‘Eleanor, bloody well pay attention. I’m sorry Chief Inspector.’ Eleanor knew the man didn’t like her mother swearing. His eyes stopped blinking like Alice’s. She clutched the sides of her chair as the room bent like the Hall of Mirrors on the Palace Pier. She didn’t remember saying anything. She was sure she hadn’t. She must have.
In an interlude of truce during tea after the Cheese day, Alice had confessed to Eleanor that she had failed her Underwater Proficiency test and had to be rescued by the instructor from the shallow end. She didn’t care that Eleanor had got her life saving certificate and had once swum a mile in a freezing pool covered with dead flies. She said Eleanor shouldn’t have pretended to drown by staying under because, she had explained, drowning was not funny. She told her it was rude that Eleanor had waved around in the air the stripey pyjama trousers she had just escaped from, when she finally bobbed to the surface. Eleanor had assured Alice that drowning was like going to sleep.
You close your eyes and let the water go over you. It won’t hurt. It’s better that you can’t swim, you die quicker. Sailors don’t learn to swim in case their boat sinks, Luke said.
‘Let’s hurry this along, shall we, Eleanor?’ The chin came closer; unlike the ‘Stricken Senator’s Chin’ it was full of holes and a funny pink colour. ‘Where have you hidden Alice?’
‘It’s not amusing, darling.’ Isabel glared at Eleanor. ‘You’re not normally like this.’ Isabel smiled hopelessly at the Chief Inspector. It was obvious that Eleanor was normally like it.
‘He said where had I hidden…’
‘Be quiet!’ Isabel grabbed her by the shoulder, pinching her skin under her shirt, pushing her sharply away and then yanking her closer, so that Eleanor nearly toppled from her chair. ‘Just answer Chief Inspector Hall’s questions properly. For the last time: this is no time for fun and games.’
Eleanor felt tears well up, like an enemy stalking. She was frightened of the woman with the tin voice and jabbing fingers and now she was frightened of the policeman with the red sweets and the red chin. He had stopped smiling.
‘When did you last see Alice?’ He had no idea he had asked things before. Eleanor decided that if it was a game she could pretend. She relaxed.
She told the story of the last day. She made the snap decision to put Alice outside the blacksmith’s, which was now a garage, at the bend in the lane leading to the White House. Eleanor told only of the first game of hide and seek which they had played in the village on the Sunday afternoon before tea. She pretended they had played it on that last Tuesday afternoon. She could not say the second game had been at the Tide Mills as they shouldn’t have been there and although Alice had agreed to come, it had been Eleanor’s idea.
It was best not to mention the Tide Mills at all. Eleanor wasn’t going to allow Alice to spoil anything.
The detective’s face was a gritty mask, as Eleanor elaborately outlined how she had hidden in her den on the edge of the ten-acre field behind the old blacksmith’s. It was a secret place that Eleanor didn’t think Alice knew about. If Alice had been in the room she would have said Eleanor was lying and told him they were at the Tide Mills not in the village.
‘You know we have to tell, don’t you.’
She would say the game in the village had been on the Sunday and give them accurate times and dates. Alice would have confessed the truth even if it got Eleanor into trouble. She would simper and whimper about how their feet had slipped on the bridge over the millpond and they had nearly drowned. She would say how Eleanor forced her to walk along the crumbling arch over the gigantic wheel underneath. Alice would pop a strawberry sweet between her moist lips and, being allowed to smile, she would assure him that honestly, she had asked Eleanor not to walk there, but Eleanor had forced her to.
It was very good, concluded Eleanor, that Alice was not there.
She did tell the policeman about her special trick, but was annoyed when he wrote it down because it was a secret. It wasn’t cheating. She explained how she spied on the person looking, and once they had checked one hiding place and found no one there, she would choose her moment and rush over to hide in it. This way Eleanor could be hiding for days if she wanted to.
She had not done this on Sunday.
Richard Hall noted down that Eleanor Ramsay talked like a boy as she boasted about taking apart dead animals and vaulting across furrows in the triangular field with an old farm cart in one corner. Once she reached the other side she said she had turned back to see if Alice was following her. Chief Inspector Hall prided himself on his ability to be objective, but in this case he was not. He didn’t like this child; she wasn’t a proper girl or a proper boy. He vaguely blamed it on the mother who was very attractive.
