A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Mark Henry Ramsay

  20th November 1925 – 6th June 1999

  The Dead Professor.

  Chris knew nothing remarkable about this man except the bizarre way he had died. The mass of this ignorance, literally a body of uncharted facts, lured her closer. What had the woman been writing? Who was she? This man might have given her answers. He might have consoled her. They might have consoled each other. But she had arrived too late.

  Mark Ramsay’s grave was but a marker for the magnificent marble headstone with forbidding lead lettering that stood next to it. The marble was pristine, unblemished by the years, which Chris calculated dated from when the first name was carved on it – Rosamund Ramsay – in 1934. The shiny stone contrasted with the state of the grave itself, a rampant weed bed entirely merging with the surrounding grass. The neglect was callous. Yet the leaden words said that Mrs Ramsay and her husband Judge Henry Ramsay, who had died in 1958 and was buried beside her, were ‘greatly missed by their children, Virginia and Mark’.

  Chris was familiar with graveyards. Before they’d graduated to pubs, she and her friends would sit on a bench in the cemetery behind the school, passing round Red Bull and vodka in a plastic toothmug and spinning preferred realities. Pock-marked angels with spread wings cast gravity on teenage sagacity, as they made up torrid lives for the dead surrounding them from scant tombstone information. One woman had lost her husband in the First World War and all her sons in the Second. Another had ten children and died aged thirty-eight. There had been no words engraved for Pauline Davies who had died aged twenty-one in 1972, just the glazed image of a happy face, with a dreadful hair-do. They had let this pass as they searched for signs of her impending doom in Pauline’s too-red lips and bright brown eyes, looking for what made her different and would ensure their own immortality. There had been no clue except the awful hairstyle. The group would straggle on by, eager to put death behind them.

  Chris had always gleaned reassurance from the brevity of the words on the headstones. People were born, they were related to other people and then they died. The facts of life.

  Now she sat down on a bench beside the Ramsay plot and from a comparatively safe distance stared at the graves, willing them to yield their secrets. She felt a tickling on her cheek and reaching up to scratch it, her fingers came away wet; she was crying, maybe that was why the lady with the notebook had been weird with her.

  The sun was dropping down behind the downs, and Judge Ramsay’s headstone cast a long shadow across his scrubby plot. Between the inches that separated Mark Ramsay from his parents there were over forty years. The child who had ‘greatly missed’ his father was now dead himself, with his own children to miss him. Or not. Where were the years? Were they in the rustling leaves of the ash, the chunks of soil, the lichen-covered stone? Were they around her now, the hundreds of minutes experienced, the birthdays, the family holidays or Sunday lunches? Moments like this, when sitting still she could hear the engines and gears of all the lived lives? The woman who wasn’t Alice had said there was no Heaven and Chris had thought this idea reasonable. But what happened to all the seconds that amounted to a life?

  ‘That’s your grandfather.’

  The whispering voice made Chris start. Then with a rush of delight and relief she put out her hands. Her Mum was here. The next instant white heat urged her to smash Alice to pieces.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I came to find you.’ Her reply was addressed to the freshly dug grave. She was holding a twig in one hand and flicked it over the fingers of her other hand, leaves fluttering and tearing.

  ‘Well, you found me. So piss off!’ Chris was tugged with vicious insecurity at the sight of her Mum, baffled and vulnerable, looking with such desolation at the flimsy cross. There was no one to step out of a crowd and save Chris from kicking, stamping and smashing her mother’s face into silence with a chunk of flint.

  ‘Haven’t you seen a grave before?’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘Couldn’t even be arsed to get a proper headstone. Like that ugly bastard of a mausoleum.’ She waved impotent arms at Judge Ramsay’s tombstone. ‘Is that false too? Going to take it away as soon as I’ve gone, are you?’

  ‘Apparently it’s being carved, this is temporary. And the ground has to settle.’ Eleanor had not meant to point out Chris’s ignorance and reveal her knowledge of the Ramsays’ affairs. ‘Oh, Chris.’ She turned to her, not bothering to dash away the tears that trickled down her cheeks. ‘He’s your grandfather!’

