A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  Trotting and skipping like a young girl, Eleanor led Chris out of the village, scrambling through a hedge when there was a perfectly good gate and running helter-skelter across a stubbly field. Chris was imperturbable as Eleanor leapt over a stile; she followed with deliberate reluctance, determined to provide a sober contrast to her mother’s strangely skittish state. Soon she had no choice but to caper beside her, for Eleanor grasped her hand and Chris was pulled and tugged along over a pot-holed lane that ended at a six-foot-high wall, topped by rounded bricks coated in yellow and white lichen. There were holes where the wall had crumbled, creating windows with a vista of gnarled fruit trees. Assuming the authority of a tour guide, Eleanor explained that the trees were the remains of a pear orchard. This was the garden of the Mill Owner who had run the thriving mill, its hours dictated by the tides, in the mid-nineteenth century. Over a hundred people had once lived here, at one point making flour for the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Most of the houses were demolished during the Second World War to stop the Germans using them for cover, but a whole section of the big house had survived until the late sixties.

  ‘You must remember me telling you about the crane with the massive metal ball that swung back and forth, smashing into the walls? Like the one we saw from my bedroom when they knocked down the Bricklayer’s Arms station? I saw it here first. The noise was deafening. It was a fantastic sight, but I was devastated when I came back straight after breakfast the next morning and found everything reduced to rubble. I hadn’t stopped to think what would happen in the end.’

  ‘What’s new?’

  Chris snatched away her hand.

  Eleanor leaned on the makeshift sill of a hole in the wall, talking fast as she described the row of workers’ cottages beyond the orchard; the blacksmith’s, the carpenter’s shop. In a minute she would show Chris the last remaining millpond and then the railway track that carried the grain away from the Granary to the halt on the main line. They had passed it on their way down, now reduced to a stranded platform, marooned in a thick tangle of nettles and hawthorn. They had waited by the crossing on the branch line. Eleanor had made Chris listen out to be sure there was no train, although the line was grown over and there hadn’t been a train since the 1930s. She had got very excited by an ancient signboard covered in graffiti, and had insisted on spending ages working out the word Bongville behind the staccato scrawl. She said the name had been painted on the sign in the sixties, and that Alice had said it was rude, but Eleanor couldn’t see why. Nor could she now. Chris couldn’t either, but said nothing. So far, she thought coming down here was a waste of time, but Kathleen had pleaded with her to make an effort to get to know her real mother. For once, Chris decided, Kathleen was wrong. Eleanor Ramsay was an embarrassing and pathetic middle-aged woman.

  They came across a narrow path overshadowed by the high wall, and had to pick their way over the uneven ground, moving branches out of the way to avoid being slashed across the face. They tripped up on the remains of a fire glittering with bent and crushed drinks cans. Later, as they had to avoid twists of shit-stained tissue, Chris could see nothing secret about this place. Despite her intransigence she was disappointed. They emerged into a clearing that Eleanor told her had been the back garden of the Mill Owner’s house and was where she had once planted a secret flowerbed. There was no sign of Eleanor’s garden. All her nasturtiums had gone.

  Then the flinty path gave way to a two-foot square section of terracotta tiles surrounded by a tide of coarse grass and moss. Suddenly Eleanor was on the ground scrabbling at the soil, tearing up clumps of turf, ripping away long tresses of ivy to reveal more tiles.

  ‘This was the kitchen in the big house. I once dissected a dead cat near here. You would’ve been in your element. It was a great place to find dead animals. The entrance hall had these brilliant diamond shaped tiles in a really complicated black and white pattern, oh in fact, like the ones on the ground floor at the White House. I’ll show you.’

  ‘No way. I’m not going.’

  ‘They must be somewhere under those bushes over there.’ Eleanor talked in bursts as with the sharp edge of a flint she cut away a section of moss and then buffed the exposed tile with the spit-wetted heel of her palm. Chris lost patience and nudged her shoulder; the task was pointless. Now the tiles would be nicked.

  ‘No they won’t. No one comes here but me. Help me; who cares about a bit of dirt.’

  Chris hung back.

  ‘Come on! Don’t be like that.’

