A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  She was livid with Mark for leaving the police entirely to her, literally leaving them. She had told them she had been lying in the sun reading, and even described how the heat was somewhat mitigated by a refreshing cool wind and how her blue and white umbrella positioned to the left of her lounger shaded her face and book while allowing the rest of her to tan. Police liked detail.

  ‘Oh, and it was factor fifteen, in an orange squeezy thingy. No idea what’s happened to it. I’m sure I had it outside. Mark was lying on my lilo which my daughter, this one here, my eldest, gave to me last year.’

  She turned to Gina for confirmation. They needed corroboration. Statements backed with hard evidence:

  ‘It was last year, wasn’t it? Or the year before?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mum. They don’t care about the lilo.’ Gina had glowered at her toes. She blamed it all on Isabel, of course. Even today it was not Mark’s fault.

  ‘We went to the Caribbean the year before, so yes, it was last July.’ Gina’s commitment to accuracy got the better of her.

  Gina had gone to the hospital with Mark’s body, hovering possessively close as they zipped him up in a shiny black body bag and loaded him on to the gurney before wheeling him round the side of the house to the drive. Absurdly the wheels rattling over on the gravel reminded Isabel of a supermarket trolley and she had stifled a shout of laughter. She had expected Gina to be squeamish – as a girl she had been unable to contemplate her dead hamster – but she had been devout in her attention to her drowned father. She had even tried to make Isabel come in the ambulance too.

  ‘I’m not ill. There’s nothing the doctors can do for either of us, me or your father.’ She had already disowned him.

  ‘You’ve had a shock, they could sedate you.’

  ‘A large gin could do that.’ Isabel was shapeless in Jon’s gigantic pullover and Gina’s jodhpurs, which hung loosely on her thin legs. None of them had thought of going upstairs for her clothes, but had grabbed what they could find in Jon’s car. Her hair had dried in clumps but now there was no Mark to care. Or so she had said to Jon when he offered to find her a brush. She could see the dismay in her son-in-law’s chlorinated eyes, and knew that he saw Isabel’s abandonment of her appearance as a sign of madness. Perhaps it was. It was a long time since she had lived in the real world.

  Finally Isabel had upset Gina over the sun lounger. Her eldest child had never been good at relaxing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Isabel had found Gina in the hall filling out a label on the side of the cardboard box containing the luxury lounger.

  ‘I’m sorting this out. It’s not like anyone will want it.’ Gina gave the cardboard a thump.

  ‘I want it. I’ve been waiting absolutely ages for it. It’s come from Italy.’

  ‘Isn’t there enough to deal with? Police, forms, questions; a frightful mess?’ Gina continued to write, then she looked up and spat out: ‘There’s going to be a post mortem.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ For a brief moment, it was Mark. Isabel had never properly noticed how much Lucian resembled him. Had the quality of likeness changed now there was only Lucian?

  ‘Nothing.’ Gina had screwed up the address label and stood close beside the box.

  ‘We have to be a team on this one.’ Lucian was brisk.

  ‘On what one? No we fucking don’t.’ Isabel had snapped. ‘We just have to get through without ballsing up.’ Her children instantly became a team.

  ‘I’ll get scissors.’ Gina had moved towards the kitchen, but Lucian produced a blade from the key ring in his pocket and slid it precisely along the rim of the box.

  ‘Where do you want this? It’s um, rather busy at the pool.’ He grinned quickly and for a second she had back her young son.

  ‘Oh, stick it out the back. I can lie on the lawn at least.’

  Gina had elbowed Lucian out of the way and set to unpacking the bed and studying the cleaning instructions.