Eleanor did not mention that Alice had cheated in the first game because now she was pretending to the policeman that there had been only one game. In the first game Alice had sneaked a look while she was counting. She did tell him how on the last day Alice had stopped counting too soon.
Eleanor soon found the talks with the policeman boring. So must he, for on the Thursday morning he had suggested they go out and that Eleanor take him to her hiding places. A gang of tall men loped after the diminutive expedition leader, as she marched them up the lane, and showed them her den through a hole in the hedge of the triangular field. She stood back proudly, arms folded as, one by one, they stuck heads into the gap and made ‘Ah-yes’ noises. In a burst of inspiration she took them to the very petrol pump she had told them Alice had been standing next to when she last saw her. By now Eleanor had forgotten she wasn’t telling the truth and waited with hands on hips, while the police measured the exact distance between the spot where Alice had supposedly been standing and the gap in the hedge that led to the hiding place with a wheel on a stick. It was forty-four feet and eight and a half inches. Eleanor had done measuring in the playground, and knew how many inches to a foot and how many yards to a mile if they asked.
Richard had marks on his cheeks like a potato. Eleanor addressed these marks when she answered the question about hearing a car while hiding in the hedge. Patiently she reminded him that she had swapped hiding places so was not hiding in the hedge the whole time. Later she wished she had put in a car. She could have used the one with silver hubcaps that she saw driving on the Thames by the Hammersmith yacht club. She had thought it was a dream until Lucian talked about the car that could go on water one breakfast time. She made up her mind that if Richard asked her about a car again, she would grab the chance to tell him about it.
By Friday, Eleanor had grown used to the questions and could answer them promptly and consistently.
‘Why did Alice stop counting?’
‘To find me sooner.’
‘Is that what you do?’
‘No, it’s cheating.’
‘Where were you when she stopped counting?’
‘Hiding in the bushes.’
‘What bushes?’
There were no bushes in the triangular field or on the footpath. The bushes were by the Mill. But he accidentally helped her:
‘Do you mean the hedge?’
‘Yes. I ran very fast across the field and down the zig-zag path to the beach. In the opposite direction to the Mill.’ She drew breath and grinned inadvertently. She lost two lives if he guessed about the Tide Mills.
‘Why wasn’t it fair to stop counting?’
‘There was no time to hide. If I hadn’t known exactly where to go, I would have been cross.’
‘So you were cross with Alice.’ He was friendly again.
‘No, I didn’t ’specially mind. Except I didn’t have time to hide.’
‘But you did hide.’
‘Not properly. If I hadn’t known about my den…’ By now Eleanor knew for certain he had something wrong with his memory. She had a game called Memory that Alice had agreed to play. Each person had to turn up two cards in a go and hope to remember where the other part of a pair was. Alice always knew and always won. When
she had gone Eleanor found faint pencil squiggles on the backs of the cards.
‘How far did Alice count before she stopped?’
‘Five.’ He wasn’t listening. Eleanor doubted that anyone ever told him off.
‘You recall exactly. That’s smart.’
‘It was meant to be ten, she stopped halfway.’
‘Good at maths too!’ He made a lopsided smile, with his lips showing his teeth and cracks appeared on his face that made the marks on his cheek move.
‘It’s likely, isn’t it, that you were out of earshot, too far away to hear Alice, and she was in fact still counting, but you could not hear?’
‘No. I heard her stop while I was still on the path, I mean… while I was in my den in the hedge. I was only forty-four feet and eight and a half inches away. Sound carries that distance.’ If he never remembered anything, they could be there in the dining room forever saying the same thing. He was writing it down, but didn’t look at what he had written so it didn’t help. Eleanor could put up with it, but she knew her mother would get fed up.
‘The point is, you were able to hide, so it didn’t matter that Alice stopped counting. No need to get cross, was there?’
‘Cheating always matters.’