  Chris got down beside Eleanor and sulkily snapped off a couple of blades of grass. Then, making a bit more effort, she lifted off a whole tussock of coarse grass to reveal three tiles at once. Despite herself Chris was triumphant, and grabbing a stone she used it to saw away the moss and sever the thick ivy stems. She had spent most of her life wishing her Mum would do things outside with her and now she was. Soon they had cleared another square foot. It really looked like a floor.

  ‘This’ll take all afternoon, there’s lots to show you.’ Eleanor flung down her flint: ‘I’ll come another day to finish it. I want you to see my cottage. Where I carved my name.’

  Eleanor paused at the bottom of a steep slope. She stroked Chris’s sleeve briefly, but Chris shook her off. ‘I told the police we played near my house and that I last saw Alice in the lane, just before the bend.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We were here. Just over this hill is where she was counting.’

  They climbed up a steep incline, helped by steps cut into the chalk. Over time these had lost definition, and it was hard to get a foothold, so that they had to use gorse branches to keep their balance.

  ‘This goes to the beach.’ Eleanor’s febrile chatter infuriated Chris whose own past had been demolished by a swinging ball. Her mother was only intent on justifying her lies, and crushing Chris’s own memories under the weight of more of her stories. Chris wished she hadn’t come.

  They got to the top and were brought up short by a metal fence that ended in jagged spikes exactly like the one at the back of their flat in Bermondsey. They gripped the bars while they got their breath and stared uncomprehending through them to a huge aluminium structure with vast orange and wood panels clamped to its side. A Sainsbury’s Superstore. Chris recognised it as the one she shopped in with Kathleen every Friday morning. A man in a forklift truck, moving with the erratic swivelling of a dodgem car, was unloading a tower of boxes from a lorry. In the distance they could hear smashing glass from the bottle banks in the car park. The discordant sound orchestrated Eleanor’s shock. A landscape had been wiped away. The crumbling flint wall at the bottom of the hill and a few kitchen floor tiles were all that was left of the Tide Mills.

  Eleanor clutched the railings.

  ‘I left Alice counting over there to the left of that doorway. It’s impossible to be sure exactly where.’

  ‘There’s a salad bar there now.’

  The path continued along the side of the fence. The place where Alice had last been seen had vanished too. Alice might never have existed.

  ‘This is the hill I ran down to hide.’ Eleanor spoke as if in a trance. ‘I hid in those bushes halfway down on the right. I found his handkerchief on the path. I said I got it off the ironing pile. I didn’t tell the police it was Dad’s.’ Eleanor put her hand to her mouth.

  Chris felt sick. It was the first time she had referred to the dead professor as ‘Dad’ since she stopped being Alice.

  ‘You said you lied to the police about where you hid. Why was anyone searching here?’ Chris stared dubiously at the bushes lining the slope down to the sea. A child would be cut to shreds hiding in there. They would risk breaking their neck falling down the sharp drop on to the shingle. She scanned the beach wistfully as a cold sharp wind blew the hair away from her face. On one side the stretch of shingle was enclosed by a chalk outcrop and at the far end by a huge pile of boulders near to which a group of young blokes were playing Frisbee. There had been a girl at her scho
ol who had refused to see her Mum after she walked out on her Dad. Chris had thought she could never cut herself off from hers. Now this is what she planned to do. As soon as she could, she would make an excuse and go.

  ‘Why couldn’t you just tell the truth?’ Chris asked gruffly. No, don’t answer that.

  ‘I would have got in trouble for coming here. I said we played near the house. Alice hadn’t wanted to. She always did what she was told. But oddly that afternoon she said we could do whatever I wanted. I should have realised she was up to something; she had never been so eager to please before.’

  Eleanor stepped off the track and thrust her way through a mass of thick brambles down the steep hill. After a few feet she stopped and looked out towards the sea, behaving like the last surviving explorer on a desert island, scanning the horizon for a rescue ship. Then she turned back to the hillside and indicated the dense shrubland.

  ‘I hid somewhere over there. It’s so changed. It’s grown so much.’ She wasn’t talking to Chris. ‘I heard footsteps. I didn’t dare look in case I gave myself away.’