  In the hours after his death Isabel had been intent that Mark’s death should not stop her living as he had during life. But he was stopping her. Isabel’s lifestyle was being raked over and awarded marks. She wasn’t doing very well. She had told the police:

  ‘I went inside for some orange juice and when I came out my husband had gone.’ Gina had been beside her on the swinging Jack and Jill seat with frilly blue and white canopy a little way from the pool. The police had wanted to interview Isabel in the house, but she had said she couldn’t bear to be indoors on such a sunny day. Gina was holding her arm in a show of emotional support although it was Gina who needed it, so Isabel held her hand. The double seat swung if they moved only slightly so this arrangement kept them stable if nothing else.

  ‘So was that your husband’s gin and tonic by the side of the pool?’ The young man knew it wasn’t. Isabel was glad she had made him sit on a stool at their feet.

  ‘It was lunchtime, my daughter was due any minute.’ At this she had felt Gina stiffen as if unwilling to be implicated and Isabel became momentarily flustered.

  ‘Did I say orange? No the gin was mine.’ Silly old bag, he was thinking. Out of the corner of her eye, Isabel caught Gina biting her cheek, doing that dreadful face, pulling her mouth across like rubber. She already had lines around her mouth and now it might make her look unreliable. Isabel only just stopped herself from slapping Gina’s hand. The seat swayed, making the policeman teeter backwards to avoid being kicked.

  ‘Mark drinks whiskey,’ she added for good measure. Mark was not getting off scot-free.

  ‘So Mark had been drinking?’ The young man was sure of himself. He had soon dropped ‘Professor Ramsay’, no doubt the result of communication training. Use first names to make them feel at ease. Isabel remembered the detective talking to Eleanor when Alice Howland went missing. He had been deferentially polite, and never gave away what he was thinking. Perhaps he had been cleverer than she had given him credit for. He had never found Alice so he wasn’t that clever. She wondered if he was dead too, policemen died young, they worked such terrible hours.

  She had roused herself:

  ‘No, my husband said it was too early.’ She hadn’t meant to say that and quickly offered: ‘He was driving into Lewes. He never drinks if he’s driving.’

  Drank. She wasn’t in denial. She knew Mark had gone and was not kidding herself, saying ‘we’ because she couldn’t bear ‘I’, but it was too soon for past tense and besides she needed Mark to be in this with her. Later she caught a young constable – a boy – looking at her. She knew the expression, and felt a frisson of triumph that she could still inspire that look in the opposite sex.

  ‘Was he in a funny mood recently? Low, distracted, uncommunicative?’

  ‘Oh yes, always!’

  ‘Mum’s joking.’ Gina squeezed her arm. ‘You’re in shock, Mum. Is this okay? They can stop for now.’

  Isabel thought of Eleanor over thirty years ago, refusing to take Richard Thingummy’s questions seriously. Perhaps she was entering her second childhood.

  ‘Mark was the same as ever. There was nothing different about him.’ But there had been. Suddenly she knew what it had been like; Mark had behaved as if he was being hunted.

  ‘Is there anything special about today? The 6th of June, is that significant?’

  ‘Not remotely.’ She held his gaze. What could she say? There was no sense in mentioning Robert Kennedy, then they really would think she was mad.

  ‘You had no idea he was going to do this?’

  ‘Are we assuming he knew he was going to do it?’ she had replied archly.

  The interview by the side of the pool was punctuated by a bubbling sound that might have been relaxing had it been a water feature. It was the car shifting in the water. Actually it was a water feature. She had snorted with sudden laughter, startling the police and making Gina squirm, which in turn rocked the swing seat and unsettled the policeman.

  ‘You think your husband accidentally drove his car into the swimming pool?�
�� The man would have been openly sarcastic if death and status hadn’t been involved.

  ‘Of course.’ She thrust out a long jodhpured leg. The policeman flinched. ‘He was on the lilo when I left the garden. He had to hurry, to get to Lewes and be back in time for lunch.’

  ‘Strange time to choose to go out, with guests due any minute, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘They weren’t guests, they were family. We don’t stand on ceremony.’

  ‘How long were you in the house, Mrs Ramsay?’

  Gina was watching her.

  ‘How long does it take to make a gin and tonic?’

  The policeman had raised his eyebrows in a ‘you tell me’ way, probably relieved his own mother didn’t drink gin in the day.

  ‘Minutes, I suppose, I don’t know, maybe five, maybe ten? I took my time, I had no…’

  She stopped mid-sentence. She could read his mind: ‘Strange woman, not shed a tear, drinks at all hours, lies about it, keeps laughing at odd moments. The minute she’s out the way, husband slams his car into the pool and drowns and she doesn’t bat an eyelid.’ Isabel was crying inside but that didn’t count. She wanted to go back to lying in the sun with Mark doing graceful circles on the lilo. She wasn’t ready for this phase of her life.

  Now she trailed across to their bed and, finding Jon’s jumper folded on Mark’s side, hauled it over her head and rolling up the sleeves, prepared to go downstairs. She didn’t want to be on her own any more. There would be enough time for that.

  Fifteen

  Just as Isabel had guessed, her children and their partners were in a tight group around the kitchen table vainly trying to weigh up the consequences of what Jon had dubbed with transparent enthusiasm ‘a total fuck up’. It was not that Jon lacked feeling, he had always been intent on gaining the admiration of his father-in-law, but he was at his most congruent full tilt in a crisis. This was his chance, now they would see him come into his own. The pity was that the one Ramsay he most wanted to impress was dead. In the hours after Mark was taken to hospital, everyone had vied for supremacy in practical prowess as lists were drawn up and then ripped up, and scenarios of the future were described and dismissed. Everything led back to the big question: what had really happened?

  ‘I doubt very much it was an accident.’ Jon had forgotten the emotional implications, so carried away was he with vaunting specialist knowledge and infinite capability. ‘There might have been time to get out of the car, if the windows were up. But he had wound them down. Besides what was he doing there? He’d had to drive out of his way to be in the pool.’

  ‘Of course it was an accident. That’s not up for debate.’ This from Lucian. ‘It’s summer, do you drive with the windows up in this heat?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got air-con so…’

  ‘That old car was knackered and Dad was tired, he works harder than you and I put together.’ He glared at Jon who failing to heed the beady scowl cantered on happily.

  ‘Hey, but you know, the great thing is that those camera tapes will tell us. Funny how we all banged on at the old man about them, and now he’s been proved right. We’ll have the whole thing on film. I’ll tell the police first thing tomorrow.’ Jon persisted in referring to Mark Ramsay as ‘the old man’, thinking it made him sound rakish and one of the family.

  ‘That film is none of their business. Besides, let me be the judge.’

  Then Caroline, Lucian’s girlfriend who had never felt the precarious nature of her relationship with him more than now, and spurred on by Jon’s seeming disregard for Lucian’s authority, chose this moment to mention Mrs Ramsay’s ‘problems’. Alliances solidified. Lucian and Gina closed ranks and closed down the discussion.

  The two out-laws made mumbled exits:

  ‘Check the garden, lock up the house, run baths…’

  Soon after this Isabel appeared in the doorway. Her wispy and hesitant demeanour, one hand on her stomach, the other on the door jamb, brought their whispered conspiracy to a stop just as a little girl’s unwanted presence had done in the same room years before. Lucian screeched back his chair as he leapt up to pour his mother the last of the cocoa from the pan on the Rayburn into the mug that Gina snatched up off the dish rack.

  After Isabel had returned to her bedroom with her drink, unable after all to bear the company of her children, Lucian and Gina stayed sitting at the table like statues keeping vigil in stony bewilderment, as the sun set on the last day in this world that included their father.

  Sixteen

  When Chris had opened the bedroom door, Alice snapped shut her eyes, and pretended to be asleep until at last she heard her go away. Chris had not gone to the launderette, but Alice could hardly blame her. Her behaviour earlier that evening would have seemed peculiar, and in the morning she must make up for it. Alice lay on her back and tuned into the sounds of the building. The creaks, hisses, bangs and whines orchestrated the lives of residents as they did her own. The woman upstairs had gone to the lavatory five minutes ago. She had heard the intermittent trickling followed by a rushing of the waste pipes in the wall behind her head. Alice hated having such intimate knowledge of her neighbours, although perversely her distaste provoked a prurient obsession with these secret existences and she would listen out for them. Alice was the possessor of facts that no one else knew.

  Then she heard Chris’s radio: a thin chattering interrupted by music emerging into a track she recognised, ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. She had once remarked that she liked it. Perhaps Chris would remember this and might now be thinking fondly of her. Alice wanted the music to do the work of reconciliation for her. It was unlikely. Finally there was nothing but thoughts inside the gothic Victorian tenement as it fell into uneasy night silence.

  At one o’clock it was safe to get up.

  Alice shrugged on her dressing gown, a size too big: a peril of mail order. Her feet fished around in the dark for slippers. Amber light from the lamppost in the quadrangle gave the living room an uncanny appearance, filtering out vitality, memories; all specificity. Alice crept in with the spatial unfamiliarity of a visitor.

  She saw immediately that the casserole stain had vanished, and kneeling down she ruefully touched the damp rug in front of the fire. The gas fire was where she always heard the voices. This was how Alice knew they were real. If they had been inside her head, they would be everywhere.

  At first she had assumed it was a television in one of the other flats. But then getting so close to the blue and orange flames that her cheek stung, she had worked out that they came from behind the heater and were too unruly and spasmodic to be scripted. Arguing. Shouting. Soothing tones of making up. There was a child crying, a voice that might be a man interrupting. Sometimes the voices weren’t talking to each other, but speaking in isolation, like a bedtime story or a stern lecture and then the boy or girl laughing or perhaps crying. Alice rarely caught actual words although she was certain they were speaking in English from the inflections. If Alice did hear words, like exceptional, beautiful, special, they were like her own thoughts.

  Alice hadn’t yet told Chris about the voices but did wonder if she had heard them too. Chris would be matter of fact and say they’d come from next door. But there was a stairwell on the other side of the chimney and the voices were constant, not those of passers by. At other times she liked to imagine they were the inhabitants of the world inside the mirror. Now she put out her hand and touched the wall above the fire. Perhaps they had been trapped inside the wall. Was she hearing their ghosts forever calling, pleading, destined never to be heard or believed? Perhaps it was the people who had lived here a hundred years before. Or was it that all rooms were busy with the palimpsest natter of past conversations that the living were mostly too preoccupied to hear? Mostly Alice couldn’t think of the place beyond the gas fire as a brick tomb. She preferred it to be a room with pools of lamplight and filled with easy companionship. There were no voices tonight.

  Alice had not got up to hear the voices; grabbi
ng the newspaper she settled on the sofa, and less cautious, switched on the light.

  The White House had been at its best in the summer: draped in laburnum and lilac, lattice windows flung wide, hanging baskets shapeless with so many frowsy blooms. But in the photograph the line of the diving board led the eye away from this backdrop to a large green car hanging from a crane over the water.

  The word suicide was not used in the article. Lucian Ramsay insisted his father was happy. Mark Ramsay loved his family. She frowned at the gas fire; did loving people make you happy? It seemed that he had rammed his car through a fence into a swimming pool. She knew he was a strong swimmer. He had taught all his children to swim. All the Ramsays knew how to get out of their pyjamas and up to the surface in less than a minute. Alice had always been mocking. She had asked Eleanor what the point of it was. If you were in bed, why would you be likely to drown? She had argued that getting out of daytime clothes would be more realistic. Alice thought this now.

  She knew how to escape from a car underwater. She had heard Dave Allen explaining it on the radio. She knew to wait until the car was almost full of water and the pressure inside the same as the pressure outside, then push open the door and swim out. Simple.