A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘I know a secret about you.’

  The effect of her words had been better than she could have hoped for. Alice snatched up the packet of serviettes her mother had left out on the sideboard. She could hear Eleanor chattering on in the hall. Someone called her name, but Alice pretended not to hear. Then she heard Eleanor giggle. She wished her Dad would come home and be on her side. There would be no one on her side if they heard what she had said to Eleanor about Mrs Ramsay. She had only said it because of the matches and the poo.

  When they had got back to the dining room table, Alice had sneaked a look at Eleanor as she leaned over her picture. Her nails had green rims and her hands were always scratched and rough. Her hair needed a proper brush and that day there had been a grey smear across her forehead as well as a bruise on her arm from climbing on to the conservatory roof to fetch a tennis ball earlier in the day. Alice had been relieved when it landed there, the game would be over. But Eleanor had worked her way up the drainpipe, pulling with her hands and pushing with her feet and thrown it down. She never kept still, but must always whizz about. Even in the dining room when they were drawing, Eleanor was bouncing about on her chair. She never walked properly. She had to do cartwheels and handstands. She kept on at Alice to do a handstand, knowing perfectly well that Alice couldn’t bear being upside down, not even to have her hair washed.

  Alice knew she could draw better than Eleanor, whose pictures made no sense and used up too much crayon. That day the room had been littered with bits of oil pastel and curls of peeling paper torn off to free more crayon. Alice was glad they weren’t her crayons. All she could think about after the matches was how to hurt Eleanor.

  Eleanor’s feet had been tucked up under her and she was very worked up about her picture, which she said was of herself as a pilot in an aeroplane. She didn’t even paint properly. She had gone on and on, saying the sun she was drawing was scalding hot, even touching the paper and acting burned. She hadn’t answered when Alice asked if it was her best picture.

  Now her Mum was showing Eleanor the barometer in the hall. This infuriated Alice, her Dad’s barometer was nothing to do with Eleanor. Alice went over to the table and poked the side of the jelly with her finger, and nicking a hole in it, quickly licked her finger.

  ‘I know a secret about you.’

  She had stared hard at Eleanor’s face, but Eleanor had carried on with her drawing. Say it again, louder. Then Eleanor had lied, saying secrets were stupid.

  ‘Not all secrets are stupid.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  Alice had been worried that Eleanor really wasn’t bothered. She had to make her bothered. The jelly was soft and cool, lapping over her fingers.

  ‘If it was me, I would care about it, because it’s a huge secret.’

  She had wanted to pull Eleanor’s hair and punch her. Eleanor went on colouring as if she was alone and Alice had gone. Alice might have said her three-year-old cousin could draw better. The sun wasn’t that big and Eleanor was a girl so she could not be a pilot.

  The kitchen clock struck four. Eleanor had arrived early. Zebedee tipped out into the roundabout clock face four times. Alice had loved the clock when her Dad brought it home. Now she picked up the plate with the cubes of cheese stuck on to wooden sticks, and thought of smashing it into the clock, pushing the cheese into the hole for the characters and gumming up the hands. Instead she tipped them on to the floor. The cheese scattered across the lino. They wouldn’t be eating cheese. Her fingers were sticky from the jelly and the plate slipped out of her hands and landed with a thump on top of the bits of cheddar.

  Eleanor had tried to pretend she was looking for a black crayon on the floor. Alice had not let her leave the room and enjoyed swishing her ruler like the cruel supply teacher they had last term. For a moment Alice had been happy, then she had seen her own picture. It no longer looked so good, with tiny pencil lines scribbling off the page. She had crumpled the paper into a ball, which she tossed back and forth in her cupped hands as Lucian did with a cricket ball. Eleanor had not dared look for the crayon and with some shock Alice saw Eleanor was trying not to cry. Then Alice wanted to leave and she said she must get home even though she was meant to be staying for tea. There had been no sign of Mrs Ramsay and the toilet door was firmly closed as Alice rushed away, abandoning her favourite pink cardigan to the wolves.