  ‘So where exactly did you kill her and what did you do with her body?’ Chris was humouring her now. She hadn’t worked out which was worse; to have killed someone or be so mad that you thought you had.

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Chris hated that she still loved her. She had hoped staying with Kathleen would break the suffocating connection. But when Eleanor had arrived at the cottage that morning, Kathleen had been kind to her so Chris had felt obliged to be the same. Kathleen had told Chris a lot about Eleanor. How she had been so much fun as a child, making everyone laugh, and so imaginative. Never a dull moment.

  ‘I once found myself wishing my Alice would be more like her. She was such a free spirit. But in the end she was fine as she was. I did feel sorry for Eleanor because she was called naughty when really she was just different. I think she meant well.’

  Chris marvelled at how Kathleen could be so saintly about a child who had killed her daughter. None of it made sense. Kathleen had stopped Chris going to the police, or even to the doctor’s. Although she had grown very fond of Kathleen in only a short time, Chris was now sure Kathleen too was lying.

  There was only one way to find out the truth.

  ‘Okay, I’ll come to your house.’ She was careful to be casual because her Mum would change her mind if she guessed the real reason. ‘See them all and that…’

  Eleanor contemplated the sea. It was tourist brochure blue. A strip of mirrored sand glistened between the straggling strata of wet pebbles and the encroaching water. She would like to have stripped off and dived into it. Closing her eyes as the cold water stopped her heart.

  Who was the man in white trousers talking to a little girl? They were too far away for her to see their faces. Eleanor couldn’t get to them that way, because the tide was coming in and would quickly cut her off. Already it had washed away their footprints. Their voices were lost in the crashing waves. They had only been a trick of the light. When she next looked the beach was empty.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Chris expected her at least to be grateful.

  ‘Come for Sunday lunch. I’ll get everyone over. Or is it too…’

  ‘No, it’s fine. Get them all.’ She would need to observe the whole family.

  Chris let Eleanor trail off down the path. Her coat was open, her shirt coming out of her jeans and her hair was sticking up at angles. She hadn’t been taking care of herself. Yet, in the jaunty step, the nimble hopping across ruts and stones, Chris saw again the woman she had glimpsed dancing to David Bowie. Once upon a time she had wished she could have a mother like this woman leaping and jumping through bushes to the beach. Now it was too late.

  Eleanor loped over the loose shingle and flopped down at the foot of the cliff. She had been sure she could bring Chris round if she would agree to meet her. Today’s journey had not been wasted. She shut her eyes and listened to the ceaseless whoosh and hush of the incoming tide. That sound had come through the open windows in the evenings as, tucked in by Lizzie and waiting for her Mum to come upstairs and kiss her good night, Eleanor would drift off to sleep lulled by its rhythm. It would still be there when they had all gone home after the holidays. It was there the day Alice went missing.

  Isabel hadn’t come. When her Dad crept into the room, Eleanor had pretended to be asleep.

  ‘I brought you here when you were a baby. Isabel persuaded me to.’

  ‘What, right here on the beach?’

  ‘Yes, you and me and my mother. An odd little party. Then my Dad turned up. Isabel had said he was in London. Now I think she was telling the truth. She was as appalled as me. He carried you down to the shoreline to show you the sea.’

  ‘Did we come by train?’ Did you walk with me in your arms down the quiet road to the church?

  ‘Yes. Then we left. They didn’t stop me. It was you they wanted. To be touched by innocence.’

  ‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Chris went cold. Eleanor was crying. Not in her usual way with sobs and loud sniffs, but silently, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand like a kid. If Chris ran now, she’d have a head start.

  But Eleanor would know where to find her. There would be no more hiding.

  ‘I saw him in London about ten years ago. He was following me. I dodged down an alleyway. He came into the alley, but I was behind a dustbin. He could easily have found me, but he’d never have thought I was hiding from him. So he went away. I didn’t come out of that stinking passage for an hour. After that I never went out.’

  ‘Did you think he was going to hand you over to the police? After all, he didn’t at the time.’

  Eleanor sat up and dried her face with the flat of her hands. She looked tired and beleaguered, yet there was more life in her features than Chris had seen before. She could imagine Eleanor as a young girl rampaging through the countryside bareback on an imaginary horse. Except that she was frightened of horses.