‘It certainly does matter. I expect that made you very angry, didn’t it?’ The Chief Inspector reached into his pocket and pulled out another bag of sweets, the paper rustled as he spilled them out on to the table between himself and Eleanor and her mother. Eleanor and Isabel stared at the pile. Isabel didn’t usually like her children buying penny sweets.
‘Have one, Eleanor. What would you like? You choose.’
‘Strawberry, please.’
‘Yes, of course it’s your favourite, you told me. Mrs Ramsay, can I tempt you?’ His eyes hovered for a moment on Isabel Ramsay, who had the looks he had never expected to meet in real life. Her mother barely shook her head. Any minute Eleanor hoped she would invent an excuse to go. It would mean they could stop, because her Dad was in Lewes and she had found out that the police couldn’t talk to her without one of her parents present. Eleanor spread the wrapping paper out into a square, neat and flat, pressing and smoothing out the folds. Suddenly her mother snatched it away and screwed it up, frowning at her.
‘You were saying how cross with Alice you were.’ He tilted back in his chair. The chairs had belonged to the Judge and they were supposed to sit sensibly in them.
‘It wasn’t fair. When she hid, I counted all the way to ten and particularly didn’t do it fast to give her time. It was easy to find her because she hid badly.’ Eleanor tucked the chew into the back of her cheek, so she could speak clearly. ‘Actually, I expect that’s why she stopped counting.’
‘What do you mean?’ The chair creaked.
‘She must have wanted to do hiding, she didn’t want to wait ages for her turn, because I’m expert at hiding, so she hid anyway. She had loads of time, because I was hiding too. She knew in the end I would look for her.’ She pushed out her lips and furrowed her forehead to deliver her diagnosis. ‘It is far more fun hiding.’
‘Don’t you think she was upset after your argument?’
‘We didn’t have an argument.’
There was silence. Her mother gazed out of the window, the backs of two fingers stroking under her chin over and over again. The next time Eleanor dared to glance at the Chief Inspector he was looking at her mother’s fingers. He caught her looking at him and started shuffling his papers, squaring the edges with sharp taps on the table.
‘All little girls have fights. I have a daughter the same age as you and she squabbles with her sister all the time. I expect you do! Changes her best friend with the weather!’
‘Gina and me do fight sometimes,’ Eleanor agreed, moving her hand so that her thumb and forefinger rested on her collarbone like her mother was doing. She tried smiling with the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t meant to say that. Her mother would be annoyed later. So would Gina.
‘You mean Alice and you fight?’ He pushed another strawberry chew towards her. It was at this point Eleanor saw that there were mostly strawberry ones. He did remember some things.
‘No, Gina. She’s my sister, not Alice.’
‘We are talking about your fights with Alice.’ He spoke like Lucian fishing out facts. Any minute he might say the Lord’s Prayer backwards in Latin without stopping.
‘We didn’t fight.’ Eleanor couldn’t say Alice was not a person you had fights with. She wanted to say she wasn’t a friend either. When Alice refused to play spaceships, Eleanor could not argue. At least with Gina there were things to say back.
It dawned on her that the Chief Inspector must know about the flower-pressing expedition. All his questions, the sweets, the smiling: everything had been to get her to talk about it. She would not.
She had been so happy when, at tea last Sunday, her Dad had announced they were all going on an expedition after they had finished eating. After only two days Eleanor was at her wit’s end with Alice and was even longing for the holiday to be over, which had never happened before. It had turned out that her Dad had been talking to Alice about her flower collection and the reason for the expedition was to find new flowers to add to it. To make things worse, Lucian and Gina were told they didn’t need to come. Eleanor had tried to get Gina’s attention: if she came Alice would be distracted, but Gina had ignored her frantic signs, probably because Eleanor had egged Lucian into doing the Dance of the Fork with her at tea. Gina had got Alice a fork for her cake then disappeared off to her room without once looking at Eleanor.
The expedition was as nightmarish as Eleanor had expected. Alice had known the names of every flower. She had flitted to and fro like a fairy, then acted like it was private as she crouched down, gripped the flower head between her fingers and confided its name in a whisper to ‘Doctor Ramsay’, as she called him, though he kept telling her she could say ‘Mark’. He then told her the Latin and helped her to pronounce it. Eleanor got crosser as he sliced the stalk with the shiny blade of his sharp knife and slipped the severed flower into a plastic folder for Alice to press.