  ‘Whatever. Until the next lie.’

  ‘I know you’re cross.’ Eleanor could see that Chris sniffed insincerity in her clumsy choice of words. Sometimes the truth didn’t speak for itself.

  ‘I don’t think you do.’ Now Chris too addressed Mark Ramsay’s grave.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you. Quite the reverse.’

  ‘‘Quite the reverse’ oh, lah de dah. She’s got new words to go with the new name. Who do you think you are to lecture me!’ Chris gulped for air and added with self-conscious triumph: ‘In fact who do you think you are? Does anyone know? Or was it just me you lied to?’

  ‘Chris, please…’ Eleanor couldn’t sound as upset as she felt. She had grown too adept at being someone else.

  ‘It’s only stupid-git-features here, who thought her Mum was Alice Kennedy, the Agoraphobic of Bermondsey…doh! So who are you today? Elea-nor-Ram-say!’ She put on an upper class intonation, as she spat out the syllables.

  Eleanor shrank back, unable to disguise her fear of her own daughter. Chris realised with a jolt that she couldn’t remember when she had last seen her Mum out of doors. Eleanor was dazzled by the sunlight. Chris pictured her Mum behind the partial screen of the lace curtains or with her kindly features softened by the light of the gas fire. She was still holding the strange handbag that had confused Chris earlier. She was an indecisive figure, the dainty handbag incongruous because Eleanor wasn’t collected enough or tidy enough for its understated elegance.

  Eleanor’s legs were unsteady and her attempts to hide this were pathetic. Of course, her Mum was frightened to be outside. It must be torture to her to be so exposed.

  No, that was another story. Yet anger briefly ebbed as Chris saw her Mum did genuinely seem to be upset. She would part her hair, numbering the different coloured flecks – brown, gold, blonde, no silver at all.

  You’ll never be old to me.

  ‘I will go if you want me to. I could wait for you at the station.’

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Chris spoke evenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’ Nasty now.

  ‘My mother…Isabel Ramsay gave it to me, just now. Your grandmother.’ A futile placation. The bag incriminated her. She couldn’t tell her daughter she had accepted it only because she had seen that Isabel hadn’t known what to do with her. She couldn’t explain that it had touched her that her mother had tried so hard to make a maternal gesture. Neither of them had been able to talk properly because they never had.

  She had not told Isabel she had only come to fetch her daughter, after which she was going to leave again. Her mother had been so happy to see her, so that when she hadn’t found Chris at the White House, Eleanor had lost volition and had submitted to Isabel’s uncharacteristic stream of hyperbolic chatter that had culminated in the handbag. Isabel had snatched it off a pile of jumble in the utility room and thrust it into her hands. None of this could she explain to Chris.

  Chris knew Eleanor tossed in the word ‘grandmother’ as stale bread to a duck and had noted her mother’s snap decision to stand her ground as Chris advanced towards her. She didn’t even flinch as Chris tore the bag off her, wrenched it open, ripping the gold clasp from the flap, and tipped it upside-down. The contents spilled on to the grass. Chris’s arm described an arc as she prepared to smash the bag down on her mother’s head, but at the last moment she hurled it over the top of the gravestones. It smashed through the branches, and in a sh
ower of leaves landed in the wheat field behind the churchyard wall.

  Her mother didn’t react and Chris was afraid of the blatant misery in her face. There was no satisfaction in defeating the defeated.

  Who was this well-spoken stranger?

  ‘So are you just going to stand there?’ Chris demanded.

  Eleanor scuffed a toe in the ground, kicking up dust.

  ‘I hate the bloody thing anyway.’ Eleanor did not sound convincing. After so long doing a good imitation of Alice, she had forgotten how to do herself.

  ‘Yet, you were happy to be given handouts by Mummy, and forget about me. Go there a lot do you, while I’m at school, or doing the shopping or the washing.’

  ‘It was for you.’