  Her Mum and Eleanor had reached the kitchen door. Eleanor was telling her about her cat with the mad name, chatting away as if they were friends, although she had only met her Mum last Friday. Alice envied Eleanor, she did not dare be so friendly with Mrs Ramsay. Then she remembered the doctor and felt better.

  Kathleen Howland would later forget what greeted her as she tripped lightly into the kitchen. The scene would be erased as if it had never been. She was very much looking forward to Eleanor Ramsay’s reaction to her table display. She loved to see pleasure in children’s faces.

  She screamed and was distantly aware of stepping backwards heavily on to Eleanor’s foot and not saying sorry.

  Eleanor peered around from behind Alice’s mother and, forgetting her carefully rehearsed manners, swore out loud.

  There was food everywhere. Serviettes were shredded and stuck all over the table and the floor, where squelchy stuff lay in soggy mounds. Orange squash had soaked into the tablecloth and dripped slowly on to the lino making a brightly coloured puddle that Eleanor found pleasing. Inching further into the room Eleanor nearly toppled on to the bin. It lay on its side, surrounded by squares of cheese stabbed with sticks pointing this way and that. There were globules of jam everywhere, on the chairs, slithering down the sideboard, even hanging from the ceiling. In the middle sat Alice smattered with red jelly, smeared with chocolate, with her hair decorated with scraps of Victoria sponge.

  She leapt up, flinging her hands above her head and standing right on the tips of her toes, she yelled at the top of her voice:

  ‘Surprise!’

  Ten

  That evening, alone in her room, gazing down the empty lane in the direction of the White House where Doctor Ramsay would be eating supper in his dining room, Alice was determined to be friendly when Eleanor saw her the next day. After her behaviour at the tea table she was frightened by the girl she was turning into. She gave herself one last chance to change back.

  As she had helped her bewildered Mum clear up the chaos in the kitchen after Eleanor had been sent home, Alice promised Kathleen Howland faithfully that she would do whatever the Ramsays said and that no, she would never play up strangely again. Her mother couldn’t bring herself to use the word ‘naughty’ about her daughter, usually so well behaved. But ‘strangely’ was to Alice far worse, because it proved her fears were true. Her Mum was so horrified that she couldn’t even be cross. This time Alice knew for certain that her Mum had not told her Dad. It only made things worse.

  But he would soon find out. Everyone would. Already people were beginning to see what Alice was really like. As she watched Mrs Carter from the post office come out of her flat above the shop and trot off down the lane in her slingback stilettos towards the station, Alice knew that from now on she must make a real effort to be nice and good or it would be too late.

  They didn’t meet up until after lunch on the Tuesday because Mrs Howland took Alice into Lewes to get new shoes. When they did, Alice quickly told Eleanor that it was entirely up to her where they went to play because she honestly truly didn’t mind what they did. When Eleanor promptly suggested that they go and play hide and seek down at the haunted Tide Mills, Alice, determined to be good, had no choice but to agree.

  Part Two

  June 1999

  Eleven

  Isabel was annoyed with Mark. He had taken the lilo because he knew she wanted to lie on it. He had done it to get at her. He hated sunbathing.

  There he was, sprawled across the silver plastic, his long legs still muscular and shapely; glistening with sun tan cream and droplets of water. He could have been fifty, n
ot seventy-four. Her friends teased her that it must be like being married to Paul Newman, but better looking. Lucky Isabel, they said.

  She hadn’t told anyone that she had started to suspect Mark was avoiding her. She believed that communicating this fear would propel it into being. Besides, sometimes she was convinced she was imagining it. Then a brief moment of comfort would be obliterated by her self-knowledge. She was too observant, much too watchful to be mistaken. In the last few months Mark never looked at her when they were talking, his eyes were restless and distant. Indeed right now she could see that Mark was busily paddling the water with his hands to prevent the lilo drifting in her direction. These things were paltry if described on their own, but added together they made Isabel uneasy. The one thing that had always made life tolerable was that they were a team.