  In another life Chris could have been happy here too.

  ‘As each day went by, you and I were building up a new past.’

  ‘How could you be so stupid?’ Chris was angry with herself for still wanting to soothe her and stop her crying. ‘I’ve never been real. Even today you only wanted me here to listen to your stories and let you off the hook.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ But it was. Eleanor had never bothered to find out the second name of the boy in the bathroom, because he meant nothing to her. Yet he was Chris’s father. Now he too had vanished and with him the Renault garage where he had worked, demolished to make way for executive flats while Chris was still a baby. Eleanor had robbed Chris of her own story and substituted only fantasies and phantoms.

  ‘I have always been me with you.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I always loved you.’

  ‘You don’t know what love is. You’re off your head!’

  ‘Don’t be like this.’ Eleanor got up and came towards her.

  Chris backed away and rushed back up the hill. At the top she looked back and saw the silver roof of Sainsbury’s twinkling in the wintery sunshine where the Tide Mills had once been. For a moment Chris thought it possible Eleanor had been real with her. Then she dismissed the idea. Tomorrow she would worm her way into the Ramsay family. Eleanor wasn’t the only one who could play spies.

  Chris would do what Eleanor had avoided doing.

  She would find Alice.

  Twenty-Nine

  Chris had stumbled on to the scene of a murder. The body had been removed, but all around the room were signs of a fierce fight for life before it was snuffed out. There were broken toys, half a chair on its side, books flung across the room to land in sprawling heaps, some with torn covers and twisted spines. The contents of a board game were strewn across the floorboards. Then she pulled herself together – two glasses of wine had got the better of her – it was only the rough and tumble of a long abandoned playroom.

  The
doll’s house was in the centre of the room.

  It loomed now, as it had dominated the stories her Mum told her long ago, quietly thrilling with concealed knowledge of past events and vanished inhabitants. Lingering in the doorway, the chatter of her mother’s ‘gas-fire-voices’ jogged Chris’s memory with broken sentences and stifled cries. She felt nauseous, and to recover herself fixed her attention on the two tall chimneys at each end of the roof of the house.

  Images from her deserted life swapped in and out like lenses in an eyesight test. Chris saw in quick succession her bedroom window, the shadow of the light shade on the ceiling like a static sundial, the dips and folds of her mother’s duvet, and the hawkish lace-curtain birds that, like everything else, her mother had given names to. When Chris was small, the bedtime stories were punctual, each night at six-thirty, because Eleanor believed structure and routine were all. This had become an enchanted time they both had loved.

  Whose memories were they?

  Each new lens brought the doll’s house into sharper focus so that it became obvious to Chris that this was the room where she was meant to end up. Her diligent detective work of the last five weeks would end here tonight.

  It was 31st December 1999, the last night of the twentieth century, and many months since Chris had discovered the truth about Eleanor and had met her real family, the Ramsays. She was living with Kathleen Howland, sleeping in the room that was once Alice’s but was now hers. Having passed her ‘A’ levels, she had begun a forensic science degree at Sussex University. Doctor Ramsay’s grand-daughter was at her calmest when staying late at the lab examining the different types of insects that feed on corpses. Eleanor was still in their flat, but she would have to move out because she was now a wealthy woman and the housing estate was for tenants on little or no incomes. Besides the flat was no longer home.

  Without any explanation, Mark Ramsay had left his youngest child the White House, which Isabel was to hold in trust for her, as well as a share of his estate. He had left Chris the doll’s house; a pecuniary legacy, again with no explanation, to the grand-daughter he had only once held in his arms. Chris was glad he was dead and she didn’t have to deal with him along with the other Ramsays. She wasn’t grateful for his gift. She was suspicious. There must be strings attached that would one day become clear. This was confirmed by the lack of surprise expressed by any of the family, who had been horrified when Eleanor had offered to make the White House over to all of them or pass it to her mother. No one wanted either house. Chris thought her mother might as well have been offering to share blood money with them and, intrigued, stepped up her visits. Eleanor thought Chris was becoming reconciled to her new family after all. This in turn encouraged Eleanor to soften towards them too.