsay. Eleanor had laid it on the huge double bed in the main bedroom.

  ‘One day you’ll show this to your children and tell them their grandmother made it,’ Isabel had pronounced briskly. ‘They’ll treasure it.’ She was always mindful of leaving footprints for the future. Eleanor didn’t choose that moment to tell Isabel she didn’t want children.

  Soon Eleanor’s replica White House had been transformed into a cosy home welcoming in plenty of sunshine and quite safe from intruders. Her cars were content there.

  That Friday morning, Eleanor had been eager to finish breakfast and embark on her proposed changes. She insinuated herself into the gap between the playroom wall and the house and inched the heavy structure across the painted floorboards until it was about four feet from the wall. A happy rush of anticipation galloped through her as she cleared out every room and gathered the contents in a heap on the rug by the fireplace. She would spend the afternoon painting new pictures for the walls; the main bedroom could also do with a chest of drawers. She knew how to make one out of matchboxes with paper studs for handles. Her Mum might help again.

  Then Lizzie called out that she had a visitor, ‘a surprise person’, she would say no more. A selection of perfect people paraded through Eleanor’s mind, starting with Aunt Ginny who only ever visited when they were in St Peter’s Square because she hated the dead Judge and who always brought wild adventure, perhaps a ride in her Austin van with Aunt Ginny’s friend Maggie, all of them singing songs by Cilla Black in shouty voices and swearing at other cars without being told off. After this the list tailed off for it couldn’t be her best friend, Lucy. Perhaps it was the girl at the village shop yesterday afternoon, who had blown pink bubbles with her gum until one burst covering her face like a mask. She had left it there, plastered over her cheeks until her Mum noticed, just as Eleanor would have done.

  But the surprise was none of these.

  What Eleanor saw from the top of the stairs was a ghost with chalky-white skin in a yellow dress, fair hair fanning out over its shoulders so that Eleanor thought its head was a triangle. Then she saw it was a girl standing to attention in a patch of sunlight outside the porch, smiling with the tops of her cheeks. She had on what Eleanor soon discovered was her new favourite dress; the flimsy frilly frock adorned with lacy bits filled Eleanor with foreboding. The girl was entirely still, her bony knees close together, her feet in black patent leather pumps with no specks of dirt, proving she had flown to the White House without touching the ground.

  Like her grandfather, Eleanor wasted no time drawing conclusions, and she instantly wished that she had hidden when Lizzie called. She slowed down for the last few stairs but had inevitably to reach the bottom one.

  Mark Ramsay lounged in the porch rocking back and forth on his heels, hands in the pockets of his favourite country trousers. Eleanor was sure he was trying to keep a straight face as he listened to the girl’s mother, who talked very fast then stopped with a hiccup to give way to bursts of cockerel laughter. His genial doctor’s voice kept saying, ‘I see’ and ‘Is that right?’ Then she saw that he didn’t laugh when the woman laughed which meant he wasn’t listening. This was normal. Eleanor relaxed.

  ‘Ah, Elly, there you are. What kept you?’ He scrumpled up her hair, gently urging her forward out of the shadow of the porch towards the ghost girl. ‘Well, now you can stop sulking around the place moaning. We’ve found Anna.’

  ‘Alice actually. Nearly right!’ Eleanor was impressed that the woman could move her neck like a pigeon. She splayed her hands in the direction of her daughter as if introducing a circus act.

  ‘Like Alice in Wonderland! Your favourite book, isn’t it, Alice!’ She gave a squeal.

  At this Alice moved her head, which startled Eleanor, as she had grown used to the idea that she wasn’t real. She guessed, without forming the words, that her father made Alice’s mother scared. A lot of people behaved strangely with him. The glistening lady with damp hands, who had tried to teach Gina the flute, got a blotchy neck after encountering him in the hall. Her mother had said it was because he was a doctor and they were idiotic enough to think he could see them without their clothes on.

  Suddenly Eleanor remembered hearing about Alice. She was the girl who had moved into the cottage next to the village shop. Her Mum was receptionist at the local surgery, and her Dad was Charbury’s new postman. The bubble gum girl had confided to Eleanor that there was an Alice who could stand on her head for over fifteen minutes. It must be this one. For a moment Eleanor’s unalloyed admiration for this supposed feat overcame her objection to the proposed arrangement.

  She was astonished to find her mother outside too. Isabel was walking up and down outside the dining room window, her arms folded tightly as if she was cold; her high heels crunched small holes in the gravel. She was dressed for going out in her turquoise trouser suit and full make-up. Eleanor had thought she was in bed and, although pleased she was up, she was disheartened that she would soon be gone.

  Isabel’s two eldest children were too grown up for the ruthless tactics they had adopted four years earlier when Lucian and Gina, aged six and eight with a tearful Eleanor in tow, had hidden their mother’s jewels in seed trays stacked in the potting shed to stop her leaving. The plan had failed. The jewels were found and the gardener was dismissed on the basis that he had boasted to Lucian about stealing a car when he was a boy. The children said nothing, not even to each other and the secret grew like a deadly plant. Gradually they stopped playing together and only formed expedient, if uneasy alliances. These were fluid at first; any two of them might side against the third or close ranks against outsiders, but as they got older Gina and Lucian sealed an unspoken pact, freeing them of guilt and adroitly placing amorphous blame on their little sister. Isabel was smoking, eyes hidden behind sunglasses that reflected the group clustered around the porch. She addressed no one, her voice husky from smoke and hours of silent darkness:

  ‘She’ll stop my daughter getting into mischief. Gina’s too old to play, although she’ll keep an eye. I am sure Alice is a sensible girl.’

  Eleanor’s heart sank as her mother gave one of her very short smiles, which made the girl in the dress shimmer with lacy trembles. She glared at Gina, leaning triumphant against an Ionic column, acting too old to play. They avoided looking at each other in case it was all too clear what was really in their minds.

  The four years between the sisters was beyond argument, but this chasm, usually represented by Gina’s devotion to horses,
had been widened recently by new differences in their experience. The past week had seen Gina clamped to a hot water bottle with period pains and the failure of a boyfriend (who her family said didn’t exist) to appear at the Hammersmith Wimpy as arranged. Eleanor and her friends’ only interest in boys was around how to win back Eleanor’s champion marble from Chris Thornton who had unfairly refused to risk it in further games. The sisters had little to say to one another.

  It was proposed that the friendship between Eleanor and Alice start immediately. Eleanor’s mother had her ‘out-of-bed’ voice: higher than usual, with one ‘darling’ every minute,listing rules like other Mums. She made Eleanor promise not to do anything foolish and to make sure that every day they were back in time for tea.

  Every day? Was Alice going to be there from now on? Eleanor’s spirit was dampened. In resigned tones she enquired: ‘What time is tea?’

  ‘Four. Same as always, darling!’

  Eleanor had flinched as hands tugged at her hair, straightened her collar and smacked invisible flies off her chest and arms. Looking up she could see herself reflected in her mother’s sunglasses: a dark shape with no face. She mechanically took Alice’s outstretched hand and glumly led her upstairs to where they were to play, properly like good girls, until Alice’s mother, who was called Kathleen, came to collect her.

  Alice and Eleanor were only months apart in age and with the odd logic that people apply to everyone but themselves, this broad commonality identified them as like-minded and inevitable soul mates. Alice quickly established she was born three months and three days before Eleanor and this fact became the basis of a discussion, in which they quizzed each other vigorously, gleefully unearthing differences with no inclination to find shared ground. Alice archly informed Eleanor that the age gap meant that she was already on solids by the time Eleanor was born. By the time Eleanor was walking, Alice was winning prizes for dancing.