  She knew it was inconceivable her husband was having an affair, after all he had ignored countless opportunities over the last forty-six years; all those women queuing up in all those waiting rooms over the decades.

  The lilo was extremely important to Isabel. It represented a vital comfort that recently, as her body succumbed to its late sixties, eluded her. She would have had it all to herself if Mark had driven into Lewes this morning as he usually did on a Saturday morning. His denying Isabel this crumb of joy infuriated her; not only did he shun her companionship, but he stole her tiny pleasures. To add insult to injury, Isabel’s luxury sun lounger, made to order in Florence, had so far failed to arrive. All she had was the lilo and now she didn’t even have that.

  The lilo was the size of a double mattress and fantastically sturdy, so it didn’t fold up like an envelope or tip up unexpectedly if she twitched a toe or turned her head. She could float on it in the pool without getting wet as Mark was doing now. When Gina had brought it over, folded up tight in a deceptively small and childishly colourful zippy bag, Mark had scoffed, consigning it instantly to that place he was too lofty to inhabit: the world of soap operas, chunky holiday fiction, gossip and anything Isabel enjoyed. Mark had declared that Jon had wanted it to use in the pool when he and Gina visited, but as usual had to disguise his materialistic desires as fulsome liberality. It was like Mark to assume that others coveted what he claimed to despise. Then, like a wound he must worry, he would grumble that seeing how extravagantly rich his son-in-law was it was peculiar that he hadn’t built Gina a swimming pool. Mark insisted Jon was mean, preferring to use theirs for free. Typically Mark hadn’t blamed his eldest daughter for the frivolous present, assuming the idea was her poor husband’s, who Mark gleefully found a rich source of jokes. This meant that if for no other reason, Isabel was grateful to her son-in-law for inadvertently diverting her ever more gloomy and restless husband.

  Mark remained unimpressed by the fortune Jon had built over the decade through the manufacture of plastic commercial products, mostly grey, although there was a health and safety line that was a jolly yellow. He called him Jon-the-Footrest – usually to his face like a title honourably bestowed – because of the chunky adjustable platforms Jon manufactured for under office desks. It cut no ice with Mark when Jon laboured the point that his success was only due to Mark’s wonderful daughter Gina supporting him through thick and thin. Isabel would hear these tipsy speeches, generally made after Sunday lunch, with a sinking heart because they sealed Jon’s death warrant. Later Mark would unleash a torrent of cruel wit that luckily Jon appeared to receive as complimentary. Once they had left, Mark would expostulate that it was the last straw for Jon to implicate Gina in his devotion to making mountains of money through flogging roadside grit bins and sand-weighted safety cones. Apart from these, the highly successful Ginaware range included wrist rests, inserts for commodes, baby changing platforms and bucket/wringer combination packs for public spaces. It financed the horse – indeed a whole stable of horses – that Gina’s parents had refused to buy her when she was a girl. Isabel would concede that it didn’t make her a proud mother to be confronted by Gina’s name on a sanitary napkin receptacle (she had picked up the terminology) while hovering over a loo seat in a motorway service station, or negotiating a splatter of spilt salsa sauce guarded by a garish multilingual caution sign near the frozen fish in Sainsbury’s. But you had to earn a living somehow and Isabel could think of far worse things a man could do.

  Mark was wrong. The lilo had been Gina’s idea. She had genuinely expected her father to like it when a lilo was so clearly a more suitable present for Isabel. Yet as Isabel eyed Mark circling on the water, casually regal on his litter of silver plastic, she reflected that after all Gina had been right. He did like his present. Not that Mark would be the one to tell her.