  ‘You got a stupid cast-off from your mother for me?’

  ‘No, I mean all of it. The going into hiding and changing my name. It was all for you.’ Eleanor regretted the trite words – too Alice. Except there was no Alice.

  Chris sat up unnaturally straight on the bench, the muscles in her temples and jaw twitching. Eleanor desperately wanted to comfort her. She was moved by her child’s valiant effort to be unaffected. Chris had been thrown into the situation by her own mother.

  Eleanor was stunned by what she had done. It had been a minute-by-minute thing with extraordinary consequences. With a dull and crushing recognition like a glimpse of death, Eleanor saw she had lost the right to Chris’s love the day she went to the Tide Mills with Alice. The soon-to-be-nine-year-old was too young to know she was stepping into Hell.

  ‘Let me get this right. I’m on a train going to Alice Howland’s mother to tell her that her missing girl was very much alive and living near the Elephant and Castle, and you’re sneaking out and running back to your real mother when she’s meant to be dead in a car crash!’ She finished with a strangled shout: ‘You were never Alice! You’re a liar. You fucking bitch!’ Chris had only ever spoken to Alice this way in her head. How good it would be to go back to the time when the only problem she’d had was how to tell her Mum that she’d had sex with a supply teacher and not had a period for five weeks. How innocent she had been to think that the arrival of her period signalled the end to her worries.

  ‘That’s not right,’ her mother protested.

  Chris snapped her head round and Eleanor froze.

  Chris looked down at the clutter of objects scattered in the rough grass. She loved them for the picture of Alice they eloquently portrayed. A nail file, a packet of tissues, a used foil of aspirins half hidden by a blue plastic packet with ‘Handy Shopper’ printed in slanting writing. Her diary had landed half open, its spine broken by the fall. Chris had given it to her for Christmas. She must have grabbed all this stuff before leaving, as usual thinking of every eventuality. Chris hadn’t thought of buying her a handbag, because she never went out.

  They both knew Alice wanted the bag. They both saw Alice leaning over, pulling it up, and methodically replacing her things. Tidying up. She would want to check if the clasp could be saved and give the leather a buff with a tissue.

  Eleanor didn’t care. The bag was too small and ladylike to hold anything useful.

  They both knew that if Alice got the bag sorted, they could go back to Bermondsey and carry on as before.

  But there was no such person as Alice.

  ‘So how was it then?’

  ‘When I rang you, you said you were with my mother. You have no idea what that did.’ Eleanor stole a furtive glance at Chris and emboldened by her stony silence continued:

  ‘I didn’t think of Mrs Howland. I assumed you were with Isabel Ramsay, I came to get you.’

  ‘So how come your name is Alice?’ Chris’s voice quavered.

  ‘People change their names. It’s normal.’ As soon as she heard the words, Eleanor saw her mistake. Unless she told the truth without excuses or expecting sympathy, Chris would go. Already it was probably too late.

  ‘Don’t patronise me!’ Chris was on her feet. ‘I know people change their names! What I want to know is why you did. You changed your whole life, don’t tell me that’s ‘normal’. You pretended to be a missing schoolgirl and lied to me, your own child. That’s if I am yours.’ She held up her hand. ‘There’s nothing you can say. I thought my grandparents died in a car accident. Me and Emma even went to that brewery where you said they were killed and put flowers there. I’ve always thought you were all the family I had.’

  ‘She wasn’t just a schoolgirl. Nobody knew what Alice was really like.’ Eleanor was talking to herself. ‘She could be so cruel.’

  ‘I don’t care about Alice.’ Chris stalked over to her mother, and coming up close like the boys in the playground, she jabbed her hard on the chest.

  ‘You were my Mum. Have you ever thought of that?’ She pushed her roughly. ‘You’ve taken my whole life away by pretending to be a girl you didn’t even like?’ Her speech was blurred with sobbing. ‘And you call that being a mother? You’re mental.’

  Chris was breathing through her teeth, a gulping hissing.

  ‘Chrissie, I have nothing in my life other than you. You’re the point of it.’

  ‘I’m so grateful!’ Chris punctuated the exclamation with another push, rougher this time, even though she guessed her Mum was telling the truth. She saw her wince, then hide it. Her Mum would stand there taking it. Chris punched her hard on the shoulder, knocking her backwards.

  ‘Why?’ Her voice was low and grating.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Eleanor would not cry. She knew what Chris meant.

  ‘Why did you call yourself Alice?’

  A small plane buzzed high overhead, and on the other side of the church a car engine purred into a rev as it drove up the lane; there was the bass boom of a snatch of ‘Baby One More Time’. The village was coming to life, but neither woman noticed.

  ‘I’ve done my best to make it up to Alice.’

  ‘Make up for what?’

  Eleanor stepped away and with her back to Chris she gazed far into the distance at the point where the downs became the sky where she wished she could be:

  ‘For killing her.’

  Twenty-Five

  Kathleen was worn out. She had been astounded to find the Ramsay sisters on her doorstep. People said children were resilient and being young they didn’t feel things. Kathleen had always doubted this. Alice had been very sensitive.

  Eleanor Ramsay had barely spoken and, with a shake of her head, had refused tea when her sister had just accepted, which made Gina change her mind. The girls had looked no more at ease with each other than they had when Kathleen had first met them that fateful summer. When Kathleen told them that a young lady who had said she was a reporter had turned out to be yet another sightseer, Gina had said she was appalled and wanted to call the police, while Eleanor had said nothing. Then just as Kathleen was reassuring Gina that she didn’t think the girl had meant any harm, Eleanor had announced she had to leave and fled the house before Gina could go with her. It was a long time since Kathleen had recalled the suspicion that the detective had confided to her in the garden where Steve couldn’t overhear. After the Ramsays had left it came back to her clearly.

  She hadn’t cared for Detective Inspector Hall and for this reason made more effort with him. He was like a cat, drawn to her because he sensed her dislike. Most people took Steve to one side if they had something unpleasant to talk about, like the search of their cottage or of the Tide Mills and the day they dragged the river. They supposed Steve was the stronger one and could absorb bad news. But after a while Richard Hall realised this wasn’t the case, or maybe he preferred to talk to Kathleen.

  He led her out into the little garden, guiding her with a cupped hand on her elbow, which she had resented for its suggestion that she had lost so much she couldn’t walk unaided. Over time Kathleen came to see that this insistent protection was more complicated. While Isabel Ramsay intrigued and disturbed him, Kathleen Howland was Richard Hall’s ideal woman. In the first few days after Ali
ce’s disappearance, she too was bathed in an innocence that over time, as she failed to fit people’s expectations of a grieving mother, eroded. At the time her maternal mimings with her arms flailing in an empty embrace, made sense to him.

  Like Jackie Masters, he said he had understood about the sandwiches and the freshly ironed nightie on the freshly washed pillow.

  As their feet sank into the soft soil around Steve’s vegetable plot, Richard Hall’s proximity, so close she could sniff waves of minty breath, revolted Kathleen. She remembered noticing that one of the canes for the runner beans had snapped under the weight of the plant and thinking she must tell Steve. Then in the same thought she had known not to bother. Steve had lost his love for the garden and let his plants and flowers run wild or die. He too had broken under the weight.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t like the attitude of the youngest Ramsay girl.’ He seemed to suppose Kathleen shared his contempt for the Ramsay family and their privilege. Once upon a time this privilege would have earned them automatic respect from men like Richard Hall.

  ‘Eleanor Ramsay?’

  ‘Her story doesn’t add up. She isn’t one bit bothered by any of this. I gather she’s a handful at the best of times, but now she’s too clever by halves. The idea beggars belief, but we have to keep our minds open.’

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘I’m giving mileage to the theory that this Eleanor had a bit of a run in with Alice and things got out of hand.’

  ‘For pity’s sake, don’t waste your time bothering Eleanor Ramsay. What you’re really saying is my Alice is dead.’ She had been frightened by her words.