‘Red valerian. Now I love this one, it’s sooo pretty.’ Alice said she loved every flower they found, in a tinkly voice that Eleanor hadn’t heard before.
‘Centranthus ruber.’ Her father was doing Judge Henry. He let Alice use his knife, steadying her hand as they parted the stem from the main plant. Alice was breathing in her sucking-up, wheezy way. Doctor Ramsay knew how to treat Alice like a grownup.
Eleanor snatched up a flint and threw it with all her might. It bounced down the bridleway. Alice shook her head. Her father was too busy fumbling with Alice’s flower folders to notice.
Later that night when Alice had gone home and everyone was in the living room, Eleanor had sneaked outside. The sun was going down and it was cooler. Her Dad’s study door had been left unlocked, although there was no sign of him so she had hurried in and taken a large envelope from his stationery cupboard. Then armed with her secret penknife she rampaged off down the lane in a private race, charging through the thin gap in the wheat growing in the triangular field. She savagely tore and cut whatever flowers she could find in the hedges and verges. The colours were more vivid now in the gathering twilight and were easy to find. When everyone was in bed, Eleanor sat on the floor of the playroom slapping an example of each flower into an old notebook and belting it in with a bit of sticky tape. She wrote the name in biro followed by jerky printed Latin, got from the battered Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers that her Dad had left out on his desk after their outing.
‘I’ve already got a book of flowers, actually,’ she had remarked airily after Alice had been in the house about five minutes the next morning. Eleanor had meant to take the book with her to tea at Alice’s house later that afternoon when she had planned to produce it like a rabbit out of a hat, catching Alice unawares. But she couldn’t wait. As things turned out this was just as well because she wouldn’t have got a chance.
‘What are you talking about?’ Gina trotted into the hall, and executed a petit jeté as she reached high up for her riding hat from the shelf above the coat hooks. Alice got there first and thrust it into Gina’s arms eagerly. Gina was glaring at her sister and simply put out a hand for it.
‘Oh, just pressed flowers. I’ve been doing them for ages, in my spare time,’ replied Eleanor carelessly. ‘There’s a book I use. It’s nothing, just flowers, you know. And some Latin.’
‘Have you had a bash on the head, Elly?’ Gina had looked at Alice and rolled her eyes. Alice rolled hers too making her head go like a duck. Normally this would have enraged Eleanor but she had been fortified by the pressed flower book, which she produced from under her tee-shirt with a flourish.
The small notebook was swollen and bulging with damp, dying flora. She dumped it on the hall table fully thinking it settled all arguments. For a moment no one moved, obviously taken in by the magnificence of her achievement. Then Alice came over and lifting the warped cardboard cover with just the tips of her fingers, flicked open the front page and stepped back revolted. Gina’s interest had passed and she was on her knees rummaging through the shoe rack.
‘You haven’t pressed them properly.’ Alice had rattled the page holding a flower named ‘Yellow Toad Flax’ in tottering capitals that had stained the paper a nasty brown. ‘You can’t put them straight in. They need to dry. You need a special book.’ She paused for Gina to agree, but Gina was struggling into her boots. As Alice flipped through the notebook, the page heavy with a fistful of Nipplewort (Lapsana communis) fell out at her feet. Apparently without realising it, Alice moved her foot, crushing the head of the flower beneath her sandal.
Gina had got up, inches taller in black riding boots, her hat swinging from her arm, and clopped over to give a final verdict. Eleanor was enraged to smell the scent they had given Isabel. Gina was always stealing things.
‘It’s a shame to press flowers. They should be left where they are for everyone to enjoy. If we all pulled them up willy-nilly and carted them home there’d be none left. Besides it’s a form of murder.’ Gina tossed her head and stalked out of the open door, vanishing in a blaze of sunlight like the lady in Star Trek. She didn’t see Alice gazing at her from the porch until long after she was out of sight.
A Kind of Vanishing Page 9