  Isabel would watch their children bringing Mark gifts the way Crawford had long ago deposited decapitated rodents on their pillows with doe-eyed expectancy. Mark’s grownup children were anxious for a smile, even a nod, as he fastidiously unwrapped them. He always took a long time, careful not to tear the paper, folding it up neatly before turning to the object itself. But as he examined the offering, with a contemplative frown, all they ever got was a gruff thanks drowned out by her own vacuous cries of delight. How much more miserable would they have been if they had seen Mark after they had gone, communing with the Judge, brooding into his whiskey at the dining room table, as he teased out incontrovertible evidence of his children’s betrayal in the guise of a Liberty tie or a tan coloured Filofax of the softest Italian leather. The years had turned Mark into a well-dressed King Lear, who read only dissent in his children’s pathetic acts of love. Isabel had become adept at spinning a new take on events to render the day-to-day experience that makes up family history palatable. She would hurriedly weave a plausible explanation, even inventing nice things the children had said about Mark to comfort their disgruntled father or vice versa. In her late middle age she had constantly to wield this skill:

  ‘He was absolutely thrilled with the tie, wears it all the time.’

  ‘Gina wanted to get you something special. Isn’t that reason enough?’

  Yet Isabel had absorbed Mark’s dismal outlook. Perhaps he was right she decided, as Mark gracefully eddied in the middle of the pool, their time was up and their children were waiting in the wings to step into their shoes.

  Love had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Mark, I’m getting a drink, do you want one?’ He was pretending to be asleep to stop her claiming the lilo. To keep her out. To such pettiness had their lives been distilled.

  ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not for me.’ Fuck you!

  ‘I’m fine.’ With a flick, the lilo glided away.

  ‘When I come back, I want to lie on that,’ she warned.

  He raised his head in mock surprise at her tone.

  ‘As you like. I have to go anyway.’

  Mark must be going to Lewes after all. Despite her dismay Isabel refused to protest because it would be just the response he wanted. He knew perfectly well that Gina and Jon were arriving for lunch any minute, expecting him to be there. Indeed he had arranged it with Gina himself. Recently he had been acting perversely, leaving the house just before supper was served, going to bed early, setting off to the National Hospital in London where he still did consultancy, but instead driving into Brighton or Lewes. Or so he said when she’d told him she had rung the hospital and he wasn’t there. He didn’t care if he was caught out. Last Monday he had said he was working in his study, but when she had stuck her head round the door to tell him she was going out, he hadn’t been there. His car was still on the drive, but there was no sign of him. That afternoon Isabel had suddenly been reminded of herself as a young woman looking for Eleanor who had constantly concealed herself behind curtains, inside cupboards and under beds when she was wanted for anything. And on bad days Isabel’s memory would burrow even deeper to another search, one that most of the time she succeeded in forgetting about.

  Two weeks ago, as she had stood by Mark’s immaculately tidy desk, careful not to touch anything because he laid tiny tra
ps and would know if even a stapler had been moved, Isabel had found herself wondering if Mark was hiding from her. Despite the empty room, she had fancied she could hear breathing and had swept aside the curtain to see if he was standing stock-still behind it.

  Isabel had once dreaded that Mark would end up like his father, but she had never really believed it possible. As a young man, Mark had been so different from the grouchy old codger who got pleasure issuing death sentences; she had been confident Mark would always be cheerful and charming. But once they were married things had changed and now Mark was every inch that grouchy old codger. Isabel smiled bitterly at this description as she crossed the garden to get her drink. She had managed the Judge. She would go on managing Mark.

  The lawn had been mowed the day before. It was cut close like a carpet and was pleasingly springy under her bare feet. That was one thing: the garden looked the best it ever had.

  Flowers were mere pixels in Isabel’s grand design. The Mondrian bed, the heady lavender borders, her small patch of wild meadow, and the sculpted busts she had made in her pottery class and mounted on red brick plinths in surprise places all created an enchanted space. She had resisted topiary, to the dismay of Toby, the new young gardener, who had done a course. Hedges were only boundaries, delineating each area and leading the visitor on to the next. A tall beech hedge framed the Rose Garden on one side and on the other, as well as the lawn with Uncle Jack’s tree. The swimming pool had been her achievement. She had reclaimed the meadow behind the house, where Gina had planned to graze the horse she never got. Mark hadn’t wanted the pool: